Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  Then his lawyers introduced evidence that the Cardiff Giant was a fraud. They produced the rock-solubility findings of Dr. Hall. They had investigated shipping records and traced the Cardiff Giant’s beginnings from Fort Dodge to Stubby’s backyard. They had an affidavit from the sculptor, Burghardt, saying it was his creation.

  There comes a time to give up the ghost, Hull wrote. And that was the time. I admitted to the whole plot, and explained my motive was to only debunk the Bible-thumpers, not hoodwink the public or exploit their gullibility for personal monetary gain, or get rich. That was just an unforeseen by-product, I told the judge as sincerely as possible, but my countenance was not helped by a stage snicker from Barnum. The judge was threatening to have me arrested for fraud, when Barnum intervened on my behalf.

  “Let’s not be hasty here, Eli,” Barnum said to the judge. “Mr. Hull here made no claims about the scientific veracity of his Giant. He left it open to interpretation by the men of science. As a man who has experiences in these endeavors, I see Mr. Hull’s actions as simply furthering scientific debate. To charge him with fraud seems to punish his initiative to create such discourse. We now have two giants in our great city, and we are soon to be besieged by men of science and curiosity-seekers from all over the civilized world. Our good, mutual friend, Governor John T. Hoffman, approves of such spectacle for the economic health and robust tourism of the city. Great crowds will want to see the spectacle, and become part of the spectacle. We are about to stage an event that will draw people who simply want to say they were there. This isn’t about truth, Eli, it is about entertainment, the expansion of commerce!”

  The judge ruled Barnum could exhibit his giant as planned and was innocent of fraud, because, as a matter of law, no fraud was committed because there was no authentic Giant. In other words, there is no such thing as a fraud of a fraud. Life for both giants went on.

  After the proceedings, I stood alone in the rotunda of the New York City Superior Court, Hull wrote. I had exonerated my partners during the proceedings to the judge’s satisfaction, thereby making them immune to future charges. Nonetheless, they ditched me with nary a word, racing out to Centre Street and into a waiting hack without me. A few newspaper fellows crowded around Barnum, who told them all was well, and both exhibits would open as scheduled. He never mentioned my admission, although word did leak out over the next few days. But just as Barnum predicted, it did nothing to dampen the crowds. They came for weeks and stood in December’s cold drizzle and wet snows, waiting in lines while Christmas bustle went on around them. They came and went between Barnum’s giant and mine, comparing the two, often arguing over which looked more realistic, and which was more believable. Through the holidays, through January and beyond Washington’s birthday, they came. Barnum was right; they came to see the spectacle and be part of the spectacle. That, in the end, was all that mattered.

  And in the end, it ended almost as quickly as it began, perhaps the first example of the abrupt flame-out of instant celebrity. Hull’s Giant fell into obscurity within a year of Stubby’s discovery. It never did make a national tour, let alone worldwide. It landed with such a thud, the partners sold it to the first taker, a Syracuse hotelier named C. O. Gott, who put the Giant in a corner of his eclectic lobby, nearby a suit of medieval armor and several examples of taxidermy, including a snarling black bear up on hind legs, an antlered mule-deer trophy, and a peacock in full blossom. The price? $5,000.

  Hull’s memoir ends there, as if he had no life worth living afterward. His final entry is boastful, but laden with regret.

  But one thing I will never forget is my last conversation with Barnum as he left the courthouse flanked by his entourage of lawyers and associates.

  “No hard feelings, I hope, Hull,” he said as he shook my hand. “In fact, I admire you. We’re kindred spirits, my friend, pioneers in a coming American industry. You may not see it now, but it is coming, my friend. The factory and farm machines and other inventions will give everyone from the field hand to the seamstress more leisure time. And how will they fill that slack time? Piety? Searching their souls for God’s mark? Doing good deeds? Contemplating the heavens? Philosophizing over the great mysteries of life? Mastering a musical instrument? Learning foreign tongues? No, sir, they’ll fill their long evenings and days off with the humbug I bring them. They will look for lazy ways to be entertained and I will entertain them.

  “I learned an important lesson from you, Hull. All this time, I put my entertainment in the big city, and expected the people to come to me. But you showed me this: I should take my show to every backwater hamlet and out-of-the-way village. You unveiled your Giant in a godforsaken place and still drew crowds worthy of Broadway and made headlines worldwide. It gave me an idea: I’m going to pack up my menagerie of exotic animals and human freaks, and travel the countryside, packing in all those people with time on their hands. It will be a Roman circus! A traveling Roman circus!

  “Truth be told, you make a lousy cigar, Hull. Give it up and join me in the business of amusement and entertainment. Mark my words, it will one day be the trademark industry of this nation.”

  Hull declined.

  Of the mistakes I’ve made in my life, the next was the biggest. Weary of the entire Giant affair, I wanted nothing more than to shrink from the public eye (and escape my partners’ wrath), and return to Binghamton and the anonymity of my everyday business. I told Barnum so, and he stuffed his card into my breast pocket in case I ever changed my mind. And then, Poof!, he was gone.

  * * *

  WHEN HORACE WAS DONE READING, he dug through some of his old first-reference material and found this summary of the Giant affair by Andrew D. White, the president of Cornell at the time of the scam:

  There was evidently a “joy in believing” in the marvel, and this was increased by the peculiarly American superstition that the correctness of a belief is decided by the number of people who can be induced to adopt it—that truth is a matter of majorities.

  Truth is a matter of majorities. Those words hit Horace in a way he hadn’t seen earlier. The Cardiff Giant wasn’t only about America letting go of its religious roots and rurality. It was about the birth of popular culture, with the mute Giant himself starring as one of the nation’s first celebrities. A stone man, nothing at all like the public believed him to be.

  Truth is a matter of majorities. Those words reverberated in Horace’s head. He smiled, as if he’d just seen an old friend.

  Truth, defined by majorities. Not God, not family, not some innate, internal sense of fairness or reason. Forget the lone voice of the individual soul, or the moral barometer of the God within; it is only an unheard whisper against the howl of noise around us. America, with no ancient, ingrained, or inherent culture, no Renaissance patricians to set high standards of value, no Michelangelos or Mozarts, was ruled by the tastes of the masses.

  Horace took out a legal pad and began writing down all the modern measuring sticks. Nielsen ratings, box office numbers, Platinum records, sell-out crowds, Google searches, Twitter trends. All that truth in majorities, swamping all other art. Success deemed by numbers. The bottom line. Think of all that got lost in a world ruled by numbers. Artistic nuance and visions that did not appeal to the masses. Individualism. Esoteric expression. Niche products. Business became cutthroat; stock prices, not employees, not quality, mattered.

  His presentation was forming and Horace wrote quickly: A nation founded on the God-granted sanctity of the individual was now a nation of sameness, with a culture not decided by those with extraordinary talents but by the ordinary masses. The American standard for quality, for culture, is held in the numbers of acceptance . . .

  Ah, this is what’s wrong with America! Those words, said often by Horace, never felt more relevant than right now, and he felt the joy of a choir singing the “Hallelujah” chorus bursting from his heart.

  And at that moment, the door to the archive opened and in came Natalia, Natalia Piatrovich, the graduate stude
nt, not in a milkmaid’s dress but in a pair of form-fitting jeans, and a tailored white blouse that muted the color of her pastel blue bra. Twenty-first-century lip gloss, eyeliner, jewelry, and heels. Heels, at the farm museum. Horace realized he’d maybe never seen that before.

  “Beauty is hard work, Horace,” Natalia said when a compliment got loose from his mouth before he could stop it. From there he recovered and stumbled through a sentence that ran the gamut of calling her “gorgeous” to expressing “admiration” for her work (which he knew nothing about) to an apology for saying something “inappropriate.”

  She laughed and waved off his political correctness.

  “Women from Ukraine never go out looking like slob, Horace.” She laughed again. “This how I dress, unless working in barn!”

  The accent, the articleless broken English, and the way she said Hooorace quickened his heart and sent a pulse through his balls.

  “So, Horace, do you mind if I work now, too? I’m researching thesis,” she said.

  “Please,” Horace said.

  Horace explained he had been the archivist before he became the blacksmith.

  “So if I can do anything to help,” he said, adding the Cornell degrees.

  “Thank you. Very impressive, Mr. Ivy League,” she said playfully, and went to one of the oak cabinets to retrieve several folders of her work. She dropped one and bent over to pick it up, and Horace got a chance to stare.

  “So, Horace, what are you looking up?” she asked as she straightened.

  Horace explained the situation, from asking Grundling to give Michael a job and being forced to give the Giant presentation, to his old research on the nation stepping away from God and country folks, to his gleeful discovery just moments before about “truth being a matter of majorities.”

  “Oh! Then I have something that might interest you!” she said with delight in her voice. “I have found similar things in my work!”

  Now it was her exuberance for dead history that sent blood in both directions, and he felt himself becoming aroused. She sat next to him and pulled her hair behind the ear closest to him. He fixated on the perfection of that ear, the gold dangling earring, and the elegance of her neck. And the scent that rose from it. Cherry blossoms. No, something sweeter. She was that close.

  “I, too, was interested in growth of proletariat taste during Industrial Revolution,” she said. “So look at this.”

  Natalia opened a folder filled with copies of newspaper articles.

  “Look. 1869. Year of your Giant, right?” she said. “Here. Broadway’s first million-dollar show, The Black Crook, about black magic and the devil. See this? Religious groups protested, but show went on, even Sundays.”

  Exhibit A in the step away from God, Horace thought.

  “Then I found this,” Natalia continued, gently producing another clip. Horace stared at her fingers, long and a little thick but perfect, and the scarlet tips. “Look, Horace, here. Twenty-one theaters opened on Broadway. People started paying more attention to actors. Gossip columns started in papers. Like this.”

  She showed him an article about Lydia Thompson and her “British Blondes” burlesque troupe.

  “There is some suggestion of backstage sex,” she said. “Titillating? Right?”

  Backstage sex . . . blacksmith shop sex . . . barn sex . . . archive sex. Was it a signal? Damn, he was rusty. He stayed put.

  “In 1869,” she said, shuffling more clips. “First boardwalk built in Atlantic City. First college football game, Rootgers against Princeton. First professional sports team, Cincinnati Red Stocks, Stockings, in baseball.”

  “The birth of popular culture,” Horace said. “The birth of spectator sports.”

  “Yes!” she said, squeezing Horace’s arm. “Birth of shopping as sport, too. Look what I discovered, just looking through old papers. Advertising. More and more. Then more and more newspapers. I did research. Seven hundred papers in country before Civil War. By 1869, five thousand! Magazines, too. In 1869, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair started. First mail-order catalog, Montgomery Ward. Lord and Taylor opened, then Wanamaker’s, all in 1869! Guess what was next? First advertising agency, Ayer & Son, in Philadelphia. All in 1869. Same year as your Giant!”

  “The end of homemade goods,” Horace said. “Shopping as a sport, as entertainment. I like that.”

  “You see! We’re doing same thing. Industrial Revolution was also birth of pop culture! When I go back to Rochester in fall, I’m writing this as thesis,” she said.

  Horace again resisted the temptation to lean in and kiss her. Instead, he began to write with manic excitement . . . “the year was 1869, when America began the business of diversion.” He crossed out “business” and substituted “industry,” then settled on “economy.” An economy of diversion. All of it, from smartphone games to movies to sports.

  He thought of Michael’s room, a pantheon to sports stars, and Hull’s line about “worshippers of stone men.” The modern pagan gods. He wondered if Michael could name an astronaut, or a Medal of Honor recipient from Iraq or Afghanistan, real heroes. Or if the frontier legends—Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp, even Jesse James—spurred his imagination, as they did Horace’s when he was a boy?

  “We have raised a generation that believes athletes are heroes and sports results are history,” Horace wrote.

  He put down one of his favorite quotes. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act—George Orwell.

  He would tell the truth, as he saw it.

  He grabbed his head with both hands, trying to contain the bigness of his discovery. And Natalia’s. And Natalia. The Cardiff Giant, an allegory for all Horace knew had gone wrong! Who knew? And how did he miss it the first time around? “You fucking idiot,” he said out loud, laughing.

  “And you,” he said to her. “You fucking genius.” Then he grabbed her head the same way.

  His laughter was contagious to himself, and it became uncontrollable. Natalia looked puzzled at first, then began to laugh with him.

  “Horace, the mad sociologist!” she said.

  That thought made him laugh even harder. His head pulsated. His peripheral vision got fuzzy. He wanted to kiss her. In joy. In everything. When had he ever felt this happy?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Grudeck drove down Stacy’s street, and braked for a group of brown kids kicking a soccer ball. Not a white one in the bunch. This part of Union—all of Union, really—had changed. This neighborhood was now mostly Indian and Hispanic, with a few Chinese. Grudeck saw it on the real estate signs. Donash Patel. Elmira Ramos. Li Xiang. Tells you who is selling, and who is buying. Back in the day, these blocks were filled with white immigrant factory workers or builders who came home to their 50-by-150 piece of the dream. The streets were rows of orderly, simple Capes, two bedrooms down and stairway up to a converted attic, like his parents’ house. On other blocks were stunted versions of the storybook Tudor architecture so prevalent in the rich towns to the west, Maplewood, South Orange, Short Hills, and Summit. The Union versions were solid, with brick walks and chimneys, trowel-smoothed stucco sides, built by the same Italian masons and Portuguese handymen who lived in them. That was Grudeck’s Union. Back in the day. When Joey and his friends played around here with a Wiffle bat and tennis ball, they used car bumpers and manhole covers for bases, and always tried to hit down the middle of the street so some guy in a guinea tee wouldn’t come bounding off his porch with a can of Pabst in his hand yelling, “Watcha the goddamma car!”

  The kids were in front of Stacy’s house, so Grudeck drove about fifty yards down—not to protect the Caddy, but not to disturb their game.

  As Grudeck pulled himself out, he saw the soccer ball flying toward him. He could have let it go, but what the hell. Holding a bouquet of flowers for Stacy in his left hand, he stretched for the ball with his right and stopped it dead, without so much as a noticeable bobble. Then, in one quick, graceful motion of perfected fluidity, he
planted his left foot well out in front of his right and swung the full weight of his body forward. His arm came up, cocked over his shoulder, and then whipped down with the violence of a knock-out punch. He uncoiled his arm at the vortex of maximum thrust of his body, just as he climbed on the ball of his left foot and turned his hips and shoulders perpendicular to the target. The sportswriters called it machine-like, and it was. Grudeck made that throw thousands of times, in a hundred seasons, with a baseball or a football, and now this. The ball rocketed straight at the kids and only the oldest, a skinny Indian about sixteen, had the guts to stick out his hand to stop it. It smacked his palm and skittered off into the gutter.

  “Whoa!” said one kid.

  Grudeck, showoff that he was, walked toward them, arms out in apology.

  “Sorry, old habit,” he said.

  “Dude, that was awesome!” said another.

  “You okay?” Grudeck asked the Indian kid.

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing his hand.

  “Well, when you get home tonight, tell your parents you caught Joe Grudeck.”

  “Huh?”

  Grudeck figured he didn’t understand the baseball vernacular.

  “Tell them you caught a ball thrown by Joe Grudeck.”

  “But I didn’t catch it.”

  “Well, tell them you tried.”

  “By who?”

  Now Grudeck understood the puzzlement.

  “Yeah, mister, who?” asked another.

  Then he saw a smattering of stifled laughing from the kids in the pack. One kid said something in Spanish and another busted out and a girl rolled her eyes. Two ran off to retrieve the ball, wanting nothing to do with the big guy coming at them, saying something they didn’t understand, with a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

  Grudeck felt a blink of embarrassment that escalated quickly to something akin to anger.