Poetics and Ruminations

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Twelve

Part Twelve

Friday, 9^th. Last night I managed to sleep, but very fitfully. Cara was in her own bed. Nothing happened.

         Today I've decided to cooperate with Cara in every way in her efforts to cure me. Cara is busy preparing things, as she has been doing for some time. She stands in her kitchen and grinds with her mortar and pestle, uses things stored in Mason jars with coded labels. She has made a small still. Today we tried this from Quincy's Pharmacopoiea:

Aqua Bryoniae Com. Compound Bryony Water

         Take Juice of Bryony Roots 4 Pound; the Leaves of Rue, and Mugwort, ana 2 Pound; Savin, 3 Handbuls; Feverfew, Catmint, Penniroyal, ana 2 Handfuls; Basil, Dittany of Crete, ana 1 Handful and a half; Orange-Peels, 4 Ounces; Myrrh, 2 Ounces; Russia Castor 1 Ounce; French Brandy 8 Pound; Distil 12 Pound after proper maseration; for the large things of this kind infuse together, the better is the Water.

         I know Cara improvises when she doesn't have an ingredient. This particular stuff tasted a good deal better than the recipe suggests it should:

         If the Water be drawn too low, the oily Parts of the Ingredients will make it milky and foul; which some throw down with a little burnt Alum; but that spoils the Medicine.... This is a very untoothsome Composition; but admirably well suited to the Intention of an Hysteric; and there is not an Ingredient in it, except the Dittany, which does not contribute thereto. — This is much prescribed in Hysterical cases;.... It is likewise good against Convulsion in Children; and of service in any nervous complaint in either Sex. Its kDose is from 2 Drams to 2 Ounces, with any convenient Diluter. —

         It really works. It keeps one half smashed at all times. I remember one of my girl students telling me she had been "ploughed" the night before. It startled me. I finally saw she meant "drunk," and she didn't understand the nature of my puzzlement until I explained to her what "ploughed" had meant to Chaucer. It hadn't embarrassed her. Perhaps she had been ploughed that night. It was the beginning of my education. There was a vast gulf between her generation and mine that I tried to close. Perhaps I've succeeded too well in some ways, not well enough in others. The gulf is like the abyss between centuries or eras — ages.

         I have been reading some more in Bodman:

Bodman spoke with the spirit of one of his "departed friends," but Bodman began to suspect that it was not, in fact, a spirit, but an embodiment of Satan. This "friend" visited him at various times, frequently, and then the visitations diminished in number for a period of years,

...till it pleased God in his providence to call me to the sharpest trial I ever endured, the sickness and death of my dear partner in life. A little before her death, as she lay apparently in a happy state and condition of mind, calmly resigned to death, I was out in the field, a considerable distance from the house, and had been very earnest in prayer for her, Satan in the capacity of the Almighty there made the declaration to me that her salvation was eternally sure; as sure as his eternal throne. I considered this a declaration of the Almighty, and therefore it could but give comfort. — My wife lay a number of days apparently in a comfortable state of mind, and then very unexpectedly to us, departed this life. Such a stroke as being deprived of the desire of my eyes, in the bloom and vigor of youth, was almost insupportable. It was now I needed divine consolation: whether I had it or no, I know not; but my mind was uncommonly calm. But one thing I knew to my entire satisfaction, that I was immediately visited by these delusions; they appeared to be renewed in great increasing strength. And these scenes of communication were perfectly astonishing, and were far greater, and appeared more glorious than I can describe. There was something so great — so majestic — so worthy of superior beings — such deep reverence for God — such holy conversation — such coherence, method, aptness and incomparable greatness, as perfectly astonished me, and nearly every person to whom I related it. And in all these, there appeared to be the most perfect holiness and delight in God. O how these being would extol the mercy of God in Christ. How they would speak of the compassion of Christ to our world. — The infinite importance of sinners pressing into the kingdom of heaven. — And how delighted they were at the conversion of sinners, and the outpourings of the spirit of God. How they would charge me not to sin against God, — to walk uprightly; if I stepped aside from the path of duty, I was almost sure to get reproved.

         It was thus that Bodman experienced the trials of Job at the hands of the spirits of friends, his wife, angels, archangels, Jehovah himself — or their impostures sent by the evil Satan, for a period of eight years and more, "and frequently several times in a day."

         Who is there among the sons of men, but would have taken these, for the worthy servants of Jehovah? — Now this was not an illusion of the fancy, or imagination, merely as such; because, the recipient could immediately give a regular relation of these things, verbatim. And in the view and opinion of all candid and substantial people, they were perfectly supernatural, and in the view of many, they must be of heavenly origin, and above human language — O the inconceivable deceptions of Satan!

         This morning I came down late for coffee, and Rafe was already there — had been there for some time, talking to Cara. I could see from the way he looked at me — concern, wonderment — that Cara had told him of my dreams.

         I sat down and said hello. Cara poured my coffee. Rafe mentioned something inconsequential, and then there was silence, which lasted quite a while. Cara busied herself in the kitchen, then went down cellar — the door opens off the dining room. The cellar stairs are in the same stairwell as those that lead to the second storey. She keeps her roots among the foundations of the fireplace and often goes there to get or do something. Rafe and I were left alone — obviously a setup.

         I looked up to find him gazing at me with those great blue Missionary eyes.

         "Is there anything I can do to help, Charles?" He stirred his cup slowly, still looking at me.

         I shook my head. "No," I said.

         Another silence. Then, "I think you're wrong, Charles, but I want you to see it yourself. I'll wait until you're ready."

         The gorge rose in my throat, but I swallowed it and remained still. When he left I refused to talk to Cara for the rest of the day. She is hurt.

         She has just come up behind me to say goodnight and ask, "Where is Wesley?" The question took me aback till I realized she meant Catch.

         "Up attic," I said. "He has yet to catch a squirrel."

.Saturday, 10th. The Bryony Water let me sleep decently last night. Rafe Hawkins hasn't come by at all today, and Cara has spent the day shopping for food and Ingredients. I think it only slightly coincidental that both Rafe and Cara have absented themselves at the same time.

         By exactly what means Bodman came to believe that he was the victim of unholy deceptions he does not relate, but

Suffice it to say, that in the course of events, I was convinced, and effectually convinced, that these were all the delusions of Satan. And that, although, mankind never could have convinced me, the Lord alone, made a short work of it! — In this, there were no supernatural voices, or communications, from God.

         As soon as I was convinced, I instantly concluded to stand on the defensive; and under God, to defy all the powers of darkness.

         A dreadful conflict ensued. Soon, however, I began to experience refreshing views, as I thought, from the heavenly world.

Bodman now discovered how paltry his previous experiences had been

when compared with the real thing:

         The heavens seemed almost to open to my view. These things appeared wholly spiritual, and of the same nature of what I received in early life, before I fell under my late delusions, but very different from them. — The views I now had seemed to resemble those which St. Stephen had. But my dreadful conflict soon began. — I was quickly assaulted by the powers of darkness, and every thing which their horrid minds could invent, was suggested or conveyed to my mind.

         As long as I could hold, in my own view, my innocence, I could stand against them: but they heap'd such a load of these wicked expressions upon me, that I sunk under them. The impressions were so strong and violent that they made me to realize them in some measure, and to consider them as my own.

         The colossal struggle between Bodman and the infernal hosts went on and on, waxing and waning, for a considerable period, the visionary rejecting, with varying degrees of success, the Devil's accusation that he had committed "the unpardonable sin." Eventually, at one point Bodman

...went home to my father's house in company with my brother.... My brother then observed to me, that I had not committed the unpardonable sin: but that it was the work of Satan, in trying to make me believe it, or drive me to it. Likewise my brother observed; that he did not believe that God made any such communications to us, as I had represented — This gave me great relief; my brother still accompanied me to my father's house, and in the evening prayed with the family; and when requesting of God, that he would give his holy angels charge concerning us that night, Satan, by his cruel suggestion to me, made answer: All but you, I'll take care of you.

         Either the next morning, or shortly thereafter, Bodman hadanother great encounter with the Angel of Darkness while he was sitting at home in a chair:

It threw me into a nervous kind of convulsions, which I knew was wholly effected by Satan. — The people in the neighborhood were gathered, expecting that I was about to make my exit, or lose my reason, or some terrible occurrence was about to take place. The shakings that I had were successive and very violent. Satan would say, or suggest to me, that he would shake me into hell the next time. I had my reason so well, that I was sensible that it was the power of Satan that affected me. I believe he caused me to articulate words that I had no kind of agency in. These words, however, I suppose were not sinful, but only frightful. The minister and physician of the parish were both sent for. When it was asked if I was willing to hear the minister pray, I answered, I have no objection, but it will do no good, as I am going right down to endless destruction. He prayed with me, however, and my mind became more calm.

         The physician bled me. And Satan's power ceased for a time. And here I would observe, according to my best recollection, that in all those violent agitations and convulsions of body, there was no pain attending them.

         A few minutes ago I heard a car drive into the dooryard and the doors open and close. Cara came in, and I went to the kitchen. She put two large bags of groceries on the table and I went out to get the rest of the things. When I had finished I asked where she had been. She swept her eyes over the various bags.

         "Shopping," she said, tossing her dark hair over her shoulder.

         I said nothing, but glanced at my watch, and the three clocks chimed just then all over the house — twelve strokes, reverberating through the lighted rooms and the dark.

         Silence. "Rafe Hawkins and I had some things to talk over."

         I turned and left the room.

         "Charles — !" Cara said. But I had nothing to reply.

         As I passed the stairs, I glanced up and saw Wesley Catch sitting at the stairhead. In my scrapbook there is this anecdote out of my childhood:

THE BIBLICAL QUOTER

As told to me by P[aul] W[iese]:

P—- had been sleeping soundly when he was awakened by something. He was immediately wide awake. His eyes opened and he saw a light slowly contracting, as though someone were shutting the door to his bedroom with the hall light on. He thought nothing of it as it may have been his father or his mother. Suddenly he heard a voice speak to him. It said, "Repent ye now and be converted!" Paul thought it might be a trick being played on him by his parents, but not willing to take a chance he stayed right where he was. Upon investigation in the morning, however, he found that neither of his parents had strayed from bed all night or knew anything of the night's happenings.

Sunday,11^th. I've been thinking about my dream, about the Putnams and the others in Salem, and about Manoah Bodman's visions. It occurs to me at last, forcefully — I have entertained the idea subliminally for many years — that reality has nothing to do with logic or observable facts, but only with belief. If we have invented gods, or the One God, and He is real for those who believe — such as my father and Manoah Bodman — may not we have invented a real Devil and real witches as well?

         The aborigines of Australia, when they believe their time has come, regardless of age or health, sit and wait for real Death, who comes, and they go with him, though their bodies may be sound. In Salem, for a little while, they believed in witches, as Tituba did deeply. Hers was the dominant personality for a time. She knew her "poppets" could kill through voodoo, and a charm could raise a storm or leave a man impotent. She was the October moon's Copernicus, as the Putnams were her Newtons.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Ten

Saturday, 3^rd. I discovered, too late, that Cara has been at my books — Quincy's Pharmacopoiea in particular. This specific prescription, in fact:

Linementum Virilitatis

A Liniment against Impotency

         Take clarified Honey and Oil of Nutmegs by Expression, of each half an ounce; Pellitory of Spain, black Pepper, and Cubebs, of each half a scruple; Civet, a scruple; Musk, half a scruple; Balsam Peru, a dram; make all into a liniment S. A.

         With this it is advised to rub over the Penis and Perinaeum, in order to stimulate to Venery; but the sole End such Means can answer, is only the Purchase of a short Pleasure, which by being so procured, more strains, damages, and debilitates, than 20 times as much that is prompted only by natural incentives.

         I was standing in the parlor this afternoon, about two, looking out of the window at the old well hill, thinking of very little, merely admiring. Cara came into the room and took my hand. She tugged a little, and I looked at her. She was smiling and pulling toward the door leading to the stairs.

         I let myself be taken. As we were climbing the steps, her very nice skirt weaving before my eyes, I noticed she was carrying a small jar. She led me into her bedroom, turned to me, and undid my clothes. I stood naked before her, and she ran her hands down my chest and belly, touched my groin, kissed it. I felt myself stir and half fill.

         Kneeling, she took the jar from the floor where she had placed it, removed the top. "This may do it, Charles," she said, looking up at me. I merely watched. I was a spectator of these things she was doing to my body.

         In the jar was a salve. She took some on her fingers, began to massage it into my genitals and the area of my groin — the insides of my thighs, my testes, the head and neck of the penis, the pubic hair.

         As she worked, sensation increased greatly. I felt each succeeding stroke much more powerfully than the preceding one. My flesh began to flush, not only in the groin, but everywhere. Soon, and for the first time in many months, my member was standing hard, and my breath was irregular.

         At last, she looked up again and smiled. I let my hands run over her blouse as she rose. She wore nothing beneath, and her nipples stood firm against the fabric. I began to fumble for her fastenings, but she turned away and stepped out of her clothes in a moment. She went to the bed, sat on it, lay back, and spread her legs, arching upward slightly. Still smiling, she gestured to me.

         I went to her, spread her thighs wider still with my hands, and stoked her. She was very wet. She took me and pulled me in. It was a hard rocking and a short journey. I exploded inside her, and she cried out, her legs like ropes around mine, our bodies taut against each other.

         When it was done, I lay limp upon her; she was groaning and saying, "Charles, Charles," panting the syllables, her hands running in streaks down my back and sides, between us onto my belly.

         I still burned, and in a while we did it again. I rolled off; we lay quiet for a time. Then she took the salve and, bending over me, used it once more. This time, when I was hard, she straddled me and worked me up into her. I did little to help, but she wanted little. This time she was gentle, and as she moved in amorous ways, she sometimes leaned against my chest with her hands, sometimes leaned back upright, her hands on her own thighs, and closed her eyes. I watched her pleasure, the mouth slightly open, the even teeth in their bed of rose flesh, the smooth, light skin tight over the bones of her cheeks. Her breasts rose and fell and swayed in a mist.

         This time when I came, it was not so pleasant. And when we were finished, the burning about my groin was intense. Cara hurt too, I think. When she touched me a fourth time, the mere pressure of her fingers was fiery. I gasped, and she sat back, startled.

         "I've got to wash this stuff off," I said. She nodded. I went downstairs and showered; when I came out Cara went in. I had to put on some loose pajama bottoms.

         When she came out Cara looked uncomfortable. "I don't think we'd better try that stuff again," I said. "What was it?"

         She sighed. "It's in your Dispensatory," she said. "Page 672. Mind if I try a couple of other recipes?" She grinned lasciviously. "Unless you're willing to go to a doctor or a shrink...?"

         I shook my head.

         "Well," she said, "it was worth it, but I guess maybe it was sort of extreme for ordinary occasions." She made me blush. Idiotic.

         "So long as you don't kill us."

         I went upstairs and got down the book. As I sit writing this evening, my cock is flaming and swollen, and I have to sit, with my legs spread, on a damp towel.

         I trust Cara will never try the prescription that appears just beneath the one she used today:

Linimentum sympatheticum

The Sympathetic Liniment

         Take oil of Roses and fine Bole, of each an ounce; Linseed-oil, 2 ounces; Man's Grease, Moss of human Skull, of a Person killed by Violence, in Powder, of each 2 ounces; Mummy and Man's Blood, of each half an ounce: make a liniment S. A.

         We give this here only to oblige such as are weak and whimsical enough to have any Belief in such things. If the Weapon by which a Wound is made, be dressed with it, it is said to cure as much as any Application immediately to the Part itself; but for such Knowledge, the Reader may turn to Sir Kenelm Digby's Treatise of the sympathetic Powder, and meet with a Philosophy as ridiculous as the Facts are false upon which it is founded; but so easy is Delusion to some Minds, that they are better entertained with Chimeras than demonstrative Truth.

         If I can sit at a typewriter tomorrow, I must get back to my novel. I'm not sure I like the idea of Cara looking into my old books. All women seem to be driven to tamper.

Sunday, 9^th. The Book of the Black Heart

Chapter Three: The Ship

It was thus that Nothus arrived at the ineffable argument that, if the world was to be his oyster, he must open her. In order to open her, being penniless though streetwise, a wise guy, and now a wise child as well, he must find means of transportation. "The Navy Wants You!" the poster replied, unbidden, to his unspoken thoughts. "Join the Navy and Screw the World!" And so it was that Nothus the recruit ran through the town, topside, below decks, in his skivvies looking for the fantail and the catwalks: Are the sailors in their bunks? Can't you hear....

Clocks of the city, belltowers, steeples and steeplejacks asleep, booming out the night hours in ticks and breaths. At last he found her. The Hornet lay on the bay like a great tower toppled upon the water, her masts, antennae and gun mounts singled against the night. Nothus stood looking at her lying coldly and closely at pierside. Her island crags jagged out of the flight deck, the black windows of the Captain's bridge reflected a single light out over the Brooklyn Shipyard with its nearby Bridge of the same name, the harbor, the gantries and scaffolding, the buildings done up now for the night in black batting.

Behind Nothus lay the city through which he had come seeking her. Nothus watched. An engine now and then sprung its sound out of shadows and into the yellow flare of a street lamp. A swabbie song made of beer and cigarettes rose now and then on scuffed hooves, hairy fetlocks hung in bellbottoms out of an alley, and a nightstick somewhere tapped and rang on a grating.

A foghorn bloated. A gull shifted restively on a bollard. A mooring line creaked. On some deck somewhere heels clattered then began clanking up a ladder that led from a midpoint above the water, overhead into the stars.

Nothus turned and walked toward the temporary barracks that housed the mariners who were to man the carrier when she was commissioned. He found the hatchway and went in. The dingy bulkheads were piled with sleeping men, the floor was covered with seabags, ditty bags, bag dreams and sacking. He found his bunk, undressed to his skivvies and lay down. Tomorrow, he thought, would be the day they took her two thousand men and one great woman.

Who was she, this steel mama? This lover in whom he and his shipmates moved, whose intestines they inhabited? The great, florid face of a bo'sun peered in through a hatch, its jaws grinning. "Now hear this!" it shouted, "Reveille, reveille — all hands hit the deck! Go git her, boys!" A flurry of groans and motions, hands thrust through jumper necks. "Now hear this," said a voice of metal filings and copper wires, "all hands turn to and hit the deck, 'fore and aft. Sweepers, man your brooms."

"Go git her, boys," again said the side of beef hung in the hatchway. "She's waitin' for you."

Down deep in her bowels somewhere a huge throbbing began, like the pumping of a heart. There were boots and flurries, an exodus topside. Nothus at the rail watched the lines being cast off, the harbor tugs spluttering around and nosing against the hull. "Now hear this," said a voice of tubing and glass, "stand by to get under weigh." The sunlight struck through the early haze and into the gray-green-blue ordure of the water in which a mountain of steel floated and began to swing free.

Above him the island just missed the roadbed of the Brooklyn Bridge joining the two islands. She was not yet moving under her own power, but the power was there, steaming and caking in the oily pipes underfoot. The men assembled on the flight deck in their white pajamas saluted and the Marine band, like so many fancy caterpillars, piped and fluted into the morning pigeons. An admiral admired himself from afar atop the ship's bridge. Old Glory flapped away from its steel truss. Along the waterfront scores of lesser vessels clustered and huddled against their piers and moorings. Nothus listened for the first sounds of the great lady's screws churning fathoms deep in the belly of the bay. At last they came — the tugs pulled loose and she headed for the open seas.

Behind her the shore slipped backward farther into its continent. The city became visibly a city, not a stratagem of buildings. Then the tall woman with her torch signaled farewell to this vagrant sister and slipped under the horizon. Now there were nothing but waves and sky and a skipperly breeze sloshing spume over the bow, gulls, and a patient pelican perched upon the fantail.

The clouds scuttled overhead, leading the way. Though she rolled and made headway, Nothus knew, his new mistress had lost her sense of direction. The ship and time were static. To starboard a school of porpoises jolloped and flirted, and the sun fluttered out overhead now and again like a drunken helmsman alternately hilarious and morose.

Flash and dissolve: Nothus found himself in the ice-blue sea of Madame Sosostris' crystal ball looking upward toward the surface. In the sea's belly there were shapes like kidneys and livers, hearts tremulous among the groves of weed and seagrass. Or was this one of Nothus' aquaria in the sun porch of his father's house? Nothus sent his eyes roving after a great flat shape with a tail that flipped after a cloud of silvery scales. In the ooze of a rock ledge a monstrous worm like a colon cut free sustained itself by digesting mud crawlers. Anemones bloomed, voracious, out of fissures, and a thing made of a sack and eight snakes skittered along in a cloak of silt.

His gills palpitating behind his ears, Nothus floated and began to rise off the bottom toward the hulk becalmed overhead — she was encrusted with barnacles. As he moved closer the hull dissolved or, rather, became as transparent as the glass sides of Nothus' aquaria.

I am very tired, but I know what I'll write tomorrow. Yesterday morning, we had only the bells of the churches, but this morning we had Rafe again for coffee — or Cara did. She has spent the rest of the day making candles — all colors: the rainbow, and white, and black — using paraffin, crayons for pigment, and for wicks some old thick twine she found in the shed and soaked in wax.

Tuesday, 6^th.

The Book of the Black Heart

Chapter Three: The Ship, continued

It was as though the dead men inside were walking on a hide made of air. Nothus, with one great eye, glazed upward into a forest of feet. The sailors, their hair wavering in the currents of a liquid lighter than water, danced their hornpipes silently, did the business of the darkness in wavers. Among them, like threads of rust, the veins and arteries of the ship stitched and trembled, pulling the whole into a fabric of motion and stillness.

On the bridge, through layers of mirrors and transparencies, a man in a blue blazer had thrust his head into a wreath made of golden tarnished foliage and bits of coin and ribbon. He was greatly bearded. On his brow was a legend tattooed in red: "For God and Country." His hand was on the wheel, but he was looking aft, and his guidance was random. He spun and jerked the spokes of the great circle of driftwood that steered the ship. The rudder, Nothus could see, stuttered and flushed. The ship was stilled in a great tarn of caudals and dorsals, bulging eyes and distended mouths. Slugs sludged along the ratlines and hawsers. The capstan creaked with the corrosion of hours, winding its chain endlessly, never becoming overburdened, for as each new link approached the steel spool, the oldest and farthest disintegrated and fell to wet dust on the deck.

"Whose ship is this?" Nothus asked, "whose voyage?" Into the night she pulled, under the stars parsed out over Oceanus, the whitecaps breaking, breaking against the bow, the wake luminous, made of swells that looked like the breasts of mermaids, sexless, without nipples — only surfaces made of brine, concealing brine; roofing hearts that sucked and forged like squid breathing.

The ship pumped and plunged, and Nothus listened to its metal heart squeezing sound out of silence, the sound falling back into silence, rust, the beautiful and deadly branches of coral forests scraping upward towards the keel. "What is the destination of this, my true mother?" Nothus asked. "What is mine?" But there was no answer, and Nothus, for the time being, was all at sea. The only things of which he was to a degree certain was this: he was young, he was his own father, and there must be ports and coasts over the horizon.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Nine

Part Nine

Saturday, 26^th. I have spent all of today upstairs among the books in the library, going through volumes bound in crumbling calf, and through Uncle John's old notebook on Salem, which is filled with the notes he took concerning his forebears' — and my own — involvement in the Trials.

         I have been buried in these notes, and in the books, going from one to the other in an attempt to piece together a coherent narrative, and it appears I shall have to do the same for several days more.

         It would have been easier for me simply to go to the library of one of the colleges in the area, and get some books more recently written. But, though I may make errors, I prefer to go back into the past myself, here in a Putnam house, with my uncle's books and crabbed calligraphy rising up off the desk to envelop me in those days of darkness and folly.

         I prefer my own narrative to another's, for I am involved in it, and it is of a piece with this place where I have come to find out who I am, and in what age I am born.

OCTOBER 1970

Thursday, 1^st. The narrative is finished. I am astonished and sickened by the involvement of my Putnam ancestors in this New England madness at Salem — actually, Salem Village, now Danvers, Massachusetts — in 1692. There has been revelation after revelation, among them being these:

         The original American homestead of my many-times great grandfather, John Putnam, was Oak Knoll which, in the 19th century, became the home of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. I own a letter written by Whittier datelined Oak Knoll.

         I am a direct descendant, on my mother's side, of Constable "Carolina" John Putnam, who arrested many of the accused witches on warrants sworn out by the Putnams on "spectral evidence" given in to the Court by his aunt, Ann Putnam Sr., and his cousin, Ann Putnam Jr., one of the "witch-bitches," so-called, who threw fits in the courtroom and screamed that the spectres of the witches were tormenting them.

         I had thought to paste the story into this journal, just as I lay-in the pages of my novel, so that the many things might lie side by side between covers — past and present aimed along these blue lines filled with emptiness, where I might come to look back and see things clearly at last. But the story of Salem is so depressing, so manic, that I think nothing good can come of that plan. Instead, I will put the story into Uncle John's file folder which I will lock in the safe. Let darkness swallow it.

         It has been nearly a week since I have written an entry. The days have been quiet, and at the same time intense, for both Cara and me. I am exhausted. Cara has been busy today with the plant life we gathered in these old Maine fields of Uncle John's last Friday, doing with the herbs, roots, and seeds whatever it is a horticulturist does in the Fall to prepare for gardening in the Spring. The house is filled with the aromas of Autumn, and Cara walks like Ceres among her sere gatherings.

         The other morning, while I was working, I heard a car drive into the dooryard and then, a little later, the voice of Rafe Hawkins downstairs visiting Cara. She must have told him I was busy, for they didn't disturb me. Yesterday morning I again heard the Rev. Rafe downstairs talking with Cara. A little while later I heard his car drive away, and I went back to my work. It went very fast, and I stopped around eleven-thirty in the morning for a rest. I leaned back and listened to the house. It was very quiet. I got up, went downstairs, looked into the parlor and livingroom — not even Catch was in sight. I went into the kitchen and called, "Cara?"

         She often works outdoors, or goes into the woods looking for plants. I opened the door, but she wasn't in the dooryard. Her car was still there, though. I walked around the house into the riveryard and called, but got no answer. So I went back to work.

         Around noon I heard a car pull up outside and a door slam, and then the car drove away. About fifteen minutes later Cara called upstairs, "Want some lunch, Charles? It's ready." I went down to eat and said nothing. She did not volunteer an explanation for her absence.

         I wish I could be shut of women for all time.

         While I was visiting Old Salem, the weather broke finally, and Vertumnus has come out of hiding to turn the sundial toward another season. It is cool enough now to brave the attic. Tomorrow Cara and I will go aloft and chase out the squirrels that scrabble all night on the ceiling.

Friday, 2^nd. When we opened the attic door we found three bats lying dead on the lowest steps. They were the first thing we cleaned up. Cara made a face. "I know it's supposed to be a folk-tale," she said, "but they get tangled in your hair sometimes."

         The stairs are narrow, so I went up first; Catch brought up the rear. We found a room at the top where the nineteenth century lay about in old trunks, or stood stacked against the walls, or hung from nails in the rafters.

         The chimney piled up through the floor and thrust itself through the roof among old harness, lanterns, picture frames in gold leaf-and-scrollwork. There were boxes filled with collections of buttons and shells, like portions of some baroque seashore caught and held in an eddy of time. Faded dresses and suits stood in racks along the wall. A child's sleigh rode the dust on its deep wooden runners with iron rims.

         "There they are," Cara said. In the colored sun that filtered through webs and the husks of trapped flies I saw the mattresses at which she was pointing: a stack of them piled upon an old bedstead. The feathers were leaking out of them, and the holes in the ticking were small tunnels obviously well-used. I felt sorry, for a moment, that we had to destroy such an evidently comfortable squirrel apartment dwelling.

         "How am I supposed to get these outdoors without messing up the entire house?"

         That's an interesting question," Cara said. She stood beside me, and while I wasn't looking she leaned to peck me on the nape of the neck. She moved closer, and I put my arm around her.

         "How about the window in the other room?" I pointed through a doorway beside the chimney where the eastern light broached the gloom through large panes. She nodded, and we went in to see.

         The room was where Uncle John had kept the eighteenth century. There was some very old furniture: a rope bed, two spinning wheels, one of them quite large. There was a real cobbler's bench, its surface shredded and pitted and dry. The wood was gray with age. On it, some buttermoulds and candlemoulds. In corners stood wooden churns and sugar buckets, a Puritan flail, a mortar and pestle made of wood.

         "What a beautiful old place!" Cara exclaimed. Her eyes, out of that lovely oval face, touched each thing with their glance.

         I tried the window and was surprised to find how easily it opened. It simply lifted, and I propped it wide with a cane.

         I told Cara to stand aside. "Let me help," she said, but I shook my head.

         "Those mattresses are filthy. No use our both getting messed up." So, while I dragged the bedding from the other room t the window, she wandered about considering things and picking them up.

         I took each mattress and heaved it through the window. It would flop out, feathers spraying out of it on its journey and exploding out o n impact with a soft, large pluf! There were six of them, and it didn't take long. I had just thrown out the last one when a voice from below called up, "What the hell is going on up there?" Cara and I looked out to see Rafe Hawkins standing in the dooryard by his car. A few feathers were falling out of the air onto his shoulders and head. He picked off the ones he could see.

         Cara laughed.

         "Stop using fowl language," I called. Pluck up, you're looking down in the mouth. If you're going to be chicken, learn to duck."

         I heard him groan and say, "What, can't you get a goose in there somewhere?"

         Cara distributed upon him and me a look of forbearance mingled with slight distaste. "We're cleaning the squirrels out of the attic," she called down.

         "Weird looking squirrels," Rafe said, looking up. "All I can see is a pair. Well, have a nice time. I've gotta get to school." He waved and got into his wagon.

         "Rafe's taken to dropping in just about every morning, hasn't he?"

         "Yes," Cara said, "for coffee. He's a batch, and he likes to talk, so he drops by."

         As Rafe drove off we turned to go downstairs. Cara brought the mortar and pestle with her, and a set of candlemoulds.

         I got out the tractor and trailer and disposed of the mattresses in one of the gullies that spring across the north fields and fall away to the river. Then I went back up attic to strew mothballs over the floors, hoping to persuade the squirrels that the place was unlivable.

         We are beset by animals here. Hardly a day goes by that Catch doesn't present us with a mole or a shrew or a mouse. He's even caught snakes and toads, leaving their carcasses in the year or anywhere in the house. Raccoons get into our garbage pails unless we leave food out for them on the kitchen steps, which we've begun to do regularly. It's much easier than cleaning up after them.

         Crickets have begun coming into the house to live, now that the weather is colder. Cara feeds them crumbs, and they sing to each other across the hearth. This evening I was in the living room listening to them when Cara came in. She had two cob pipes, and she handed me one. It startled me. For a moment I was confused, and then I realized what she was doing. Obviously, one of the herbs we had gathered, and that I hadn't recognized, had been marijuana.

         I've smoked the stuff very little, because it doesn't affect me the way it seems to affect other people. Back at school, in fact, it had been Cara three or four years earlier who had introduced me to the weed. I'm very leery of anything that touches or threatens my thinking. I drink very little alcohol, even.

         The first few times I'd smoked, I hadn't been affected at all. Then, finally, at a party, I had gotten quite high. While everyone else seemed to be receiving pleasure from the smoke, I simply found that the top half of my head was where I was — my body was left behind. I became an observer of myself, and I felt very little connection between what was occurring in my brain, and the things my body was doing. It frightened me.

         Now, as Cara handed me the pipe, I was taken with a fleeting suspicion of her. Why did she want to mess with my mind? I was about to refuse, but I looked into her eyes and found there nothing but contentment. I told myself she merely wanted to please me, and I think that's true. So I took it, and we smoked. It was pleasant this time. We got a mellow high on, and we talked about our menagerie as we watched Catch's black silhouette against the fire searching for the crickets between the bricks.

         We got to laughing. I went upstairs to bring down George Riley's The Beauties of Creation; or, a New Moral System of Natural History; displayed in the Most Singular, Curious, and Beautiful, Quadrupeds, Birds, Insects, Trees, and Flowers..., published by William Young, Philadelphia, 1792; and Jedidiah Morse's The American Universal Geography, Vol. I, Young and Etheridge, Boston, 1793. I read some entries to her: "The Camelopard somewhat resembles the deer in form, without its symmetry. It has been found eighteen feet high, and ten from the ground to the top of the shoulder. The hinder parts are so low, that, when standing upright, it greatly resembles a dog sitting."

         Cara began to giggle uncontrollably. I read on, about the Hippotame, Ourang Outang, the Dodo, the greater Butcher Bird. "This one's my favorite," I said; "Riley says of Owls, '...these birds employ the night in devastation....'"

         "It would be," Cara said. Her laughter had been growing brittle, and had finally ceased altogether.

         "The cock of the Twite species '...is known by a red spot on the rump. Food. Rape and canary; but they like the latter best.'"

         There was nothing in the room but strata of smoke lying across the air when I turned to Morse and read Cara about a fabulous animal of Norway: "'The glutton, otherwise called the erven, or vielfras, resembles a dog; with a long body, thick legs, sharp claws and teeth; his fur, which is variegated, is so precious, that he is shot with blunt arrows, to preserve the skin unhurt: He is bold, and so ravenous, that it is said he will devour a carcase larger than himself, and unburdens his stomach by squeezing himself between two close-standing trees....'"

         "What?" Cara asked, staring. I read her the last part again, and she said, "You don't want to be standing behind him when he does that." We laughed for a long while.

         When we had quieted, I told her I had something else to read her, and I went and got the third letter from Wesley Court, which I hadn't yet read myself.

                                                                                 "Lowell Jan 11 1860

"Charles,

         "I received your letter this morning. Was much pleased to here from my old friend. Yesterday there was the greatest accident in Lawrence that ever happened in any the northern states. About four Oclock the Pemberton Mills fell in killing about 500 persons. I will send you a paper containing the whole facts, you can see them better than I can tell you. The cars have run extra trains all day. I had an invitation to go to Lawrence last night but could not leave it is about 9 miles from here. Lowell seems like Frankfort today all the folks have gone to Lawrence.

         "You said you had a dance newyears night. I should like to of been there. There is a furnul just passing the store, they are carrying off some there friends. It would bee a good thing if they was all caryed off, for they don't smell good. The irish are worse then the 7 years itch.

         I have just been out to get two papers but could not get but half ones.

         "I want you to give one to Farther & read the other your self. It is now six O’clock & they have not got them all out yet.

         "P.S. I think you boys had better let Albert alone if he has amind to hug a girl, let him do it — poor boy, dont get the chance every day as you do.

         "I received a letter from home to day said Louisa has married good on her head & Georges too I am going to be one these days.

         "Pleas dont let any one see this for I commenced it just after diner & wrote aword to a time.

         "How is it Chas. does Henry to up to Blind mans hill now

__________

         "I am going up to Mrs Erskines to night, there is a young lady from Richmond Me there her name is L J ask Henry who it is

         "Write oftener or Ile pull your hair when I come home next Fall

                                    "Good by

                                             "Wesley"

         Cara and I were both depressed by the time I had finished. I have sat up late waiting for my head to clear. Catch is sleeping with Cara; she says she will call him Wesley from now on, as they are both dark persons. If I sit quietly, I can hear the squirrels still.

 

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Seven

Sunday, 20th. During the night I caught cold. When I went to bed about midnight my soft palate was raw. I tossed and turned and had bad dreams. My kidneys hurt badly. About every hour, it seemed I had to make the long trip through the dark house to the john in the ell. I heard the clocks chiming all night. I finally left the dining room light on so I wouldn't stub my toes so often.

         At dawn I noticed Catch was missing from the foot of my bed. Glancing into Cara's room on my way by, I saw him on her bed. I must have been a regular windmill.

         I got up around 9:30 and took a shower. By the time I was through, Cara was up, making breakfast.

         "Poor Charles," she said as I went through the kitchen. "Sit down and have something." I shook my head and got dressed. When I came back I had coffee. She has been busy since. She went into Wiscasset to pick up the Times and some cold remedies. Nothing did any good until she made me a toddy. The steam and the whiskey have finally made me feel human enough to do some reading.

         I read the Times, but I didn't feel up even to the headlines: the vice-president and his cretinous multisyllabic insults; the fighting in the Middle East; hijacks of planes; twelve-year-olds dying because they shot up heroin; eighteen-year-olds dying because they were shot in Vietnam; the world shot in the ass with pollution.

         "Cara," I said as we sat at the fire in the parlor, "If you have to buy newspapers, do me a big favor and keep them out of my sight."

         Her eyes clouded over, as the sky has been doing. 'You can't escape that way, Charles," she said. The fire hissed on the grate behind her where she lay with Catch.

         "I can fucking well give it a good try," I said. She watched me go into the study. I've closed the door and have looked up the Americana article on "Devil" — referred to in the one on witchcraft. It continues to refute Gilpin:

         Most of the old religions of the past acknowledged a host of demons, who, like their gods, were not ordinarily considered, in a moral point of view, as good or bad, but merely as exercising a salutary or injurious influence. In the latter case, they were looked upon as punishing spirits, without inimical or wicked purpose.

         The article an "Demon," which I looked up also, gives a good historical background on the differences between pagan "demons" and Christian "devils."

         Seeva, the judging and destroying god of the Indian mythology, is a symbol of the great power of nature, which is alternately beneficial and injurious, but in itself neither good nor evil. The doctrine of Zoroaster, who adopted an evil principle, called Ahriman, opposed to the good principle, and served by several orders of inferior spirits (in order to explain the existence of evil in this world), spread the belief in such spirits among the people. The Greek mythology did not distinguish with the same precision between the good and bad spirits. The Titans, it is true, struggled against the gods, but not for any merely moral reason, and the gods are not represented as patterns of pure morality. The cacodemons of the Greek mythology, as, for instance, the Furies, always appear more in the character of punishing than of malignant spirits.

         On the contrary, Hecate, the goddess of the lower world and of enchantment, and the Lamiae, corresponding to the witches of the modern popular belief, have more of what we understand under the diabolical character. Typhon, who partakes in the fate of the Titans, properly belongs to the Egyptian mythology, in which he appears as the origin of evil, under the figure of a horrid monster. Similar to him is Beelzebub, or Beelzebul, who, from the mythology of Western Asia, was introduced into the belief of the Hebrews.

         This is the crucial point In the development of the Christian devil. Heretofore, there had been no conception of evil as a force by itself, in opposition to an all-powerful God, The original Hebrew Satan had been God's agent, sent to test Man and find whether he was worthy. Sorcerers, to this point, were not in league with any spirit of evil - they merely had knowledge of magic, or necromancy, which they could use for their own good or evil purposes. The necromantic arts were neutral, like the sciences today (which, no doubt, would be necromancy, if we still. used the word); only men can conceive of good or evil. My students, in blaming science for the troubles of the world, are again inventing the Devil.

         But to this juncture, sorcerers were not yet "witches," who compacted with the Devil, who gave them in return magic powers.

         But as the captivity of the Hebrews in Babylon had in many respects a decisive influence upon their way of thinking and prevailing notions, by the acquaintance which they acquired with the ideas of the Chaldeans, the idea of the devil, as the principle of evil, resembling Ahriman, first appeared among the Jews after that captivity. He is called Satanas, in Greek, the fiend, destroyer, antagonist. The word devil is derived from [diabalos]. This Satan, however, is to be distinguished from the one in the book of Job" — i.a., God's agent.

         The latter is no fiend, but the accuser before the throne of the Almighty, and belongs to the heavenly servants of God.

         In other words, when the Greeks came to translate the old and New Testaments, they used the same tern to translate the old Satanus and the new Christian Devil. Hence, Gilpin's (and many others') inability — through confusion and ignorance, to say that "all ages" have believed in witches and witchcraft.

         I am enlightened, but not much encouraged by this. The world's history is a record of orbits spun through Iight for a while, then back into darkness. What kind of age is this? Is there "progress"? The only sure view is hindsight, and hindsight does not ensure a vision of the sure future. Christ, the Enlightened One, assured us of darkness as soon as He was dead.

         Cara has come in while I was writing with a wonderful cup of something — even better than the toddy. I asked her what it was and she replied, "sassafras tea, with rum, honey, and Indian balsam,"

         It has cleared my head for a while, but I think a fever has set in. Where did she get sassafras? The liquid is pink, and there are some grains or bits of leaf floating in it — mint, I think, but I can't taste things very well. For the first time in months, I feel a little horny. But my eyes feel like stones.

 

Monday, 21^st. Last night I was feverish. Cara sat up with me, dozing in a chair. She kept some of her tea handy — in a thermos, I think — I remember taking sips between dreams.

         Sometimes it was Norine beside the bed. I remember a huge Os Externum descending to swallow me. One time I recall crying out about the wings in the chimney, but not what it was I cried. Norine and Cara soothed me — they were lying beside me, on either side, and their hands stroked my privy parts, which burned.

         Towards morning I woke, clear-headed, to find Cara cleaning me up. She had taken off my pajama bottoms and thrown them on the floor. She smiled as she used the towel on my navel and thighs. "Too bad we couldn't have used this in a less wasteful way, Charles," she said. "But it's a good sign. At least we know there's nothing physically wrong with you."

         I was too exhausted to say or do anything. I closed my eyes and slept soundly at last.

         At ten I woke again, but I am too weak to think of doing anything still. I want to get to the books, but Cara won't let me. "Plenty of time for that tomorrow, " she says. "What do you find in those old things?"

         "Everything," I told her, and made her bring me my journal. I want it all down here: the only sure place is the past, and as I write, already this moment turns into a word in a frame, I can see myself as I cannot before the ink is there, filling the white space between the blue lines that run on and on through the days of these pages.

         I lie here and stare at the blankness ahead, riffling these pages, and I am, filled with faint dread. But when I riffle backward, there I am, lying across these lines, solid as a clock, and the dread falls away into clean sheets, the sun flooding through the windows, a little fire in the grate, and Cara downstairs humming a little, walking the great planks the floor is made of.

         She has switched me now to plain tea and aspirin. Tomorrow there's a book I want to look at.

Tuesday, 22^nd. Another very bad night. The cold has gone down into my chest, but my cough is dry. Cara has tried to make me stay down, but I got dressed and went to the library.

         I looked through Dr. Chase's Practical Recipes, but found nothing. I had more luck with John Quincy's Pharmacopoeia Officinalis Extemporanea. Or, A Complete English Dispensatory —, the twelfth edition, London: Thomas Longman, at the Ship in Paternoster Row, 1742:

         Sassafras. It is the wood of a very large Tree, which grows in Florida, Virginia, &c. It is of an aromatic Scent: some compare it to Fennel. John Baubine calls it Lignum Pavanum;- and Caspar Baubine distinguishes it — ex Florida ficulneo folio, from the Places it is brought from; and it is the Anbubia of Piso. It is very drying: and hot, tho' not quite so much as the Guaiacum. It is used in all the same Intentions, and it is much more met with in extemporaneous Prescriptions, than in the Shop Medicines; tho' the College, in their Dispensatory, give us an Electuary of which this is the basis, and whence it has its Name. This is somewhat come into fashion in Families, by way of Tea; which the Shavings of it make agreeably enough; but the Scandal of its being good in Venereal Cases, is a great detriment to its Credit; which prevents a great deal more, good being: done by it, than otherwise might be; for 'tis certainly...an admirable Sweetener. tho with some indeed it does not well agree, at first especially, and in Morning; as it affects the head Iike some Perfumes, and occasions Pains, Drowsiness, and Vapours; but Use, and first drinking it in Afternoons, will with most Constitutions wear off these Inconveniencies.

         Next I looked up balsam, but could find no such thing as "Indian balsam," which is what Cara called it. Perhaps this is it:

         Tolutanum, of Tolu. The Tree producing this, is a Species of the Pine, and distinguished, Foliis Ceratae similibus, by Caspar Baubine; and is the Balsamifera quarta of Hernandez. This is a Balsam of a deep yellowish Colour, approaching near to red; and of a most delicate scent, much beyond any other Balsam. Schroeder says 'tis brought from some Parts of the African continent, near Carthage; but we have it from the West Indies. It first flows from the Tree which produces it, of the Consistency of ordinary Turpentine; but by keeping we meet with it in the Shops frequently so hard as to be brittle: and it seems not the worse for being so; its balsamic Parts cohering too closely to fly off in the Waste. It is a most excellent Balsamic and Restorative; is very good in all Decays, particularly of the Lungs. It softens and thickens the Blood; and cures Catarrhs, and Coughs from tickling Defluctions. Its healing Virtues also extend to the remotest Parts; and it is an extraordinary Medicine in Seminal Weaknesses, and old Gleets, in both Sexes.

         I begin to see that Cara is trying to cure me of more than a cold. When I asked Cara where she had gotten that recipe for Sassafras Tea, she laughed and reminded me she was a country girl.

         "My grandmother taught me all I know," she said, and went back out into the kitchen where she is at work cooking up something that stinks. She pays no attention to me when I ask what it is. She just says, "You'll find out, Charles. We've got to get you over your Norine hangups, and I think I have a way." I bet Dr. Chase would have loved to meet her grandmother.

         The weather is very hot and wet, and I have been unable to think about my novel. My mind wanders when I try.

Wednesday, 23^rd. We have had a caller The Rev. Ralph Hawkins of the local Episcopal Church overstreet whose bells disturb us Sunday mornings. He came to the door about ten this morning dressed in flare-bottom trousers, a red sweater, moccasins, and a clerical collar.

         Cara met him at the door, and he asked if Mr. Ally were at home, he presumed he was speaking with Mrs. Ally.

         "Wrong assumption," Cara told him, "but come in anyway."

         I happened to be standing behind Cara, a little out of his line of vision. Cara's retort didn't phase him at all. He came in and caught sight of me.

         "Ah, Mr. Ally. Welcome to Frankfort. Sorry not to have gotten here sooner." His smile was perfectly tennis, and he looked like a tennis player: tall and athletic — all except for the long tow hair and sideburns. He held out his hand, and I took it reflexively. Cara stood aside, sizing him up.

         I recognized the type at once — the New Breed of pastor, hip and intelligent. I had run into his kind on two campuses; on both, the preachers had been into social action — counseling draft resisters, speeders and acid-heads, heading picket lines, taking ads in the local papers against the war, preaching sermons that outraged the solid citizens.

         I hadn't thought the two local churches had full-time ministers. Sure enough, when he was settled in the parlor Hawkins, with a glass of Scotch in his hands, explained all.

         "I'm doing this part-time," he said, smiling — one was meant to melt into that toothy tennis grin. Though he lived in town, his real job was on a nearby college campus. "But, hell," he said, "the natives need a little Salvation too." He sipped his drink. "Mainly, though, I wanted to meet Charles Ally. Not many famous writers around after the summer folks bug out."

         That was meant to be flattering, but it came off as an insult. The only way he could have heard of me was from a member of the English department at the college where he worked. Unless he read little magazines and poetry books himself. Looking him over, I decided he might just do that.

         I'm afraid I was somewhat surly. I recognized the name Hawkins as a local one, from headstones in the graveyard. "If you'd wanted to meet me, you could've done so before this. My family and I have spent one or two summers here in the past, while my Uncle John was ill especially. And my mother used to bring me up for visits when I was a kid." As I said this, it occurred to me finally that that was how Cara had known about the farm. While Uncle John had been in hospital — a nursing home, actually — Norine, Melany and I a few years earlier had come up to be caretakers, sort of, for the farm. Cara had been a student then, and I must have told her where we would be during the summer. It cleared up a mystery I had nearly forgotten.

         Hawkins raised his eyebrows into his forelock. "This is my family town too," he said, "But my branch of the family's from the West Coast. I've only just moved here this fall. I couldn't have met you, Mr. Ally."

         "Aside from curiosity," I asked, "what's your business with us?"

         He shrugged his square shoulders. "None," he said. "I don't suppose you'd care to attend Sunday services?"

         I shook my head and Cara frowned. He caught the look out of the corner of his eye and laughed, throwing his head back so that the forelock of blond hair flopped back into place.

         "Don't worry, Miss...?"

         Cara shook her head faintly. "Just Cara," she said. "The name's Italian, and you couldn't pronounce it."

         "Call her 'beautiful lady,'" I said. "Lots of men do."

         I could see Cara begin to flush angrily, but Hawkins paid me no attention, finessing the situation nicely.

         "Okay, Cara it is," he said. "Lots of people call me Ralph, but I prefer Rafe."

         That made sense. Why not one more little affectation?

         He drained his glass and stood up. "May I come again?"

         Cara stood too, but I stayed in my Morris chair.

         "May I come again?" the very reverend Rafe Hawkins repeated.

         I looked up. "What for?"

         "To bug your ass. If you need anything, I'm up on Blind Man's Hill, first house on your left, in the middle of the grade." He nodded to me, turned to leave the room after handing Cara his glass.

         She took it. "Come again. I mean it." She reached out and touched his sleeve. "This house gets too quiet sometimes, and Charles isn't always so grouchy. He's got a cold." She gave me a significant look — or maybe the look was for Hawkins' benefit. I have no doubt he'll be back.

         It's the first day of autumn, and unbearably hot. It's also been humid the past two days. My cold has broken, but my eyes have hurt so badly, my head feels so tight, that I can hardly bear to write, and can in no wise think of going to the books. Tomorrow things may be better. It seems to be trying to cool off, though the air is wet still.

         Catch wants to go up attic, but I'd prefer to go up myself first. I understand squirrels can be rabid these days. I must try to get some sleep tonight at least.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Six

Friday, 18th, Cara has found me, there was a postcard waiting for me:

"I am coming,

                                                      "Cara"

         I tried to phone her from the gas station, but there was no answer. I tried several times, throughout the morning. I want no visitors. Too upset to eat at noon, I went to sit among the books, and that helped.

         The center of quiet is the upstairs hall library. The house settles into itself there, and I can think. For a while I sat and looked out of the window at the rain — there was fine weather the last two days, of course, while I sat at the typewriter. My eyes turned from the rain and settled on the Daemonologia Sacra of Gilpin. That is a hateful book. I took down vol. xiii of Uncle John's 1836 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana and looked up the entry on witchcraft:

         WITCH, WITCHCRAFT. A witch is a person who has acquired supernatural power by entering into a compact with evil spirits. In this sense of the word, the notions of witchcraft are essentially of modern origin, being entirely distinct from the superstitions of the ancients concerning the magical powers of the enchantments of their sorcerers. (See magic.) The term witch occurs, indeed, in our version of the Scriptures, according to which, the law of Moses is, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus, xxii, 18); but, besides that many commentators believe the Hebrew term charasp, here translated witch, should be rendered poisoner, there is nothing to indicate any infernal league between the Hebrew sorceress end diabolical powers, as is the distinctive mark of modern witchcraft. Trafficking with idols, using charms, invocations, &c., seem to constitute the crime of witchcraft, so often referred to in the Scriptures, both of the Old and New Testament.

         Among the early Christians, the belief in the active agency of the spirit of evil in human affairs, became more fully developed than it had previously been; and it has been a familiar notion with Christian writers, from an early period, that the gods of the ancients were actually wicked spirits, who had led the nations astray from God, and blinded them to destroy them. Hence they have attributed to the heathen oracles the character of prophecy, but ascribed their prophetic powers to the devil; and it is well known that the Sibyline oracles have been quoted, by Christian theologians, in proof of the divine character of the Savior. "There appears nothing," says Sir W. Scott (Demonology and Witchcraft) "inconsistent in the faith of those, who, believing that, in the elder time, fiends end demons were permitted an enlarged degree of power in uttering predictions, may also give credit to the proposition, that, at the divine advent, that power was restrained, the oracles silenced, and those demons who had aped the divinity of the place, were driven from their abode on earth, honored as it was by a guest so awful."

         I suppose now we would have to spell that word aweful or awe-full to get the meaning right.

         The opinion here alluded to is the commonly-received opinion that the heathen oracles were struck silent at the time of the coming of Jesus Christ (see Demon, and Devil.)

         At this point there is a footnote:

         In Brown's Dictionary of the Holy Bible (fifth edition, Edinburgh, 1807), it is said that "A witch is a woman that has dealing with Satan; that such persons are among men is abundantly plain from Scripture, and that they ought to be put to death. It is plain, however, that great caution is necessary in the detection of the guilty, and in punishing them, lest the innocent suffer."

         This work was republished in Albany in 1816! Man — each man — is of two minds — the mind of darkness, and the mind of light; Gilpin vs. Ferguson, Blackstone vs. Blackstone. And in all the ages Ouroboros turns, with the sun and the moon, through the days and the years; through mind and spirit. One is born, and he takes his chances with himself and the spin of the coin in the world.

         Uncle John Putnam seems to have been something of a scholar with regard to the doings at Salem, and the involvement of the Putnam clan — in a drawer of the combination safe is a notebook titled, simply, Salem. I've leafed through it, and there are copious notes written in a rather cramped calligraphy, which is hard to make out.

         I have tried to call Cara again — still no answer. There are no swifts in the chimney, but the noises continue.

         This morning Catch returned. When I awoke, he was lying on my chest, staring at me. When I got out of bed I stepped on a mouse he had caught and brought in.

         I sense a deterioration in The Book of the Black Heart.

Saturday, 19th. It was a mild morning with some high clouds, but a good deal of sun. I happened to be in the kitchen when Cara drove into the dooryard between the elms. She blew her horn twice and got out. I met her at the door.

         "Hello, Charles," she said. She stood on the doorstep dressed in a Iight jacket-sweater and s miniskirt. She hadn't grown older in the two years since she'd left campus, only more mature. I'd forgotten the depth of her gray eyes, and how dark her hair was. She wore it long. It was like a graceful, old-fashioned frame on an oval picture. She wore no make-up, nor needed any.

         `She smiled. "You don't look so groovy yourself," she said. "When are you going, to ask me in?"

         I swung open the screen door and held it for her. "You shouldn't have come. I tried to call you."

         When she was inside she turned and faced me, still smiling. "That's why I wasn't home. But I got the right message, whether you know it or not, Charles. It'll take a little time for you to dig it." Her smile faded into a fraudulent pout. "What a hell. of a way to greet a girl. You haven't even said hello yet. It's been two years, but we're still friends, aren't we?"

         She stepped up to me and kissed me. I had been forgetting. When she was through, she pushed away. "That's enough for now." She touched her hair end smoothened her sweater, then she laughed and bent down.

         "Who's this great, silky black thing?" She had Catch the cat in her arms, purring. He had been rubbing against our ankles as we stood. "You're not still Calling him Catch, are you?" I nodded. "What an awful name. Can't we think of something else?" She petted him in long, voluptuous strokes as he settled in the crook of her arm against her bosom.

         "I meant it when I said you shouldn't have come, Cara. I'm trying to write and get my head together." She ignored me.

         "How about showing me the house?"

         She went through the dining room and into the living room where I had a small. fire going. Cara put Catch down, and he went over to lie near the hearth.

         "It's a lovely place, Charles, but it's a mess." We sat down in armchairs, and she looked straight at me. "I'm staying," she said.

         We were quiet for a while. Then I asked what about her grad work? She shrugged.

         "I finished my master's in June." Her hand moved slowly up and down the arm of the Morris chair as she spoke. "I've been working since, and I have some money...." She leaned forward. "Don't worry about that, Charles. I won't be a burden — not that kind, anyway. I'm taking a year off to think. I'm not sure I want a doctorate in horticulture — or anything else." She

sighed and settled back. "I think I want you, Charles. When I heard you had left Norine, I decided to come and find out about us. We never really had a chance, you know." Her eyes were nearly closed.

         I thought of asking her how she'd found out about my leaving, but we had many mutual friends. It didn't matter. It didn't occur to me until much later to inquire how she had found out about the farm, and by that time she was asleep. It was late.

         Finally I said, "I'm glad you've come." She got up, came over, and leaned to kiss me. Then she straightened, took my hand, and tugged. I got up;

         We went upstairs. I showed her the hall library, the small bedroom, my bedroom, and the one across from mine, just above the parlor.

         "It's very nice," she said, looking around. There was a tall standing mirror in one corner, and we stood looking at each other in it. I began to fall through the glass into her eyes.

         It happened very slowly. She unbuttoned her sweater; she wore nothing underneath. I. watched my fingers move to undo her skirt, which fell in the mirror. My hands rose to her breasts, and I squeezed the nipples gently.

         Cara bent a little to get rid of her lingerie, and I could feel her buttocks pressing against me.

         When she rose, she turned and began to work at my clothes. Her breath came in warm bursts, but I felt like a statue. She pulled me to the bed and made love to me, her hands stroking me. I tried to respond.

         I gave up at last and lay back against the pillow. Cara sat beside me, moving her hand in long strokes down from my chest, over my stomach, to the broken fount. There was an amused, brooding look in her eyes as she followed the movements of her hand, which stopped at last near my penis. "So this is whet Norine has done to you, Charles." She bent down and brushed the nipple of her left breast along my lips. "You're charged with guilt, Charles. I think I can help you, but it may take some time. Do I sleep with you in your room?"

         I shook my head.

         "Then I'll stay here."

         She took my penis between two fingers. "Poor little worm," she said, and bent down to kiss it. I felt her tongue at the core, touching end exploring, but I could do nothing. "Poor little worm," she said again. "It's empty." And she let it fall.

         We dressed, I brought in her things. While she was settling in, I went to the library to find what I could.

         Book I, Vol. I of A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery by W. Smellie, M. D., Edinburgh: C. Eliot, 1784, Chap. ii; "Of the external and internal Parts of Generation proper to women, Sect. 1, The external Parts and vagina." I read a description of the female sexual parts and was interested to read that,

         On each side of the Meatus Urinarius are two small. lacunae or openings, the tubes of which, ending in a kind of sacculus, come from the prostrate gland:" — that's what the book says, the prostrate gland. Very

fitting (no Pun intended) — the male has a prostate, and the woman has a prostrate gland. I also read that "The upper end of the Vagina is joined to the circumference of the lips-of the Os Uteri, Which resemble the mouth of a puppy, or tench; and a thin expansion of this membrane, being reflected inwards, covers the exterior of these lips, which in virgins are smooth and of an oval form.

         Before going on, I looked up the word tench in Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, in miniature, to which are added, An Alphabetical Account of the Heathen Deities, and a Copious Chronological Table of remarkable Events, Discoveries, and Inventions, by the Rev. Joseph Hamilton, M. A., Third American Edition, Boston: West & Blake, 1810:

         "Tench, s. a river or pond fish."

-

         I continue to derive great satisfaction from these old books. It's late; Cara is asleep; Catch is telling me to come to bed.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Five

Tuesday, 15^th. A gray, dreary day, The dooryard is mud — I'll have to have a load of gravel trucked in. The rain has been falling slowly all day. The house is chilly. I can't build a fire in one of the fireplaces because of the swifts. How can they still be nesting so far into September? The heating system: works, but the fuel is low. I can't call the oil company unless I walk to the gas station in all this sog. I forgot to phone this morning when I went to the post office.

         There was no mail, so I have read another of Wesley Court's letters to Charles Putnam:

                                                               "Lowell Dec. 18, 1859

"Charles

         "The top of the morning to you

         "I trust you will excuse me for not answering your kind letter before, when you here my excuse. It is not a very good one, but however, good or bad I must tell you. I was too lazy

         "What do you think of that charles."

         Personally, I think it's pretty good.

         "How do you get along with your temperance meetings does the Carney girls attend, give my respects to them, tell them I am just as bad as ever. I should like to see them very much. Charles I should like to come back to Frankfort once more & you & I take a ride over on the neck. How is Laura Eastman, do you ever see her. I suppose she is thinking about her lover, Johnson Call, half of her time, good on her head" — I'm sure that's what it says.

         "Does Henry go up on that heigh hill yet. I should think the snow would drift so bad that he could not get along ——

         "Charles it rains very fast here today. I think it will take all the snow off, but it will make good skateing, for the girls. I: should like to go skateing with them Charles, but it is no use I have to stay in the store all the time. Nine long months to come before I shall have any time to play. I have been here three months the 17th day of this month.

         "The time has passed away quick for the last three months, but to look ahead nine months is as long as from here to Pawtuckit Falls.

         "Charles I don't know what to write I can't think of anything new, except Mrs. Going has got two babys, they are both boys. Her husband keeps the American house, so when you come to Lowell call & see them, & me too.

         "I have nothing more to write give my love to the folks & the Carney girls especially

         "So good by"

         No signature — the letter fades away into blue paper, but a trade card is enclosed, the edges turned to sepia.

         I shouldn't have read the letter, I shall never get to Lowell. It occurs to me for the first time to ask myself what I am doing here.

         And I shouldn't have read more of the old books today, though the first I opened — Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles And made easy to those who have not studied Mathematics. To which are added, A Plain Method of finding the Distances of All the Planets from the Sun, by the Transit of Venus — (the transit of Venus)— over the Sun's Disc, in the Year 1761. An Account of Mr. Horrox's Observation of the Transit of Venus in the Year 1761. By James Ferguson, F. R. S.

'Heb. xi.3. The worlds were formed by the Word of God

"Job xxvi.7. He hangeth the Earth upon nothing.

"———— 13. By his Spirit he hath garnished the Heavens.

         "The TENTH EDITION, with some additional notes," London: J. Johnson et al., 1799 — astonished my mind and made me glad a moment, for it gave a cosmic, concrete view of the universe — there was a time when science was suffused with humanism — and spoke of infinite goodness."

         Infinite goodness...and the velocities of Iight and cannon-balls. My students would perhaps find this elder book "relevant" in some remote way. I wonder what they would think if they were to put aside their paperback copies of The New Revolutionaries and read in this musty antique,

         Instead then of one Sun And one World only in the Universe, as the unskilful in Astronomy imagine, that Science discovers to us such an inconceivable number of Suns, Systems, and Worlds, dispersed through the boundless Space, that if our Sun, with all the Planets, Moons, end Comets belonging to it, were annihilated, they would be no more missed, by an eye that could take in the whole Creation, than a grain of sand from the seashore.

         In my own ignorance and trapped selfulness, I marvel at man's capacity for grandeur yesterday, and the day before:

         Since the Fixed Stars are prodigious spheres of fire, like our Sun, and at inconceivable distances from one another, as well as from us, it is reasonable to conclude they are made for the same purposes that the Sun is; each to bestow light, heat, and vegetation on a certain number of inhabited Planets, kept by gravitation within the sphere of its activity.

         The new, "camp" science-fictionists my students read are treading an ancient orbit.

         What an august, what an amazing conception, if human imagination can conceive it, does this give of the works of the Creator! Thousands of thousands of Suns, multiplied without end, and ranged all around us, at immense distances from each other, attended by ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, all In rapid motion, yet calm regular, and harmonious, invariably keeping the paths prescribed them; and these worlds peopled with myriads of intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity!

         I should not have opened Richard Gilpin's Daemonologie Sacra: or, a treatise of Satan's Temptations, an 18OO Edinburgh edition of his seventeenth century work — there are other views of the Creator's majesty, and other uses for man's mind:

         I shall add, in the fifth place, some particular instances of" Satan's "power in which I shall insist upon these four Witchcraft, wonders, apparitions and possessions.

         Witchcraft, affords a very great discovery of [Satan's] power: but because some give such interpretations of witchcraft as if true, would wholly take away the force of this instance, I shall first endeavor to establish a true notion of witchcraft, and secondly, from thence argue Satan's power.

         Gilpin first disputes, in the classic medieval, casuistic rationalization, hose words in the Bible that some translate "poisoner" or "poison" rather than "witch" or "Witchcraft."

         Pure sophistry end ignorance, Gilpin replies to such critics. "Though it cannot be denied" that there have been cheats, yet "to conclude, that all

these things that have been done under the name of witchcraft" were fraudulent, "must be an unsufferable piece of insolence; not only denying that credit which all sober men owe to history, to the constant belief of all ages, to the faithfulness and to the wisdom of judges, jurors, witnesses, and sanctions, but also dangerously overthrow all our senses; so that at this rate we may well question, whether we really eat, drink, move, sleep, and anything else that we do."

         Secondly, it cannot be imagined that such things are merely delusory, where the voluntary confessions of so many have accused themselves and others, not of thinking or juggling, but of really acting, and doing such things; with such circumstances as have particularized time, place, thing, and manner.

         And the ten-thousand times ten-thousand worlds, all in harmonious motion, keep their prescribed paths; their myriads of intelligent beings progress infinitely toward perfection and felicity, while across the million moons the witches course on their way to Sabbat. Though the astronomers are blind and see clouds instead of brooms; infinite fires pricking out of darkness, not a doom of fire in the abyss beneath the Creator's outstretched hand, there are others who see more clearly what the universe is made of. Others have the eye that takes in all Creation at a glance, and finds the macrocosm in the microcosm: an old Woman's heart flaming at the stake.

Wednesday, 16th.

HE BOOK OF THE BLACK HEART

Chapter Two The Tower

Upon his return to the parlor of Madame Sosostris Nothus saw another scene in which Nothus was older. He sat upon his bed in the crystal ball watching the sign across the street say PIZZA in red neon every second or so. It was hot in the tiny room of the parsonage which had been built to scale for people four feet high, and the warm shadows curled out of the corners, nearly obscuring the old glass-paneled bookcase which his childhood had transformed into a museum of cocoons and crawdad shells. Seahorses rode cotton breakers, the houses of mollusks billowed in shadow.

The jukebox in Gallo's Pizzeria was loud. Nothus sat letting the songs sink into his ears, believing, perhaps, they burrowed into his heart — "Goodnight, Irene," "Kisses Sweeter than Wine," "Truly Fair." Last month Nothus had turned eighteen. His class had graduated this month with all the townish circumstance appropriate to the occasion. He had tramped up the aisle, his knees ringing marches like twin clappers against the maroon bell of his gown, between the proudly flowered bosoms of matrons and the big-V fronts of double-breasted dads. At the door solemnly which led into the corridor Nothus had raised his eyes, flicked a toothy stage smile at a cotillion of mentors. When they had unblinked, he was solemn again and past them into a flurry of hands and noises.

No. It was a blue summer for other reasons. The crowd would be around. They'd be going to colleges in and around Connecticut in the fall, and that would break things to pieces, but the breaking would be slow. They would hardly realize.

Nothus got up off the bed and went over to kneel at the low sill, his chin on his knuckles. A couple of years earlier he had helped put Gallo's together. One of the owners had been a recent immigrant from Italy; the other, his brother, had been around a while longer: Salvatore and Ernesto Gallo. Ernesto, the elder, was droll and always talking. Sal was as fisheyed as he was thin. He was of course manager of the place which he and the neighborhood small fry had tacked together out of an abandoned store, some beaverboard, and some old restaurant equipment he'd gotten hold of at a bankruptcy sale. The thing Nothus remembered best was that Sal had not treated his small crew to a pizza on opening day or thereafter.

The evening was heavy with heat, but as Nothus stared out of the window a crisp breeze came walking down the row of thick elms that stopped abruptly at the corner where the Italian neighborhood started. The breeze seemed like a breath of September. It was cool.

It cleared his nostrils and smelled fresh. It darkened his blues. Fall was always a melancholy season, he thought, but fall in June was nearly unbearable. He rose to go downstairs.

His father, the preacher, like some scuttler of the deep, had retreated from the family eye into the sunporch behind some bookcases he'd arranged in such a way as to cut himself a slice of space for his study. Nothus, standing in the double door, watched for a moment the liquid movement of the angels among the valisneria plants in the aquariums, which took up the rest of the wall space in the porch.

His younger brother was out playing somewhere with the neighbor kids. His cries swam in the window: "Allee allee infree!" His mother was in the kitchen. He walked past her, out the screen door, letting it slam behind him on its spring.

"Where are you going? It's late to be going out, isn't it?"

Nothus looked at her through the dusty mesh — she was perspiring and dabbing her face with a soggy handkerchief. She was sitting at the table. A plate of what had been ice-cream was at her elbow. She faced away from it toward Nothus. Her hair was still solid brown, though she'd been married late, and she looked as oaken as the trees her father had felled to build the Wisconsin farmstead which, once sown, had sprung to seed at once.

"I'll be back in a while. It's hot. It ought to be nice driving." Nothus started down the back steps. "Want to come?"

She shook her head. Nothus left her and the clock humming above the range to revolve the summer slowly in silence. He went out to the smashed pear tree dying beside the house. His '40 Chevy jalopy was parked under its wickety limbs, and he got in, started it. He backed out of the drive.

Soon he was clattering along the roads at the western edge of town. The furtive moon rearrived and shone through the windshield; the clouds lifted and there were stars. The hills around town pulled him in and he drove up through Hubbard Park to Castle Craig, a tower some rich man had built on East Peak, the little crop of rocks no large state would dare to call mountains. Castle Craig belonged to the town now, and Nothus mounted its black throat to come out again into the night. He looked down on the place where he'd grown up.

In the cool night the breeze was edgy and surreptitious among the leaves of the woods below. Nothus stood and watched the lights out there, downward past the reservoir. And as he looked, seeing the ripples of darkness glimmer and fade in Mirror Lake reservoir, and in the streets and yards of Meriden, it seemed as though his blues had been dipped into the basin of carnal knowledge and come out pure. He knew, for this brief space of clear time, the difference between sadness and guilt, between self-pity and scorn.

It was nearly time for him to leave, not merely the tower, but his boyhood, his town — everything he had known, and to go to find manhood in a world unknown and disorienting. Nothus, his eyes turning like planets scanning an orbit of emptiness, sensed something. He stepped backward from the parapet. Under his feet the stone was yielding. The tower breathed a vapor of perfume and stars.

He stumbled backward, stepped into the cavity of stairs to descend. The iron landings rang like ribs, and the rail under his fingers was viscous — it bent and wound. The wind ushered upward past him in his descent as though it were the breath of desire.

The doorway at last! Musk surrounded him — the tower was a woman, robust and beautiful, standing on the mountainside, her hair floating over the precipice, her great breasts pendant and her arms extended toward him. Her eyes were wells singing at him of promise.

Unwilling, he returned, slowly, and the trees, like a wall of eunuchs, shielded them as he entered her there, as he took her, plunging into her upon the hill, over the town that rolled beneath them in the huge movement of their love until, spent, his lust consumed, himself squandered, he lay with eyes closed in the roots of wild laurel and slowly, squinting painfully upward into the night, wide-eyed at last in the darkness, he recognized the phallus of the tower blooming towards the sky.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Four

         Wesley, it seems, was something of a personality. He wrote on lined blue paper for the most part, in an elegant hand. The first letter is dated,

                                                                        "Lowell, Oct. 2d 1859

"Dear Charles,

         "I now take the pleasure of writing you a short note. I went to meeting this morning & after diner I went to take a walk up to the falls. It is quite a pleasent seenry, every thing is so new to me. There is a great meny people going & coming from the falls, but they are all strangers to me. Last Sunday I saw James Pushard the one we used to call little Jim, he works in the carpet factory I see him most every day, he buys his tobacco to the store of Buttrick & Co. Grocery business is some different from painting, I get along very well considering it is new to me, I think I shall like very much after I get broken in. We do grant deal of business & it keeps us all at work so I don't have much time to go about. I am going up to Mrs. Erskings after tea to see Miss C. Cooper I suppose you know her if you don't Henry does. I went home with her last Sunday night & now I am going up there so she can come home with me thats no more than right is it, I should like to see the folks in Frankfort & one in particular, I suppose you know who that is. Has Mr. Bridge got his house painted yet let me know when you write I suppose he does not like it very much. Well Charles if ever you come to Lowell come & see me our house is on Tyler St. the store is on Market St. No. 20 givus a call,

         "It is geting late & I must go up & see Miss Cooper

         "Give my love to all the folks

                           "Write soon

                                    "Yours truly

                                             "Wes the Painter"

         Monday, 14th It's a chilly, dreary morning. A while ago I walked to the post office, which is on the Gardiner road down the hill, across the culvert, and a few houses over, Turn right on the Gardiner road, pass a gas station, a church, and the village green, walk over the bridge that crosses over our river. The post office is the first house on the left, painted red. There's no RFD here, and all town residents must pick up their mail.

The postmistress, Mrs. Goodspeed, said, "Good mawnin'," and she'd been expecting me. There was a letter from Norine:

                                                                        "September 12

"Dear Charles,

         "We are fine here and hope you are too. Our friends have been kind at the College, and I have a job in the library. Don't worry about money.

         "Drop us a note to let us know you've arrived safely. Melany sends her love, She doesn't understand. I'm not sure I do, either. Do you, Charles?

                                             "Norine."

         I bought a card at the window and sent it off. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before.

         One more thing to feel guilty over.

         Ever since Cara, things had been going downhill, and Cara was no one's fault but my own. It was either my fault or bewitchment. Or age. I'd rather not consider the latter too deeply — I'm still young enough: thirty-six isn't ancient. But I was less and less use in Norine's bed after Cara and I had broken off. Disease? Nerves? Probably the latter. But Norine had been growing colder over the years as well.

         Certainly, nerves were part of it last year. From the beginning of the fall semester I had been growing more and more bitter with my students, almost none of them were in class to learn. I couldn't come to grips with the new romanticism and deliberate turning; away from the life of the mind that this generation has taken to heart. I saw everything through lenses that magnified the dark side of human nature — a side these kids were denying. In their denial I saw great danger, for I believe man is not basically good — nor basically bad — he is both. He is of two minds: the bestial, unthinking mind left over from the mud from which we've risen, and the specifically human, thinking but unfeeling, rational intellect.

         If one abjures the latter, he gives himself over to shadow. If he does not consciously attempt to be human, he runs the danger of being animal.

         All these notions my students derided. Man's animal nature was at least, in their opinion (if and when they could articulate their feelings), better than his brain, which had brought us more and more deadly technologies, fewer and fewer livable environments. It was time to try to believe in goodness; feeling is good, thinking is bad.

         In January the doctors found evidence of ulcers. My affliction, in specific terms, was excess acid; in literary terms, an excess of Black Bile and deadly humours; in theological terms, a frustration of missionary zeal.

         I come by these things honestly, as my father had the zeal, my mother the bile and humours, and their combination produced a writer in an Aristotelian mold. I detest mysticism, even though my preacher father was a truly good man, a la the Platonic conception. My students, had they known him, could have pointed to him and said, "See, it's possible."

         But my mother was possible too. I had, over the years, watched her mind deteriorate as my father's grew stronger. It was as though his spirit and zeal had fed on hers and grown great as hers had grown weaker, and the strain of darkness in her clan flourished like nightshade till only bitterness remained; bitterness and a fear of death and loneliness, while my father looked forward to the end with his mortal eyes becoming blinder physically, but increasing proportionately in religious clarity of vision.

         I saw something unwittingly vicious in this single-minded, zealous mission of my father's. He knew the truth, because he had seen the truth, and he was saved. Those who could not see the truth, like my mother, were lost, though he never said so in. so many words.

         So there I stood in the classroom, surrounded by the saved, doomed because I could not see; destroyed because no monolith of Salvation inhabited my soul, but only an ambiguous duality, a combination of light end dark: Ouroboros, the worm that bites its tail and devours itself; the One made of All: birth and death, love and hate, microcosm end macrocosm, matter and spirit. I could not deny half of it. But which half would win in me?

         Then, in the Spring, I sat before the television set and watched as the President sent us deeper into war; as flames engulfed the Black ghettos; as the National Guard shot some students, including girls strolling on a campus lawn.

         As I watched the father of one of the girls speaking in rational bitterness to America, I raged, for I had a daughter too, and she might someday lie beneath a nationalist muzzle if this war went on another rational, honorable, technological ten years. I raged, and I joined the May Strike, standing on the steps of the Humanities Building with a picket sign, trying to persuade my colleagues and the more cautious students to join us in the rain, arguing in hastily-called faculty meetings, turning our classes into workshops, arranging Poets for Peace readings on the mall in front of the library.

         For a while all. went well. The strike was successful on our campus, despite some sporadic violence and deadly editorials in the local papers.

         Then, the students copped out! These believers in Good left the school in droves once they got their early marks, while I sat in class with one or two people and talked about ideality.

         I remember an evening class to which none came but one of my extension students, an old shop teacher working on an M. Ed. who needed some English credits. I listened as he told a story.

         The kids are always talking about morality, he said. But I don't understand what they mean. They've blown the lid off colleges all around the country because these youngsters got shot at a Midwest university, and I can understand that in a way. But they would laugh at me if I told them I'd just come from the funeral of an old friend and neighbor of mine, who was also shot. I feel his death was more tragic than the deaths of those girls, yet there were no headlines, only an obituary notice in the town paper, and a second-page story.

         My friend, when he was ,younger, had been a geek — you know, a carny man. Hs stood in a sideshow and ate live chickens. Don't laugh. That's what he did for a living, and few livings were easy in the thirties. He did what he had to do to support a family. When he could, he quit.

         Last week he was in a bar, and there was a woman there whom he didn't know, but she was being bullied by another man at the bar, who called her a foul name.

         My friend got up and went over to this man. He said, "that's no way to talk to a lady." The other fellow said, "She's no lady. And stay the fuck out of my hair.'

         The geek took him and pulled him off his barstool, shoved him through the door. "Let's go outside a minute," he said.

         Instead, the other man pulled a gun and shot my friend dead on the spot, then ran out.

         I've .just come from his funeral, and he died for honor, nut no one cares, He was a brave man, and a good father, but none of these kids could care less.

         I said nothing, because I stood halfway between the old man and my students. In my mind I could see that tarnished honor in his mind, and the shining new one in the minds of my pupils, an honor that meant as little to most of them as the geek's meant to the righteous townsfolk who read the story in the newspaper. I could see a cosmic smirk spreading across the face of America at the geek's outmoded honor, and the smirk was of all generations,          'What the significance of this story is, I don't know, nor do I know why I include it here. except that, perhaps, it was the beginning of the end of my marriage. I became less of a man, less of a husband and father, if that were possible. I don't know where I am going, any more than Nothus does, but I have to write it all down. I see nothing up ahead, and when I look inward I see nothing but guilt for the many things: for loss of mission, for the mission itself; for my actions and inactions; for my inability to cope with love and honor and thought any longer, after so many years of surety.

         I sit here, listening to the old books, writing a new one. They are all full of darkness, the shadow of one canceling out the light of another: Ouroboros spinning and, as he spins, devouring himself.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Two

PART TWO

Thursday, 10th. This evening the wind is high. It is turning the weather — two shifts in a day. The morning was bright, and I spent it exploring these two hundred acres of the Putnam farm. The afternoon turned to thunder showers and, between, clammy mists. I shopped for food, and used the rest of the late afternoon looking through the books upstairs. I shall have to build some good shelves and sort things out. Now summer is blowing away in scuds across; the moon.

         The farm is various. In the river-yard, to the right, is a raspberry patch; to the left, a patch of blackberry bushes. There are a few apple trees as well, but most of the land is clear of everything but high grass and milkweed.

         Steep banks go down to the river, which is tidal, and trees run along the top edges — several kinds: oaks, pines, and cedars. The tides have undercut two cedars, about fifty yards apart, and they are growing almost straight out from the bank, over the water. One can climb out on them and sit. I've found an old, heavy plank boat lying in a corner of the barn, and next summer I'll put it in shape, launch it, and tie it up at the biggest cedar, which will be my pier.

         The river makes an S-curve not far to the northwest of the house and barn. Uncle John's land extends quite a way beyond the curve. Most of it is woods, but back of the barn are fields that once were pasture.

         On the other, eastern, side of the house is the road, and the town cemetery where Uncle John lies is up the road, not far from the dooryard — one can see the headstones up a dirt path off the main road at the first curve; the road makes an S in reverse, so that it and the river, if seen from the air, must form a wishbone, with the farm in the stem.

         There are a good many Putnams in the cemetery, some of the stones dating — when one can make them out — well back into the 18th century. My mother once told me a branch of the family immigrated here after the great shame of Salem, where the original Putnams settled, and where some of his progeny pointed out the road their neighbors were to take to Hell. I don't believe she ever talked of that again. It's not something much spoken of in my mother's family.

         Across the road from the dooryard is the millstream at the bottom of a deep gully filled with alders. Up the stream a way is a falls, where the foundations of a shingle mill can still be made out among brambles and roots. The stream drops down off Blind Man's hill from the bogs five miles distant. Where the road once followed the river, it now follows the brook. The falls are small, but beautiful, hidden away, as they are, from passing traffic by woods. Uncle John's property stops at the falls.

         The stream crosses under the road, through a large culvert, below the house, not far from the village, such as it is. Where the stream emerges from the culvert, on my property, are the shambles of a grist mill: three huge round grinding stones and the fallen rock foundation.

         If one stands in the kitchen door and looks across the gully, one is faced with a domed hill, also mine, covered with maples, pines, and oaks.

The old well is up there, still partly filled with water — it used to be full, and it fed the house by gravity till the new spring was dug down by the river's first bend.

         They say an Indian fort stood on the bluff in the riveryard overlooking the confluence of the millstream and river, commanding the prospect downriver toward the Kennebec, which is fed by our smaller waters. This was Abenaki country.

         I've browsed in the books a bit. There are about two-hundred volumes dating from the late seventeenth century to the Civil war. Someone last century had an excellent collection — geographies, histories, religious books, volumes on astronomy and other sciences — Bowditch's Navigator is one; books on law — mostly the laws of Massachusetts, of which Maine was originally a part; literature, husbandry. Truly remarkable.

         One of the books, by "Mr. Salmon" and published in Edinburgh in 1771 is called A New Geographical and Historical Grammar. I looked up "New England" in the chapter on British America. I found the old Esses that look like effs confusing at first. The article mentioned prominently the trade of shipbuilding, and there was, in fact, a shipyard on this land, at the mouth of the stream, on the other side where the flat land starts. A 19th century print on the wall of the parlor shows a schooner being built there. As I read on I came to a passage that mentioned "the Dutch and Hamburghers" — the word brought me back with a jolt, It all sounds so impossible, and yet so likely. I must begin to think about my own book. It is midnight. I miss Norine and Melanie. The capital H and the small h must be exorcised.

Friday, 11th. It has been clear, bright, and crisp today. Here and there, on the old-well hill across the road, the upper limbs of maples are turning to autumn flame.

         In the barn is a stack of lumber, salvaged from the demolition of an outbuilding or two, I imagine. This morning I went out, picked some good boards, and spent the rest of the morning into early afternoon building shelves upstairs. I've always liked working with my hands when I want to mull something else. This is a very different life from the one I've led for ten years…classes, exams, student problems, faculty meetings and committee work, and, lately, all the unrest and violence. There's not even a television set in the house — which reminds me that I haven't read a paper lately. I don't know what's been going on out there these past few days.

         If I had known what ease there is in merely turning off, I might have tried it long ago, The world seems irrelevant — as my students would say — here in this place.

         And I wonder whether that will be good or bad for my novel. I know who the protagonist is — Nothus, myself. It will be set in the years when I was a younger man, just out of high school, and a sailor. The days of the Cold war and the beginnings of all the unending complications of this frenetic, fanatical, space-age, super-everything "civilization."

         Nothus will be found, at the beginning of things, in the middle of everything, searching for himself in others.

         As I envision it, the novel will really be a prose epic. There will be the traditional voyage — in this case, a real one: the world-cruise of the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Hornet, aboard which I served for two years, following the track of the New England whalers. But as he moves through the world, Nothus will meet people who tell their stories — Chaucer won't mind. There have been Other pilgrimages.

         Looking back over what I've just written, I wonder if my having been a professor of English hasn't destroyed me. It all sounds so artificially literary. But I've felt the novel in me, like a fetus, and, if I don't know where I'm going with Nothus, I must at least find out if there's someplace to go. So I'll begin it tomorrow, and I'll use the weekend for writing.

         Norine, I think, believed at last that I'd never write it. But Cara knew better, even after we had stopped our affair. She hadn't just been putting me on, or putting me on a pedestal, God knows I'd written enough else in those ten years — poems, articles, textbooks, a few stories. The royalties and Uncle John's bequest will keep me, barely I guess, till the book is done.

         I even have a title: The Book of the Black Heart. Perhaps

I'll dedicate it to Catch.

         The shelves are finished, and I've put the books up. I've browsed a bit more. In one volume, Dr. Chase's Recipes or, Information for Everybody — the 10th edition, published in Ann Arbor in 1866, there's a tremendous recipe for "Tomato Wine," which Cara would love, and an even better, comment on the product:

         It makes a most delightful wine, having all the beauties of flavor belonging to the tomato, and I have no doubt all its medicinal properties also, either as a tonic in disease, or as a beverage for those who are in the habit of using intoxicating beverages, and if such persons would have the good sense to make some wine of this kind, and use it instead of rotgut whisky, there would not be one-hundredth part of the 'snakes in the boot' that now curse our land.

         "Dr." Chase, it appears, used to be a merchant with a sweet-tooth:

         I have destroyed my own teeth, I have no doubt now, by constantly eating candies, while in the grocery business, before I knew of its injurious effects; and I believe it to have destroyed the first teeth of all my children which were born during my candy-eating propensities. What say our candy-eating gentry to the above?

         He was a self-made physician, I take it —

         Many persons will stick up their noses at these "Old grandmother prescriptions," but I tell many "upstart Physicians" that our grandmothers are carrying more information out of this world by their deaths, than will ever be possessed by this class of "sniffers," and I really thank God, so do thousands of others, that He has enabled me, in this work, to reclaim such an amount of it for the benefit of the world.

         A very good sense of ego.

         To bed — Catch is waiting for me. I can feel him sitting on the floor behind my chair. Tomorrow I begin my work. I will lay my carbons into this journal so that someday I'll be able to see how it all was, as a single entity of time.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part One

THE JOURNAL OF CHARLES ALLY, Part 1

Friday, September 4^th, 1970. Norine has told me to leave or be left. I will leave. It is a strange time for her to have found out about Cara, two years after the fact, just as we were to settle in for the semester. The students are just beginning — to arrive — those who will live off campus, Perhaps it's their arrival as much as anything that's stirred Norine so — The young things coming on another year, an endless supply, though she's still as good-looking as any of them except, perhaps, for the thin look about her lips, and the coldness of her eyes.

         I had asked Norine only a week ago, during one of the squabbles we've been having so frequently lately, whether she'd mind if I took a mistress. She said, "Yes, I'd be humiliated — more so than usual," and now, to discover Cara, who is no longer a student here, but to see the image of Cara everywhere....

         I'll leave everything. I'll regret leaving Norine and Melany, but nothing else — not the job, which gave me a bad stomach last year during all the turmoil on campus; not this poky town or our few friends. Not even our possessions. I've wondered for years whether I couldn't make a living on my writing alone, and I'll find out. Perhaps, at least, I can get to the novel that's been building in my brain and temper. It's been the novel, anyway, that's been wearing my nerves thin lately, and the silver on our wedding plate.

         I will leave it all, as partial compensation, and go live on the farm in Frankfort. Since Uncle John's death last spring it's been standing empty by the river, and I might as well use it. I've never spent a fall in Maine, in the town of my maternal ancestors, and I've always imagined how it might be with the leaves lying in the fields, along the road.

         Now we'll see; and, as this is another life, I well record it here, in this journal, from the seminal moment, as I will try to get down that other life in my novel

Wednesday, 9th. It was simple. I bought an old car, packed a few clothes, and put Catch, my cat, into his traveling cage. Before we left, though, there was a picnic in the college park beside the lake with a few friends and their families. It was the most beautiful Labor Day afternoon I can remember, no other faculty but the five couples and our children all over the grass, I launched my boat and gave rides. No one said anything serious.

         Yesterday, before leaving I told my chairman, and I'm sorry he's left in the position of having to scratch for a replacement only a week before classes start. He was surprised and, at first, upset, but he understood the situation finally.

         I drove the ten hours from upstate New York to Frankfort in one stretch, and I'm now in Uncle John Putnam's old farmhouse, writing this at his rolltop desk. Tomorrow I'll have to do some shopping.

         The house is in good repair, but it seems to me it's been left essentially unchanged since last century. I understand there's a new water supply, though, and the house is electrified; there's a hot water heater standing in the kitchen-corner in the ell.

         I've looked the house over thoroughly, and the first thing Catch did was to bless our new home with a dead star-nosed mole. As soon as I let him out of his cage, he disappeared into the fields. When I had wandered about a bit and come back to the kitchen, there was Catch on the doorstep, staring at me out of his black head with those yellow eyes, the mole between his forepaws. Catch has always been mine, not Norine's, for it was Cara who gave him to me. She is a good deal like him.

         The house was built, according to family tradition and the lawyer's letter, in 1754, the second oldest house still standing in Frankfort, It was originally a hunting lodge: square, two stories tall. The ell was added about a hundred years later, and the interior of the house proper Victorianized.

         The cellar does not extend under the ell; it has a stone floor, and a stone foundation, In the house proper there are, downstairs, two sitting rooms — each with a fireplace — on either side of what was once the front door entranceway when the road followed the riverbank. Now, the "front" door looks out into a yard that falls down, between two large and beautiful blue spruces, toward the stream that flows into the river about 100 yards away.

         In the sitting-room on the river side of the house there is an old square grand piano. Off that room is a small bedroom, on the north side, and off that, to the east, is the small room where I am now sitting at Uncle John's desk. Beside me is his combination safe, which the lawyer has told me how to open. I've looked into it, and it's full of old deeds and ledgers dating back a hundred years and more.

         Behind me is the hall, and the stairway slanting west as it rises. There is another outside "middle" door at the foot of the stairs — the house is full of doors: on my right there's one leading to a screened porch that faces north, and, at the south end of the porch, still another opening onto the dining room.

         At the foot of the stairs to the left as one descends, is the door into the single story ell; dining room, kitchen, and shed, in that order. The toilet, with a shower stall, is really, a room in the shed, on the west side of which there is still the two-seater "outhouse." If one stands on the screened porch, the outhouse juts out of the ell and blocks a view of the barn.

         Upstairs there are three rooms; over each of the downstairs rooms is a large bedroom with fireplace. The arched brick structure in the basement that supports all this central masonry is massive.

         In the northeast corner upstairs is another, smaller, bedroom, facing the stairs. The upstairs hallway is large — in effect another room, It surrounds the stairs, and in the southwest corner there are bookcases and a table filled with old books. I want to look at them as soon as possible: some look very old.

         The house is clapboarded, painted white. The kitchen door looks out on the new road — on either side of the entrance to the drive is an immense, dying elm. The barn stands at right angles to the house, slightly north, facing the dooryard.

         I am tired. I don't know, yet, whether I miss Norine and Melany, but I'll sleep on it and get over this shock of strangeness. It's growing dark. The house is saying night things. Catch will sleep with me, at the foot of the bed, as usual. He is sitting behind me, telling me it's time to go to dream.

 

TO BE CONTINUED ON POETICS AND RUMINATIONS

The View from a Tower Window

 

 

I am standing in the window of the tower at an artist’s colony in upstate New York, and I am looking down at the fountain behind the mansion because I can think of nothing to write today. That’s why I’m here, I’m supposed to be writing.

The man is walking toward the fountain, and the sky is blue. He stops at the wall and looks at the sculpture of two nude nymphs and a satyr that lies against the woods under the mountain.

       In his pressed white jacket the man leaves the fountain, and the sky is still blue. The man stops beneath me on the lawn. He is waiting. The wall stops as well and surrounds the white sculpture of two nude nymphs and the satyr who lie beside the woods under the mountain. In the other rooms of the mansion people are writing things, and in the studios on the grounds artists are painting and sculptors are sculpting.

       No one is left to look at the fountain, and the sky is less blue. One nymph stands and yawns in the white sculpture of two nudes and a smiling satyr lying beside the woods under the mountain. The first nymph stretches her arms above the fountain, and now the sky is clouding. The other trails her fingers in the green hue of the pool where the nymphs and satyr lie beside the woods beneath the mountain.

       Above, I stand in the tower window watching. I should be sitting before my laptop tapping on the keys, listening to the patter of words falling onto the virtual page, but the mist of the water in the fountain is a curtain, and the sky is clouding.

       The man in the jacket returns to the sculpture where the two nude nymphs and the satyr lie still beside the woods beneath the mountain. The mist of the water is a curtain, and the sky is cloudy. Now a girl trails her fingers in the aquamarine of the pool where the nymphs and the satyr lie beside the woods by the still mountain, where the man stands looking at the sculpture and at the girl as I stand watching rather than writing in the tower window.