King of Spades

by Frederick Manfred

  Indeed, Manfred deftly depicts the complicated effects of American life. He romanticizes neither the frontier nor the civilization that follows in its wake. Rather, he captures the myriad ways in which humans shape and are shaped amid changing contexts. In America, an earthy, rebellious freedom clashes daily with settled norms, customs, and laws. In King of Spades we see Americans merge elements of their past with their unbounded dreams for the future, thereby crafting a nation that is very new but still very old. The contradictions that inevitably result from such a mixture, whether in cultural or political matters, can be profound and not easily resolved.

  One tension between old and new worlds concerns the status of labor. The Worthingtons and Kings, true to aristocratic form, view laboring for a wage as utterly degrading. Labor is for commoners, not for nobles, whose contributions to society (spiritedness, wisdom, heroism, cultural patronage, etc.) depend upon being freed from the cares of daily existence.

  It is humiliating for Alan King to work for a living in Iowa; he expected that things would come much more easily for him. Facing poverty, he sacrifices everything to keep up appearances. While he continues to dress expensively, Henrietta works herself to death to cover the bills. His pride is the source of great suffering. As time and generations pass, however, certain of the Kings’ aristocratic expectations fade. Whereas Alan King is useless in the new world, Magnus reluctantly embarks on a useful career. Studying to become a doctor, he reasons, is the best way to ensure some kind of status. In turn, Magnus’s son is a man of the frontier, and thus he is much less concerned about avoiding labor. Ransom works very hard, becoming expert at many useful skills, even forging an equal partnership with a lice-infested miner—a deed that would have appalled his forebears. Work brings him dignity and a decent living—not shame, as it did for his grandfather.

  One might consider Ransom’s attitudes toward work as superior to those held by his father and grandfather. However, Manfred is content to highlight the differences, leaving it up to the reader to contemplate and judge. Alan fits England and its aristocratic disdain for labor; Magnus might secretly long for noble privilege, but he becomes content with a place in the professional elite; Ransom operates successfully in a more democratic context, where each person is expected to pull his or her own weight, regardless of status. As we move west, from Alan to Magnus to Ransom, the pride of self-reliance is developed. This seems to be a good thing, but it requires leaving behind much that is beautiful and valuable. The best the old world has to offer—refinement, reflection, culture—is always in danger of being ignored or forgotten in the frontier settlements.

  Manfred also offers a running commentary on the sources of purity and corruption in the new world. On the surface, he appears to be making the familiar argument that America—especially the American frontier—represents a kind of natural purity, in contrast to the corrupting power of imported European ways. The clearest example of this opposition involves Ransom’s two “wives,” Kate and Erden. Kate, who came from England via Chicago and Sioux City, is physically deformed, with prominent scars and an eye patch. As madam of the Stinging Lizard, she is connected to—and profits from—all kinds of vices. Her furniture is from Chicago, and she wears manufactured perfume. She symbolizes, in important respects, the heaviness and sickness of long-established civilization.

  Erden, in contrast, is close to nature, living in the woods, smelling of wild sage, and communicating with animals. She worships the spirits that inhabit the Black Hills and works to protect their secrets. Whereas Kate looks older than her actual age, Erden is vibrant and youthful. Given a choice, it seems obvious that Ransom, or anyone else, would prefer Erden to Kate.

  Indeed, Ransom is drawn to Erden. He respects her connection to the natural world, is proud that she will bear him children, and regrets that he left her. Nevertheless, he can never quite shake Kate. She holds a different kind of attraction for him—which pulls him back into civilized society. That his relationship with Kate provokes him into a murderous rage suggests that he is hardly indifferent to her; rather, he struggles madly to discover what place she ought to have in his identity. He is caught between two worlds, or two mothers, as Manfred might put it. One represents his ancestry and the artifice of society. The other is a nature or earth mother, caring less about time and ancestry than about place and context.8 Both are essential to Ransom’s character, though they exist in sharp contradiction at times.

  In an honest novel, there can be no easy resolution to this tension, and Manfred does not disappoint. While Erden seems to represent Ransom’s true future in the new world—Magnus thinks she will be the perfect mother, being a “white girl Indian-raised”—Ransom never succeeds in finding her again, nor does he have any firm evidence that their child has been born (304). Erden remains at a distance, perhaps far off in the Bighorn Mountains, symbolizing how the West can be tantalizing in its promises but fickle in delivering on them. On the other hand, Ransom can never free himself from Kate, just as he must carry around her heavy furniture. This past, though deeply troubled, cannot be destroyed entirely. Even under amnesia, it comes back to haunt him.

  So it is for all who head west. Boundless opportunities present themselves, only to disappear amid drought, pests, and bullets. At the same time, while the East seems ever more remote, its fashions, ideas, and customs continue to penetrate the western mind. Americans look forward with a love of experiment and of founding, even as they depend upon the accumulated wisdom, laws, and culture of much older societies. While lesser writers might side with either the old or the new, Manfred sees that it is the interplay of these forces that makes America, especially the American West, truly distinctive.

  Notes

  1. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918).

  2. For other discussions of the Oedipal story in King of Spades, see Joseph M. Flora, Frederick Manfred (Boise: Boise State University, 1974), 35–40; and Robert C. Wright, Frederick Manfred (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 85–87.

  3. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1912), 405.

  4. John R. Milton, moderator, Conversations with Frederick Manfred (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1974), 62.

  5. See, for example, Marthy Jones, It’s in the Cards (York Beach ME: Red Wheel/Weisler LLC, 1984), 146–48.

  6. “The History of the Court Cards,” The World of Playing Cards, http://www.wopc.co.uk/cards/courts.html (accessed January 27, 2014).

  7. Whether Thomas Jefferson would consider Magnus and Ransom members of the natural aristocracy is debatable, but his criticisms of artificial or “tinsel” aristocracy fit well with Manfred’s description of the old Earl Worthington and his son. See Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1304–10.

  8. Manfred clearly enjoyed crafting the names for the main characters of this book. The connotation of nobility is obvious with Magnus King, Earl Ransom, and even Katherine (a royal name). Erden Aldridge’s name invites speculation, as well. Erden, though similar to Eden, is also related to the German word for earth. As for Aldridge, it is possible that Manfred was thinking of the old Germanic name Adelrich and its variations, which mean “noble ruler.” If true, Manfred has given us a choice not only of two mothers but of two queens—with Erden being a queen mother of the earth.

  To Alan C. Collins,

  trusted friend

  The Creator made the people—

  come and see them.

  —Indian Prayer

  Contents

  PART ONE: Magnus King

  PART TWO: Earl Ransom

  PART THREE: Earl Ransom

  PART FOUR: Magnus King

  PART ONE

  When a son’s blood is finally spilled, which mother weeps most? The old mother Europa? The new mother America? Katherine? Erden?

  The first great miracle to appear on earth was the e
mergence of love in the mother lizard. And the first great bewilderment to appear on earth was the emergence of taboo: having learned of love from his mother, a son was not to return this love to his mother.

  Caught in flesh and caught by flesh.

  Even so, O Lord, how marvelous are all Thy fleshly works.

  Magnus King

  1

  His mother was of good lineage. She was born in 1812 at the ancestral seat of the Worthingtons in Wessex, England. Her father the old earl lamented she wasn’t a boy, but he loved her nonetheless as his firstborn and named her Henrietta after a favorite uncle.

  The Worthington name went far back into hoary Anglo-Saxon times. It belonged to a family of Old Frisians known as the Wurthinga or the Woartelinga, meaning “root people” or “people of the root.” The Wurthinga, who originally lived in Fryslân on the Continent, were once great sailors and shipwrights. The Wurthinga helped transport the Angles and Saxons and Jutes to England and in the end elected to settle with their tribal cousins in the new land.

  Henrietta Worthington’s childhood was a happy one. She was given all the advantages of being born into an English first family: the best private tutors, travel abroad, the best friends, leisure. She was loved by her mother and adored by her father. Because of her charm and sturdy intelligence, she became much more the favorite of her family than her younger brother George.

  When she reached the age of eighteen, blond, sweetly mannered, attractive despite her rather large feet, her father the old earl announced that he had made plans to marry her to the son of a duke, a neighbor.

  Then the trouble started.

  Henrietta had fallen in love with another young man. Quietly, but with some show of force, she told her father that she did not much care for the neighbor’s son, that she had already made up her mind she would marry an Alan King, a dark-haired lad living in Wiltshire.

  “Pah! Who’s this Alan King you speak of? An orphan. With no expectation.”

  “Alan can hardly help that, Father. His parents died during the plague.”

  “Too bad the plague didn’t carry him off too.”

  “Mother approves of him.”

  “Pah! Your mother is a goose. With no sense in such matters.”

  “Father.”

  “Appears to me this Alan King of yours might have poor blood too. In more ways than one. Weak.”

  “Please, Father.”

  “No matter. I have already made the arrangements with our neighbor. It is too late for your Alan.”

  Alan King was far from weak. It was true Alan tended to be mild-mannered, but he could also be a winning man. One day Alan talked Henrietta into eloping with him. Her mother helped him arrange it.

  The old earl was shocked, outraged, and immediately cut Henrietta off without a cent. He announced that forthwith the title of earl as well as all the Worthington holdings would be handed down to her younger brother George. George was a wild one and up until then the old earl had always had misgivings about him.

  A year later the old earl had a stroke and died, and George Worthington took over. Henrietta’s mother died soon after.

  Brother George issued orders that Henrietta should never again be allowed to set foot on a Worthington acre. George had his own reasons for hating Henrietta and her husband Alan King.

  Not too much was known about Alan King, except that his father had once dug ditches and his mother had taken in washing. Even his given name, Alan, was of obscure origin.

  Alan remembered his father talking about the better days when the Kings sat above the salt. There was the story, often told at family gatherings, that the name King had come from their once having had some kind of connection with the royal family. Another story often told was that the Kings had got their name from an ancestor who had played the part of the king in a village pageant. In any case, Alan’s father, who sometimes wore a monocle, betrayed more than usual pride in the name King.

  Alan was incensed when both Henrietta’s father and her brother had cut her off because of him.

  “We will go to America,” Alan announced. “We will make our fortune there. Because I’ll never give your drunken brother a chance to lord it over us. Gloat.”

  Henrietta was willing. She was of a mind to show her family they had made a mistake about her darling Alan.

  Meantime the Honorable Elizabeth Dulcie, an aunt, assured Henrietta that should George die young and without issue, and there was a good chance he might as he was very reckless, she would take it upon herself to make sure that the earldom and the estate should pass on to any man child born to Henrietta.

  A promoter named Newhall told Alan about a place in Iowa, America. It was a town called Weldon.

  “For just a hundred pounds, or four hundred dollars American money, you can be settled up on eighty acres of land, with a house, yoke of oxen, horse, cow, twelve sheep, poultry, pig, wagon, plow, harrow, seed, and thirty weeks’ provisions—enough to live on until you’ve raised a small crop.”

  Alan raised a dark brow. “This has been done?”

  “Often. And if you happen to have a wife who doesn’t get homesick, I can see no reason why, with ordinary luck, and blessed with patience and perseverance, you shouldn’t prosper equal to your utmost expectation.”

  “It has been done then.”

  “You have the hundred pounds?”

  “My wife can get it from her aunt.”

  “Take it and go. Because at Weldon you’ll be living with the very pick and flower of British immigrants.”

  Alan and Henrietta went. Early in 1834.

  Weldon turned out to be a rawboned place. There were, however, several British homes of some elegance some miles out in the country.

  Alan and Henrietta built a house on a hill beside a stream.

  They plowed and planted. They lived frugally. They sweated and dreamed through the summer months.

  But the crop of wheat they reaped that first fall was so bad they couldn’t sell it for hog feed. Luckily game was plentiful in the area and they managed to survive through Christmas.

  They sold out for a pittance and in January moved to town.

  Just in time. Magnus was born a week later, in 1835. Henrietta was in severe labor for three days, almost died. She was badly torn inside, and was never to have another child.

  Alan King was known to have little or no knack with either animals or farm machinery and when he looked for work the next spring he was laughed at. The people in Weldon felt that if a man couldn’t make a go of it farming, under ideal conditions, he couldn’t make a go of it at anything else either.

  Nor could Alan get on with his new neighbors in America. He could not unbend from what he thought he had once represented in England. He persisted in wearing his Oxford hat and his bright linens and his fashionably cut weskit. Local Weldonites considered him to be a conceited ass and for final proof of it pointed to the monocle he wore on any and all state occasions.

  Alan was good at cards. But when he tried to work up a little friendly game in either of the two saloons in town, the House of Commons or the House of Lords, the callow swells hooted him out of doors.

  Particularly galling was the fact that many of the Britishers around Weldon had money to burn. They were in most cases second sons of titled English families who had been given a liberal remittance to go to America and to stay there. Some drove a four-in-hand, with a man winding the horn. All of them went fox hunting, and played polo, and called each other “a capital fellow,” “a brick,” “an honest chum.” Bitterness ate into Alan.

  At last Alan came to the point where he was flat broke. When he tried to raise yet another fiver at one of the saloons, as well as a snit of beer, the elegant drunks spoke of him over their cups as having a great amount of cheek.

  Henrietta decided to swallow her Worthington pride, and took in washing. They lived as beggars in a one-room shanty on the south edge of Weldon. Because they had fallen so low from high estate they were all the more despised by the towns
people.

  Somehow Henrietta managed it that at least her husband could put in a good appearance, and Alan continued to wear his Oxford hat and his bright linens and his fashionably cut weskit. The more bowed and bent she became, the more Alan strutted and paraded.

  One of little Magnus’ first memories had to do with how his father Alan, after fixing a monocle to his eye, would tell about the illustrious Kings back in the old country, about how someday they would yet give Uncle George Worthington his comeuppance.

  Little Magnus was nine when his father Alan went duck hunting, alone. It had rained; Alan fell into a slough; it snowed. Alan was chilled to the marrow. In three days Alan King drowned in his own phlegm.

  Henrietta wrote her aunt the Honorable Elizabeth Dulcie in England to tell of Alan’s death. There was no reply.

  Henrietta continued to take in washing. She refused several offers to run the households of the richer British around. Lowly as it might seem to take in washing, at least it gave her independence. Both she and Magnus lived for the day when certain blessed news should come from England.

  Henrietta taught Magnus everything she knew about the Worthingtons. She instructed Magnus on how to behave as an earl, should that day ever come. She told Magnus where the ancestral seat was; where certain Worthington cousins lived, one family in Friston in Sussex and the other in Frizinghall in Yorkshire. On occasion she even had Magnus practice wearing a monocle, and how he should swing a cane, and how to doff his hat and bow to the ladies, all in the manner of his father Alan. The Worthington line as well as the King line was in his blood and he was to keep it up. “Always remember that you’re truly one of the bloods of England.”

  One day the Weldon town bully bumped Magnus off the boardwalk.