An Embarrassment of Riches (8 page)

“Bilbo,” I said from my makeshift balcony seat on the cabin roof, “you have missed your calling. Beat a hasty path back to New York and take to the boards, I implore you!”

“'Twas true, to every last detail,” he protested.

“Come now. How could you possibly have any knowledge of this creature's history lest you were at his side through each tribulation.”

“I know because he told me,” Bilbo said.

“He
told
you!” both Uncle and I exclaimed.

“How else might he have conveyed such a wealth of detail?”

I climbed down off the roof and approached the dwarf.

“Do you speak English?” I addressed him directly.

The dwarf shrugged his shoulders.

“Neddy speaks only when he has something important to say,” Bilbo answered for him.

“I see,” said I, still astounded. “Well, here is a question I deem to be of some importance: how in God's name did he ever come to associate himself with such a thieving, nefarious, and unregenerate mountebank as you, Captain Melancton Bilbo, Esquire?”

“I was the only human being who ever showed him a moment's kindness,” said Bilbo with an expansive gesture of his skillet-sized hands, and there the matter rested.

Later that same afternoon, we rounded a sharp bend in the river to see, at about three miles' distance, a column of black smoke rising from the verdure. A look through our telescope disclosed many alarming details.

The smoke arose from a sandy prominence at the junction of a tributary stream—no doubt the Dismal River—and this smoke issued not from a chimney, nor smokehouse, nor brick furnace, but from what appeared to be a rubble of ashes. This, we had been told, was the site of Bottomley's Trading Station. As we drew closer, the scene appeared more desolate and awful. There was no sign of life. An odor, as of burning hides, soon reached our nostrils.

“Man the sweeps,” Bilbo ordered us in an anxious tone of voice. “Make for that cove on the near bank.”

We guided our craft to the place in question. It was a quiet eddy, out of the Ohio's currents.

“Put down the anchor,” Bilbo said. “We'd best lay to for a while.”

“Do you think it was Indians?” I asked.

“Do I think it was Indians?” Bilbo replied mockingly. “Well, now, who else do you supposed might o'done this? Kublee Khan?”

A pitiless silence weighed upon the melancholy scene, as sinister in its own way as any fracas of marauding savages. Carrion crows wheeled soundlessly over the site, and at a great altitude. An hour passed and the sun descended behind the pillar of smoke. At twilight a few songbirds trilled wanly in the surrounding banks. The cinders of Bottomley's Station glowed forbiddingly across the water as night finally fell.

We remained in place, an hundred yards off the shore in our eddy. Bilbo disallowed the firing up of our shipboard brazier on the grounds that savages lurking on shore might swim out, try to climb on board, and assassinate us. We nibbled military biscuits. There was no moon. The shore rang with the cries of countless beasts. Sleep was out of the question. The hours dragged by as though time itself had been fettered in chains of lead.

Dawn spread over the river like an ague. Fog obscured all banks. Our craft was enveloped in a dense miasma, each unseen leaping fish sending an alarm through our company as though it were the stroke of a swimming Indian, dagger clenched between his teeth and his savage heart bent on murderous mischief.

In a little while, a chill breeze arose out of the west. We could smell the burnt station before this breeze dispersed the fog and revealed it. A fine drizzle began to spray out of the gray, cloud-clotted sky.

“Weigh anchor,” Bilbo finally said, “and let's see what the rascals left.”

With that, we made for the far bank.

Minutes later, we were wading ashore. I was limp with terror. Bilbo strode up the bank, pistol in hand, and motioned us to follow with a jerk of his head. We followed. Neddy scampered ahead. Soon he was barking at something in the charred weeds. We ran up to see what it was.

Though we walk daily through this life hand-in-hand with the portent of death, though we are daily accosted by news of tragedy, though our kith and kin are yearly snatched by disease and accident from this only world we know into the daunting eternities, though we even divert ourselves by viewing plays about death, murder, regicide, suicide, massacre, poisoning, hanging, dueling, et cetera ad nauseum, it is actually uncommon amongst ordinary folk to view the unfortunate victims of such violent fates. We may sit at the bedside of a departing parent, we may minister to the injured, the stricken child, the mother in labor. But all these are domestic scenes chiefly of the bedchamber and do not prepare us for those scenes of brutality that are frequent occurrences on the frontier. Such was the portrait of horror that now presented itself to me, and I was seized at once by an explosive nausea—made worse by an empty stomach—that brought me down on all fours in the fire-blackened weeds.

The corpse was stiffened into a pose that eloquently bespoke its owner's final agonies. The top of its head was a blackened mass of clotted blood and flies, like an obscene skullcap, where the fellow had been scalped.

There is a belief lately that this practice was actually taught the red man by us whites, and though there are countless records of abuses by us against the native tribes down through the centuries, it is also true that they had perfected the arts of mutilation in their own right before any Englishman or Spaniard set foot upon this continent. Scalping was an act too deeply embroidered in the fabric of their war customs to have been merely borrowed, and only a sentimentalist would believe the Indian to be less imaginative in this respect than any other race of men.

The eyes of this unfortunate soul, presumably Mr. Bottomley himself, were stark staring open, and his mouth was gape, as if in that final instant he gazed in awe at his gentle green world turned a howling red hell. The droning blowflies swarmed at his lips and nostrils. Seven arrows had penetrated various parts of his body, though none in his heart or lungs—another sign that his death had not been quick. His feet were naked, denoting the theft of his boots. His clothing was singed, but not burnt. The stench of this tragic butchery is a memory that all the roses in Ohio would not avail to erase.

“Poor devil,” Bilbo muttered. Neddy whined. Uncle tried to close those terror-stricken eyes and straighten the body supine on the ground, but rigor mortis defied his efforts. Bilbo, meanwhile, marched up to the smoldering ruin of the station itself and gingerly sifted through the ashes looking for items of utility that the Indians or flames had not already claimed. It was from there, whilst Uncle and I fussed with Bottomley, that I heard the pirate exclaim, simply but ominously, “O, dear…!”

We hurried over. Just beyond the heap of blackened rubble and a smaller gutted outbuilding, Bilbo knelt cradling a woman who yet lived, but who had obviously been the victim of abuses so fiendishly vile as to challenge one's most cherished precepts of a merciful God. Like her husband, she too had been scalped. A sanguinary trail, sort of an horrific red-black smudge in the weeds, evidenced that she had been carried off some distance by her assailants and then, with a struggle of heroic proportion, had somehow managed to crawl back to the only refuge her mind could conceive—though that refuge had already been destroyed.

Her breathing came in short, weak huffs, like a puppy panting on a hot day. She made no effort to speak. The lower portion of her calico skirt was dyed entirely red with her own blood, while the shoulders were similarly ensanguined from her scalp wound. Uncle knelt beside her, opposite the encradling Bilbo, and tried to give her water from his wooden flask. Moments later, she simply ceased to be, her anguish and woe extinguished along with the life she had lately owned. It was when Bilbo laid her back down upon the earth that we discovered the hidden, obscene, and monstrous torment the savages had inflicted upon her. For, some minutes after she had ceased breathing, we all witnessed a movement 'neath her blood-soaked skirt. At first, we merely glanced at each other in bewilderment. Then, Bilbo, being the least fastidious among us, simply lifted the garment up, and there, between her blood-smudged thighs, protruded the rear half of a baby porcupine, itself desperately struggling for life and freedom. All four of us leaped from the sight of this abomination as though we had glimpsed the very face of all that is unholy. I reeled away, toward the river. A gunshot resounded. I looked back up the bank. There stood Bilbo, his pistol pointed toward the ground, muzzle smoking.

“A curse! A curse!” he shouted into the swollen gray heavens. “A curse, by God's wrathful hand, on those red devils!”

The words had barely left his mouth when those very heavens opened wide their floodgates and it began to pour.

“To the boat! Back to the boat!” Bilbo shouted at us through the downpour, beckoning with his huge, apelike arm.

“We cannot just leave them to rot,” Uncle protested loudly.

“This is the frontier, sir!” Bilbo shouted back.

“Thou scum! I shall not leave 'til they are buried like Christians.”

Bilbo had already begun wading out to the keelboat with Neddy on his shoulders. Uncle stood fast. The dwarf leaped aboard whilst Bilbo hoisted himself on deck. There he stood, dripping in the downpour, a hand upon the pistol in his sash.

“Come, I say!” he importuned us.

“No,” Uncle shouted back.

Bilbo drew his pistol and held it up.

“I shall count to three,” he said. “Come aboard or rot with them. One….”

“For Godsake!” I pleaded with Uncle, shivering in the cold rain.

“Two….”

“Please!”

“Three.”

Bilbo pulled the trigger. The pistol clicked emptily, its charge already spent upon the porcupine. The villain laughed.

“You contumacious dunderhead!” he shook his fist at Uncle. “Even if we had the leisure to bury those poor wretches, we do not have at hand so much as a shovel!” Bilbo burst out laughing again. Uncle maintained his resolute posture, but glanced about at the ground as though flummoxed.

“We could weight them with stones and commit their bodies to the river,” he suggested. “Thee has claimed to have served in the navy under Captain Jones. Surely thee has heard of burial at sea.”

“At sea one has no choice, sir,” Bilbo riposted. “'Tis a prophylactic measure. Either one carries a stinking corpse on board or one disposes of it. What does it matter if these poor souls are eaten by catfish or worms or buzzards?”

Uncle was already gathering stones.

“All right, all right, by the everlasting cod of Christ! Gather your stones and let's be done with it!”

And so we bound the poor brutalized Bottomleys in shrouds of burlap, weighted them with stones, and committed their bodies to the confluence of the two rivers with a few words of consecration, that they might meet their Lord and Savior in a better world than this one.

Notwithstanding one's being held captive by the likes of such offal as Bilbo; or of stumbling upon a scene of barbarous murder such as that terrible aftermath at Bottomley's Station; or of being, in general, defenseless in the midst of a vast and hostile wilderness filled with unfriendly savages and roaring beasts—there is no occupation so easy and restful as floating down a great river on a keelboat. By the converse, there are few occupations so tedious as poling such a craft against the current.

We departed the dolorous site of pillage and murder and made upstream on the Dismal. The[O4] turgid progress, but in those stretches where the river narrowed between brooding, tree-topped clay bluffs, our labor was arduous. Uncle and I would stand at the prow of
Megatherium
, brace our poles against the river bottom, and, leaning against said poles, walk to the rear of the boat along the narrow deck, or runway. Then: up poles, a quickstep back to the bow, and the same hard procedure over and over and over. Bilbo stationed himself on the cabin roof, one jaundiced eye clapped upon us, the other scouring the shadowy banks or bluffs for signs of Indians, pistols at hand, Neddy and Bessie seated beside him with a brace of rifles and supply of ball, powder, and patches, ready to reload. And always, held fast between Bilbo's bootheels and the wooden crate that served as his throne, was a specimen jar of Monongahela whiskey.

Hardly a moment went by that I did not expect a hail of arrows to issue from those drear bosky banks, but I was to be happily disappointed in this respect. For though the river teemed with life—with deer
(Odocoileus virginianus)
and elk
(Cervus elaphus)
drinking at the water's edge; bear
(Ursus americanus)
with cubs frisking on the sandbars; raccoon
(Procyon lotor)
grubbing daintily for insect provender upon the shore; otter
(Lutra canadensis)
and whelps sliding comedically down their chutes as though for the sheer pleasure of it; heron
(Ardea herodias)
and crane
(Grus americana)
winging majestically overhead; ducks of two dozen species plying the eddies with their chicks in flotilla; wolves
(Canis occidentalis)
baying in the distance, and songbirds lilting by the multitude in the verdure—for all this teeming of life, it was our good fortune not to cross paths with that most dangerous denizen of the forest: man.

Nights, we anchored offshore, and though our commander tried to establish a shift of watches 'twixt himself and the dwarf, it was a pretense soon abandoned, for I would wake in my bindings in the morning to their polyphonic snores.

Likewise, as the days followed, one upon the next, we ventured now ashore. Neddy was sent abroad in the forest to procure succulent viands for our supper. I was regularly conducted into the woods for two purposes: (1) by Bilbo, to survey our whereabouts in respect to the alleged fountain of youth, the neighborhood of which we were presumably nearing, and (2) by Bessie, to be amorously abused, with the ever-vigilant Neddy ever close at hand to superintend, lest I escape. The girl grew more insatiable with every assault. I was helpless to rebuff her.

It was upon one of those enforced debaucheries that I looked around the thicket in which she was having her way with me, and spied a sprig of phrensyweed. It was just as Uncle described it—a timid shrub of compound treble leaves, irregularly toothed or lobed, cordate, slightly reddish, and conspicuously hirsute. As Bessie hauled upon my haunches, I reached over her head and seized the weed in my hand. When the shameful act was concluded, and she lay panting in stuperous exhaustion upon her back, I tucked the leafy treasure inside my shirt.

As soon as we returned to the boat, I drew Uncle to the bow, out of the others' earshot, and took out my specimen. He rolled his eyes and groaned.

“Thou poor, luckless rattlebrain,” he said. “That is not phrensyweed.”

“No?” said I fingering it in chagrin, “'tis just as you described it: hairy, cordate leaves—”

“Hairless. Hair
less!
” Uncle despaired.

“O,” said I. “Well, 'twas an honest mistake. What is this weed, by the by?”

“Rhus toxicodendron,”
Uncle said.

“What a grandiose appellation for such a trifling botanical.”

“'Tis poison oak, Sammy,” Uncle said.

I turned my palms down and watched the leaves flutter into the muddy water below.

“Gentlemen!” Bilbo hailed us from his throne-crate above. “May we have your attention, please?”

Uncle and I traded glances, wondering what portentous news the scoundrel was about to inflict on us now. The trio was grouped atop the cabin as though in a formal portrait scene—Bilbo, the paterfamilias, seated; Bessie at his right; and Neddy, the loyal pet, on his haunches to the left. I could not help wishing I might paint a portrait of the motley clan just in this pose, if only to have some image to fling darts at in that longed-for future when we should be rid of these incomparable dregs.

“What a treat is in store for you, my hearties! So happy is my darling Bessie that she has agreed to give a performance. What shall it be? Eh, partners? Some Milton? Herrick? A little Suckling, perhaps? Shakespeare? Spenser's
Faerie Queene
? Name it and the piece is yours.”

“Has she any Cowper, per chance?” I asked with a slight sarcastical edge, alluding to one of our more modern masters of the strophe.

“Cowper!” Bilbo guffawed. “Why, that melancholy, mealy-mouthed country Methodist!”

I was taken aback.

“That morbid misfit of a moping mooncalf!” Bilbo railed on, quite beside himself with mirth, and began to recite with actorish verve:

I was impressed that he knew the work, let alone that he had committed the verse to memory.

“What rot,” Bilbo commented and laughed again. “Well? What do you say, my lambs?”

I scratched my chest in some perplexity whilst Uncle frowned.

“All right, I shall choose for us. ‘Spring,' by Mr. William Shakespeare.” Bilbo folded his shovel-like hands in his lap, closed his eyelids languorously, and smiled. Bessie stepped forward, cleared her throat, and curtsied.

She curtsied again. The air resounded emptily with the drone of flies. The very songbirds in the trees seemed goaded to silence. Bilbo gazed at his offspring with a look of total and unequivocal pride, a tear of joy glistening on his leathery cheek.

“Bravo! Bravo!” he lauded her, clapping his hands. Neddy joined in enthusiastically. Bessie, meanwhile, squirmed and blushed girlishly in place, as any maiden thrust to center stage might do. Uncle finally joined the applause, his heart no doubt wilted by the abysmal proceedings. He even poked me in the ribs, as if urging me to show the poor creature some sympathetic appreciation. Not wanting to appear an insensitive boor, I deigned to join in. It was at the very first clap that I felt a burning sensation in my hands. It was as though someone had tossed me an hot coal, and I, stupidly, had caught it. I looked down at my palms. The bubbly blisters of poison oak had begun to spread in all their sickening, rubescent glory.

Every cloud has its silver lining, we are told. While the affliction of my oak poisoning tormented me for days, I was relieved of my duties both as poler and as studsman to the egregious Bessie; for Bilbo grew more jealous of my health and well-being the closer we drew to our putative destination. Thus, Bilbo himself now manned the starboard pole whilst I replaced him on the cabin roof.

Even so, it did not become a pleasure ride; for besides the awful itching and burning of my skin eruption was added a new torment as the days grew ever warmer and summery: mosquitoes. By mosquitoes I am not talking about a few pesky, droning mites sullying the twilight hour, but of multitudes, clouds of ravening bloodsuckers, active at all hours of the day and night, and from which there was no escape. Not even the cabin proved a sanctuary against their relentless onslaughts. We soon learned that the only protection from the marauding hordes was to swaddle ourselves in as many layers of clothing as possible—making for, let me assure you, sheer torture in that heat. And while this swaddling protected one from the remorseless stabbings of those tiny, winged brutes, it only aggravated my prior affliction, 'til I swear I would have preferred the nullity of death than continue this manner of living. At times, I was reduced to weeping, such was my misery.

It was after several days of this continual assault, that one of us—possibly Bilbo himself—had the bright idea of firing our iron brazier and charging the coals with whatever dank rubbish the forest floor afforded that might produce the densest, foulest, most mephitic smoke possible, and thus drive away the bugs. In so doing, we had to risk attracting the notice of Indians. But no hail of arrows answered, and the smudge pot neatly quelled the siege of insects. Soon normality—such as we knew it—once again reigned on board
Megatherium
. A week passed. My hands and chest began to heal. The river narrowed.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon, the last day of this peaceful week, when we heard an insistent far-off nattering, as of the sound of dry leaves in an autumn breeze. But it was a balmy day in midspring, and minute by minute this noise grew louder and more alarming. Uncle and I (I had resumed my duty) stopped poling. Our entire company looked at one another in apprehension of danger.

“Set the anchor at once,” Bilbo ordered. The noise increased in volume.

“Indians?” I turned to Uncle.

He only shrugged his shoulders and searched the endless verdure, as we all did. The cacophony rose yet higher, a clacking that evoked in my mind the story of the Egyptian plagues.

“Locusts?” I ventured.

“Wait….” Bilbo growled with a look that combined both horror and awed expectancy. “Wait … wait …!”

To the west, a shadow seemed to fall across the sun, though there was not a wisp of cloud in the slot of sky above the river. The noise grew deafening.

“… They come!” Bilbo cried, and from over the treetops swept a flock of flapping, chirruping creatures in numbers so vast as to paralyze the imagination. The sky turned blue-black with them. Day became the meanest twilight. It was actually a matter of some minutes before I realized the cloud was composed not of ravening locusts, but of sleek, winging birds.

“Passenger pigeons!” Bilbo shouted above the pandemonium.

One could only encompass this spectacle with the awe that greets the most fundamental mysteries of existence. For so immense was the multitude of birds that any calculation of their total was like unto that schoolboy's riddle of trying to reckon the grains of sand on the Great South Beach.

I cannot say how long we stood upon the deck gazing at this spectacle, but it could not have been more than a minute, for no sooner did the inexhaustible flock begin to darken the sky, than the white rain of their droppings commenced to splatter the deck of our craft and ourselves. Bilbo cried, “To the cabin, quickly, everyone!”

Here we huddled in the most intimate, odious, and fearful confinement for the remainder of that day, the night, and most of the following day. There was no telling exactly when night did fall, so utterly did the birds blot out the sun, but as the hours crept by we could detect a definite change in the character of the noise they were producing—from the flap-flap-flap and chirrup of mass flight to a different racket of snapping twigs and crunching foliage, as though they were devouring the entire wilderness. Then they commenced a chorus of cooing that resounded like a March gale.

“Listen, my lambs: they're roosting,” Bilbo said. His daughter was whimpering with fear. “Don't worry. Don't cry, my pearl. That cracking and snapping is just the branches breaking under the weight of these vermin. So stupid and prolific are they that they pack themselves hundreds to the branch, and the branches give way and break and fall upon those a'roosting likewise beneath, and so on, killing these birds by the thousands.”