A Table of Green Fields

by Guy Davenport

  In a shared fish, said Demokritos, there are no bones.

  —So let me tell you a story that may shed light on our predicament. There was once a highwayman in England who disguised himself with a great bagwig, such as the noted Samuel Johnson was the last to wear in polite society. When a wayfarer came along the road he worked, so to speak, he emerged from behind a bush, giving the wayfarer the choice of giving up his money or his life. The frightened wayfarer quailed at his pistol, and probably at his wig, and turned over to him his horse and purse.

  The highwayman, riding away, threw the wig by the side of the road, where a pedestrian later found it, and put it on as windfall finery.

  Meanwhile, the wayfarer who had been robbed came to a town where the pedestrian with his newfound wig had also just arrived. The wayfarer, seeing him, called out for the bailiff and had him charged before the magistrate with highway robbery. He would, he testified, know that wig anywhere.

  The magistrate sentenced the pedestrian to be hanged.

  Now this was a small town, and the assizes drew a large crowd, among whom was the highwayman.

  —Fool! he cried out to the magistrate. You are sending an innocent man to the gallows. Look, give me the wig, and I will put it on and say, Your money or your life, and this false accuser will see his mistake. Yes, yes! the accuser said. That is the voice I heard from under the great wig.

  The magistrate, however, ruled that the first identification was made under oath, before God, and that the sentence, pronounced through the majesty of the law, had been passed. And must stand.

  Surely there was a shifting of shadows over there, between the Norway pine and the larch, upward and sideways, where the troll must be.

  It would be charming if the troll looked like a Danish child, if it upended itself and stood on its head, pedalling its feet in the air and turning pink in the face. Or stand on its right leg with its left foot hooked around its neck, like the Gypsy acrobats on market day.

  —The law, you see, is unbending. We made the law after the manner of the god, so it has nothing human in it. Let me tell you about the god. When he brought his people out of bondage in Aegypt, he led them to Kanaan, but for forty years they wandered in the desert, where the god fed them with a white fluffy bread, manna it was called, of which they became tired. So they asked for something different, something savory. Like quails, quails roasted brown on a spit over a fire, basted in their own juice, salted and rubbed with sage. So the god, who was in a proper snit about their ingratitude and greed, with their placing the sensuality of taste before a just appreciation of his grandeur and might, said:

  —Ye shall eat until it comes out of your nose!

  And a hail of dead quail fell from the sky, and his people dressed and cooked them, and (here I quote Scripture) even as the meat was yet in their teeth, the god caused a deadly plague to kill them who had eaten of the quail.

  —What do you think of that? It was a prayer he was answering.

  The troll's eyes were those of a happy child and therefore unreadable, for a child's happiness is something we have all had to forget. It is a happiness that comes from wrenching the hands off the clock, of pitching Grandpa's false teeth in the fire, of stealing, of lying, of pulling the cat's tail, of shattering the china vase, of hiding from one's parents to make them sick with worry, of hitting one's best friend's toes with the hammer. Of a child with beautiful hair, as if of spun and curled gold, and with big blue eyes, culture says behold an angel! and nature says here is your own personal devil.

  A bird in those branches, or the troll?

  —Listen! he said. You see me here in my great coat of German cut (in which I have heard Schelling lecture, for German auditoria are as cold as Greenland), gloves, stovepipe trews, cane, and handkerchief up my sleeve, but you cannot see from any of this, from my large nose or the fact that my brother Peter is a bishop, that I live in a city of merchants who imagine themselves to be Christians. You might as well say that a banjo player from Louisiana is Mozart.

  You cannot guess from any of this that my father once shook his fist at the god on a hill in Jylland, and cursed him to his face.

  The troll, the troll! But no: a hare or fox whose home this wood is.

  Trolls belonged, Mr. Churchyard imagined, to the genera of toadstools, in the same way that trees were kin to angels. Mr. Churchyard's century was looking into nature, and the Germans were scrutinizing Scripture. Why have the god, after all, when they have Hegel?

  Were not there passages in Scripture where the scribes wrote the opposite of what mercy and fear suggested that they suppress? Abraham most certainly sacrificed Isaac.

  His father had cursed the god and moved to Copenhagen and prospered as a merchant, money begetting money in his coffers. He died in the arms of angels bearing him to heaven.

  The corollary, is it not, is that if we pray we are answered with death while the meat of the quail is yet in our teeth. But the world is here, and to despair is sin. Even in their churches the tall light, the ungiving hard January light in the high windows bespeaks that worldliness of the world which no Hegelianism can pretend isn't there, isn't here.

  Mr. Churchyard lifted his specs onto his forehead, ran his little finger along an eyebrow, massaged his nose, closed his eyes, licked the corners of his mouth, and coughed softly.

  The irony of it.

  A horse was as alive as he, and a cow had exactly as much being. A midge.

  It would be some comfort if he could know that he was precisely as ugly as Socrates. He was, like all Danes, beautiful in his youth. Then his nose had grown and grown, and his back had warped, and his digestion gone to hell.

  Perhaps the troll was not the size he thought it was, and was wrapped in a leaf.

  Whatever we say of the god that he isn't, he is.

  —Absconditus we say he is, seeing him everywhere. What's with us, O Troll, that we have faith in the unseen, unheard, and untouched, while rejecting what's before our eyes? In the mists of despair I see that we prefer what isn't to what is. We place our enthusiasm in scriptures we don't read, or read with fanciful misunderstanding, taking our unknowing for knowing. Our religion's a gaudy superstition and unlicensed magic.

  Mr. Churchyard knew that the troll was behind one of the trees before him. He felt it as a certainty. He would have, when seen, a flat nose, round green eyes, a frog's mouth, and large ears.

  —Listen! This Sunday past, in the palace church, the court chaplain, who is very popular and who in his bishop's robes looks like a Byzantine emperor, preached a sermon to a select congregation of fat merchants, lawyers, bankers, and virgins. He preached with eloquence and resonating solemnity. His text was Christ chose the lowly and despised. Nobody laughed.

  The afternoon was getting on and the sky was graying over with clouds. Mr. Churchyard decided to make a bargain with himself, a leap of faith. He would believe the troll was there, and not bother whether it was or not. An event is real insofar as we have the desire to believe it. Bishop Mynster preached his eloquent sermon because Mr. Churchyard's father had admired him, not because Mr. Churchyard was sitting between an outlaw dressed as a merchant banker and a lady whose bonnet was made in London. He heard Bishop Mynster for his father's sake. He would converse with the troll for his own sake.

  And so, the troll. He was not prepared for it to be naked. Its Danish, when it spoke, was old.

  An urchin from up around Swan's Mill. It put out an arm for balance, standing on one leg, swinging the other back and forth.

  —Be you a frog? it asked.

  —I am a human being.

  —Could have fooled me. What way comest ye, through or under?

  It was amused by the consternation on Mr. Churchyard's face and crimped the corners of its mouth.

  —If through color; that be the one way, to butt through yellow into blue, through red to green. T'other way's to back up a little, find a place to get through, and wiggle in. Through the curve, at the tide. Even's one, odd the other.


  The troll came closer. Mr. Churchyard could see a spatter of freckles on its cheeks and nose. It cautiously touched his walking stick.

  —Ash, it said. I did not know the tree. Always on this side, one moon with another, bayn't ye?

  —This side of what? Mr. Churchyard asked quietly.

  —Ye've never been inside the mullein, have ye? Never in the horehound, the milkweed, the spurge? What be you?

  —I am a Dane. What if I were to ask you what you are? You are to my eye a boy, with all the accessories, well fed and healthy. Are you not cold, wearing nothing?

  The troll raised a leg, holding its foot in its hand, so that its shin was parallel to the forest floor. It grinned, with or without irony Mr. Churchyard could not say. Its thin eyebrows went up under its hair.

  —Let me say, Mr. Churchyard said, that I am certain you are in my imagination, not there at all, though you smell of sage or borage, and that you are a creature for which our science cannot account. When we think, we bind. I have not yet caught you. I don't even know what or who you are. Now where does that get us?

  —But I am, the troll said.

  —I believe you. I want to believe you. But this is the nineteenth century. We know everything. There is no order of beings to which you could belong. Do you know the god?

  The troll thought, a finger to its cheek.

  —Be it a riddle? What have ye for me if I answer right?

  —How could it be a riddle if I ask you if you know the god? You do, or you don't.

  —Be you looking hereabouts for him?

  —I am.

  —What be his smell? What trees be his kinfolk?

  —I've never seen him. No description of him exists.

  —How wouldst ye know did you find him?

  —I would know him. There would be a feeling.

  —Badger, squirrel, fox, weasel, hopfrog, deer, owl, grebe, goose, one of them? Or pine, oak, elderberry, willow, one of them? Elf, kobold, nisse, one of us? Spider, midge, ant, moth?

  The troll then arranged itself, as if it had clothes to tidy the fit of, as if it were a child in front of a class about to recite. It sang. Its voice had something of the bee in it, a recurring hum and buzz, like the Barockfagott in Monteverdi's Orfeo, and something of the ringdove's hollow treble. The rhythm was a country dance's, a jig. But what were the words?

  Mr. Churchyard made out the horse sick of the moon and the owl who had numbers. The refrain sounded Lappish. One fish, and another, and a basket of grass.

  When the song was over, Mr. Churchyard bent forward in an appreciative bow. Where had he heard the melody, at some concert of folk music? At the Roskilde market? And had he not seen the troll itself, astoundingly dirty, in patched clothes and blue cap, on the wharf at Nyhavn?

  And then there was no troll, only the forest floor and the damp green smell of the wood, and the ticking of his watch.

  That the god existed Socrates held to be true with an honest uncertainty and deep feeling. We, too, believe at the same risk, caught in the same contradiction of an uncertain certainty. But now the uncertainty is different, for it is absurd, and to believe with deep feeling in the absurd is faith. Socrates's knowing that he did not know is high humor when compared to something as serious as the absurd, and Socrates's deep feeling for the existential is cool Greek wit when compared to the will to believe.

  O Gadjo Niglo

  In the summer they bring the artillery and fire out to sea. The officers in their red coats arrive the day before on glossy horses. The caissons and powder wagons come through the woods at night. In the morning the cannons sit battery by battery on the beach.

  The sergeants give the orders for unlimbering and spreading trails. The gunner opens the breech and seats the shell and charge. A lieutenant gives the quadrant and deflection to a corporal who shouts them to the gunners who run the barrels up and wind them to the side with a crank on a wheel. An order to fire at the top of the corporal's lungs and the gunners pull the lanyards. The cannons crack and jump. A line of splashes far out at sea.

  I watched all this from my place in the bushes on the hill above. The old officer pulled his moustache. There was a grand haze into which the cannon smoke ran like ink in water. The thrushes and sparrows ripped from the bushes when the cannons boomed. The gulls fluttered and scattered. I was Robinson Crusoe observing from my covert the army of the emperor that had come to practise its aim on the shores of my island.

  Once when an officer came to the door I could see close up his sword and shoulder belt. His eyes were grey with lashes like a girl. The colonel would be obliged for the loan of a lemon had we such an article to spare. Thesmond glided away and returned with a lemon on a salver. It was wrapped in a twist of tissue. Thesmond nodded briefly to the charm of his smile.

  Why ever a lemon? Matilda would ask such a question. It was her nature. She gave me one of her looks. Thesmond said that it was for the colonel's drink before dinner. To Papa he would have said for the colonel's preprandial impotation. Tie your tongue. So colonels had dinner out there in their tents on the scrub. I had seen the soldiers file past the field kitchens and eat on the rocks out of tin plates. Sometimes they wrestled.

  Toward evening they stripped naked and swam in the sea. Some were as white as plaster and some were as brown as an acorn. The officers bathed separately. Orderlies had towels for them when they came panting and knocking water from their ears.

  The officer who came to the door on his roan was as hairy as a rug down his front when he undressed for the sea. Thickest just under his throat and across his chest and between his legs. I saw his peter good.

  I could still hear the cannon at night along with the dull roar of the sea. Over two hills and a valley. The road to the beach is off our road to the turnpike. The caissons rattle and creak along it back to wherever they come from. Back to Stockholm. Back to Goteborg. In a week the ruts and marks will be smoothed by the wind.

  Next day the gypsies go over the place looking and picking up. They come from nowhere like the artillery and go off as suddenly. They will steal me if I let them see me. Matilda can recall the names of boys taken off by the gypsies. Nor must I go near the artillery because of the gunpowder and the talk.

  The artillery came this year after Stilt. How could I have escaped Stilt to see them? He comes in the winter and stays for months. He replaced Fröken Gomber who taught me when I was little. Svensk and arithmetic. Geography and history. Stilt teaches me geometry and rhetoric. Latin and compound interest. He himself goes to school when he is not here. He is writing a thesis in divinity which is about matters which he says I could not yet begin to comprehend. Free will and destiny. Election and grace.

  Stilt bends and kisses Grandmama's old hand to her merriment though her scrunch of fun is all gone when he stands straight again. He comments on the golden weather. She says that it will change. She asks him to witness the instability of the candle flames and the thickness of the squirrels' coats. There is moreover an early red in the larches.

  For Stilt I am ordered into jacket and tie. I must have clean fingernails. He cleans his while we read Latin. He smells of peppermint. Vercingetorix. Helvetia. Cisalpine Gauls.

  In the summer there is no Stilt.

  Papa comes and goes and stays only a little while. He is very busy. He always brings wonderful things. The microscope which Stilt has taught me to use is the most wonderful though I have liked better my model ship.

  Grandmama is in her room. She is little and cold all the time. Every morning we kneel around her and say our prayers. We hear Scripture and we hear Swedenborg. And she gets off the subject. She will say in the middle of scripture that titled coaches used to come to the door. Thesmond brings the big bible and opens it on a table that sits over Grandmama's knees. Thessalonians. Galatians. We hear that all of heaven is one angel just as all of mankind is one man except that he fell away from grace.

  With Stilt I look at leaves under the microscope. I draw a stoma. An arrangement of cells at the stem and
at the edge of the leaf.

  Papa looks like Sir Charles Wheatstone in the stereopticon.

  In the summer with no Stilt I found it easy to sneak away to the stables to find Tarpy the miller's son. He is not the miller's son but the miller's bastard. The miller flies into a rage if you tease him about whose son he is. I have heard that he is the bastard of the miller's wife got on her by a drummer who sells needles and thread. Old Sollander raised him on our place. He would say tried to raise him.

  Sometimes when I find him he has his usual crazy sweetness in his eyes and tears too which he wipes with his rotten sleeves. Sollander has crisscrossed welts up his legs. Some on his arms. And one across his forehead beading blood. He is older than I but a baby. The predikant says that we are not to associate with him. He is vile and depraved. I learned that for myself down by the river collecting beetles. He was there smiling as wide as the urchins in the funny German picture books. He was wearing my cast off breeches mended beyond mending more and a jacket that had been Papa's. His hair was cut any which a way and combed with fingers if combed at all. His smile bloomed into huggermugger. He asked to see my peter and showed me his. I felt lucky and liked his friendliness and his interest.

  I think I knew that his welts were something to do with his peter and his playing with it lots. I knew that the predikant had given Sollander leave to beat this vileness out of Tarpy. So I balked. And knew that my stubbornness was a false face.

  I lied and said that I didn't do such things. All the while there was to my mind a rammy prestige that went with his goatishness. Of a man who butts down doors with his head you can only say that he butts down doors with his head. But he is not a niddering about it and does it with a will. Tarpy had his peter out of his fly. It was bigger and longer than mine.