Eastlick and Other Stories

by Page, Shannon

  “Our beer!” shouted several men at once, as Gundar’s motley army charged together toward the open granary entrance. The sad fact that none of them had thought to bring their steins along would not likely have impeded them from simply kneeling down and lapping it out of the vat. These were men more practical than proud. But here is what they found as they raced through the granary door:

  Directly before them, filling more than half the room up to the ceiling nearly thirty feet above, stood an unimaginably large beer vat, its hastily constructed walls groaning audibly in the sudden silence. In front of this stood nearly every henchman Mad Gus employed, which helped explain the odd lack of resistance they’d encountered in the courtyard. And finally, dead center, out in front, stood Mad Gus beside his cannon, staring right at Gundar’s rebel band, and smiling blandly.

  In one hand Gus held a white lace handkerchief, with which, it seemed, he had been giving his beloved cannon a last-minute polishing. Without shifting eyes or smile from Gundar’s men, Gus gave the cannon one last swish, and said, extremely quietly, to a henchman standing just behind the cannon, “Fire at will.”

  Of all the müdder füching[56] dirty tricks, thought Gundar, certain that he and his brother peasants were completely had. But in that instant, a lifetime of bottled rage fountained up inside him, and, no longer caring how few minutes long his life might be, he tucked his head defiantly, and charged straight at the cannon with a bullish roar.

  Fortunately, Gus’s fussy cannon was of the kind ignited by those silly six-inch fuses that burn down so slowly and dramatically in movies—which provided Gundar just sufficient time to close the gap and shoulder the cannon’s barrel upward as it went off with a deafening boom. Gundar felt his hair part on one side as the cannonball whizzed past on its way to hit a heavy metal plate bolted just above the entrance to support a hanging pulley system, then bounce back to fly with nearly as much speed across the chamber toward the high vat wall, into which it slammed and stuck, not ten feet above the heads of Gus’s startled henchmen. All of them turned now, looking up with open mouths to where the leaden ball hung half-embedded in the splintered wood. An instant later, with a tinny pinging sound, the cannonball popped loose and fell onto the upturned head of one unhappy henchman, who went down like a sack of sand. Where the cannonball had been lodged, a little fountain now appeared, spitting out a slender golden arc of beer, which splashed down onto other upturned faces among Gus’s corps—igniting momentary envy in Gundar and his crew. Then, an ominous grumbling sound issued from the vat’s straining wooden walls, rather like that of a stomach filled too full.

  “RUN!!!” Gundar screamed, already racing for the granary entrance.

  Being so near the door already, Gundar’s men just made it out as the awesome vat gave way. Only Gundar failed to make it through in time, though he was so few feet inside that the tidal wave of beer just picked him up and spat him through the straining entrance like an olive pit. Gundar’s wide-eyed men backed rapidly away, sure the granary’s quaking front wall would collapse at any moment. But it held, causing most of that unthinkable tide of beer to rebound off its inside face and surge back toward where Mad Gus and his henchmen lay broken and scattered now amidst the ruins of their ruptured vat. Afterward, it was surmised that the rebounding flood had gathered up all in its path and flung the load so forcefully at the already shaken building’s rear wall that it gave way at once.

  As a sodden Gundar climbed back onto his feet out in the courtyard, his men and the remaining castle staff stood frozen, staring in shocked silence. Then, when it seemed certain that the front wall would stand, they began to move—first slowly, then with greater speed—back toward the granary door. Inside, they found nothing left but a giant frame for open air where once the granary’s back and the castle wall behind it had stood. Rushing to the vast gap’s edge, Gundar and his men looked down—a long, long way—at the still roiling and foaming waterfall, which plunged even more precipitously than usual into the valley’s sole outlet ravine, beside the steeply switch-backed trail that led one out of Durn and down into the wider world. There was no sign of Mad Gus and his henchmen. The great tide of beer, in combination with the waterfall’s usual raging torrent, had washed them all away.

  “Mein gott in himmel!”[57] Gundar murmured. “We are free.” He turned, beaming at his brave companions. “We are free at last! To live however we wish! To eat all the food we grow! All the milk and cheese our cattle give us! To sleep nights without fearing for our homes or wives or children! To drink all the beer that we can make again—without fearing that some dummkopf in this castle might come take it all away! Do you hear me, brothers? We are Mad Gus’s slaves no longer!”

  [Another lengthy pause, broken by the sounds of quiet weeping from Mr. Dourtmundschtradel. Then, after further sniffling, in a broken voice:]

  As you may imagine, Herr Halifax, a great cheer went up at this. Not just from the village men, but from the castle staff as well.

  There were many weeks of celebration after that, for there was no end of food and drink stored up in Gus’s remaining granaries and storerooms... I have no doubt it was ... a very ... beautiful time to be alive...

  RH: What a tale, Herr Dourtmundschtradel! I’ve heard nothing more astonishing in all my years of research. I assume they all lived happily ever after?

  GD: Ach, no, Herr Halifax. Regrettably, they did not.

  RH: Oh dear. Did Mad Gus come back after all? Had he survived somehow?

  GD: No, no. Nothing half so dire as that. They sent a party down the riverbed to look, of course. Wanting to be sure. But all they found were planks of wood, several dead henchmen, and a lot of inebriated fish, still flipping onto shore in drunken confusion. It is presumed all other bodies, including mad Lord Stephenson’s, lay tangled in the rocks and roots below the river’s countless rapid shoots and pools. Mad Gus was never seen again.

  RH: Then what went wrong for them?

  GD: Alas, they could not bring themselves to end their celebration, Herr Halifax. They had been so miserable for so long, and risked so much to free themselves, that no one thought they should be made to work again—on anything. Without a dictator to organize their labor and keep the valley’s complex civic logistics in motion, the peasants just ran out of goals, and food, and reasons to get up each day.[58]

  RH: That’s ... so sad.

  GD: Not entirely, Herr Halifax. Not ultimately, at least. Their inability to live without a dictator forced them all to leave in search of another one to give some order to their lives again. This search for new enslavement caused them to disperse all over Europe,[59] bringing the previously secret knowledge of beer’s manufacture[60] with them everywhere they went. As I mentioned when we started, Gundar Dourtmund’s journey ended here, in what would much later come to be Germany. It was here that Gundar met my many-times-great-grandmother, and we have been enjoying what he taught this country about brewing ever since. There are no better brewers in the world than ours, Herr Halifax.[61] How much more happiness can one demand of any ending, ja?

  * * *

  [1]At the time of this interview, Mr. Dourtmundschtradel was 91 years old and largely confined to a wicker wheelchair. He died just two years later, having fallen, somehow, from his chair into an old well more than 500 meters from the house.

  [2]Mr. Dourtmundschtradel’s English was quite good owing to a lifetime of extensive international travel and very active participation in American commodities markets, trading primarily in pork bellies.

  [3] Not to be confused with Oxford Community College in the unincorporated town of Verylittleville, Ohio—or with Deerford Vocational School in Teenytinyville, Idaho, both commonly confused with Bisonford in Littleville, Iowa.

  [4]Since this interview was conducted, the hamlet of Frauschlesundmunster has been leveled to accommodate an industrial bio-engineering facility and shopping complex. The Dourtmundschtradel ancestral farm now lies largely beneath the new development’s seventeen-acre parking structure. Henc
e the value in preserving oral history.

  [5]An uncomplimentary German term referring to someone of questionable analytic skills.

  [6]German term for “ya”.

  [7]German phrase roughly translated into English as, “Akk to God in heaven!”

  [8]Roughly translated: “The Age of Rather Long Stories”; a very brief and obscure period between the Teutonic Age of Legends and the subsequent Time of Succinct Essays, which, in turn, ended some seven centuries prior to The Moment of Memos preceding what we now refer to as “recorded European history”.

  [9]An English phrase roughly translated into German as “Ach du Lieber Himmel!”

  [10]Subsequent research has confirmed that the village of Durn, the kingdom of Schkerrinwald, and the Vorkenfast Empire are certainly quite gone, and apparently unheard of by anyone other than Mr. Dourtmundschtradel.

  [11]This assertion is disputed by some scholars.

  [12]As is this one.

  [13]And this one.

  [14]This assertion is both verifiable and undisputed.

  [15]In conversation with Mr. Dourtmundschtradel after the recording of this interview, the interviewer learned that the “brown feather” referred to was on display in Stephenson’s so-called throne room, where he made loud and frequent claims that it had been plucked by his father from the tail of a phoenix, and thus somehow proved his divine right to rule—though, to virtually all others, Dourtmundschtradel asserts, it looked an awful lot like the feather of a common owl.

  [16]This policy might go a long way toward explaining the dearth of any reference to Lord Augustus Stephenson or Durn Valley in the known historical record.

  [17]If not apocryphal, this detail places the origins of Mr. Dourtmundschtradel’s tale sometime after the introduction of Christianity to Europe, and thus well after The Age of Rather Long Stories—not to mention the first known invention of beer—casting potential doubt upon the rest of his tale, though Durn may conceivably have been the cradle of modern beer for that part of Europe—whatever part of Europe that was, exactly.

  [18]The practice described here was actually fairly common in medieval Europe, often referred to in official documents as “managing the tax base”.

  [19]As Mr. Dourtmundschtradel attributes his tale to The Age of Rather Long Stories, a period by definition outside the historical record, it is impossible to ask, much less determine, whether the historical record corroborates or contests his claim that no one else had made or heard of beer prior to its creation in Durn. (See footnote 16.)

  [20]Mr. Dourtmundschtradel’s description of the process by which this particular mixture came into being engenders some doubt as to whether the “beer” described bore much if any resemblance to the modern libation so named.

  [21]A sound assumption, even under scrutiny by modern investigative methods.

  [22]Again: a claim impossible to test from any tale attributed to The Age of Very Long Stories, etc.

  [23]More rigorous analysis places this figure closer to 14.6 billion happy endings to date, though this result must be balanced against an estimated 9.375 billion unhappy endings to date. Individual results may vary.

  [24]This practice too was fairly common in medieval Europe, commonly referred to as “information management”.

  [25]This strategy has been a staple of good governance in nearly every empire known to history, though means have varied widely from vodka in Russia and gin in Britain, to opium in China and the Middle East, to marijuana, chocolate Ding Dongs, cheeseburgers, television, and, of course, handheld video games in the US.

  [26]Given the situation described in Durn, it does seem plausible that Gundar might have gone to such trouble in transporting his harvest to Mad Gus’s granaries, desperate not to leave Gus’s men any excuse to visit him at home and perhaps burn down the place while they were there.

  [27]There were no laws at this time forbidding minors to serve or sell alcohol.

  [28]There were, of course, antacids in those days. They just hadn’t been discovered yet.

  [29]A standard lager of medieval vintage would likely have weighed in at 4.7% alcohol.

  [30]This passing reference may be even more startling than Dourtmundschtradel's assertion that beer was invented in Durn — as potatoes are not thought to have been introduced to Europe from the New World until sometime around 1500BC. This apparent anachronism now has some scholars speculating that if Durn Valley was the lowly potato's actual cradle, and some of the tubers made their way to Scandinavia (which could not have been far away given the naming conventions prevalent throughout this narrative), they might well have been transported from there to North America by seafaring Nordic explorers—whom we now know visited the New World many centuries before Columbus did—where they could have flourished and spread, only to be rediscovered and brought back to Europe centuries later just in time to catalyze Ireland's great potato blight! How ironic would that be?

  [31]A standard pale ale of the time would be estimated at approximately 5.2%

  [32]A hearty oatmeal stout of the time, estimated close to 6.4%, though batches doubtless varied widely.

  [33]Quality late-season porter of the day: 8.9% at the very least.

  [34] By this point in the narrative, any wary historian will likely have begun to question such an extraordinary volume of detailed dialogue woven through an account ostensibly one or more thousand years old. It does seem that some degree of apocryphal embellishment may reasonably be posited.

  [35]As any competent linguist will confirm, to translate a sneeze into German requires at least two paragraphs of text. German words and syntax are renowned for their length and complexity. Apparently, Mr. Dourtmundschtradel finds American linguistic minimalisms equally absurd.

  [36]Alas for Gundar’s considerable effort to avoid just this kind of attention.

  [37]Colloquial expletive.

  [38]Recall that villagers were permitted to forgo surrendering their grain to Mad Gus if it was surrendered instead to one of Durn’s many beer distillers for immediate brewing.

  [39]German phrase roughly translated into English as “Holy cow!” More literally as “God in heaven!”

  [40]Most beer scholars agree that the real issue being skirted here by this exclusively male group is that most early brewers of beer were female (known as brewsters). The abduction of so many village women may have been a much bigger impediment to new emergency brewing than the late season or sequestered grain harvest.

  [41]An intriguing interjection for two reasons. First, such concepts of clinical psychosis would not appear in the rest of Europe until around the 19th century with the work and writing of Sigmund Freud. (Was he too, perhaps, a descendant of the Durn Valley?) Secondly, the speaker here makes this accusation of psychosis even as he and his companions exhibit such clear symptoms of full blown cenosillicaphobia (fear of an empty beer glass).

  [42]Another colloquial expletive.

  [43]Deft sidestep by a consummate professional who, with all deference to German sentiments about displays of sentiment, clearly understands the value of uncensored authenticity in oral history. Our respectful apologies to the late Mr. Dourtmundschtradel, and any surviving family members.

  [44]German term for “thank you”, not to be confused with “dunken” which pertains in Germany, as in America, primarily to warm, soft, mouthwatering, God-I-wish-I-had-one-right-now donuts.

  [45]Some scholars theorize that men and dogs were brought into partnership in ancient times by the fact that they smelled much the same when wet. Further research suggests that when dry, ancient men smelled worse, but this was likely no deterrent for dogs, who, as any layman knows, are only too glad to shove their noses into any heap of dung they pass.

  [46]This detail too, if not apocryphal, suggest the tale’s origin must be much later than Herr D has indicated.

  [47]This reference continues to confuse historians as it seems to suggest carrying sausage in one’s pants was common practice at this time—an assertion supported by no o
ther known medieval reference, and made all the more mysterious in light of the fact that the men in question here have made it clear they possess no food at all.

  [48]An idea likely inspired by accounts widely published at that time of the famous Trojan Horse, though it’s puzzling that they didn't just adopt the Greeks' tried and true approach without alteration—unless perhaps the construction of Mad Gus’s vat had left in its wake a village-wide lumber shortage.

  [49]There is, in fact, a firmly established if rather brief list of items which goats won’t eat, including, but not limited to, bathroom cleanser, granite, jet fuel, haggis, marshmallow peeps, and any object larger than the goat which cannot be broken into smaller portions. Pretty much anything else though.

  [50]This detail is indisputably apocryphal. Parsnips are delicious.

  [51]Being new to the science of leadership, Gundar was clearly still unacquainted with standard diplomatic syntax used by seasoned leaders everywhere expressly to make even the simplest conversations complicated for the very prudent purpose of discouraging anything so reckless as decisive action.

  [52]Lord Augustus is credited earlier with having a cannon, which one must imagine capable of delivering its lethal payload faster than any man could react, if not with nearly the silent stealth of a bow. However, it appears that Gus had allowed just one such weapon in his domain, and reserved access to himself alone.

  [53]Further evidence of Lord Augustus’s penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to leadership.

  [54]Unclear whether this refers to the villagers’ limp resistance to harassment, or their general digestive condition, as either one might be consistent with a regular diet consisting almost entirely of beer.

  [55]Lord Augustus’s men were also regularly required to beat up villagers, burn down buildings, and kidnap women and children, of course. But given the hitherto general flaccidity of response denoted earlier, it seems likely that none of those activities had required much more in the way of muscular exertion than drinking and whoring normally do. Quite possibly less.