by Robert Hill
Shelves of facts and figures and forgetting. He’d begin at the beginning and he would not stop until he reached the end of all that man knew to learn, and so distracted, his mind would circumnavigate his heart as he hoped it would, and this would suffice as a life. He wasted no time, digging in like it was a mouthwatering Sunday Sit Down. He read about Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle, and Galileo’s heavenly wonderings, and was captivated by Ulysses and his perilous twenty-year wandering on the wrong route home. He’d open one book and then another and dine on both as he would a plateful of Sunday delectables. Volumes on Descartes, Plutarch, Epicurus—they nourished him as completely as chervil and lovage and a heaping helping of huckleberry slump. Their pages were silk against his skin, the thoughts moving through his dermis and into his bloodstream with osmotic intensity; he absorbed their ink like air. But no sooner had he settled on the teat than a bell with a velvet clanger rang, a bell that might call Frainey’s goat home for a bucket of clover, and as it rung out a melodic cling, clang, clung, the illuminants over his head one by one went dark, and slatted blinds descended over the windows that were too high to see through, and he found himself ushered out of his uninterrupted utopia and thrust abruptly back out the slab glass door, outside the low-slung loaf of bread, a plate cleaned of all treats but the ones he had no taste for—the shops, the acrid smoke, the vehicles, the hum, the herd. The moon was rising. He had not accounted for a time limit to his escape—escape, he was led to believe, is a sail always finding the wind, an adventure in perpetual self-invention, endlessly struggling against odds and ogres, but this escape had soft treacheries: a velvet bell and illuminants gone dark, and a door that locked from sundown to dawn. He had not thoroughly thought through this endeavor, brought no provisions with him, nothing in a satchel for bunking a night under the stars. And then there was the matter of currency, of which he had none. Not an eagle silver to his name, not a Jefferson two dollar (when’s the last time anyone in New Eden had traded currency for hospitality?) and without such, he could not buy what he lacked, not a meal and surely not a bed. Not even his bluer-than-blues could do his bidding here among the downcast, of this he was certain, although for a moment he was tempted to seek out Big Joe, but wasn’t that kind of curiosity what compelled him to leave Hunko behind and lose himself in a world of facts and distractions? Better not. Inside the library, the entirety of man was his to access for free; but free comes at a cost, and Kennesaw, for all his cleft and chisel, for all his crisp hems and darted buttonholes, for all his superior good looks and bearing was, among the herds on the streets of this odd town, unlike among his own, nothing but a bum with empty pockets, and despite the bounty that could be his at 2 for 99¢, was too broke to do anything but leave and make the long walk home. With no other choice, he would make every day a twenty-year journey: leave home every dawn and return to his mother’s dinner table of boiled rocks every night, to his father’s demands, his Scylla and Charybdis, Ulysses of the daylight. Dawn after dawn. So this he would do, and it would have to suffice as a life.
And for many years it did. Marco Polo and Magellan, Charlemagne and Columbus, Socrates and Plato, he followed every tale, every bit of wisdom, to a new piece of knowledge. From first rays to dusk his mind was occupied by a world of thoughts so far from New Eden and the lore that was his provenance that this library and its contents may well have been one of Galileo’s celestial orbs in the unchartered regions of the universe and not simply a room full of books in a building in a town on the other side of a hill beyond the end of the gravel road that formed the center of New Eden.
And it sufficed as a life. For many years long after his mother’s dinners of boiled rocks had burned the last of her pots, and long after his father’s neck twisted and snapped in the belt noose of his own slinging and the bastard was spaded deeper than Adam’s excrement, long after the Belvedere home went silent but for the rumblings in Kennesaw’s gut and heart, it continued to suffice. Hunko in this long expanse learned to spend his days by Grunts Pond intent on his own business without questioning if every distant twig snap or sudden flutter signaled Kennesaw coming to join him. The markers in Nedewen Field doubled, tripled, far outnumbered the spaces still to fill. Farms once cropped crapped out. True lost more apple trees. The tree that felled the Drells was milled to the nub Kennesaw rests on.
Days begat years, and years pushed the limits of Kennesaw’s universe. He filled himself to overflowing with more knowledge than the library at Alexandria could ever hope to contain, but what had started out an enterprise of distraction became itself an enterprise in need of distraction. For, as Kennesaw soon discovered, every advance he learned of became mired in complications from times back when, worlds thrived and fell, adventurers turned warriors, and mankind, for all its smarts, seemed never to move much further from its primal aggressions than a newborn from its need for teat. Learning for itself began to wear on Kennesaw; the violence he learned of in the world beyond his began to wear on him. Wars begetting wars. The violence in his own life—how had that come to call? He read Tennyson and Cowper and Hopkins and came to understand the blight man was born with and born for. But where were the birthday teas begetting birthday teas? The innocence of an afternoon on the shore of Grunts Pond? Why were these not among life’s must-knows? One can only escape so far by knowing the names of the continents and the planets, and poetry is a very weak aspirin when one learns from history that for every rhyming couplet there’s yet another senseless Carthage, Antietam, and Corregidor, another Flummox, and yes, another Kennesaw.
At home, at the heel end of each day, after so many years of this, in Kennesaw there grew a feeling stronger and more burdensome, a feeling of something insufficient in the unfolding of his actions, an emotion not thought through. Where he had found a world more suited to what his mind told his heart he wanted, his heart began a retaliation that Kennesaw was challenged to rebuff. Dusk treks home took to detouring from the insistent road to the dirt one to the path down to Grunts Pond, where quiet steps were careful not to snap twigs, and where in his stealth even birds were not moved to flutter. After full meals daily of religion and science and philosophy washed down with gulps of wars, and more wars and wars meant to end wars that only started new wars, Kennesaw’s diet wanted for nourishment he could only get from one place, and so he began nightly to snack on the sight of Hunko from behind the rock on the pond’s edge, feeding on the lad and his industry at hand, and the hand, and the heart, and never ever letting on that what they had had, had never truly ended.
20. Luddy
Mawz Engersol would be remembered for a night he couldn’t undo, and Brisket Whiskerhooven would be remembered for an intimacy too urgent to keep quiet, but what would Luddy Upland be remembered for, if anyone’s to remember him at all?
Luddy Upland and Mawz Engersol might be remembered as friends like Carnival and Hunko might be remembered as friends, or like Kennesaw and True might be remembered as friends, or like True and Jubilee might be remembered as friends. They might even be remembered as better friends than Zebeliah and Frainey might be remembered as friends (even though no one can remember if Zebeliah was a Hackensack or a Whiskerhooven), or better than Frainey and Chippewa might be remembered as friends, and possibly likely in the end remembered as better friends than True and Threesie might ever be remembered as friends if indeed they ever were truly friends at all, for as everyone remembers befriending Threesie Lope was as reckless a pastime as cleaning a gun in the dark.
Luddy’s friendship with Brisket Whiskerhooven (whom everyone remembers was indeed a Whiskerhooven if for that one good reathon) was a friendship that might have grown and adapted itself through the ages like a river settling into its own smooth groove through a valley, had Brisket not been swept up young in that second wave of the big fever, and it was the friendship that Luddy should be remembered for, but time has done its darndest to obliterate that friendship from memory. To recall Brisket at all is to recall him at Grunths Pond and to recall hith lithping
grunt-outh of “Knotsthy!” on a nightly bathith. What has passed from common lore is the lisp’s Luddy-link, for it was Luddy Upland whose suggestion it was that Brisket repeat the name Knotsy over and over in order to break him of his articulatory encumbrance.
Night after night on the shores of Grunts Pond, Luddy would whisper encouragement into Brisket’s ear to put all of his urgent business into getting the correct pronunciation of Knotsy’s name into his mouth while in his hands his urgency went to work. It was an enterprising attempt at solving a problem that had plagued the lad since his first uttered words, which were, according to his mother, the two favored words out of his father’s mouth, which were, as all who recall can attest, two words often spoken as one, which were the word “horth” followed by the word “thit,” which is, as some folk might agree, the very definition of a legend. But, alas, practical as Luddy’s remedy was, repeating Knotsy’s name over and over was not the problem-solver it was hoped. In fact, it only led to further complications no one could have anticipated. For able as Brisket proved to be at his urgent business, he never did succeed at getting his tongue out of Knotsy’s S.
And that’s all the story anyone remembers, if anyone remembers any of that story at all.
The friendship people are more inclined to remember if they remember any friendship is the friendship between Luddy and Mawz Engersol. You could say that Luddy and Mawz would be remembered as close friends. What you could also say is that while they would be remembered as close friends, proof of their close friendship wasn’t something anybody remembered ever knowing. Luddy and Mawz, while close friends, were not friends as close as Mawz’s papa, Bull, had been friends with his good friend, Remedial Bliss. Luddy, unlike Remedial, was an able fellow who could roll his own rocks and till his own rows and seed his own beds and didn’t need Mawz to step in and muck things up like Mawz’s father had done and look where that got Mawz, no thanks.
Luddy was someone who was always around when a day came and when a day went. The lands his father, Pernicious, had scraped raw with an instinct for farming that would have better served him had he been a locust, Luddy spent the better part of his life reinvigorating with God spit and cowshit, and at their finest, it could be said that his lands yielded chervil and lovage like nobody’s business. Chervil and lovage were not a crop business that served his toils well; you could say he was better at doing a thing than he was at thinking about why he was doing it, but the man had to be commended simply for doing his old man one better, which was to get his lands to grow something—anything—edible. It was a truism that he could boil chervil in water flavored with lovage, lay chervil raw and dirty on a platter and sprinkle it with lovage he dried and crinkled to bits between his rake-like fingers, gnaw on one of the umbels that grew hat-rack like from the umbelliferous chervil stalk and masticate it to swamp mud and just before swallowing, chomp a bit of lovage to season the mash of it and make it go down double-icky; all of that was true, all of that he did, but none of that mattered a burp because no one wanted to eat it, for to everyone else, rutabagas and sorrel are a tastier twosome than chervil and lovage, yet muck up Luddy’s thinking with a truism like that his good friend Mawz Engersol wouldn’t dare, having learned from his own father what putting yourself into someone else’s business can lead to, no thanks.
What few recall is that it was Luddy who knew about the business with Cozy and Bull and how that stepped on the toes of Mawz’s dance date with True; that Luddy also was the first to hear from Mawz about Bull Engersol’s unfortunate tumble from his spooked horse and his head’s unfortunate encounter with a rock; about Mawz’s burying his father and burying him beneath the spooked horse that threw him (Mawz never said how he dealt with the horse, one just assumes it was an unfortunate encounter between the horse’s head and a bullet); and it was Luddy years later who found Mawz on the mound that marked the spot where his father and the horse were hell-bound, and who decided to leave the bird-pecked remnants of his friend’s body exactly as he found them—heart gone, eyes gone, skin flayed rare, and True’s pink velvet ribbon clutched in his maggoty hand.
So a story is lived, so a story lives on. Etched on the living as acutely as those cold chiseled onto stone markers like the ones all atilt in Nedewen Field. Had the sight of Mawz on the ground there been its own self-wielding cold chisel, it could not have imprinted itself on Luddy any deeper or more permanently than the vision itself did without benefit of tool or intent. For years, Luddy carried that final sight of Mawz with him into every room and every planted row. It entered his house, it walked his fields with him, it settled down beside him on the two-seater privy, and no amount of lye could make it decompose. It was in every forkful of chervil, every crinkle of lovage, to the point where he, too, grew to hate their taste. It wasn’t so much the eyes gone plucked, or the bones of Mawz’s ribcage gnawed raw. What haunted Luddy was that half-blackened, half-maggoty hand clutching that pink ribbon. A desire so close to its intent, as insistent as a full moon crowding through the curtains, but foiled at the very end by the very heart it sought. And how he had left the decomposing body there as if it were an animal corpse he’d come upon and not his friend who not so long ago had wanted so to live. To have left that body there for the elements to have their way with was unfinished business that rattled in Luddy’s mind like a door on loose pins and he could not stop its noise. Had he done in Mawz himself, his regret would not have been any louder.
Yet, stories etched on the living as on stone, with the wear-away of time come to fade, and as on the worn-away markers all atilt in Nedewen Field, in time leave to those looking on only indecipherable indentations suggestive of a something, but not a specific someone; a what, but not a definable when; a was, but not a particular how. Such was the way the memory of finding Mawz lost its outward definitions on Luddy’s person; in time his flinching at the smell of cooking flesh subsided, and he was able to contain his stomach when seeing others eat meat down to the bone, and he developed a numb kind of patience whenever the subject of Mawz and True was being opinionated on for the umpteenth time. Without stating his disgust for their insensitivity, he’d offer up an alternative for folks to chew on, one he knew would turn their stomachs as they were turning his: a wagonful of his chervil and lovage and he dared them to refuse. Up until that afternoon on the ridge Luddy was as happy as any to offer his two Indian heads on whatever grist was churning in the daily mill. But from that vision on, he taciturned inward, and rarely would he speak unless he was yelled out of his numbness. You could say that the Luddy Upland who once-was was left to rot in that same sun as his close friend, Mawz Engersol, or at least he wished he had been.
Bearing Mawz’s testimony to life’s cruel turns, keeping it as hidden in his own conscience as Mawz kept himself hidden behind trees from True’s eyes all those years, then keeping hidden the final sad bits of Mawz’s sad end deep in his heart as if his heart were deep as a six-deep hole—Luddy carried all that business through his life faithfully, honorably and guardedly, until the sharp details of it in time wore smooth and indecipherable, and the indented facts of it pitted and turned to powder, and Luddy was left with not so much the story itself as he was with its heavy and very particular sadness, much like the smell of flesh in the air after the rotting of it is done.
Folks who did not fully understand his friendship with Mawz or know the history that Luddy took great care to conceal, looked on Luddy as a man simply grown sad with time, for time will do that to a man who doesn’t have much of his own story to live. You cannot blame people for not seeing what they cannot see, even when what they cannot see is so present before them. In Luddy, what they could not see, though it was as evident as air in the lung, was that his sadness for Mawz, having taken up such prominent a place in his heart, became the story of his own life.
Think of Luddy Upland and you think of labor and patience and steadfastness and chervil and lovage. His name is one of those names like Zebeliah Was-She-a-Hackensack-or-Was-She-a-Whiskerhooven (it no lon
ger even matters that no one can remember which) or Elementary Hurlbutt that always comes up in the back stories to memories, not because of any deeds that can be attributed to him, though we do know there were at least three (urging Brisket’s “Knotsthy” and leaving Mawz all maggoty and growing crops everyone considered icky). More likely Luddy figures in the river of New Eden’s narrative simply because he was one of any number of stones the waters rolled over on their way to somewhere more eventful; a life who, for all his life, breathed in and breathed out on a steady daily schedule during the moments when something special was happening to somebody else.
Think of Luddy Upland and the virtues of labor and patience and steadfastness—all serviceable virtues, nice to think about, but not a one of them strikes a representative image in the mind that you’d care to place on a pedestal or admire when painted on the blade of a saw. Virtue on its own, with no blocky shape to its head, or lanky carriage of its body, no hump that sets it apart or a third hand coming out of a hip, will not get you effigized in bronze and set down in the middle of town where it’s an honor for eyes to ogle you and birds to cover your head and shoulders in feces. No one builds bonfires on a Saturday night to the patiently sturdy and silent. No walking stick is whittled to celebrate the slow-building, day-to-day steadfastness of nice and unassuming. And surely never was a sonnet composed that praised the heavens above-age for chervil and lovage. When you’re in command of your own life but not commanding, and even though you are the first to think of others, you are not the sort whom others think of first. And everyone would have told you that about Luddy, if they’d remembered to.