Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  Aff. of Philip Kiser and Charles Banner, Stokes Co., NC, 9 Apr. 1834 – acquainted with Christopher, believed in the neighborhood to be a soldier in the Revolution.

  Aff. of Joseph Darnall, Stokes Co., NC, 13 Sept. 1832 – Darnall is well acquainted with Christopher Eaton, who now resides in Surry County. He personally knows that Eaton served faithfully as a revolutionary soldier in the militia company commanded by Capt. Absalom Bostick in Col. Armstrong’s regiment under Gen. Rutherford. Eaton entered this service in Surry County in June 1780. They marched to Salisbury, NC, where they joined headquarters and then marched to Cheraw Hills in South Carolina, where they joined General Gates army. They then marched toward Camden where “we fell in with the British when the battle ensued” between Gates and Cornwallis’ armies. Joseph Darnall was not in the battle but Eaton was, he believes.

  Aff. of Hugh Boyles, Stokes Co., NC, 13 Sept. 1832 – He knew Eaton during the Revolution and always understood that he served in the Revolution.

  Aff. of William Merritt, Stokes Co., NC, 13 Mar. 1833 – Merritt was in service at Moravian old town in 1780. There was an Eaton in the service at that time guarding the prisoners taken at Kings mountain and I believe Christopher Eaton is that same man.

  When the government eventually offered him an annual pension of only twenty dollars, he refused to accept it.

  When he was six, Chris Eaton’s parents tried to give him some focus. He needed some good focus. Couldn’t focus. So they put him in tennis lessons, drum lessons, acting lessons, football. But he was not good at it. Lessons. Not good at lessons at all. Chris Eaton’s parents even put him in violin lessons, taught via the Suzuki method, a technique based on endless repetition and observation, the way a child first learns to speak. Shinichi Suzuki was the son of Japan’s first violin manufacturer, born at the turn of the century, and he taught himself to play by stealing one of his father’s completed models and using it to replicate any sound he heard, from recorded music to bird calls, and later in his life, the sound of the missiles falling from the American bombers. Chris Eaton was going to be a prodigy, and some day play for kings and queens if kings and queens were still around by then. Or so his father dreamed. But Chris Eaton spent most of those lessons hiding behind the back seats of the conservatory auditorium. The only thing he learned, like Suzuki, was to imitate everything he heard, like a confused, urbanized starling calling back to the surrounding car alarms. Eventually, he picked up his father’s old Stella guitar and, just through memory, flawlessly duplicated Mark Knopfler’s solo from the live recording of “Sultans of Swing.”

  When he turned ten, his mother tried again, and sent him to piano lessons taught by nuns near the hospital, in a building that would later become occupied by the regional Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs. His sister had warned him about the nuns. When she didn’t arch her fingers properly, her uncooperative hands failing her time after time, her knuckles were rapped with the ruler. Chris Eaton’s nun, thankfully, was younger and less violently inclined. She didn’t even wear a habit, just handed out stickers like raindrops and was happy to be working, he guessed. Two years later, after his sister wet her pants on the way to her weekly session, his mother switched them to lessons with the mother of one of his classmates. Four months later, as he was about to make his ninth assay into “The Alleycat,” she swiveled his seat to face her directly.

  “How many hours do you spend practicing a week?”

  “…”

  “When your mother shows up, I’m going to tell her we’re through. You’re wasting my time and her money.”

  He was eleven by this point and frankly a much bigger fan of European football; and devising alternate rules to Dungeons & Dragons with less chance of failure; and BMX bikes with fake plastic gas tanks; and the drums; collecting “sports memorabilia,” which basically amounted to a few hockey cards, a broken goalie stick from The Carolina Hurricanes’ Traseac Drakhinov, and some stickers he’d collected from bags of potato chips, mostly of wrestlers like Hornet Cisa, Stone Hirca and Inert Chaos; musical parody (his favorite: a send-up of Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line,” redubbed “Taco Shrine;” and joke books.

  JOKES HE TOLD INCESSANTLY

  AND UNDERSTOOD:

  How do you stop an elephant from charging?

  Take away his credit card.

  How do you make an elephant float?

  Take two scoops of elephant and add some root beer.

  What is the centre of gravity?

  The letter V.

  What is at the end of everything?

  The letter G.

  What will you find in the middle of the sea?

  The letter E. (Sea. E. His initials, which made the joke even funnier for him.)

  JOKES HE FAILED TO UNDERSTAND

  BUT TOLD ANYWAY:

  How do you get down from an elephant?

  You don’t. You get down from a duck.

  What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino?

  Elephino!

  Want to hear a dirty joke?

  Two white horses fell in a mud puddle.

  Want to hear an even dirtier joke?

  Three came out.

  Really he spent most of this time playing foosball in bars he got into using a fake ID, which was ridiculous because he was obviously not even close to puberty, let alone forty, or British. But because he won so often, they believed it. And so did he. It was like they were seeing an entirely different person.

  How else could they justify being beaten regularly by an eleven-year-old kid?

  When he told the elephant float joke to some of the other players, one of the men told him he had told it wrong. When he showed the man the book, he was told it was an honest mistake, but that he should change scoops to buckets.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Elephants come in buckets, son. Buckets.”

  This was another one he didn’t get.

  She had trouble making friends as a child, falling asleep in one state and then waking up in another, a new home, same as the old home but with a different placement of sunrise and sunset, different mountains, different trees, sometimes no trees, sometimes no mountains, a different smell on the wind, a swimming pool, a neighbor she liked, a neighbor she didn’t like, a neighbor with a swimming pool and thus didn’t matter if she liked or not. In one place, she made one friend, a girl named Trisha Cone who had also come from away that year and whose father, she claimed, killed people for a living. Really, though, he was just an undertaker.

  Trisha’s father, James Cone, had always wanted to be a professor, a philosopher, an academic, a great mind; but as a child in Arkansas he had written special aptitude tests, and the results had been misread and mistaken for another boy with the same name, so instead of being placed in an advanced class he was relegated to the back of the room, with the troublemakers and the mentally ignored. He understood the subject matter better than his teachers, but he was told he did not, and thus moved through knowledge like a mental dyslexic, as though the things he took for truth were just a trick of his mind, that his intelligence and comprehension were just illusions, like a rainbow, or the thumb trick of his drunk uncle, or democracy, until he began to distrust the cognitive part of his brain so much that he eventually just shut it down. He dropped out of high school to work at a drive-in, earning points with the smarter kids by allowing them to sneak in for free but then losing the job for the same reason, which made him feel even stupider. He hitchhiked up to Malvern, and for three months made a living as an unsanctioned tour guide outside the main gates of the hot springs, helping tourists find similar pools outside official park grounds for half the price of regular admission, then helping himself to their wallets and shoes while they soaked. For this, he spent six months in detention as a juvenile near Alexander, but having learned other lessons in this time, he then set off on a string of new scams up into the Midwest, sidled over to Memphis, and was then drawn, as if by Fate through a straw, up the Mississippi to S
t. Louis and beyond, committing another series of seemingly unrelated crimes under the names Sean Mejoc, Jason Mece (pronounced meechee, like the fish, not meesee like the principle of grouping data), Mace Jones, Jan Coëmes, and Enoc James, until someone realized they were all anagrams of his own name and he was picked up near Rapid City, South Dakota, going by the name Joe McEans.

  It was the Coëmes alias that confounded authorities most. A couple from Canada made a call to the local sheriff near Bowling Green, Kentucky, saying they’d been touring the Mammoth Cave when a young man from their group had lost his wallet to a pickpocket. The young man had just shrugged it off, saying the amount was so insignificant it didn’t really matter, but the couple insisted on calling it in, just to make sure the police were on the lookout, to protect others in the future. The Canadians also made sure he had enough to cover his costs back to Chicago where he was due to catch a flight back to Belgium. The sheriff filed it beside his empty coffee cup and sandwich wrapper, alongside yesterday’s crossword.

  Then, about a week later, the sheriff fielded another call, this time from the wife of a farmer near Smiths Grove. She had likewise encountered a young man who had had his wallet stolen, “a handsome man with teeth like a horse,” and had likewise provided him bus fare to Indianapolis, where he could at least have money wired to him from his father, a Belgian diplomat in Washington. And three weeks after that, he was sitting across his desk from the Glasgow grocer, listening to her story of the poor fellow who spoke in such broken English, as if the lower half of his jaw were too heavy to properly maneuver, who promised to reimburse him once he returned to Europe and – more than that – to pay for a ticket in thanks so that the grocer might one day come share hospitality from him, after which the grocer had heard nothing more. The sheriff asked if he’d gotten the man’s name, and after making a few calls to confirm that there were no visiting Belgian dignitaries in the country with that handle, the sheriff turned things over to the Feds. Though James Cone had barely passed high school English, many of the victims claimed the poor young man spoke fluent French. But the US Marshals were already familiar with Cone and with the area’s own language skills. And he likely would have gone to prison for most of his life had it not been for the millionaire Vic Saater, who surprised everyone by using some of his political leverage to get Cone off scot-free.

  His full name was Victor Hådron Saater, although he much preferred Vic. He also identified first and foremost as a Norwegian, despite the fact that he’d been born in New York, educated in Boston and made his fortune in South Dakota. His father had moved to the US in 1902 to work as a civil engineer on the fledgling New York City subway project, but had returned to Oslo on his divorce to create a similar system back home. Vic’s mother had stayed behind, raising Vic and his sister by herself, and Vic eventually earned an engineering degree of his own in explosives from MIT. He’d never dreamed of living any further west, perfectly content to remain in Massachusetts to help expand its own transit system. But when fellow Norwegian-American and Klan member, Gutzon Borglum, was charged with the task of designing a fitting monument to four of the country’s greatest presidents, Borglum hired Saater as the head of demolitions, and for the next fourteen years, Borglum often left him in charge while he lobbied for more funds in Washington. Saater simultaneously expanded his own wealth by contributing to local gold and iron ore mines in Keystone, Deadwood and Lead.

  Of course, when the German forces eventually occupied Norway on April 9, 1940, Vic volunteered along with a team of other expat commandos to join the Scandinavian resistance, all of them trained in survival, skiing, marksmanship (two of the team members, Haukelid and Røjevold, had competed for the U.S. at the 1936 Olympics in the military patrol competition, an early form of the biathlon) and – Saater’s personal expertise – advanced demolition. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lick of orienteering skills in the whole bunch, and the mission, code-named Operation Sloth, involved parachuting into the mountains several hundred miles from Vemork, where the Norwegians had been producing heavy water for nearly a decade as a byproduct of making fertilizer. The Halifax bomber encountered bad weather and dropped them several hundred miles off course, and by the time they actually reached their target, the shipment was already on its way by train to Lake Tinnsjø, where a ferry was waiting to transport the dangerous material to the nearest airbase. Haukelid, who had been placed in charge because of his prior military experience, felt that detonating charges on the ferry might be the best way to sabotage the Nazis’ hopes of developing an atomic weapon, so he and Saater snuck down to the docks and convinced one of the Norwegian hands to smuggle them on board.

  When he returned from Europe, Saater had a few medals and a genuine Norwegian bride to show for it, and the two of them wasted no time in producing nine daughters named Ingrid, Anna, Sara, Kirsti, Kaia, Karoline, Hanna, Frida and Marte. He managed to marry each off in fairly quick succession, except for Ingrid, who despite being the most beautiful, had managed through her Shakespearean stubbornness to remain as chaste and unlovable as possible for over thirty years, even as each of her sisters fell helplessly in love and married the most incompetent men their father could have imagined. By the time Cone showed up at his door, working some angle as a travelling salesman with a broken automobile, Saater was so desperate to be rid of her or find a suitable heir to his empire that he told Cone he had a room for him, most assuredly, but he would also have to share a bed with his daughter. And when the federal marshals trapped him a week later, Saater agreed to get Cone off if Cone agreed to marry Ingrid and earn a regular stipend working for him. On the first day, Cone flicked his cigarette butt out the passenger window of the company pickup and it spun into the back with the unused explosive charges. Later, when he was caught using his shovel to break up some stubborn rocks, sparks flying in every direction, Vic Saater helped his new son-in-law set up an apprenticeship at a funeral home in nearby St. Petersburg. He passed the National Board Exam on the first try and left immediately with Saater’s daughter to a neighbouring state.

  This was how Trisha Cone came to be Chris Eaton’s one and only best friend. In the ninth grade, their class took a trip to Vancouver to experience a foreign culture that was essentially the same as her own except for the proximity of the mountains. There, they did most of the things they would never have done back in Seattle, like go to the aquarium, or see a musical. They even bought their first thongs, to mark their passage into womanhood, and were so worried about them being too tight up the butt that they bought extra large, and they hung loose at the crotch like tiny cotton hammocks between their thighs. Then Trisha, who had run low on money after buying a caricature near the Chinese Garden, let several of the boys from the other school touch her boobs for $10. By the end of the year, Trisha’s father heard of a better market in Salinas, California, and again, Chris Eaton was alone.

  He likely should have died. Or so he’s been told. But so much of his life is based on stories he can’t remember having lived. That’s what people do. We place so much importance on sight and touch, we are taught these things are the touchstones of experience, we base all scientific knowledge on what we can witness or at least make theoretical suppositions on potential witnessings; but the truth of the matter is that so much of identity comes not from personal experience, not from the touching or seeing or tasting or even those emotional swells of sporadic attraction and indifference, it comes from hearing – and then processing – each of those stories into some reasonable explanation of your life. Babies are born with so much potential, in a world without identity, an empty vessel. All we know is that we are somehow separate from the world. Otherwise, we are anything we want to be.

  Then, as we grow older, the indoctrination of repetition begins, and each time a story is retold, another possibility is killed. At dinner parties, listening to the grownups from beneath the serving table, we’re subconsciously losing all hope. And we start to believe it. So that the very foundation of our character is constructed fo
r us by other people who might as well be strangers, albeit blood strangers, and we accept it without struggle.

  For example, they say it was his sister who saved him, only eight but already competing in teen and adult swim meets across Illinois. In the 50m junior freestyle at the 1A State finals, since it provided her no discernible advantage, she was even permitted an unorthodox starting position from within the water. But by the time she’d reached the Nationals in North Carolina, her legend had preceded her. Once she cut the water’s skin, they said it was like she was part dolphin, the surface around her as still and pristine as a morning lake. Little did her awestruck competitors know that the only thing that kept her from completely humiliating them was the confusion of so many bodies in the water at once. Surrounded by these awkward, monstrous teens, she could barely think over the incessant chaotic slap of their flat-handed dreams, the sour scent of yoghurt drifting from their exhalations. Occasionally, she could even smell their blood. Or the diluted stench of IGF-1, Clenbuterol, cypionate, erythropoietin. She had to fight off the urge to attack, to veer from her lane and ram her heels forcefully into her opponent’s ribcage. Then, for the final heat to qualify for the Olympics, the coach from Holmes Lumber lodged a formal protest forcing her to start on the blocks with everyone else. Someone actually had to help her mount them, wobbling like a wounded foal. And after two false starts (she didn’t even wait for the gun; she just hopped in as soon as she felt the television cameras on her), they had to forcibly remove her from the pool (setting the stage for Dara Torres to repeat her 1987 title and go on to become an American swimming hero until retiring at the 2000 Olympic Games.)