The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  What lessons the German has to impart are given in single sentences. “You must look at the whole machine first. Understand?”

  Displacement, compression, power—Peter has begun to grasp these things, an understanding that begins not in the brain but in the guts. In this age before standardization, each machine is a unique creature, displaying properties unlike any other. Small things: different bolt sizes, gauge of wiring, the number of turns around each terminal. It seems to Peter more like they function through an improbable science of chance than any calculated mathematics. Their constancy both an article of, and reason for, something like faith.

  Already his days on the excavation crew in the tunnels have begun to seem like a distant dream. And mysteriously—in a way that neither Peter nor Neumann can explain—he has a knack for the work. Although he never feels like he knows what he’s doing—more that something knows through him—by the end of this first month with Neumann, Peter is sometimes able to see, as quickly as the older man, what must be done to fix the broken engines that pass through the workshop.

  Now, as Neumann gnaws his thumb pensively—his mind elsewhere from the stomach-churning brew—Peter, who has stuck to the watered beer that McGurk’s dishes out, surveys the place, head spinning slightly. Since his apprenticeship to the machines, he has begun to see mechanics everywhere: a hidden physics to the movement of the whores from one man to the next, the sudden hushes that will descend on the room as a dozen different conversations converge on the same pause. A mathematics that—it strikes him—must be guiding his own actions as well, even if he can’t yet see why or how.

  A waiter with elaborately greased sideburns and a dirty apron passes the table and Neumann gestures at him.

  “Another.” Neumann taps his glass.

  The waiter does something that might be an attempt at a friendly smile. “That’s five cents.”

  Neumann spills the coins onto the table and Peter glances at his own near-empty mug.

  “One for me as well.” He counts out five pennies, which the waiter collects with a practiced sweep of his hand. The waiter departs and Neumann sets his pipe down, extracts a tobacco pouch from his pocket, and tamps a wad of shag into the meerschaum. Peter looks away, at the cloud of tobacco and cannabis smoke that curls toward the blackened ceiling of the saloon, twenty feet overhead.

  “You have finished with the book?” Neumann asks, puffing on his pipe.

  After their first week together the mechanic had silently offered Peter a stack of battered secondhand volumes, which, in his tenement room, he has dutifully grappled with during his evenings after work. And in theory, Peter tells himself, he wants to learn all of it: to be admitted to the inner sanctum of the mechanical sciences, where the mysteries of the world are explained, an ambition that has begun to grow in him since his arrival in New York. In practice, though, reading has never been one of his strengths, and whatever secrets the books may contain seem to be locked behind a wall of boredom. His main recollection of Neumann’s latest offering, a treatise called An Investigation of Various Gear-Shapes and Their Properties, is of repeated losing battles to stay awake.

  He nods. “Yep. Not sure if I’m worth much when it comes to book learning, though.”

  “You must try harder.” Neumann glares at him. “All the world, it is in books.”

  “I’m working on it.” And it’s true; gradually, Peter finds himself needing to sound out the words less often, the pages going by faster.

  “So? Good.” The mechanic reaches into his satchel and Peter’s heart sinks as two more books emerge. He takes them, scrutinizing the titles. Differential Conversion and Its Several Principles in the Ratchet-Driven Flywheel. Peter stifles a sigh. The second volume, though, seems more promising.

  “The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, by John Bunyan,” Peter reads aloud. “What’s this—”

  “Ssh!” Neumann gestures for him to put the book away. “Not in here.” The mechanic glances around, oddly abashed. “Is only for amusement. If you have time.”

  Peter nods, sliding the books into his lap.

  Neither says anything for a moment. A burst of noisy laughter from somewhere downstairs.

  “Any news about the tunneling?” Peter asks.

  The waiter returns and sets down their drinks, sloshing stray drops onto Peter’s coat. After he has departed, Neumann shrugs. “They are crazy.”

  “Who?” This isn’t the first time the German has hinted that he disapproves of the way the project is being managed, though he has never detailed his sentiments on the subject.

  “The engineers. Edison, they say, leads the planning.” Neumann shrugs again and bites his thumb.

  “Thomas Edison?” Like everyone else, Peter knows about the wizard of Menlo Park from countless newspaper articles, snippets of conversation, and tall tales. This, however, is the first time he has heard that the man who invented the filament bulb and the talking machine is connected with the subway. “Edison’s a genius, isn’t he?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Have you met him?” Peter sits up, his heart beating faster. In these last weeks a new pantheon has taken shape in his imagination, centered on the men who invent the devices that he repairs. Among these figures, he knows, the greatest are Edison and his archrival, Nikola Tesla: the two giants who are remaking the world with their inventions.

  “Only once I met him, when they bring all of the mechanics to his laboratory.”

  “Really?” Peter stares at Neumann, impressed by this unexpected proximity to greatness. “What was he like?”

  “Edison?” The mechanic puffs on his pipe. “They say he used to collect stray dogs and electrocute them. When I go to his lab, I carry a gun. I never trust men such as this.” Neumann grimaces, revealing a row of teeth that—even in this age of routine dental abominations—make Peter cringe, a disaster of mossy stumps, misalignment, and decay. “They are all crazy. See here.”

  Neumann pulls a greasy sheet of paper from his pocket and smooths it on the table, wiping it through a puddle of beer as he pushes it toward Peter.

  It’s a crude drawing in three-dimensional perspective done in black ink: a skewed grid of lines, echoed in four layers. It takes Peter a long moment to know what to make of it—then finally he sees. The lines that make up the top layer of the grid form the shape of the subway routes as they will look in their completed state. “The subway tunnels?”

  Neumann nods. “The complete plan. Arrived today.”

  “Do they really mean to dig four levels?”

  “It seems to be.”

  “For separate lines?” Neumann doesn’t respond. “I thought they were excavating only one level—this must be a mistake. Why would they need four levels? And all the same lines?”

  The mechanic glances around and leans forward, motioning for Peter to do the same. Peter bends toward Neumann, trying not to flinch at his mentor’s breath. “I believe”—the mechanic whispers, tapping the paper—“these tunnels . . . I believe there is a secret meaning in their shape.”

  PETER FORCE in the living room of his apartment on the Lower East Side. The space is quiet, his roommates absent for the night. In one corner an iron stove pings softly, the decrepit furniture, the rusty washbasin and strings of drying laundry, tinted brown with the light of an oil lamp beside Peter’s chair.

  He looks up, glancing between the burlap curtains to see heavy white snowflakes spiraling downward over the narrow streets. Turning back to the book in his lap, he traces the lines with his finger: Some men by feigning words as dark as mine, make truth to spangle and its rays to shine. The phrases like falling snow, slow and heavy with a cadence of their own. The strange vastness of these sentences beginning to make him realize—even more than the widow’s old atlas—the scope and strangeness of the world.

  A GRAY AFTERNOON in January, just beyond the turning of the year. Peter sits alone on the cobblestone walkway by the East River. This has become his habit in recent weeks:
to sit and watch the water. He scrutinizes the muddy current and the smudged skyline of Brooklyn on the other shore, with its smokestacks, chimneys, and water towers, as if trying to make out some distant shape—

  Something that the city is trying to tell him: a sense of hidden purpose, hidden meaning that waits for him around every turn, vanishing just as he arrives. . . .

  Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a woman weaving unsteadily along the embankment. Suddenly she collapses to the ground. He turns away, hardened by now to sights like this. When he looks back a few minutes later, she is still lying motionless among the heaps of soot-stained snow. Seized by a random altruistic impulse, Peter climbs down from the ledge where he’s sitting and cautiously crosses toward her, offering his hand. She is a young woman, he sees, her eyes fixed blankly on some object in the distance. Weakly, she takes his hand and he helps her to stand.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “Nonce,” she murmurs, clutching his coat. “Thank God. You saved my life.”

  “What?” Startled, he tries to disengage himself from her grasp. “You’ve got me mixed up with someone else. Name’s Peter.”

  She blinks, then shakes her head confusedly, releasing his arm.

  “Are you all right?” he repeats. “You need help?”

  “I—no—” she starts to turn but hesitates, passing a hand over her eyes.

  He looks away, feeling suddenly awkward, following a pigeon’s ascent as it wings upward over the waves.

  “I—” she stumbles over the words. “Thank you for helping me.”

  He looks at her more closely. She is wearing a dress that might once have been expensive, decorated with petticoats and other frilly things that Peter can’t identify, but which is now so torn and bedraggled that it’s hardly more than a collection of rags. Her face is pale and narrow, framed by a tangle of black curls. And she is beautiful, he realizes, feeling an odd lurch in his chest. Not so much any one thing about her, but something about how the pieces of her face work together. Still, at the same time he can see the need in her gaze, like that of every other beggar and con artist in New York.

  “It’s nothing,” he says, taking a step away. “I was just watching the river.”

  She nods and glances around again nervously. “I wonder if—” She stops, and then, as if with an effort, starts again. “Though you do not know me, I have a favor to ask of you.”

  He waits, poised to leave.

  “Perhaps,” she ventures, “there is somewhere we could sit?”

  “I—” Peter hesitates. He has never been one to fall for a pretty face: when he needs a woman’s company, visiting a whore has always seemed easier than the entanglement of less clearly defined intimacies. But there’s something strange about her, he thinks: she speaks like something out of a book, or a rich foreigner. And although his common sense warns against it, he finds himself nodding without exactly knowing why. “There’s a German restaurant, the Kramler, not too far—”

  Unexpectedly, her cheeks flush red and she looks down at the cobblestone walk. “I must be candid,” she murmurs. “At the moment I am without the means even for a glass of wine.”

  Peter is unnerved more by her embarrassment than by the admission, which he’s been expecting. But he’s also relieved to discover what she’s after: a small handout, the kind of thing that he is asked for a dozen times each day.

  “That’s all right.” He nods. “My pleasure, and all that.”

  She nods, still not meeting his eyes. Remembering the few manners that he knows, Peter offers his arm—she takes it, and they start to walk.

  As he feels the slight weight of her hand on his sleeve, and hears the clatter of horses’ hooves and the foghorns of barges on the river, he experiences a jolt of something like déjà vu. And with this, the image comes to him of a vast machinery closing in around him. A system of invisible wheels and gears that, now started, will not cease or let him go until some final purpose has been achieved.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE LOST KINGDOM

  I HAVE TO SAY, I’M AMAZED AT HOW WELL THIS IS GOING. IT’S ALL falling into place more smoothly than I ever expected. Of course, I haven’t reached the hard parts yet. But for the moment, the actual writing itself—the story part of this history—is surprisingly easy. It’s just a matter of making everything sound like it came out of a book. And that, for once, is something I know how to handle, since during the last forty years I’ve felt more at home in literature than in life.

  And funnily enough, I think the writing lifestyle suits me. I’ve almost abandoned the antiques store, opening it once or twice a week. Instead, I walk through the streets now, and in the evening (after watching a few episodes of Dollars and Sense or Your Money or Your Wife!) I sit at my typewriter, and type.

  And telling the story is easy. It’s just deciding which parts to include, finding a space to fit them all in, that gives me trouble.

  For example, once upon a time there was a place called the Kingdom of Ohio. (Probably, I should have mentioned this sooner—but better late than never, I suppose.) The Kingdom of Ohio, sometimes called the Free Estate Latoledan, has become a fragment of forgotten minutia by now. In most history books it is less than a footnote, glossed over even among academics. But however improbable and ridiculous it may seem, the Kingdom existed. It was real.

  The Kingdom of Ohio is documented and visible (with the help of a little squinting and imagination) in the notes, indirect references, and scraps I’ve assembled over the years. It is an untold chronicle that parallels the early history of America itself: and without understanding that story, I’ve come to believe, it is impossible to understand this one.

  TO SUMMARIZE, the history of the Kingdom began in 1774, when the fledging Continental Congress of the United States was making plans for their impending war against England. To raise funds for this effort, representatives of the Congress decided to sell territory on the American frontier to wealthy Old World families. Ultimately, this scheme was short-lived (the objections of Peletiah Webster, a retired clergyman from Philadelphia, were typical when he argued that selling the land would “be like killing the goose that laid an egg every day, in order to tear out at once all that was in her belly”).6 Before the plan was rescinded, however, a single transaction was completed: a minor member of the French nobility named Henri Latoledan purchased 30,000 acres “west and south of Lake Erye [sic] extending to the water’s edge for a distanceof thirty-six Surveyor’s Chain lengths,”7 from one of the Continental Congress’s secret agents in Europe.

  A charcoal sketch that I found, drawn by the Jesuit parson Gide Baddaneau, seems to be the only surviving image of the ancestral Latoledan family castle in France. It depicts a long, low house in the Spanish style with tile roofs, an arched stucco colonnade, and wrought-iron balconies. Gazing at this drawing, it’s easy to imagine chickens, dogs, and children wandering through the outer hallways beneath threadbare tapestries. Creeping vines pry at the window catches. Inside, the house is furnished with tables and cabinets simply and solidly constructed by local craftsmen, the gilt inlay of a few heirloom antiques burnished into near-invisibility by the passage of time. This is the world that Henri Latoledan and his family abandoned (almost before the ink on the land deed was dry) for one of the wildest and least understood places on Earth.

  Although I’ve tried, the reasons for this departure are difficult for me to imagine. Perhaps Henri understood that winds of change were beginning to rise in France, which in a few years would sweep men like him toward Paris and the guillotine. Perhaps he chafed against the limited prospects available to an impoverished noble family in a forgotten corner of the rural countryside, far from the Sun King and Versailles. Or perhaps it was the spirit of adventure, pure and simple, that moved him.

  Whatever the reason for the Latoledans’ migration, the place where they arrived, and where the Kingdom of Ohio began, was a territory virtually unknown to European eyes. At the time, the Midwest region wasa silen
t, somber land, without history and without memory except for the tales of explorers and traders who had followed Indian trails to their scattered camps. . . .

  [J]ust four settlements marked the long course of the Ohio River. . . . [Among them was] a colony of French émigrés dancing minuets on a puncheon floor and trying to forget the wilderness around them; this huddle of barracks on the river bank was as unlikely a settlement as ever came to the American frontier. 8

  Possession of this uncharted territory was a morass of conflicting claims and insupportable titles. England had conquered “New France” and most of Acadia, a territory encompassing modern-day Canada as well as the area around the Great Lakes. At the same time, the Spanish court in Madrid claimed ownership of both Alta California and also “all lands . . . from the Arctic pole to the Antarctic pole . . . west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde,”9 a hypothetical kingdom spanning virtually all of North America. In the midst of these chaotic and overlapping declarations of empire, practical control of the frontier belonged to the real occupants of the land: the Miami and Chippewa tribes, the Shawnee and the Eel People.

  When, after a three-month voyage, Henri Latoledan and his family reached the land he had purchased, his first act was so outlandish as to almost defy explanation. In 1776, only weeks after the Declaration of Independence, he issued a document titled the “Latoledan Proclamation of Sovereignty,” in which he declared his patch of wilderness to be a separate nation, sending one copy to the British House of Lords and another to the Continental Congress.10

  Although in many ways Henri was an impulsive and perhaps even foolish man, it would be an injustice to ignore the breathtakingbravado in this act of envisioning his handful of ragged settlers as the beginnings of an empire. Still it may also have been a carefully calculated decision, as historical circumstances conspired to make such a gesture (just barely) possible.