The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

by Gene Wolfe

  He opened it for them and showed them into a living room that might almost have been called a parlor, so full it was of the smell of dust, and mementos of times gone by, and stiff furniture, and old books. There he seated them in two of the stiff chairs and brought out coffee (which he called java) for the young man and himself, and tea for the young woman. “We used to call this Ceylon tea,” he said. “Now it is Sri Lanka tea, I suppose. The Greeks called it Taprobane, and the Arabs Serendib.”

  The young man and woman nodded politely, not quite sure what he meant.

  There was Scotch shortbread too, and he reminded them that Scotland is only the northern end of the island of Great Britain, and that Scotland itself embraces three famous island groups, the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides. He quoted Thomson to them:

  Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,

  Boils round the naked melancholy isles

  Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge

  Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

  Then he asked the young man if he knew where Thule was.

  “It’s where Prince Valiant comes from in the comic strip, I think,” the young man said. “But not a real place.”

  Dr. Insula shook his head. “It is Iceland.” He turned to the young woman. “Prince Valiant is supposed to be a peer of Arthur’s realm, I believe. You will recall that Arthur was interred on the island of Avalon. Can you tell me, please, where that is?”

  “It is a mythical island west of Ireland,” the young woman said, that being what they had taught her in school.

  “No, it is in Somerset. It was there that his coffin was found, in 1191, inscribed: Hic jacet Arthurus Rex, quondam Rex que futuris. Avalon was also the last known resting place of the Holy Grail.”

  The young man said, “I don’t think that’s true history, Dr. Insula.”

  “Why it’s not accepted history, I suppose. Tell me, do you know who wrote True History?”

  “No one writes true history,” the young man said, that being what they had taught him in school. “All history is subjective, reflecting the perceptions and unacknowledged prejudices of the historian.” After his weak answer about Prince Valiant, he was quite proud of that one.

  “Why, then my history is as good as accepted history. And since there really was a King Arthur—he is mentioned in contemporary chronicles—surely it’s more than probable that he was buried in Somerset than in some nonexistent place? But True History was written by Lucian of Samosata.”

  He told them of Lucian’s travels to Antioch, Greece, Italy, and Gaul, and this led him to speak of the ships of that time and the danger of storms and piracy, and the enchantment of the Greek isles. He told them of Apollo’s birth on Delos; of Patmos, where Saint John beheld the Apocalypse; and of Phraxos, where the sorcerer Conchis dwelt. He said, “ ‘To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man to paradise.’ ” But because it did not rhyme, the young man and the young woman did not know that he was quoting a famous tale.

  At last he said, “But why is it that people at all times and in all places have considered islands unique and uniquely magical? Can either of you tell me that?”

  Both shook their heads.

  “Very well then. One of you has a small boat, I believe.”

  “I do,” the young man said. “It’s an aluminum canoe—you probably saw it on top of my Toyota.”

  “Good. You would have no objection to taking your fellow student as a passenger? I have a homework assignment for both of you. You must go to a certain isle I shall tell you of, and when we next meet describe to me what you find magical there.” And he told them how to go down certain roads to certain others until they came to one that was unpaved and had the river for its end, and how from that place they would see the island.

  “When we meet again,” he said, “I shall reveal to you the true locations of Atlantis, of High Brasail, and of Utopia.” And he quoted these lines:

  Our fabled shores none ever reach,

  No mariner has found our beach,

  Scarcely our mirage is seen,

  And neighbouring waves of floating green,

  Yet still the oldest charts contain

  Some dotted outline of our main.

  “Okay,” the young man said, and he got up and went out.

  Dr. Insula rose too, to show the young woman to the door, but he looked so ill that she asked if he were all right. “I am as all right as it is possible for an old man to be,” he told her. “My dear, could you bear one last quotation?” And when she nodded, he whispered:

  The deep

  Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows, for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

  The young man and the young woman stopped at a delicatessen and bought sandwiches that the young woman paid for, she saying that because the young man was driving, her self-respect (she was careful not to say honor) demanded it. They also bought a six-pack of beer that the young man paid for, he saying that his own self-respect demanded it (he too was careful not to say honor) because she had paid for the sandwiches.

  Then they followed the directions Dr. Insula had given them and so came to a sandy riverbank, where they lifted the aluminum canoe from the Toyota and set sail for the little pine-covered island a hundred yards or so downstream.

  There they explored the whole place and threw stones into the water, and sat listening to the wind tell of old things among the boughs of the largest pine.

  And when they had cooled the beer in the leaf-brown river, and eaten the sandwiches they had brought, they paddled back to the spot where they had parked the Toyota, debating how they could tell Dr. Insula he had been mistaken about the island when they came next week—how they could tell him there was no magic there.

  But when the next week came (as the next week always does) and they stood on the shadowed, creaking porch and knocked at the water-spotted oak door, an old woman crossed the street to tell them it was no use to knock.

  “He passed on a week ago yesterday,” she said. “It was such a shame. He’d come out to talk to me that morning, and he was so happy because he was going to meet with his students the next day. He must have gone into his garage after that; that was where they found him.”

  “Sitting in his boat,” the young woman said.

  The old woman nodded. “Why, yes. I suppose you must have heard about it.”

  The young man and the young woman looked at each other then, and thanked her, and walked away. Afterward they talked about it sometimes and thought about it often, but it was not until much later (when it was time for the long, long vacation that stretches from the week before Christmas to the beginning of the new semester in January and they would have to separate for nearly a month) that they discovered Dr. Insula had not been mistaken about the island after all.

  AFTERWORD

  I love this story. In truth, I like all the stories in this book (although not all the stories I have written), but this is a special favorite. Not because it ended the cycle I began with “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories,” but because it so resolutely refuses to be like other stories. It is its own wistful self, always, weeping as it smiles. I hope you love it, too.

  REDBEARD

  I

  t doesn’t matter how Howie and I became friends, except that our friendship was unusual. I’m one of those people who’ve moved into the area since . . . Since what? I don’t know; someday I’ll have to ask Howie. Since the end of the sixties or the Truman Administration or the Second Wo
rld War. Since something.

  Anyway, after Mara and I came with our little boy, John, we grew conscious of an older stratum. They are the people who were living here before. Howie is one of them; his grandparents are buried in the little family cemeteries that are or used to be attached to farms—all within twenty miles of my desk. Those people are still here, practically all of them, like the old trees that stand among the new houses.

  By and large we don’t mix much. We’re only dimly aware of them, and perhaps they’re only dimly aware of us. Our friends are new people too, and on Sunday mornings we cut the grass together. Their friends are the children of their parents’ friends, and their own uncles and cousins; on Sunday mornings they go to the old clapboard churches.

  Howie was the exception, as I said. We were driving down U.S. 27—or rather, Howie was driving and I was sitting beside him smoking a cigar and having a look around. I saw a gate that was falling down, with a light that was leaning way over, and beyond it just glimpsed, a big, old, tumbledown wooden house with young trees sprouting in the front yard. It must have had about ten acres of ground, but there was a boarded-up fried-chicken franchise on one side of it and a service station on the other.

  “That’s Redbeard’s place,” Howie told me.

  I thought it was a family name, perhaps an anglicization of Barbarossa. I said, “It looks like a haunted house.”

  “It is,” Howie said. “For me, anyway. I can’t go in there.”

  We hit a chuckhole, and I looked over at him.

  “I tried a couple times. Soon as I set my foot on that step, something says, ‘This is as far as you go, buster,’ and I turn around and head home.”

  After a while I asked him who Redbeard was.

  “This used to be just a country road,” Howie said. “They made it a Federal Highway back about the time I was born, and it got a lot of cars and trucks and stuff on it. Now the Interstate’s come through, and it’s going back to about what it was.

  “Back before, a man name of Jackson used to live there. I don’t think anybody thought he was much different, except he didn’t get married till he was forty or so. But then, a lot of people around here used to do that. He married a girl named Sarah Sutter.”

  I nodded, just to show Howie I was listening.

  “She was a whole lot younger than him, nineteen or twenty. But she loved him—that’s what I always heard. Probably he was good to her, and so on. Gentle. You know?”

  I said a lot of young women like that preferred older men.

  “I guess. You know where Clinton is? Little place about fifteen miles over. There had been a certain amount of trouble around Clinton going on for years, and people were concerned about it. I don’t believe I said this Jackson was from Clinton, but he was. His dad had run a store there and had a farm. The one brother got the farm and the next oldest the store. This Jackson, he just got some money, but it was enough for him to come here and buy that place. It was about a hundred acres then.

  “Anyhow, they caught him over in Clinton. One of those chancy things. It was winter, and dark already, and there’d been a little accident where a car hit a school bus that still had quite a few kids riding home. Nobody was killed as far as I heard or even hurt bad, but a few must have had bloody noses and so forth, and you couldn’t get by on the road. Just after the deputy’s car got there this Jackson pulled up, and the deputy told him to load some of the kids in the back and take them to the doctor’s.

  “Jackson said he wouldn’t, he had to get back home. The deputy told him not to be a damned fool. The kids were hurt and he’d have to go back to Clinton anyhow to get onto Mill Road, because it would be half the night before they got that bus moved.

  “Jackson still wouldn’t do it, and went to try and turn his pickup around. From the way he acted, the deputy figured there was something wrong. He shined his flash in the back, and there was something under a tarp there. When he saw that, he hollered for Jackson to stop and went over and jerked the tarp away. From what I hear, now he couldn’t do that because of not having a warrant and if he did, Jackson would have got off. Back then, nobody had heard of such foolishness. He jerked that tarp away, and there was a girl underneath, and she was dead. I don’t even know what her name was. Rosa or something like that, I guess. They were Italians that had come just a couple of years before.” Howie didn’t give Italians a long I, but there had been a trifling pause while he remembered not to. “Her dad had a little shoe place,” he said. “The family was there for years after.

  “Jackson was arrested, and they took him up to the county seat. I don’t know if he told them anything or not. I think he didn’t. His wife came up to see him, and then a day or so later the sheriff came to the house with a search warrant. He went all through it, and when he got to going through the cellars one of the doors was locked. He asked her for the key, but she said she didn’t have it. He said he’d have to bust down the door, and asked her what was in there. She said she didn’t know, and after a while it all came out—I mean, all as far as her understanding went.

  “She told him that door had been shut ever since she and Jackson had been married. He’d told her he felt a man was entitled to some privacy, and that right there was his private place, and if she wanted a private place of her own she could have it, but to stay out of his. She’d taken one of the upstairs bedrooms and made it her sewing room.

  “Nowadays they just make a basement and put everything on top, but these old houses have cellars with walls and rooms, just like upstairs. The reason is that they didn’t have the steel beams we use to hold everything up, so they had to build masonry walls underneath; if you built a couple of these, why, you had four rooms. The foundations of all these old houses are stone.”

  I nodded again.

  “This one room had a big, heavy door. The sheriff tried to knock it down, but he couldn’t. Finally he had to telephone around and get a bunch of men to help him. They found three girls in there.”

  “Dead?” I asked Howie.

  “That’s right. I don’t know what kind of shape they were in, but not very good, I guess. One had been gone over a year. That’s what I heard.”

  As soon as I said it, I felt like a half-wit, but I was thinking of all the others, of John Gacy and Jack the Ripper and the dead black children of Atlanta, and I said, “Three? That was all he killed?”

  “Four,” Howie told me, “counting the Italian girl in the truck. Most people thought it was enough. Only there was some others missing too, you know, in various places around the state, so the sheriff and some deputies tore everything up looking for more bodies. Dug in the yard and out in the fields and so on.”

  “But they didn’t find any more?”

  “No, they didn’t. Not then,” Howie said. “Meantime, Jackson was in jail like I told you. He had kind of reddish hair, so the paper called him Redbeard. Because of Bluebeard, you know, and him not wanting his wife to look inside that cellar room. They called the house Redbeard’s Castle.

  “They did things a whole lot quicker in those times, and it wasn’t much more than a month before he was tried. Naturally, his wife had to get up on the stand.”

  I said, “A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband.”

  “She wasn’t testifying against him; she was testifying for him. What a good man he was, and all that. Who else would do it? Of course when she’d had her say, the district attorney got to go to work on her. You know how they do.

  “He asked her about that room and she told him just about what I told you. Jackson, he said he wanted a place for himself and told her not to go in there. She said she hadn’t even known the door was locked till the sheriff tried to open it. Then the district attorney said, ‘Didn’t you know he was asking for your help, that your husband was asking for your help, that the whole room there was a cry for help, and he wanted you to go in there and find those bodies so he wouldn’t have to kill again?’ ”

  Howie fell silent for a mile or two. I tossed the b
utt of my cigar out the window and sat wondering if I would hear any more about those old and only too commonplace murders.

  When Howie began talking again, it was as though he had never stopped. “That was the first time anybody from around here had heard that kind of talk, I think. Up till then, I guess everybody thought if a man wanted to get caught he’d just go to the police and say he did it. I always felt sorry for her, because of that. She was—I don’t know—like an owl in daylight. You know what I mean?”

  I didn’t, and I told him so.

  “The way she’d been raised, a man meant what he said. Then too, the man was the boss. Today when they get married there isn’t hardly a woman that promises to obey, but back then they all did it. If they’d asked the minister to leave that out, most likely he’d have told them he wouldn’t perform the ceremony. Now the rules were all changed, only nobody’d told her that.

  “I believe she took it pretty hard, and of course it didn’t do any good, her getting on the stand or the district attorney talking like that to her either. The jury came back in about as quick as they’d gone out, and they said he was guilty, and the judge said sentencing would be next day. He was going to hang him, and everybody knew it. They hanged them back then.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “That next morning his wife came to see him in the jail. I guess he knew she would, because he asked the old man that swept out to lend him a razor and so forth. Said he wanted to look good. He shaved and then he waited till he heard her step.”

  Howie paused to let me comment or ask a question. I thought I knew what was coming, and there didn’t seem to be much point in saying anything.

  “When he heard her coming, he cut his throat with the razor blade. The old man was with her, and he told the paper about it afterward. He said they came up in front of the cell and Jackson was standing there with blood all running down his shirt. He really was Redbeard for true then. After a little bit, his knees gave out and he fell down in a heap.