Eastlick and Other Stories

by Page, Shannon

  RH: What a grim situation... Why did these people not revolt? It doesn’t sound as if they had much to lose.

  GD: It was the beer, Herr Halifax.

  RH: The beer? I ... don’t quite see—

  GD: The one exception to Mad Gus’s insane selfishness and cruelty was the beer. Or so it seems, at first glance, ja?

  RH: Ah. Right... First glance at ... what, exactly?

  GD: Understand, Herr Halifax, the people of Durn were allowed one male goat or cow and one female. Any kids or calves produced were confiscated just as soon as they were weaned, and taken off to grace the royal table—as was any milk not used for making cheese. Mad Gus’s subjects were encouraged to make all the cheese they wished, but not allowed to eat a bite of it. Off to the castle with that too, straight from the molds. Folk kept just half a bushel of whatever produce they might eke out of the rocky soil. All the rest was seized as “tax” upon harvest and sent up to the tyrant’s bulging granaries and cellars against some rainy day. His rainy day, of course, not theirs. But! Strangely enough, folk were allowed to keep all the hops and grain that they might wish—just as long as it was brewed straight into beer. You would expect that once the work of brewing had been done, all that beer would vanish up into the castle with the rest, ja? But to everyone’s carefully suppressed astonishment, no! Mad Gus allowed the folk of Durn to keep their beer as well. As much as they could make and store and drink.

  RH: Why?

  GD: Mad Gus claimed to hate the stuff. With a passion—as one might expect of such a tyrant, ja? What other kind of man could hate such divine elixir? One might even surmise that this deviant abhorrence was the very cause of his degraded character. But the truth is otherwise, I think. Mad Gus was likely not so mad as that.

  RH: But still ... why then? It makes no sense.

  GD: Does it not?

  RH: Why are you smiling that way?

  GD: All in good time, young man. First, you must know something about how beer came to be, for, as I said, it came to be right there in Durn. No one else had ever tried—or thought of trying—to make beer then.[19] Why would they have? Beer begins as pretty noxious stuff prior to the miracle of fermentation. Its first manufacture in Durn was just an accident—the result, in fact, of Mad Gus’s own relentless greed.

  It is said that some poor farmer, whose name is sadly lost to us, had tried to cheat Mad Gus out of his excessive “tax” by hiding a few scant ingredients for bread and herbal soup within his little hovel, thinking that the tyrant’s henchmen would not notice such a small omission. But Mad Gus had trained his men quite ... passionately, let us say, and they were not deceived. So, when the poor man saw them ride into his yard, he poured all his illicit grain and herbs and yeast into the only hiding place at his disposal, an extremely large urn of water, unfortunately still half full, then jammed a rag into its mouth in hopes that his assailants would not look inside. They did, of course. That urn was likely the only object in the hovel worth examining. When they saw the soupy mess he’d made of his ill-gotten grain, they shoved the rag back into place and left the mess to rot. The man himself was left to rot as well, inside Mad Gus’s dungeon.

  Somehow, though, the hapless man survived Mad Gus’s hospitality, and three months later, was released—which was not so great a favor as it may seem at first. Winter was well arrived by then. The valley was all hunkered down to starve until the spring, and the paroled farmer, already weak and hungry from his ordeal, had no one to assist him. Amidst the snowdrifts that had blown into his open hovel since they’d taken him away, he found nothing but the water urn they’d left, still containing all the food he had possessed. Without much hope, I imagine, he removed the rag and peered inside. Have you ever seen the afterbirth of fresh beer, Herr Halifax?[20]

  RH: I fear I haven’t.

  GD: It does not smell too bad, and it gives off a certain heat in fermentation, so it was not likely frozen, which was doubtless fortunate, but it is otherwise a most unappealing sight. Still, a man starving in winter might try anything. It seems he drank some of the fizzy, clotted broth into which all that grain and yeast had composted in his absence, likely hoping it might still provide at least a trace more nutritional value than could be derived from the frozen clay of his packed-earth floor, or the weathered wooden lintel of his doorway.[21] It must not have tasted too badly, for it seems he drank enough of it to experience a strange and wonderful euphoria.

  RH: You’re not telling me that no one had ever been drunk before this, are you?

  GD: Not in Durn, they hadn’t. And no one ever anywhere, not from beer.[22]

  RH: Good heavens.

  GD: Indeed. The urn was apparently large enough to provide a bit more of the miraculous substance to share with neighbors, who, in exchange for this transcendent experience, gave him enough food to delay his death from excessive starvation for several more weeks.

  RH: He still died—after all that?!

  GD: Alas. It seems he did. Martyred to bring beer into the world. I am told that one could find shrines dedicated to him throughout Schkerrinwald for centuries afterward.

  RH: I’m sorry, Herr Dourtmundschtradel, but I feel compelled to ask: does this story of yours get any happier?

  GD: Has beer ever made you ... happy, Herr Halifax?

  RH: Well ... er ... I suppose it ... may have... Once or twice.

  GD: Then you have your answer. This is the story of beer, young man, which has not just one, but many millions of happy endings.[23]

  RH: I’m not sure that’s exactly what I—

  GD: Returning to the point, however, they say that when Mad Gus was informed of the poor man’s struggle to survive on rotted grain in spoiled water, he laughed long and loud, then ordered one of his henchmen to bring him a small flask of the substance to examine. It is further said that he found the sample so revolting, he killed the man who’d brought it to him.[24]

  RH: What a monster.

  GD: As I’ve said, what else can be expected of a man who dislikes beer? After that, it amused him to invite the rest of his subjects to drink all the rotten grain and bitter, spoiled water they wished—which is, ostensibly, how the limitations on retention of certain staples became so liberalized. “If these ungrateful subjects find my provision for them insufficient,” Mad Gus is said to have announced, “then they may drink all the bread they want.”

  RH: Er... Well, all right. But it could not have taken long for him to notice that they liked the stuff. Wouldn’t he have changed his mind then?

  GD: Oh, they were no doubt careful to pretend dislike of this new concoction, and that they drank it purely out of dietary desperation—as may well have been the case at first. But I suspect the real reason they persisted in drinking it, and the real reason Mad Gus went on letting them, were one and the same: beer’s effect. Left so little else to eat, they must have pinched their noses and endured this new “liquid bread” for breakfast, lunch and dinner, ja? No doubt they found the drunken state this left them in as ... engaging, shall we say, as so many of us still do. But can you not see how useful Mad Gus may have found this unintended consequence as well?

  RH: I’m ... not sure I can. Assuming most of them were happy drunks, I’d still expect a man like that to have put a stop to it, just on principle.

  GD: Think of them not as “happy”, Herr Halifax, but as “pacified”, for I suspect that is how Mad Gus saw them. He must have known—as you yourself have pointed out—that he was in danger should they ever decide they’d had enough. But while a people always pleasantly drunk or at least partially hung over may clearly still get angry, they are far less likely to get very motivated, much less organized, ja?[25]

  RH: Why, that’s ... diabolical. Your father told you all this?

  GD: The outlines, young man, the outlines... And this is where my story really starts. Or where the story starts being mine, at any rate. My family’s ancestral founder was a man named Gundar Dourtmund. The schtradel portion of our surname was not added until many centur
ies later. Young Gundar was technically a barley farmer in Durn, though, like all the others in that benighted valley, he lived as little more than a miserable serf. He too had lost crops, cattle, property, and family members to Mad Gus’s vindictive whims. But he too subsisted largely on beer, and so had simply drifted like the others into a state of muddled resignation.

  One autumn morning, as he was pulling a great cart of freshly harvested barley from his fields through the village on his way to Mad Gus’s castle granaries—without benefit of any oxen, for his only animals had been stolen by Mad Gus’s men the previous week[26]—he chanced to see his good friend, Horning Brock, the village innkeeper, standing outside his establishment. After more than a millennium, of course, none can say exactly what passed between them there, but one can well imagine how their conversation must have gone.

  “Where are your oxen?” Brock would surely have asked.

  “Where do you suppose?” Gundar probably replied.

  They would likely have glanced up wearily at Mad Gus’s hulking manse.

  “Ah,” Brock sighs. “Just so with my dear Marya.”

  “No!” Gundar gasps. “They took your wife?”

  Brock nods sadly. “Two weeks ago. And my sweet daughter, Hester, just last Tuesday. Had you not heard?”

  “Sadly, no,” Gundar answers. “I’ve been busy in the fields with harvest for some weeks now, as you see.”

  “And poor Lily just last night.”

  “Your five-year-old?!” Gundar gasps. “Whatever have you done to piss them off so, Horning?”

  “They’ve not told me yet,” Brock answers. “They’re clearly very busy at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll get around to explanations just as soon as there’s a lull in all this kidnapping.” The two men likely turn another wistful glance up at the tyrant’s fort. “At least they’ve left my little Kamber,” Brock adds, trying to seem stoic. “It’s true he’s only three; but he can fair well reach the stove already, if he stands upon a box. Should they come for me as well, I’m sure he’ll make a fine innkeeper just as soon as he can lift more than his nose above the counter.”[27]

  Or, if not these words exactly, I am sure their conversation would have been something very like this. It’s how things were in Durn back then.

  At any rate, it is passed down that Brock invited Gundar inside to share a stein of beer; and given all the sadness both men had to process, it would have been extremely rude of Gundar to refuse him. He removed the yoke from his shoulders, and left his barley wagon in the street.

  It is never a good idea to drink beer quickly, of course. There were no antacids in those days.[28] So they lingered over that first stein, as one does. It turned out that many other calamities had been suffered recently by various townsfolk, of which Gundar had heard nothing, being preoccupied with harvest. So another stein or two were had as Brock brought Gundar up to date on all of Gus’s latest shenanigans.

  To that point, they had been drinking a light and pleasant lager,[29] as one did then in the mornings after breakfast, but before they knew it, lunchtime had arrived, and being an hospitable man by both trade and nature, Brock could hardly have sent Gundar back to his long slog without some meal to sustain him. So he brought out a potato,[30] and poured them each a pint of pale ale[31] to wash it down with. Of course, Gundar was not the sort of man to accept another fellow’s largesse and then just rush off without so much as a fare-thee-well. Even peasant manners dictate that one linger after such a meal for at least the minimal pleasantries and small talk.

  This courtesy occasioned another stein or two, and, it being afternoon by then, they moved to hearty oatmeal stout.[32] As the sun slanted lower through the inn’s bottle-glass windows, and the air began to chill, the two men finished off their very satisfying visit with a pint or two, or five perhaps, of Brock’s fine late-season porter.[33] Then Gundar stood at last, with relatively minor difficulty, and thanked Brock warmly, while insisting that he really must be off to finish his delivery.

  They stumbled outside together, and soon had the barley wagon’s yoke untangled from the ground and firmly settled onto Brock’s stout shoulders. It took just a minute more to have it off again, and onto Gundar’s shoulders. Then, with a determined heave or two, my many-times-great-grandfather was off again toward Mad Gus’s hilltop granary—even by Durn’s standards, quite profoundly “shitfaced”, as you Americans say. Little did he know what was about to come of such a mundane visit with his friend.

  RH: Herr Dourtmundschtradel, I really must congratulate you on such clarity of memory at your age.[34] How long has it been since you last heard this tale from your father?

  GD: It is difficult to be certain. He told it to me many times, but the last I can recall was during a long train ride to visit one of his mistresses when I was ... eight years old, perhaps. He died not long after that. Of a gunshot wound. To the back. Quite a tangle at the time...

  RH: My condolences, Herr Dourtmundschtradel.

  GD: Thank you, Herr Halifax, but I assure you it is all ancient history to me now.

  RH: Well, I must say, this tale of yours is really ... very long. Perhaps I ought to change the tape before we go further.

  [Tape two]

  RH: All right. I think we’re ready to continue. You were saying...?

  GD: Yes. Well. By all accounts, Gundar was so drunk, the fact he ever even reached the granary gates is yet another sign of divinity’s hand in this affair. It was near twilight when Gundar finally wheezed and wobbled to a halt within the castle courtyard. And who was he astonished and dismayed to find there waiting for him, but Mad Gus himself.

  RH: Uh-oh.

  GD: [Wheezy laughter, followed by a fit of coughing.] The brevity of which your language is so capable never ceases to astonish me, Herr Halifax. It is just so ... laughable.[35]

  But yes. Just as you say, ‘Uh-oh.’ From what my father handed down to me, the ensuing conversation between Mad Gus and Gundar went something more or less like this:

  Mad Gus says, “You’re late, you drunken sot! We’ve been waiting for you here all afternoon and into dinner!”

  All Gundar’s inebriated brain can manufacture in reply is, “Why?”

  “You dare ask me WHY?!” Mad Gus bellows. “What an impertinent question! Are you too drunk to see who stands before you?”

  “Before me?” Gundar looks around, bewildered. “I didn’t mean to cut in line. If someone was here first, I’m glad to wait.”

  “I’m talking about me, Barrel Brains!” says the tyrant. “Your ruler stands before you—waiting for a wagonload of barley that should have been here before lunch!”

  “You’re before me?” asks Gundar, even more confused. “But ... why would you be made to wait in line ... in your own courtyard? You’re the ruler.”

  “There is no line, you idiot!” Mad Gus shouts. “You’re the only one in line!”

  “Then ... what’s the problem?” Gundar pleads.

  “YOU’RE LATE!!!” screams the tyrant.

  “For what?” whines Gundar. Even he can tell this isn’t being managed well, but granary deliveries were never “by appointment”. If there’d been some schedule here, he had never been informed of it... Then again, his friend Brock still hadn’t been informed of why they’d kidnapped his two daughters and his wife...

  “I sent men to your farm this morning for the barley,” Mad Gus growls,[36] clearly struggling to regain his composure. “They were informed by a neighbor of yours—since imprisoned—that you’d already left to drag your little wagon here—where we’ve been waiting for you all damn day!”

  “Waiting?” Gundar asks again. “For a cartful of barley…?”

  “When you failed to show up as expected, I’d have bet my second pair of pants that you were trying to flee the valley with my barley! In fact, I still think that’s what you tried to do. So what went wrong, dummkopf?”

  “I wasn’t trying to flee anywhere,” Gundar protests. “You know the only way out of Durn leads right thro
ugh here. Where else could I have gone? Up a cliff? With a cartload of barley?”

  “Call me stupid one more time,” says Gus, “and you can laugh it up down in my dungeons with your insolent neighbor. If you weren’t trying to run away, where have you been all day? It should not have taken you two hours to get here from your pathetic little farm.”

  Gundar opens his mouth to say he’d just been visiting with Brock, but some lonely, semi-lucid synapse in his finally sobering mind suggests that Brock has already suffered too much at Gus’s hands. Sadly, this brief window of lucidity then closes up again as quickly as it had popped open, and Gundar is so pie-eyed that he can’t quite distinguish at that moment between thoughts and words—which is how the thought, I should just have turned this Gottdamn[37] barley into beer,[38] becomes so inconveniently audible.

  “You should have ... what?” says Mad Gus very quietly.

  “What?” Gundar replies, still only half aware that he had thought aloud.