Poetics and Ruminations

Birthday of THE BOOK OF FORMS

Fifty (50) years ago, on 19 April 1968, I wrote in my journal, "The Book of Forms has arrived! It has the most incredible art nouveau cover." The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paperback original.

The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986 (www.UPNE.com),  ISBN 0874513804, cloth; 0874513812, paper.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible."

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

Companion volumes:

The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, Hanover: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com), 1999. ISBN 0874519543, cloth; ISBN 0-874519-55-1, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Forms. A Choice  “Outstanding academic title” for 2000.

The Book of Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry by Lewis Turco, Hanover: University Press of New England, (www.UPNE.com), 2004. ISBN 1-584653-61-2, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Forms and The Book of Literary Terms.

What's in a Name?

 

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

 

By Lewis Turco

 

 I. IL TURCO IN TRINACRIA

 

In August of 1961 I was a Poetry Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, which was directed then by the late John Ciardi. The Conference is held annually in the hills above Middlebury College, on its own summer campus where I was walking one day when I was approached by a woman named Elizabeth Guarnaccia. She introduced herself as one of the two curators at the Harry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury.

Ms. Guarnaccia asked if I were Lewis Turco, and when I replied that I was, she asked me if I knew the derivation of my last name. I said, “Yes, I do.”

“What is it,” she asked, smiling.

For as long as I can remember I have known that my last name in Italian means what it says: “Turk,” and that’s what my friends have always called me. It dates, I understand, from the period of Arab rule of “Trinacria,” the ancient name for Sicily, from the ninth to the tenth centuries CE. It is not an uncommon name in Sicily where my father was born and raised, and where he was recruited to be a participant in the Turco-Italian War, fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy from September 29, 1911, to October 18, 1912.

I didn’t go into that much detail with Ms. Guarnaccia, of course, but she nodded in agreement with what I had replied, said I was correct, and went on her way. Many years later I would discover a great deal more about my family name including the fact that there was no such country as “Turkey” until the thirteenth century; therefore, the word means simply “Arab” or “Moor,” not someone from a particular place. According to Halbert’s, a Turco family coat of arms can be found in Rietstap Armorial General,¹ and the shield is described as “Silver with a Turk, facing front, dressed in a blue tunic and red pantaloons; wearing a red turban on his head, holding in his right hand a silver scroll, and in his left hand a silver scimitar trimmed gold.” People with my background were members of the Syrian cavalry in classical times.

In the mid-nineteen-forties, when I was a fifth or sixth-grader living on North Third Street in Meriden, Connecticut, I was enthusiastic about prehistory, as I have been ever since.  One day I walked down to Ciotti's sundries store a couple of blocks away, on West Main Street, and I purchased a pamphlet about cavemen.  As usual, I walked back home with my nose buried in the booklet, and soon I was standing in front of the house where we rented a flat, showing it to Bob Strauss, my friend from across the street, who looked over my shoulder as I turned the pages.  Shortly we came across the drawing of a Neanderthal, the species of early man that disappeared after the advent of Cro-Magnon, the first version of our species, Homo Sapiens. The drawing was a reconstruction of what Neanderthal man must have looked like with his strong-featured face displaying its heavily-ridged brow, a bit like the brow-ridge I have myself and that I have observed on others.

As Bob and I stood before my two-storied home reading, we happened to glance at my upstairs neighbor, old Mr. Longo, who was leaning over the second-floor porch railing.  To say we were startled is to understate, for the picture in my book could have been a photograph of our neighbor.  Bob and I stood comparing the man with his likeness for several minutes. There was no doubt about it -- the man and the reconstruction were practically identical. From that moment I felt certain I knew what had happened to Neanderthal man: he had not been exterminated by Cro-Magnon, he had been absorbed into the general population of our ancestors. But who were the Cro-Magnon men and women?  What had happened to their contemporaries, the brutish-looking, yet intelligent race called Neanderthal man that in fact had brains that were slightly larger than ours? 

For decades paleoanthropologists and other sorts of scientists had been denying that our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, and the Neanderthals had ever interbred. In July of 1993 there was an essay in The New York Times Book Review² that discussed three new books on the subject: Did Cro-Magnon destroy Neanderthal, or did he die out naturally, cataclysmically, because of some inherent flaw in his constitution? Over the years I had grudgingly grown more and more persuaded that these unbelievers were correct and I was wrong. However, over this interval, human DNA was studied, isolated, and sequenced; finally, in the May 2010 issue of Science,³ Green et al. reported that a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals had been compared with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion paper by Burbano et al. described a method for sequencing target regions of Neanderthal DNA. A News Focus podcast segment and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neanderthal-related discoveries provided additional context for their findings. Neanderthal man had not entirely died out, for two to four percent of his genome continues to exist in European and Asian human beings, though not in those Africans who never left the continent.

Hence, it turns out that a sixth-grader living in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1946, judging from the picture projected from partial skeletons of a Neanderthal in a popular pamphlet and from the heavy ridge that boy himself had on his brow, turned out to be correct and the academic Homo-Sapiens living in the interim between then and 2010, turned out to be wrong.

This interbreeding did not, however, take place as I and others assumed, for the two races did not meet in Europe and simply combine. Rather, Neanderthal, who had left Africa first and spread into Europe, apparently was driven back into the Middle East by an ice age, and it was there that the two species interacted, living in the same caves at different times, perhaps, but in the same geographical locations simultaneously. This must have been the case because Neanderthal's genes in Homo Sapiens are found not only throughout Europe, but throughout Asia as well, where the Middle Eastern modern humans spread, but it is not found in African strains of our race, in peoples who never left the African continent in ancient times and thus never lived in the Middle East. 

II. THE MAN HUNTERS

Was there a historical Garden of Eden?  Were there two people named Adam and Eve?  Did Genesis take place?  Was there an actual Exodus?  Whether or not mankind is able to answer these questions with any degree of certainty or faith, we know logically that there had to be a first human being somewhere in the dim past; there had to be the First Mother (now called “genetic Eve”) and the First Father (“genetic Adam”) of the race, and they existed in an environment that was conducive to their survival…or two environments, rather, because they lived at different times and in different places, but it was their DNA (YDNA in the case of the male, and mitochondrial MTDNA in the case of the female) that survived and spread throughout the living species of Homo Sapiens.

I have remained interested in the subject of mankind's origins all my life since my friend Bob Strauss and I identified old Mr. Longo as a contemporary avatar of Neanderthal Man.  We know that the race of Mankind spread across the globe from some point of origin in Africa; therefore, we can invent stories, like the book of Genesis or the epic of Gilgamesh, to explain our beginnings, and in those stories, though they be fiction — "lies," if you like — there will be a core of fact, and they will be lies in the service of truth. 

Many things fascinate me, but the idea of evolution fascinates me to the point of awe. One of the reasons I could not become the minister my pastor father wanted me to become is that I could not believe in a Creator, no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t seem reasonable to me that a creature so great and complicated could have existed a priori and have invented the cosmos because all that does is beg the question, “Who (or What) created the Creator?” It is easier for me to believe that the cosmos forever existed, exists now, and will forever exist (I will not at this point consider the so-called Big Bang theory) than it is to postulate an omnipotent Creator. He would have had to create Himself. That, in fact, may be what the Cosmos is doing: evolving the Godhead, for with the aid of science we can at least experience through our senses elements of the cosmos.

If evolution is inventing a godlike creature, and if one of the avatars of that creature is mankind, then at some point in the history of that evolution one of the predecessors of mankind must have given birth to the first true human being. What would that have been like? One of the things I enjoy is reading scientific books, especially anthropological works: I consider that Loren Eiseley’s book The Firmament of Time is one of the great works of literature of the twentieth century, and another great writer of anthropology was Margaret Mead. Sometimes in my reading I come up against a passage that arrests my eyes and causes my mind to begin to spin a fable. Such a passage was this portion of a sentence by Mead: "...world of the first rose, and the first lark's song."

What must it have been like for the first truly human being at dawn one day to awaken from her sleep, to look out on the savannah, and to realize that she was conscious of herself and of her plight and glory? To know, beyond all doubt, that she knew?

 

DAWN SONG

I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —

it breaks across my mind as across the eyes

of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,

and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,

breaking across my terror and my surprise;

to know that I am the beast who knows his name:

Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun

of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see stone for a stone,

to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight

and know what it may do to the brittle bone

of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the sun,

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone

held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.

The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.

He is the child of dust.  I am stone's son,

born of the first rose and the first lark's song.

 

If anthropologists could be good, clear-thinking scientists who also knew how to write, how to communicate their thoughts to readers and strike awe into their minds, they could also, unfortunately, be romantics who, if one thought about what they said, convey to readers ideas that fall apart under scrutiny, like Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”

As a reader of science fiction when I was young — what is called “speculative fiction” these days, I guess, and of fantasy — “magical reality” now, I soon understood the difference between the two, between, let’s say, the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and the beautiful, impossible worlds of Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed the one for its projections of a possible reality, and the other for its imaginary evocations of primal hopes, joys, fears, and sorrows. Therefore, when I run across a scientist who confuses the two, as the anthropologist Robert Ardrey did in the passage I quote below, I feel constrained to comment on that confusion. How close have we come to populating the stars? So I once again put words into the mouth of a skull, as I did with “Dawn Song”:

 

THE MAN HUNTER

"But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.  And so what shall we wonder at?...The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.  We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses." — Robert Ardrey

When I saw, spinning webs of sense and dust,

the heart-shaped spider of the womb's demands,

I raised myself upright upon the crust

of earth and issued it my first commands:

"Give me what I may take before the glass

of time is empty as a brain's white bowl

where slugs drink, where the mosses gorge and green."

I walked out of the forest, across the grass —

it withered underneath my callous sole,

for I could not forget what I had seen.

I saw the scarab in the turning earth

spinning murders from its golden shell;

I saw the rooting beast probing death,

but death must root if it would hope to dwell.

Therefore, I walked the trench of lambs and ewes

with winter's humour snowing in my bones,

and in my web of veins the scratching, dumb

dry tongue of the beast feeding on my dews.

Then, when at last I lay down in these stones,

I knew that more of us would one day come.

And you have come to find yourself in me

here where I lie, a skull transformed to stone.

My sightless eyes look out at you and see

that under the eons we are still alone —

but we are billions now who were a few

to forsake the forest and face time with a rock,

a naked rock held in a naked hand.

We face the ages still, and we bestrew

this cairn of stars with the remnants of our stock:

a jawbone here and there wearing to sand.

 

Perhaps one day, many centuries from today, mankind will indeed get off the planet, a bit farther off it than Luna, and take with him the myths born of Earth. When I was young I thought that might begin to happen in my own lifetime.

 

FATHERS:

 

First Father

I see him standing on the empty plain

As dawn begins to break across his eyes.

He is alone, this first of all my fathers,

But he can sense his scions and his daughters

Following down the looming centuries,

For time has started weaving through his brain,

And he can think. He understands at last

What must become, and what’s become his past.

And here I stand upon this farthest link

Staring down the line of molecules

Twisted in a spiral arc. I gaze

The other way to where the whirling haze

Rises over dark and depthless pools

And wonder what the final man must think.

 

Fathers of the Tribe

 

His sons and grandsons travel with the tribe

As it drifts out of the immense savannah

Following the herds, but searching for

Something else as well. They must explore,

Apparently. For Eden? For Nirvana?

Their leaders are unable to describe

What they are seeking past these eastern sands,

Moving always northward to colder lands.

What have we found beyond those roaming droves

That led us into canyons made of glass?

Where do we go from here? How shall we feed

The starving myriads whose simplest need

No longer can be met on Earth? En masse

We need again a miracle of loaves.

 

The Final Father

 

And as they stop, wherever they may move,

Each scion takes his mate who bears his seed,

The generations of First Father’s loins.

Time spends these children like so many coins

Minted from the soil. The Earth has need

Of purses full of these. The parents rove

Into the mystery to make it known,

To turn the strangest climes into their own.

Now we are everywhere. The human race

Has filled the niches that the world provided.

What’s left is Easter Island duplicated

On a massive scale. We are checkmated

By ourselves; we are the tribe divided

Staring hopelessly to outer space.

 

III. THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT

In 2006 I participated in the National Geographic Human Genome Project⁴ and discovered that my blood confirms what my name asserts: I am paternally a Turk through and through! Males are traced genetically through the Y-DNA marker which is passed down unchanged from father to son over generations; women are traced through their mothers’ mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter, also unchanged. Of course every now and then, at great intervals, both Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA do take on characteristics that differentiate them from other evolutionary lines, and these mutated lines can be traced.

So far as can be discerned with the data currently at hand, it turns out that my father’s branch of the Turco family is part of a group of people about which little is known. My Y-chromosome results identify us as members of haplogroup G, “a lineage defined,” my National Geographic report stated, “by a genetic marker called M201” which had its origin some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y-chromosome marker called M168.

According to Spencer Wells⁵ there was a single male who lived perhaps 75,000-100,000 years ago whose mutated Y-chromosome is carried by every male currently alive. Although scientists call this person “Genetic Adam,” or “Eurasian Adam,” in fact he was not likely the first fully human male, but none of the other males alive at the time have passed down to posterity their particular genetic markers. Adam’s line is the only one to have survived and proliferated.

A descendant of Adam identified by a mutation called “M94” was an inhabitant of the East African savannahs 75,000 years ago, and it was he who was the progenitor of most modern males because he was the founder of all haplogroups from B through R (haplogroup A did not leave Africa in ancient times). A later mutation on this male line called “M168” 60,000 years in the past is believed to have lived in an area that includes what is now Ethiopia in Africa, and he is the founder of haplogroups C through R.

To the north of Africa, according to  Spencer Wells, an ice age was developing and drying up Africa’s ecology to the extent that at least two groups that were descended from M168 migrated from Africa. The first group left around 60,000 years ago, and they are believed to have gone east following the southern coast of Asia populating southeast Asia, Australia, southern China, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. A few appear to have been reunited with their by-then-distant kinsmen in North America about 10,000 years ago. A second wave of M168 emigrants from Africa traveled to the east and the north from the area of what is now the Sahara through Egypt and the Middle East.

A mutant marker on the M168 line called “M89” inhabited what became Mesopotamia or “Erech,” now Iraq, perhaps 45,000 years ago. As the founder of haplogroup F, this male was the ancestor of all the members of haplogroups G through R which include almost all Middle Eastern, European, Asian, and native American males. Several groups of M89 males traveled in various directions to a variety of places, but the founder of haplogroup G appears to have lived around 30,000 years ago in the area of the Indus Valley in what is now northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Up to around 10,000 years ago the members of haplogroups G through J were hunter-gatherers, but those people who lived in what is known now as the “Fertile Crescent” developed agriculture, and “settled civilization” became possible — not only possible, but established, and disseminated far and wide. Populations expanded, farming and farmers followed the pioneers along the shores and through the islands of the Mediterranean, into the lands now called Turkey, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Indo-European language and its offshoots were soon to be found in northern India — including the Indus Valley — the Middle East, and Europe.

The Indus Valley civilization was the largest of the four great early civilizations including Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, South Asia, and China, but it is the one that is least known and understood because, unlikely as it may seem, it was discovered only in the 1920’s! How it was possible for modern mankind to live unwittingly among the ruins of this Indus civilization in one of the most populous regions of the Earth is confounding, but so they did, and still do. Archaeological researches are in their infancy there, and very little is known of the early tongues of the Indus because few language-bearing artifacts, most of them square stone seals with indecipherable symbols and animal motifs, have been found. So far, for lack of a Rosetta Stone, none of those scripts can be read, but we can recognize the animals, in particular the mythical unicorn, the bull, the rhinoceros, and the elephant. However, some of the major Indus cities have been identified and explored to a certain degree.

The first, Harappa, discovered in the western part of South Asia during the early 19^th century, flourished from about 2600 to 1700 BCE. Its inhabitants built with bricks of the same size as were found in other Indus cities such as Mohenjo Daro and Dholavira.  Harappa had well laid-out wide streets, public and private water supplies and distribution-drainage systems. Remnants of this Indus civilization exist in the south from the former Bombay in India to the Himalayas and Afghanistan in the north, and in the east from beyond New Delhi in Uttar Pradesh to Baluchistan, Pakistan, in the west, adjacent to the border of Iran.

Since there is evidence that trade existed between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, some of those members of haplogroup G living in its western portion must have gravitated toward the major centers of the Middle East. The westernmost Harappan site is Sutkagen Dor, located on the border of Pakistan and Iran on what once was, apparently, a navigable inlet of the Sea of Arabia and thus part of the trade route to Mesopotamia — in particular the fishing trade — between 3500 and 1700 BCE. This is the route, or one similar to it, that the early Turcos must have taken on their way to Sicily.

Looking at a map of the world one notes that a straight line drawn between the Indus River and a spot just below Sicily in what is now Tunisia, the ancient site of Carthage (not that our forebears followed anything like a straight line) crosses Iran (once Persia), Iraq (once Mesopotamia), Arabia, Jordan / Syria, Egypt, and Libya. Other modern countries in the area between the Indus and Tunisia are Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and Israel / Palestine.

Family Tree DNA is the name of the Internet organization that administers the DNA results of those people who have been tested and agreed to have their results publicly posted. Subgroups of FTDNA include organizations that follow individual haplogroups, including the Haplogroup G web group. There are other specialty groups including the Turk Name group, and the Sicily Project, to all three of which I belong. Peter Christy, administrator of the Haplogroup G organization, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Our haplogroup is seeking members from the Middle East and adjacent areas, but with little success. There are a number of ‘high profile’ members of the Saudi royal family, as well as a claimant to the throne of Iraq, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, that are members of Haplogroup G. Perhaps by your efforts to publicize our haplogroup in Saudi Aramco World, [to the editors of which I wrote a letter on October 25, 2006, to which I had not had no response] readers familiar with that part of the world may come to realize that they are a significant source of additional members.

“We have been attempting to contact those who have already been tested, but with little success. Bill Van Hemert has been using modal matching to profiles of known members of our haplogroup to find candidates who are registered at Ysearch. As you might expect, few of our emails even get through to the intended recipients and even fewer respond. All we have is some tantalizing clues left by a long list of potential Haplogroup G members with names that start ‘Al-‘ e.g., Al-Blais, Al-Bukhary, Al-Khalili, Al-Kureishi, Al-Qureshi, Al-Rikabi, Al-Ruwaili, Al-Sada, Al-Saman, Al-Shaibani, Al-Suwaidi and Al-Wazzan!”

The history of the swift spread of Islam is amazing. Muhammad was born in the Arabian city of Mecca circa 570 CE. Around 610 he experienced a revelatory vision, began to write what became the Koran, and in 613 he began to preach publicly. He left Mecca and settled in Medina in 622, and he died in 632 CE. Only sixty-five years later Islamic Arabs, many of them Moors — a mixture of Arabs and Berbers — lived in North Africa and occupied what was left of Carthage which had been destroyed in classical times and was again destroyed in 698. Today it is a wealthy suburb of Tunis.

In the ninth century CE, around 820, the Tunisian Arabs began to set up trading posts in Sicily. Incredibly, they were soon invited by Euphemius, a Byzantine general, to invade the island, and on June 13, 827, they did so from the town of Sousse, 120 km south of Carthage, with ten thousand infantry and seven hundred cavalry. According to Sandra Benjamin, “Although the invaders originated in many parts of the Muslim empire (including Spain), most of the men were Berbers (from the North African coast) and Arabs (from farther east).” Seventy-five years later, on August 1, 902, the Arabs captured Tauromenium, the Byzantine capital and the last unconquered Sicilian city. All the inhabitants were slain and the city burned to the ground.⁵

Surnames began to be used only about 1000 years ago, so the surname “Turco” dates from about 1000 CE, the eleventh century or 100 years after the Arab conquest of Sicily, that is to say about the same time as the Norman conquest of both England and Sicily. Sicily was the earlier to be conquered, by the brothers Hauteville, Robert the elder and Roger the younger who did most of the fighting, conquering Massena in 1061.

The Hautevilles’ success is said to have inspired both the envy and ambition of their countryman William the Conqueror who invaded and subjugated England in 1066. Although he never ruled there, he pretended to the kingship of Sicily as well. It was William who ordered the Domesday Book of England to be written in 1086, and it was in this statistical survey that surnames were first assigned to every family. Something similar during this period was occurring throughout Europe, including Sicily.

Michael Maddi who administers the FTDNA Sicily Project, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Have you noticed that out of 81 yDNA results in the Sicily Project, 10 are in the G haplogroup? That’s about 12%. This has been the biggest surprise to me so far in our Sicily Project results. My guess, based on my previous reading, was that we would have maybe 5%.

“I have always wondered what the Arab contribution is to Sicily’s genetic pool. It’s hard to figure out how many people of Arab ancestry remained in Sicily after the crackdown by Frederick II on Muslims about 1230. (Frederick actually had good relations with Muslim rulers and spoke Arabic and appreciated the scientific knowledge promoted by Muslim scholars. It was the Vatican which demanded that he expel Muslims from Sicily.) One book I read recently [see Benjamin, op. cit..} said that 1/3 of Sicily’s population was ethnically Arab when the Normans defeated the Muslim rulers around 1075. The town where my paternal grandparents were born, Mezzojuso, was founded by the Muslim rulers in the 10^th century. It remained a majority Muslim town until about 1220, when Muslim rebellions in western Sicily and the subsequent crackdown led to many Muslims fleeing their towns for mountain refuges.

“I think our [haplogroup] G results, if they continue to stay above 10%, indicate that there is significant Arab deep ancestry in Sicilians and Sicilian-Americans.”

The branch of the Turco family to which I belong has long resided in Riesi, a village in south-central Sicily. The closest city of any size is Licata, on the south coast. Although I know for a fact that a number of my relatives still live in the area, at the end of 2006 I was the only person worldwide with the surname Turco who has been identified through DNA analysis as belonging to haplogroup G2. (My son and my brother and his sons may be presumed to be members in this country.)

 

 

IV. GILGAMESH AND ENKIDU

Those who are interested in such things as epics are likely to know that The Epic of Gilgamesh “is, perhaps, the oldest written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script,” the Academy for Ancient Texts avers on its Web page. “It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk [Erech, modern Iraq] (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).”  In fact, however, it is an amalgamation of two stories, the older having to do with the adventures of a most likely mythological person named “Enkidu,” and the second about an ancient King of Erech.

Over the course of no one knows how many centuries, the two tales of Enkidu and Gilgamesh became intertwined and it is in this form that Gilgamesh has come down to us in various versions and languages.  In order to blend the earlier tale of Enkidu with the later doings of Gilgamesh, apparently in order to ascribe to the latter many of the feats of the former, the pair came to be seen as in some essential ways twins, even to the point where they look alike, for the King is a bit taller, it seems, and his close companion Enkidu shorter and broader.

What I have attempted to do The Hero Enkidu¹⁰ is to cut away from the Gilgamesh epic those actions and events that can quite clearly be ascribed to the older Enkidu and to write his own tale in the manner of the author of the anonymous Medieval epic titled Gawain and the Green Knight, that is to say, in cantos of the strong-stress metric line called Anglo-Saxon prosody with appended five-line accentual-syllabic metrical tails called “bobs-and-wheels.”

I do not claim to have restored the Enkidu epic, nor am I writing history: I am still writing fiction, like the original author(s), and I could not absolutely separate Gilgamesh and his companion.  What I do claim is that I have given back to Enkidu what pretty clearly is his tale, and I hope I have written it in a comprehensible and interesting way for modern audiences.

 

___

^1”Turco Coat of Arms, Historiography,” Bath, Ohio: Halberts, n.d.

²The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 4, 1993.

³Science. May 2010 issue.

⁴National Geographic Human Genome Project, on-line at www.NationalGeographic.com.

⁵Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man—A Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House, 2004.

⁶Indus River Valley civilization, etc., on-line at www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html

⁷Sandra Benjamin, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History, Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006.

⁸Morris Jastrow Jr., and Albert T. Clay, An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic, etc., New Haven: Yale, 1920.

⁹Robert Lebling, “Monsters from Mesopotamia,” Saudi Aramco World, Vol. 63, No. 4, July-August 2012.

¹⁰Lewis Turco, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 107, 2015.

Priscilla Bourne

PRISCILLA BOURNE

1705-1772

       There was time until there was no time.

       I made them bread with little leaven.

       I split wood and I carried water.

I bore them all — men, burdens, the hard years

       and the easy weather.  I weathered them

       and I withered, doing what women

       do. Did I regret it?  No.  These were

mine.  I would do it again if I could

       flesh that bone lying in the churchyard

       under the dying elms.  I throve while

       I could, and I watched my children thrive —

two of them.  We made the halls of the house

       echo and the bare fields yield.  We throve

       and we died.  Now our voices murmur

       in the dusty corners when the wind

rides up the valley bearing on its back

       a siege of storm.  We discuss the hours

       lying muffled in the dark eaves.

       Wasps humming in the summer attic

are our neighbors now.  All, all has fallen

       away into the lath and plaster

       that covers the first boards I scoured,

       into the clocks muttering upon

the mantels.  Now, at last, there is no time.

The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House by Lewis Turco, Dresden, ME 04342-0161: Mathom Bookshop, 2002. ISBN 0972271007, paper, $9.95, available from the author.  Poems in this volume won both the Cooper House chapbook competition and the Silverfish Review chapbook award. All poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com.

Honkytonk Revisited

"Honkytonk Revisited" by Lewis Turco was originally published in Salmagundi, i:3, 1966; and gathered in 

Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., 1973. ISBN 0879096373, paper. O-P but available from ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education.

Peter the Unlucky: A Memoir

PETER THE UNLUCKY. A MEMOIR

         Since we graduated from high school in Meriden, Connecticut, Peter and I have kept in touch or, rather, he has. We never exchange letters — although I've written him, he's never written back. Instead, about once a year the phone will ring, and it will be Peter calling from California or wherever else he happens to be. In our high school yearbook The Annual for 1952 he is pictured with Carolyn Kamens among the class notables as "Most Likely to Succeed." Among the ads at the back of the book there's a snapshot of Peter standing in front of a blackboard. On the board there's a diagram and the caption reads, "The Peter Theorem," for the man has an I. Q. of 165.

         Sometime during the fall of 1986 he phoned. "Luigi!" he said, "do you ever watch 'The Wheel of Fortune' on TV?"

         I laughed. "Never. What's up?"

         "Don't miss it tonight," he said, "tonight or tomorrow night — check your local listings. I'm on."

         "Not again!" For Peter had been on a game show several years earlier, and he'd won quite a number of cash and prizes — but I'd missed that one. We chatted awhile.

         "Do you have my new address?" he asked.

         "I think so," I said, assuming he meant his second California address, though it wasn't that new. He asked if we'd be going back to Meriden for the Christmas holidays, but I said no, I had no family living there any more, and my wife Jean's sister Ann was the only member of her family still in town. "I'll be going to the Modern Language Association convention in New York City just after Christmas, though, to help publicize The New Book of Forms which will just have been published."

         "I'll be in the east then, too," he said. "Where will you be staying?"

         "At the Grand Hyatt."

         He said he'd probably catch me there. "Don't forget 'The Wheel of Fortune,'" he said.

         I answered something like, "Okay, Peter, I'll make an effort to watch you tonight." But I did better than that. Even though I couldn't be home to see the program, I asked a colleague to tape the show for me, and not long afterward I bought a VCR myself. The tape became one of my fourteen-year-old son Christopher's favorite playbacks for a while. He kept bringing in friends to watch it.

         The first contestant was Lee Stewart, a sailor; a secretary, Becky Edsel, was the second. Pat Sajak, the host, introduced "Peter" as "George." In fact, his first two names, like those of his late father, are George Peter, but when he was young everyone knew his father as George and no one called the son "junior," so he was called Peter instead. After the death of his father Peter began using his real first name, but I could never get used to it.

         Sajak said that he saw my friend was a writer, and this seemed to take Peter aback. What I surmise is that he had said he was a "grants writer," someone who puts together proposals for foundation and government funding — Peter had been free-lancing along those lines for several years on the West Coast — and Sajak had misunderstood. In fact, Peter had wanted to be a writer, but he had never done anything with it. I'd been responsible for publishing a science-fiction poem of his in a little magazine called Starlanes back in the early 1950s, but I am unaware that he'd ever followed up with efforts of his own to appear in print. Whatever the case Peter, typically, blustered through Sajak's error and said he'd written some short stories and was working on a novel.

         Peter was a good deal balder than when I'd seen him ten years or so earlier when he'd visited us in Oswego, New York, and brought us all a virulent, alien strain of flu. There was no mistaking him, however: the prominent aquiline nose set among the matching Greek features; the slightly stooped posture, which he righted now and again with a hitch of his shoulders thrown back; the satyr's grin, and the lively eyes darting shrewdly about. He looked newly showered and he was immaculately groomed.

         My wife says her clearest recollection of Peter was at a party during high school at the home of our high school classmate and her childhood playmate, Tomie DePaola, now the famous children's writer and illustrator. She walked into a nearly-empty livingroom to see Peter standing before the mirror over the mantel, preening in the glass and admiring himself. "I remember thinking to myself, 'That's pure Peter,'" she told me.

         When the preliminaries are over the sailor begins the game. He is looking to fill in a phrase, and on his first spin of the big wheel he asks for a "T." Vanna White turns over the appropriate square, and he gets his letter, but when he spins again the arrow lands on "Bankrupt," and it is the secretary's turn. She asks for an "H" on her first spin and gets two of them. The first word on the board is obviously "The." On her second spin she asks for an "R," but there is none in the phrase, and Peter gets to spin for the first time.

         The arrow lands on $250.00 and Peter says with a big grimace, "I'd like an 'N'!" There are three of them in the phrase. He says, "I'll buy a vowel" — there are two E's in the phrase, including one in the first word, "The." On the next spin the arrow lands on $400.00 and Peter asks for an "S" — there are two of them; then "F": one word is obviously "of." Peter cannot lose — he spins again while the other two contestants look on with envy and boredom.

         Next Peter wants an "M" and he gets two of them; "K" next — Peter has it. He says, "The milk of human kindness" in the carefully enunciating voice of an intelligent robot. Applause, applause — Peter, who has $2750.00, applauds himself and the audience does likewise. He shakes hands with Sajak.

         When he came to visit us in Oswego where I had been teaching college for many years, we reminisced about our high school days and our crowd. I showed him that I still had a copy of our "Fantaseers" calling card: white lettering on black plastic, and a photo of the Fantaseers' Salem Witch Trials skit that I'd written and we'd performed in our junior year. There was Ben Barnes on the bench as judge Hathorne, holding up a string of paper dolls and cutting their heads off with a pair of scissors. I am dressed in my father's old swallow-tail coat, and Paul Wiese is the other prosecutor in an insane getup no Puritan ever wore. Peter is a member of the jury with the rest of the boys — Lindsey Churchill, Bill Burns, George Hangen, Art Von Au and the rest of them. Paul had wanted to gouge the eyes out of one of the witches, palm a hard-boiled egg, and throw it out into the audience, but the faculty censors — one was Mark Bollman, as I recall, and another, the Latin teacher, Ruth Coleman — wouldn't let us do it. Nevertheless, the production was a great success.

         Some of the girls in our crowd had played the witches. Peter selects gold cufflinks as part of his prize, and "I've got to have that oak tray set for munchies," he says. Jean and I are groaning with chagrin as we sit in our living room before the television set. This is her first viewing, but I've returned to the tape time and again, fascinated as a cobra in a wicker basket listening to his fakir's piping. This is vintage Peter, the Attic pixy.

         In high school Peter and Lindsey were known as the brains of the school. They were both members of the National Honor Society, both straight A students. Lindsey and I had been occasional playmates when I'd lived on Curtis Street during the third and fourth grades at Israel Putnam School. The Churchills had lived on Elm Street, not far from the high school were Mr. Churchill taught English, and it was a considerable hike for me to Lindsey's house — I had no bicycle until the fifth grade. But we had gotten along well, though he was a year younger than I.

         A year or two later Lindsey had skipped a grade, and in Meriden High during our sophomore and junior years, he was a member of our Class of 1952. Both he and Peter were charter members of the Fantaseers, our "Science Fiction Reading Club," the distaff side of which was the "Reesatnafs," of which my future wife was a peripheral member — peripheral in her own eyes, not in anyone else's. The combined bunch was "The Fantatnafs" — it was the girls who had coined that phrase.

         Although Peter's I. Q. was well into genius range, Lindsey outstripped everyone at the end of our junior year by winning a full tuition scholarship to Yale University and skipping his senior year in high school. Peter was himself scheduled to attend Yale when he graduated. Although his classmates were well aware of Peter's brainpower, we also knew he was not as highly motivated as Lindsey, and we could hardly miss the fact that he tended to get through his courses with a minimum of effort and a maximum of glitter. Peter was nothing if not flashy in a sardonic sort of way.

         Lee, the secretary, bends over to spin the Wheel of Fortune for her second try. She asks for a "T" — she is trying to figure out an event. She spins again and asks for an "H": there are two of them; spins again...and lands on "Bankrupt!" She loses her turn.

         Back to Peter who spins, smiling. The arrow lands on $200.00 and he asks for an "R" — there are three in the event he's trying to guess. He elects to spin again; he calls out, "Pin! Pin! Pin!" and it does...the arrow lands on "Pin." He bends over the railing to pull the cover of the "Pin" space and discovers he has won only $150.00.

         While we sat and talked during his visit to Oswego I was startled to hear Peter say, "I felt threatened by the Fantaseers."

         "Threatened?" I asked.

         "Yes. The Fantaseers seemed to be your milieu, but it was destabilizing for me. It wasn't the image I wanted. I wanted to be accepted by the athletes as well as the intellectuals, and the Fantaseers had the reputation of being oddballs."

         "Then why did you belong?" I asked.

         "Because all my non-jock friends belonged," he said.

         He asks for an "N" — it begins to look as though his victory is assured. Vanna White turns over three N's on the board and Peter spins again. The arrow lands on $250.00 and Peter wants a "D" — the fourth word of the event is obviously "and." Peter wants an "A" and gets six of them!

         Peter always wanted A's but, unfortunately, when he went to Yale he didn't get them. The glitter evidently wouldn't sustain him on the college level. While I was beginning my floating hegira about the world courtesy of the U. S. Navy, I heard that he'd had to leave Yale and, further, that he'd enrolled at New Britain State Teachers' College, now Central Connecticut State. I was amazed to learn eventually that he'd had no better luck there than at Yale.

         Peter spins again, asks for an "L," gets two and elects to solve the puzzle for $1950.00: the event is, "Arriving an hour and a half late." Peter chooses a pocket watch for about $300.00, a chest for $435.00, an entertainment center for $1190.00 — after two rounds Peter has won $9275.00.

         I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events that followed in Peter's early career. I know that he had to leave New Britain College a second time after being readmitted, and that he joined the Army and spent some time in Germany with the M.P.'s, but which came first I'm not sure. I do know that eventually, when he'd served his enlistment and returned to civilian life, he attended Fairfield University and acquired his B. A. at last. He was married.

         Jean and I, and a friend, Marie, had dinner with the newlyweds one evening. Peter's bride served a dish I'd never had before but that I loved — hamburger Stroganoff. A year or two later their marriage was annulled — there were no children — and we were into the 1960's.

         Jean and I had been married four years when, in 1960, our daughter Melora was born in Meriden during the summer between my leaving the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and beginning my first teaching job at Fenn College, which is now Cleveland State University. My First Poems was published the same summer. I'm not sure in what year Peter founded an "alternative school" for children in or around New Haven, but he stayed there awhile. Next we heard he'd gone to Cape Cod to be the founder of a similar public school program there. And then we pretty much lost track of what he was up to, though he'd fill in a few details when he put through his annual phone call.

         Peter gets to spin first in the third round of "The Wheel of Fortune." The arrow lands on $400.00 and he asks for an "S" — there are two of them; he spins — $500.00 — asks for an "N" and gets it. He spins again: $250.00, asks for an "R" and gets two. Another spin, Peter asks for a "T" and gets one of those as well. He buys an "E" — there are three of them in the three words.

         When my daughter Melora was about seventeen and my son, Christopher, four or five, Peter got married again. His bride was the daughter of a well-to-do New Jersey couple. Jean and I went down to Meriden to visit our families, and we drove with Marie down to Jersey to the wedding. Unfortunately, we ran into a huge traffic jam on the Newburgh bridge along the route, and we arrived too late for the ceremony, but in time for the reception.

         There we ran into several of our old high school classmates. One was Phil Riley who had lived nearly across the street from my family on North Third Street when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. Phil had a brother who was afflicted with Downs syndrome, and most of the neighborhood kids had been at least leery of him, if not downright afraid. Fortunately, these are more enlightened times. Jim Pagnam, also from the West Side unlike Peter, who was from the East Side of Meriden, was present as well, and one or two others including Jim Masterson. In high school Peter, like Lindsey, had been something of a jock as well as an intellectual, and these were more-or-less his jock friends rather than Fantaseers or Reesatnafs.

         Peter wants another vowel, so he buys an "A" and Vanna White turns over the squares. He spins, the arrow lands on $900.00 this time! Peter wants a "P" — it's obvious now that the "thing" he is trying to guess is "Peppermint Life Savers," and Peter solves the problem. He applauds himself while Sajak celebrates his accomplishment. Peter selects his-and-her wedding bands and he says, "Okay, for $1800.00, let's go for the brass bed!" He says, "I'll take the books," and, with vast understatement, "I'm kind of a reader." He gets a stack of Simon and Schuster books, including the novel by John Erlichmann of Watergate infamy. Peter licks his lips as he listens to the list of all the things he's getting. He now has a total of $13,475.00 in money and prizes. We glimpse the sailor and the secretary out of the corner of the camera from time to time.

         Peter worked for a New York publisher for a while as some sort of technical person having to do with the printing operation — or so I seem to remember, but that may have been earlier. He and Ceil moved out to California after a while and he began doing his grants writing for various colleges and institutions out there. I think, however, that eventually the Reagan administration cutbacks in support for science, health, and education seriously undermined Peter's ability to make a living by free-lancing, though Ceil always had a steady job.

         This game-show program is practically a duplicate of the other that Peter had won not long after he began living on the west coast — it was, if I recall correctly, "Jeopardy" on that occasion. I hadn't seen it, but I heard that he'd won something like $40,000.00. Sajak wishes the sailor "Better luck next time" and thanks him and the silent secretary for being on the show. "It's a clean sweep for this guy," he says patting Peter on the shoulder.

         Mugging away, Peter says, "Well, that's the way it goes." He says he's going to go for "The ca-a-ar!" — a Mazda RX7 sports car worth over $13,000.00. Peter has to guess a "Thing" in this portion of the show, which is a hurry-up version. He is given five consonants and a vowel, and he chooses "T, N, R, S, L," and "E." He gets the "L," the "N," two E's" — "Lead pencil" is the object. There is no way Peter can lose now. He solves the puzzle, and the audience goes bananas. Peter applauds too.

         Pat Sajak takes the microphone off Peter, escorts him, with Vanna, to the car, and he gets in. Sajak says, "Look out, look like a winner, and wave to America." Peter hangs his head out the window, waves at the camera, and grimaces — it's supposed to be a smile, one surmises. He mugs away like crazy. Sajak says, "You know, back in the early days of television, there were a lot of kind of cerebral game shows with people like Bergen Evans and so forth...you look like a panelist on one of those shows."

         Peter replies, "I would have been a panelist, but I ran out of wood." Sajak does a slow double take, mutters something half under his breath, says goodbye to the audience, and the game is over. Peter has won everything, over $32,000.00 in all.

         That was in 1986. Four or five years later Peter put through his annual call, but he acted a bit oddly on the phone. When I tried to call him back at home I got Ceil who seemed startled. She said he wasn't there, and she gave me another number to call. When I got Peter back on the line he admitted that he'd phoned to ask for a loan but had chickened out. He and his wife had split up and he'd been living in an apartment with several other men. He was afraid he was going to be out on the street if he didn't get up his half of the rent.

         "But what happened to the money you won on 'Wheel of Fortune'? I asked. Ah, he said, that had gone to pay the back taxes on the things he'd won on "Jeopardy" — the IRS had hounded him for years. I told him I'd send him a fair amount to help him out. He said he'd pay me back one day, but I told him not to worry about it.

         A year or so later he phoned again. The touch was easier this time, it seemed. "I can't afford to adopt you," Peter, I said. He argued with me, but I refused. "I already have a family," I told him. "You have one too, don't you?"

         "Yeah, if you can call them that," he said.

         "I've already sent you a rather large sum of money on one occasion," I told him.

         "Oh, yeah. That came in handy," he said.

         Some time later he called once more. This time all he wanted was a small loan — he said he was living out of his car. I told him that what he wanted from me wouldn't solve his problem, nor even stave it off for long. There were social agencies in San Francisco that could do him some permanent good, so I refused again and he rang off in anger. Since then I have received one or two collect calls from San Francisco, but the caller on each occasion has hung up before I could accept. "You will not be charged for this call," the operator informed me.

         In July of 1994, at a reunion of the old high school crowd that was held on Cape Cod in the home of Carolyn, one of the Reesatnafs, I discovered that Peter at one time or another had also phoned several of those who were present to request money, which some of them had sent. "You know, we saw him several times when he was working with his alternative school in Barnstable," Carolyn said. She told us that when Peter had called her from the West Coast to ask for a loan, it had coincidentally been on the evening that some friends of hers and her husband's had been visiting from San Francisco. When Peter had hung up Carolyn explained the situation to her guests, one of whom was herself a worker in the San Francisco social services system. She promised that when they got home she would try to locate Peter and give him a hand. "She did try," Carolyn said, "but she could never locate him anywhere."

         On another visit to Meriden some time later I was discussing Peter with Jim Masterson. “You know what his problem is, don’t you?” he asked me.

         “Not really.”

         “He’s an addict.”

         I was astonished. “I never saw Peter take drugs, though I’ve seen him drink some.”

         Jim shook his head. “Not drugs or alcohol,” he said.

         “What, then?”

         “Gambling.”

         I cast my mind back to the early years, and I recollected that Peter had always been involved in poker games, at Fantaseer meetings, at parties, after school, even during study halls sometimes.

         “That’s why he never went to class in college,” Jim said. “All he did was play cards. That’s what happened to the money he won on those game shows, all the money his friends sent him. Sometimes he was lucky, most times he was not.”

         And that’s what luck can do to a guy with an I. Q. of 165.

         There is a belated epilogue for this story. Just before Christmas, 2016, Peter called me once more from San Francisco. He had been trying to phone me in Maine. He didn't know Jean and I were spending the winter at our home in Oswego, New York. He tried to get me twelve times and finally called the Lincoln County sheriff to ask him to check out our Dresden residence to make sure we weren't lying around dead inside. Our neighbor Nancy Call saw the sheriff's car in our drive and went over to see what was going on. It all got straightened out eventually, and I phoned George to reassure him that all was well.

         It appears that all these years later he had decided to repay some of the “loans” he had received from his friends, including Jim Masterson and me, but when he tried to phone Jim, Peter discovered that Jim had recently died. Panic seems to have set in and he made the first of the calls to me to try to make sure he wasn’t too late in my case as well – I assured him I was not yet quite dead, and he said he was sending me a check for the $500.00 he owed me.

         He did that. I received it, was amazed, and immediately deposited it in my bank account. Peter called once more to request that I deposit the check as soon as possible. I assured him I had done just that. He thanked me, and I told him I’d be in touch. By way of my gratitude for something I had never expected to happen, I sent him a few of my books. I hope he’s enjoying them.

 

Except for the epilogue of this memoir, it was collected in Fantaseers: A Book of Memories, by Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: StarCloudPress.com, 2005, 196 pp., ISBN 1-932842-15-2, paper. Available from Amazon.

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Wutchugonnado

 

WUTCHUGONNADO

A fable of the noble savage

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Wutchugonnado"

 

Wutchugonnado by the brookside,

Squaw at his side,

Crow caw overhead,

Speckled fish on the speckled riverbed,

Sat in the painted sun,

Thoughts on Wutsicumminto,

Wutsicumminto, his son.

 

Dappled ripples lap-lapped

At the mottled clay bank,

Shadows sank floating logs;

Thoughts were driftwood,

Little good;

Thoughts were braveness muscled in

Bronze skin;

Thoughts were stone-tipped,

Ice-nipped,                                                   

Birch-bark wilderness;

Thoughts were crushed dreams,

Dead schemes, sere themes

In the painted sun.

 

Wutchugonnado dreamt of

Savage hunt love,

Land of moccasin's pad-pad

On the forest trail;

Dreamt of clear eye,

Night cry,

Glowing-coal smoke, starlit night cloak,

Solemn peace pipe, flame on cheek bones —

Dreamt of these and many more things:

 

Of his offspring Wutsicumminto,

Of his son, his warrior son,

Bronzed and free

In the white man's factory.

 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback. Also available from Amazon.com in a Kindle edition.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Twenty-Three

Part Twenty-Three, Final Chapter

 

Thursday, 14th. At first, Rafe was reluctant. I didn't tell him of my idea the night he came over, but an evening or two later Clarissa and I dropped over to his house. While she walked about, I asked Rafe if he had read the Journal.

"Yes, I have," he said, I asked him what he thought of it. He said nothing for a little while, then, "I don't know what to think of it. It's too large and complicated for me to have digested yet. Then, again, maybe I can nver digest it, Cara, because it's like devouring myself in some ways — I'n in it, so are you. There's no way I can be objective," He sat in his chair before the fire, his long legs stretched out on the hearth. He ran a hand through his hair.

I shook my head. "No, we can't be objective. But there'll be a way we can assimilate the book — we can keep it going."

Rafe was puzzled, "I don't understand,' he said, but I just sat still and watched him until a Iight began to break in his eyes. "I: hope you don't mean what I think you mean." Rafe sat up straight, leaned toward me, resting his arms on his knees. I still said nothing. Silence gathered around us out of the corners of the winter room. Now and then would we would hear Clarissa's murmur as she looked at something she'd found. The fire snapped occasionally.

Rafe said, "I couldn't do it."

“You must," I eaid, 'There are lots of reasons. First, the story Charles started isn't finished. We're locked into it.”

He looked at me. "You've got to begin to come out of that fixation.

"All right, then help me. The continuation of the Journal would be good therapy. You're a psychologist. You should know that."

Rafe looked doubtful, but I could see this was an argument he could understand.

"The Joumal didn't seem to help Charles," Rafe said. "In some ways it helped focus his obsessions, instead of dissipating them."

"But that's because he kept it all to himself. If others had seen it — if You or I, or both of us, could have gone over it with him after he'd written a few entries, couldn't we have used the information to counsel him? You and I would see each-other's entries every other day." I could see Rafe wavering. I leaned over and put my hand on his knee. "Rafe, I need your help now."

A few more minutes of silence and then Rafe said, "All right, Cara, maybe it is a good idea."

We'll start tomorrow," I said. I got up and went to the table where I'd put a package when I came in. I opened it and took out a record book, like the one Charles had used, but not as tall.

I handed it to Rafe. "You write the first entry," I told him. "Begin with the fire."

Friday, 15^th. The note of calculation in this last entry of Cara'a, and in some of her earlier ones, disturbs me. I don't know, It doesn't fit the image I have of her — at leust the pre-fire image. The flaw of perception, no doubt, lies in me. One shouldn't generalize from a few incidents, particularly not after trauma, Cara is a beautiful lady after all, like her last name, but she must soon begin to return to a more normal way of seeing the situation in which she finds herself. And I think I see that may be happening in some of the things she has been doing lately. For instance, when I told her about the possibility of her landing the lab supervisor's job at the College she reacted very positively.

I took her down to fill out an application and have an interview with the chairman of the biology department. There was a little trouble about Clarissa needing a baby sitter while we were away at the College and I suggested my housekeeper. However, Cara's eyes filmed over with hostility. "Not her somebody else," she said, "Not the way she acts around me. There must be someone else available.”

I disagreed. “This is a small town, and the girls who are old enough are either in school or they have jobs of their own. As for the rest of the women, they have jobs or families of their own, or they're too old to handle children. "Besides, Mrs.. Wall likes Clarissa, and it's mutual.”

I could see this last remark bothered Cara, but it was true.

Her son, Thomas, who is a little younger than I am — a few Years older than Cara — is married and no longer living in the house. “Mrs. Hall has projected me in her son’s place,” she said.

“it would be good for Mrs. Hall, too," I said. "She needs to feel useful, She's quite capable."

Whenever the four of us were together — Cara and I talking, Clarrissa and Mrs. Hall in the kitchen or another room —

Clarissa had immediately gravitated toward the older woman and could be heard chattering away at her.Mrs, Hall's responses could be heard as well. They took to each other. "Listen to them," I had said once. "It's good to hear Clarissa opening up."

Cara had merely frowned.

"Listen," I said to her," I went along with you on the Journal, now you go along with me on this babysitting deal." Reluctantly, she did, and things are working out well,

The interview went smoothly, Cara was hired. Her credentials are rather impressive in botany, they like her at the College. Officially, She's to begin her work when the spring semester starts, but during finals and the semester break Cara will be going down with me now and then to get acquainted with the facilities and her colleagues, Mrs. Hall, is delighted to take care of Clarissa. I wish I could say Cara is as happy, but that will take care of itself, I'm sure.

Saturday, 16^th. First, a job — then a lawyer because I am beginning to run low on funds, The "calculation" Rafe says he sees in me is merely practicality. There is a strong streak of it in my character.

My main purpose remains ths same. I have lost the only man who ever meant anything to me — the father of my child, who bears his name. And the world, though it may not know it yet, has lost a good man too. I will do everything I can, first, to get the world to recognize that Charles left a living legacy in Clarissa and, second, to recognize Charles as the great writer he was.

I must bear a great part of the burden for Charles' death. f should have done much more for him while he was alive, and I should have done it sooner. There is a deep pain at the center of my being whenever I consider the things I should have done years ago. I should have torn Charles away from Norine while I was an undergraduate having an affair with him. Instead, I bore his child alone and in silence, while that bitch continued to emasculate him day after day, using her sex to erode his sense of himself as a man.

But this is hindsight. I had no idea, until I read the Journal, how Norine became more end more frigid over the two years after I left campus. She turned into wood, into stone. And I, at first infatuated with the idea of having an affair with a writer, and then afterward romantically bearing his child and caring for it as though I were a character in some private biography of a great literary figure -— God! what must I have been thinking of?

And now it is all too late — too late! I must sit here in this winter country and try to make amends,..try to live with the memory of my folly and Charles' madness, with visions of what might have been had I not done the wrong things out of ignorance and youth.

Sometimes at night, in my bed, I lie and listen to the wind moving by the trailer, among the pines, snd I know that the same wind is moving across the cemetery at the foot of Blind Man's Hill, touching the headstones of Norine and Melanie, lifting swirls of snow over Charles' unmarked grave as be lies beside them in the frozen earth, and I think, for a moment, "I should be Iying beside him there; the same fire should have consumed us both, and the aame ice should have extinguished the blaze.*

Then I will hear Clarissa stir in her bed, and I’ll know why I've been spared. Charles Ally will not die, ever! It is my destiny to put right those things that have been wrongly done. I must revive his name and his legacies. In the spring, when the earth thaws, I’ll see to it that he has a proper headstone, so that there will be a place for his mourners to gather and see his name in the living rock. If I can, over the years, somehow, I will acquire his property and rebuild the house in which he died. Soon, I will sue to have his daughter recognized as his daughter and his heiress, These are the things I can do, And I will bear what I must to accomplish them, even to attempting an accommodation with Mrs. Hall, who hates me, I am sure, because I am not one of her own back-country, Anglo-Saxon Puritans. I even suspect her of fraudulence in her liking for

Clarissa, but I will wait a while and let her scheme, whatever it is she plans, show itself to Rafe. Mrs, Hall will exposes— I need do nothing but wait. I only hope that Clarissa will not be hurt by it all.

In the meantime, I would hurt Rafe if I acted on my convictions without proof. Rafe must not be hurt either. He is a good man — too good, perhaps, in many ways. Charles was totally wrong in his suspicions about us. Whenever we met privately, it was to discuss Charles and the things we might do to relieve or diminish his obsessions.

Rafe was his best friend, as he is mine. We have begun, Cbsrles' life, in a way, continues in this sequel to the Journal. I have taken the first steps necessarg to resuscitate his reputation. It is early yet, As time passes, the spirit of Charles Ally will rise out of his grave and begin to spread itself over Frankfort and then, at Iast, beyond its borders into the world that never appreciated his genius. I know what I must do.

Sunday, 17^th. f am very deeply disturbed by the tone and content of Cara's last entry. I don't think this sequel is working out — Cara doesn't say things like that in the daylight or during her normal doings with people, but obviously she broods at night, as Charles did. What she needs to do is to get out and become part of the community, keep busy with things. But she wouldn't pick up on my suggestion that she attend services today. "I'm a long-lapsed Roman Catholic,"she said. I pointad out that the Episcopal Church is

Catholic, but she shook her head. "I don't believe in ecumenising. Besides," and she gave a short, harsh laugh, "I practice witchcraft, haven't you heard?" I said nothing.

Neverheless, after church this morning she and Clarissa dropped by for a visit and some lunch When we were through eating Clarissa went off to play and Cara and I stayed at the table sipping coffee. After a while it became apparent that Cara had something to say. Her eyes were evasive, but now and then I would catch her throwing me a surreptitious glance. Finally I sat back in my chair, locked my hands behind my head, and I said to her, "Let's have it. The silence is killing me."

She looked straight at me at last, "Okay, I’ve never asked this before, but I've always been curious." She fiddled nervously with her cup. "At first I thought possibly you might be,.,well, queer." She blushed and I laughed. I knew what was coming now. I'd been hearing it from Mrs. Hall for a long time — though, curiously, not so often of late.

Cara seemed to be having difficulty continuing, so I helped her out. "How come I’m not married, right?"

She looked at me straight again and nodded. "You'd be a good catch for some woman,"

"It's difficult to explain." I leaned forward toward her, "But I guess the simplest thing to say is that I practice celibacy."

"But why?" Her eyebrows were arched. “You're not a priest..,not exactly. You're not required to be celibate."

I nodded. "That's why, because it's not a requirement. It's a voluntary sacrifice on my part.”

Cara started to make some sort of derogatory sound, but she suppressed it. "You really are some sort of fanatic, as Charles said, aren't you?"

"Charles never convinced me that I was a fanatic, even though he could argue rings around me. No, I'm not a fanatic, just a believer. I'm not married to the Church, but I am married to people. When you are married to everyone, it's not fair to take a wife and expect her to understand that. A wife wants a husband and a father for her children. She doesn't want a part-time houseboy."

Cara began to tear her napkin into small shreds. Her gray eyes became nervous too."That's silly, Rafe. Every woman knows that if her man has a calling or a profession he's married to that as well as to her. What about a doctor's wife? Look at Charles — I always knew his writing came first. But I loved him anyway — loved him, I suppose, because of it, in part at least."

She hesitated, "No," I said, sinking into my thoughts. "Not every woman understands."

"You're thinking of Norine, aren't you?” I nodded and said, “Yes.”

Cara sighed, and the frown marks smoothened on her forehead. "Well, I: do."

Then something passed between us. "You don't believe me, do you?" she asked. I said nothing. Thsre was a quiet between us for a while. Then, "Believe what you want," she said, "about me, and about yourself." It was snowing again out of doors, as it has been almost every day, " But there's something I know — the body has demands of its own, over and above the things one believes I don't know how you cope with your appetites."

I could think of nothing more to say, and after a little while of listening to Clarissa crooning to herself in the living room, I changed the subject.

Monday, 18^th. This evening, when Rafe and I got back from the college, we stopped at Mrs. Hall's house to pick up Clarissa. Mrs. Hall's son Thomas was there, up from Boston on a business trip to Augusta. He is a nice looking man — not too tall, brown hair a trifle long, a moustache, about 150 pounds I would guess, but not really slightly built. Evidently he had been with his mother most of the afternoon and had made quite an impression on my daughter.

Mrs, Hall introduced us — a little stiffly, I felt — but he shook hands warmly and said, "Your little girl and I are good friends. We've been having long talks."

"I should say!" Mrs. Hall stood shaking that professional mother's head of hers and laughing, "I could hardly put a word in."

"Hello, Thomas," Rafe said, shaking hands, "nice to see you again. What have you been talking about?"

"You name it. What have we been saying, Clarissa?

He reached down and patted her hair. Clarissa took a couple of my fingers. "He's got girls, mommy," she said. "I can play with them someday."

"That'll be nice." I looked at Thomas. I guess I appeared to be a little apologetic. "She's not usually such a chatterbox. There aren't many children for her to play with up here on the hill."

"There will be come summertime," Mrs. Hall said, "The place fills up with summer people."

"Including us," Thomas remarked. "The whole clan gathers — we have a place up the road, And we'll be sure to have lots for Clarissa to do. My specialty is little girls — I'm an expert. That's why we're friends — right, sweetheart?" He bent down and took Clarissa in his arms for a hug,

"I wish summer would hurry up," she said.

We all laughed. "So does everybody." Mrs, Hall raised her hands waist-high in a gesture of mock despair. "What a winter."

We talked for a while, and then I took Clarissa, bundled her up, and walked over to the trailer after we said goodbye.

"Do I have a daddy?" she asked — the first time I remember her doing such a thing. I could say nothing appropriate. "Is Mr. Rafe my daddy?" She looked up.

"No, honey," I had to say. There was no sense in saying anything more.

"I wish summer would hurry up," Clarissa said again as we opened the door and Catch said hello.

Tuesday, 19th. The investigation of the fire has been completed. The report says that the holocaust was of suspicious origin, evidently begun by burning brands scattered from a fireplace, but there is no abolute proof of arson. Cara, when she was questioned, told them she was upstairs when the fire started — which as true — and that she therefore had no idea of its origins — which is false.

For my part, I told the authorities the truth as far as it went — that I had come to keep an appointment with Charles, discovered the blaze and broke in. Neither of us mentioned the Journal.

My conscience is bothering me terribly for these lies of omission, but worse than that — we are withholding evidence of a crime. But for all of me, I don't know what good it would do to bring forth the jourmal. Charles is dead with his family, and all that could happen now is that a scandal would be raked over, Cara would be hurt, Charles' name blackened, and those obsessed fantasies he wrote about Cara would be sensational, though to•t untrue. I can do nothing constructive in this whole mess except keep quiet, as Cara counseled. And now there's Clarissa to consider as well.

The report has been turned over to the lawyers and the insurance companies. There is a good deal of whispering going on among my parishioners — among all the townsfolk. I've overheard an obscene joke about Cara and Charles — l'm afraid I lost my temper with the two old mejn who were sharing it. Rather than back down, they merely looked quizzically at me and one said, "Well, Rsverend, maybe they take to things like this easier down at College, but this is Frankfort."

As I turned away I heard the other whisper at a deaf man's volume, "Where there's smoke..,," The other grunted. I walked away in a rage. Mrs. Hall had been with me. The incident took place in the grocery store where we had come to shop for both of us, and Mrs. Hall heard the whole exchange. I paid the bill snd carried the parcels out. As I left I heard my housekeeper going at it hot and heavy with the old-timers. When she came out to the car I noticed her face was flushed and her lips were glinting. Cara is wrong about her.

I don't know how long the litigation will go on, but as long as it does, and perhaps for loneer, we can expect more of this. I hurt badly for so many.

Wednesday, 20^th. I don't care what they say, but it's getting harder, sometimes, to hold on to Charles, just because I have to think about things like this, about the things in the lab, about Clarissa. Sometimes it seems my head is crammed to bursting with ordinary things, petty things, and the memory of Charles has to be cullled out of all that rubble,

I have been sitting here in the trailer staring at the ending of Charles' novel. Catch and Clarissa are both asleep. It doesn't seem right that these two final sheets of paper should be lying around loose in a file folder. They should be put into his 3ournal with the rest of his last work. So I have decided to paste them in. I have been hesitating only because it seems such a final act, though the pages are just a fragment, broken off in the middle of an action. It isn't finished, and can never be, I know, but it still seems like such a finality.

THE BOOK OF THE BLACK HEART

Chapter seven

When they'd done their yard time in Liberty City, the crew in their carrier moved down into Jax for a day or two.

Nothus took one look over the starboard rail and decided to stay aboard. He'd never seen such flat nothingness stretching out past some buildings on stilts, a road spearing along into the night between a row of neon signs, stars muffled under a haze of smog that made pink haloes over the honkytonks and gas stations.

When be spoke his voice sounded both hollow and suppressed. "There's nothing here, either," he said to nobody standing beside him in the darkness, and his voice sounded so flat and strange that he decided not to speak again.

The clattering of footsteps down ladders, the thunk of shoes on the gangplank, the swabbies saluting at us as they hooted ashore in clean whites. "Come on," said Boats, "get with it for crissake. You'll get crabs if you stay aboard, crabs and lobsters off the toilet seats."

Nothus shrugged and shook his head. Boats shrugged and rolled his eyes at Peabody who stood tapping his foot at the hatch. He shrugged, said "shit," and left with the Gunner. Nothus lay on his bunk staring up at the springs of the bunk above him, squares of mattress quilting down through the wires like regulated patches of cloud about to pour. Nothus had the feeling that the compartment was empty, but he didn't look. Through his right eye he could see the knobby bulkhead that pressed beside him, the chains supporting the tier of bunks. Through his left ear he heard the stillness oi the narrow passage through a double line of bunks, the ditty bags hanging, and — at the foot of the row — the small of lockers.

One of them clapped shut with a tinny ring.

Thursday, 21^st. This evening, Cara Belladonna and I made love,

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Twenty-Two

Part Twenty-Two

 

JANUARY, 1971

Thursday, 7^th. I am the one who pulled Cara out of the burning farmhouse, not Wesley Court or Catch — that figment of Charles Ally's diseased mind. I can't decide whether Charles wanted to be saved, or merely wanted me at the scene of a suicide-murder, to witness his revenge for the immense delusion he had built in his head. I have never known a man more ridden by guilt and failure.

At any rate, it was too late for Charles by the time I broke through the door. I had kept our appointment, but by the time I arrived the flames had already spread from the burning coals he had scattered about the house and had enclosed him where he sat at his Uncle John's old desk in the study, writing in his Journal.

As I stood in the hallway at the foot of the stairs I called out to him through a wall of fire, but I don't believe he heard me. I saw him close the book, lean over, and open the safe at his side. He put the Journal and a folder inside, shut the door, and spun the combination. Then he straightened in his chair and just sat while the fire began to crawl up his back. He never uttered a sound.

I can't be certain, but I believe he had finally lapsed into the state of catatonia that had been threatening him since he arrived here in Frankfort in September. I think — I hope he couldn't feel a thing in those lest moments.

I tried to reach him. I tried to push through the fire to get to him, but I couldn't make it. The heat was searing. My arms have still not healed completely.

It was then that I heard the sounds from the bedroom upstairs, and realized it must be Cara. The stairs were still relatively free of fire, so I went up three steps at a time and found her. When she saw me she screamed my name and struggled to get up off the bed. I couldn't believe what Charles had done, and I stopped in my tracks, staring, for just a moment, but Cara screamed again, and I ran to her. I fumbled at the knots for a few seconds, and then I could hear the fire in the doorway — there was no time. It was eating up the old farmhouse at an incredible rate. There were flames licking up through the vent in the floor from the living room below.

I reached for a pair of scissors on the bureau and began sawing through the cords. Cara was sobbing. Finally, the last one parted. I picked her up and turned, but there was no possibility of going back the way I had come. I carried Cara to the south window of the bedroom, kicked in the glass, and rolled her out onto the roof of the front porch. In a moment I was out myself. I lay on my stomach and eased her over the edge, holding her by the arms, and then I let her drop. It wasn't a big fall. Then f rolled off the edge too.

We lay on the lawn, trembling, exhausted, until I realized we were too close to the house, which was a great torch by then. We could hear the siren on the town firehouse wailing, calling the volunteers, but no one had come yet. Somehow I dragged Cara and myself out to the middle of the yard, between the two enormous blue spruces, and passed out. Later, I realized that was a stupid place to go — what would have happened if the trees had caught?

I don't know how much time had elapsed between my arrival on the scene and Cara's rescue, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes, When I woke up, I was in the Gardiner hospital, eight miles down the road. It was the next day. My arms and face were bandaged. I asked about Cara, and they said she was all right — shock, mostly.

The flames hadn't really touched her at all. I was thankful for that, at least.

I'm not sure this is the right thing we're doing — continuing Charles' journal like this. It is morbid. Cara insists, however, and perhaps...perhaps.,.it will be therapeutic, If it exorcises a few ghosts, it will be good, but resurrection would be bad — very bad, I hope Cara sees what might happen.

Friday, 8^th. Rafe doesn't know this yet, but the fire did spread to the spruces. They found us Iying between two

torches. I was too weak to move, and Rafe had slipped into unconsciousness. The trees bloomed with fire like two great poinsettias. Lyring on my back and looking up, I could see nothing but writhing red snakes against the night and the cold stars.

There was snow on the ground. Heat beat down on us from above, and chill rose up from the earth to freeze us, I had strength enough left only to untie the ends of rope from my ankles and toss them into the burning trees. I don't know why I did that.

By the time the firemen arrived, almost nothing was left of the house. They found us and carried us to a stationa, and we were rushed to the hospital. I was treated for shock and stayed only the night. Rafe had to remain a few days longer because of his burns. When they released me, Iinsisted on seeing him privately for a few minutes, and because they were kind, they allowed it. I don't know whether they thought we were married or relatives, or what, but I managed to see him before the police questioned him, I begged him to tell them he knew nothing — merely that he had happened along at the right moment. He agreed, though reluctantly, I feel. For all that he is a minister, one of "the “new breed" that Charles so often maintained he despised — still, he is compassionate, and he agreed. There is no sense, now that everything is over, in raking over the coals of Charles' mania.

When I was questioned, I told the police I knew nothing more than that I had wakened to find myself surrounded by flame; that I was too frightened to move; that Rafe had appeared to save me. When they asked me about the ropes on my wrists and the scrape marks there where the ropes had cut me while I struggled on the bed, I told them that Rafe had put the ropes on my ankles to lower me as far from the roof to the ground as he could. Rafe didn't contradict my story.

These are good people. They suspect that something isn't right — I have heard rumors in the village that there is suspicion of arson — but no one is pushing it. They feel sorry for me, I know, although they are aware that Charles and Iwere "living in sin" when his wife and child were killed in the accident last fall. Charles is buried beside them now, in the little graveyard at the foot of Blind Man's Hill. But the townsfolk here in Frankfort v:ill never know the true story, for I was first to get to the Journal that Charles kept.

After I saw Rafe, was questioned, and left the hospital with the Frankfort constable — one of the parishioners of the church Rafe keeps part-time —, I was taken back to town and given over to the care of Mrs. Hall who lives on Blind Man's Hill not far from Rafe, Mrs. Hall, a middle-aged woman, acts as Rafe's housekeeper once a. week and attends his church on Sunday. Rafe had given instructions that f was to stay at his house until he was released, but Mrs. Hall would have none of it. I was put into a bedroom of her own home, and she fussed over me as though I were a child. There is no truth to the myth that the people of Maine are taciturn and distant, She put me into bed about noon. "Now, don't you move," she said, "until you are fit for company." And she bustled about making: me soup and trying to keep me comfortable, She made it extremely difficult for me to get out and recover the Journal, but I knew it had to be dome before there was an investigation. I refused to stay down for more then an hour, and Mrs. Hall as upset. "But the doctors said you must rest. You're recovering from shock." She stood before me, her greying head tilted in an attitude of mortification and helplessness as I got dressed.

"No," I said, "You've been very kind, but I'm used to making do for myself, and I can't stay here. I'll use Rev, Hawkins' house, as he requested until I can flnd a place to stay."

She was hurt and astonished. "You're stayln' in town?"

I nodded. "Where else will I go?" I had no job, no family — except one person — that I wanted to see.

"Could you drive me down to the farm so that I can get my car?"

Mrs. Hall shook her head. "Your car's all right. It's over at the Reverend Hawkins' place. I'll take you there if you insist."

"I do, please."

I had made my first real enemy in town, Mrs. Hall was very stiff as she let me into Rafe's house, My car was in the driveway — the fire hadn't touched it where it had been parked in the barn. She showed me the guest room and the rest of the house, but I knew where everything was.

"There's the telephone," Mrs. Hall said, pointing. I nodded. "•f you need me, call," She gave me a very hard look and turned.

"Thank you, Mrs, Hall." The door slammed behind her, and I heard her start her car and back out of the driveway. I was very tired, so I sat down for a few minutes in the overstuffed armchair in the living room, 'When I woke, it was with a start — for a moment I couldn't see. Then a few objects began to loom into shadowy focus out of the darkness in the winter moonlight that was falling vaguely through the window, I had slept for a long time.

When I turned on a light I found a supper tray grown cold laid out on the table beside my chair. Mrs. Hall had come and gone while I slept. The clock on the mantel said that it was nearing eleven o'clock. But I felt greatly refreshed. I took a sip or two of tepid milk and some crackers, and then put on my coat. I went out to my car, got the flashlight out of the glove compartment, laid it on the seat beside me. I drove down to the ruined farmhouse.

The barn stood silhouetted against the stars, not far from the cellar hole with its cargo of charred timbers. Here and there a wisp of smoke still rose, over twenty-four hours latter, from some piece of charcoal. I opened the barn, drove the car inside, got out, and closed the great sliding door.

In the light of the flash I could see many car tracks and footprints in the muddy snow. Mine would be lost among them. I felt sure the officials had had little time to sift through the debris. There was a rope strung around the house on stakes, with signs spaced around it: "No Trespassing. Investigation Area. Unauthorized Personnel Keep Out."

I knew where I wanted to go. In my mind there was a blueprint of the house, and I knew the safe would have fallen into the cellar just beneath Charles' study. I circled the house until I found a way down into the foundations and made my way carefully to where I was sure the safe would be buried.

There was evidence that a hand had already searched the area because debris had been cleared where I was standing. But who would it have been> for a moment I was frightened – who would know about the safe besides Rafe and me? They had surely  been looking for Charles' remains only, to this point. I began to clear away another layer of charred boards, and in a little while I found it — a corner of the iron safe lying among fallen plaster and a timber, I saw no signs of Charles' body, so they must have found it and stopped digging. But I was terribly tense and apprehensive as I searched. I prayed tbe safe hadn't fallen on its face, for I couldn't have turned it over by myself. I began to tremble. I heard a car come up the road from the village -- its headlamps struck upward through the night as it topped the rise just in front of the house after the road had passed over the culvert of the stream below and begun the long curve up to Blind Man's Hill.

I froze and stooped down. The motor paused as the car drew abreast of the drive. My heart paused also — and then I heard the acceleration, and the whine of snow tires fading toward the cemetery,

I was very fortunate: the safe had fallen straight down and was standing on its stubby legs. I found the door, cleared away in front of it, and discovered it to be absolutely unharmed, though the metal was discolored from the heat,

I had seen Charles open the safe several times, thought I could remember the combination. It took me several tries, but the door opened, finally, The Journal Charles had stuck inside at the last moment lay there on a narrow shelf. There was a file folder containing some sheets of paper stuck into the journal, and in other compartments and spaces there were all sorts of family papers that stretched down the years, from Charles' Uncle John's time back through the generations of Putnams who had lived in this house, in this village.

I took the Journal, with the file folder, and touched nothing else. After closing the safe, I stirred things around to disguise my having tampered, and I climbed out of the cellar. I went to the barn, got out the car, and took an old swatch of hay to mess up the tracks. Then, without light, I drove away. In a few minutes I was back at Rafe's house.

Before I opened Charles' Journal I took off my clothes, found the washer, dropped in everything but my coat, which I put into a plastic garbage bag. I would have it cleaned in Gardiner when I went to see Rafe later next day. The coat was an old one — it must have belonged to Mrs. Hall. She would want it back, or I would have destroyed it. I cleaned my shoes — sneakers someone had lent me, I assumed, and took a shower.

By the time I got out, the clothes were ready for the dryer — they were my own clothss, the ones I had been wearing when Rafe found me in bed. I would have to buy a new wardrobe. I was exhausted when I had finished, and I wanted to be awake by the time Mrs. Hall showed up in the morning, so I put off beginning to read the Journal and hid it instead in a closet. I set the alarm for five A. M. and went to bed as I heard the clock strike one.

The next morning — Monday — I got up, ironed the dry clothes, and dressed before dawn. I made the bed, washed the dishes of the supper Mrs. Hall had made me the night before, and fixed some breakfast. When Mrs, Hall arrived around seven, I was sitting in the living room reading a magazine. It was barely thirty-one hours since the fire.

"Well!" Mrs. Hall said when she came in. "You look peaked, and no wonder, but otherwise one would hardly know...," She broke off her sentence, and a look of pity crossed her face. "Oh, I'm sorry, Miiss Cara. Forgive me."

"It's all right, Mrs. Hall," I said. "I feel well. Please sit down," She came to sit beside me and took my hand, I conquered a reflex to pull away, "Will you have some coffee?" She seemed mildly astonished as I reached over end poured her a cup from the pot.

She shook her head, "You're an amazing young woman," she said with a strange note in her voice. "Have you already eaten?" I nodded. "I didn't have the heart to make you last night. I hope the supper wasn't ice cold."

''It was delicious,'' I said. I lit a cigarette. I’ll be going in to Gardiner to see Reverend Hawkins today,"

"Would you like me to come along?"

"Thank you, no, I can manage. I'd like to be alone as much as possible. You understand. I have a lot of thinigs to get used to,"

She dipped her chin once, looking hurt, "I understand,

Miss Cara," We sat silently for a little while. "Those sneakers you are wearing belonged to my son. I hope they fit all right."

I said they did, and that I'd have to stop at the bank today so that I could buy a few things, "They're just old clothes, Miss Cara. There's no need to return them, even. No rush at all," She stared at the floor. "But could you tell me one thing?"

        "Of course," I said, "How did you get that burncd place on the left one? And they look so clean. You must have washed them."

"Yes, I did. I dropped a coal on them when I fixed the fire last night." She looked at the fireplace where the logs were stacked neatly on the andirons, above a clean hearth. I finished my coffee and offered her another cup.

Saturday Jan. 9^th. Cara told me nothing of Charles’ Journal when she came to see me that Monday, nor did she mention it till after I was released on Thursday. I had been rather badly burned, though at the time it had happened I hadn't realized it. I felt rotten, even with pain killers. When Cara came into the room I was amazed at how calm she looked, though the way she was dressed you'd think she'd been on relief for a long time — the sneakers and an old pea-jacket of mine.

Cara acted calm too, It was hard for me to believe she had lost a lover, escaped a murder, and here she was reaching out to touch my cheek, walking around as though nothing had happened. I found out later how wrong that impression was. It was sheer will- power that was keeping her going. I have never met anyone who had more pure determination.

She sat down and looked at me with those great gray eyes, the dark hair outlining her face like an old-fashioned picture frame. "I haven't had a chance to thank you, Rafe."

I shook my head against the pillow. "No," I said.

"Don't stop me. I owe you my life...." She stopped, musing, and a distant look came into her eyes. She gave a short, sharp laugh. "Maybe you're right," she said, "maybe I shouldn't be thanking you after all," She glanced at me.

What she could see of my face must have looked hurt.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. You're a brave man as well as a good one, and I couldn't appreciate what you've done any more than I do. Truly." She leaned over and brushed a kiss against my cheek. "How are you?" she asked.

"I'll be all right, but I'll be honest and say I feel lousy right now."

"I won't bother you for long, Rafe," she said. "But you've done so much for Charles and me, I wonder if you wouldn't mind doing another favor for both of us — all three of us, really," she stopped and looked at me straight. I nodded.

"Please, don't say anything to anyone about this, no more than you've already told the police."

I suppose I shouldn't have agreed, but I was too tired, and felt too sorry for Cara, for Charles — for us all, And it wouldn't have done any good, I felt, to rake up the embers of what had been consumed in the fire. I still think that' true, even now that I've read the Journal.

But I do have a good many reservations and qualms about what Cara has gotten me to agree to since. It is morbid. Before I became a minister I was trained as a psychologist. It was one of the great insights of my life to discover that modern psychology is nothing more nor less than the old religion, theology, in a new dress. It occurs to me now that I've read Charles' journal that writers such as Charles — failure though he felt himself to be — are psychologists and theologians too. All great writing is inquiry into the nature of man and the Universe, and being a psychologist, perhaps I oughtn't to use a literary term to describe what I consider to be Cara's present state, though Preud used terms from literature, and so do many others, though not necessarily from Poe, but I can't think of a technical term that more adequately defines Cara at this point: she exhibits what I can only call a "Ligeiea syndrome." Excessive morbidity. She may be in danger of following Charles into his delusions regarding witchcraft and supernaturalism.

Cera will read this, as I will read what she writes, so perhaps what we are doing here will help clear away the shadows, rather than reinforce them, as I fear may happen.

By the time I was released from the hospital on Thursday, Cara had moved out of my house and into an old trailer up the road a bit on Blind Man's Hill, nearly across from Mrs. Hall's place, though hidden down a dirt drive among some trees, She had bought it outright for $800.00. It had been owned by summer residents who had gotten too old to keep coming back, and Cara had made a good bargain. It had ben kept in excellent shape; it had been winterized, and an acre of land went with it. There are a septic tank, a good well, and decent heating and cooking facilities. It was electrified, and Cara has a phone installed. The old man had even built a carport, which gave a little protection against the Maine winters.

When I got back hone, Cara was the first to call on me after Mrs. Hall, who drove me back in my own car, It was then that Cara told me about the Journal and showed it to me, along with the file folder that went with it. The folder contained a narrative Charles had written about the Salem witch trials, a lot of notes, and two hand-written pages of the novel he had been working on when he died.

Cara left the material with me — it did a good deal more than astonish; when I think of it, I can feel the prickling along the nape of my neck still. And when I think of what I am doing right now, with this pen…, I can only fight down my feelings and hope that it will all come out right at last, and pray that Cara ill become truly more like the woman she presents as a facade to the public, less like the thin and wandering wraith in Poe's absinthian dream.

Sunday, Jan. 10^th. There is such a thing as true grief. There is nothing wrong with mourning the death of a lover. Charles and I were more than lovers — we would have been married at last, if he hadn't been ruined by his frigid wife Norine, and haunted by her death end the death af his daughter Melanie lest October. Perhaps I should have told him, but he was so ill, in such a state. I was waiting for better times. We had been lover and mistress for two yeare by the time I graduated from the college where he taught. I left carrying with me more of Charles than he knew. It is agony to think that, if I had said omthing, he might still be alive. But it is as likely that it would have changed nothing, or sent him out even farther, into catatonia maybe.

When I heard he had left his wife just before this school year began, I dropped my studies in graduate school and followed him here. I found him terribly ill, and I tried to cure him, but I failed,

Norine had already emasculated him to the point of impotence — and then the accident finished the job of destroying his brilliant mind. It ruined him as a writer just as his sense of guilt had destroyed hie manhood. It nearly destroyed me, too, and often I wish it had.

The inquest is over — what a nightmare, another one. Charles is Iying low now with his wife and first daughter in the little graveyard near the farm, There is no marker yet on his grave.

Rafe was released from the hospital just in time to conduct the burial service for Charles, as he had done for Norine and Melanie. Again, except for Mrs. Hall, Rafe and I were the only mourners present on that cold December day. At first, the undertaker had said the ground was too frozen for digging, but I found a way — it was I who made the arrangements, for Charles who has no living relatives. At least, none he knew of, so I arranged for his cremation — what little was left of him to be cremated. I feel a sense of,,.well, irony, when I think of the fact that he underwent trial by fire twice. It was possible to dig a hole large enough to accommodate the small urn of ashes in the cold Maine earth.

As Rafe said the words "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," I saw a black shadow skirting the graveyard in the snowy dusk. I have seen it since, in the woods around my trailer. It is Charles' cat, Catch, I am sure, gone wild. I leave food for him on my doorstep each evening, and it is gone in the morning. I hope it’s Catch who is eating it. I will take care of him, if I can, as I tried to take care of Charles.

I did not open the Journal until Charles was decently entombed. When I had finished reading I was shaken. I wish I had realized how far his obsession had gone. He had needed institutional help, not merely the help Rafe and I tried to give him. I wish, now, I had read his Journal while it was being written there, in the dim rooms of that ancient farm.

How could he have believed I was a witch, and that

Rafe was a warlock? How could he have come to think that his dear old pet, Catch the black cat, was a familiar, the incarnation of Asmodeus, demon of the bedchamber? And how could he have imagined that Rafe and I were having an affair, that Norine and Melanie, and the people of Salem village — his Putnam ancestors and their victims in the witch hunt — had come back to claim him as one of their own?

That last scene in the Journal — that Black Mass out of De Sade, where Rafe was the priest and I the altar — I shall never be able to forget it or understand in what way reality was transformed in his imagination into so dark a nightmare, I am glad, no, extremely glad that I stole the book. No one must ever see it other than Rafe. Charles Ally was nowhere near the failure imagined himself to be, his writings will live a long while, and nobody must know how his mind had been destroyed at the end. One day he will be recognized as the genius he was, and I will do what I can to save his image and memory.

Monday, Jan. 11^th. When Cara gave me The Journal of Charles

Ally I asked her where she got it. She sat in my living room on a blustery winter evening. Heavy snow was falling. She said, "Before I tell you that, please read it."

I began to leaf through it and saw what at first looked like a hodgepodge - diary entries; notations from old books; portions of Charles' biographical novel, or perhaps "prose epic" would be a better phrase, that Charles had been working on, copies of entries from a childhood scrapbook Charles had kept. And a long narrative of the Salem Putnams' involvement in the celebrated witch hunt. This last was separately kept in a file folder stuck into the journal, and two final, handwritten p8ges of the novel, The Book of the Black Heart, were in the folder also.

Evidently the Salem narrative had been pieced together from original research in the books by which Charles had slowly been swallowed down on his Uncle John's homestead, and to judge from the notes and fragmentary account his uncle had himself put together over the years: everything is in the folder.

The effect of the Journal, just at a glance, was one of confusion — all those overlapping narratives and pieces of history, together with the diary entries and some old letters copied out. I saw my name and Cara's cropping up, often, together with Norine's, Melanie's, and Catch's. The letters seemed to be from someone named Wesley Court, and they had nineteenth century dates; Charles seems to have believed this person, who had originally lived here in Frankfort, was somehow more real than the people who live here now, for there was almost no mention of local persons beyond a reference or two to the postmistress.

This initial confusion, however, was to dissipate as I read the book later on. Cara said to me, "Don't read it right now, take your time over the holidays. You've got to let it sink in slowly, as Charles sank into it."

It was a strange thing to say. I looked at her as I laid the book on a table, and I was startled by the haunted look in her gray eyes. Her whole face seemed shadowed. "I'11 take my time," I said, "there's no rush." We sat for a while. I tried to get a conversation going, but had no luck. Cara seemed abstracted. At one point she looked up at me. "How is the investigation going?"

"I understand they found an old safe with its con tents still intact." This seemed to interest her.

"What was in it?" She got out a cigarette and lit it. While she smoked she nervously kept tapping it over an ashtray, her eyes moving restlessly, but never meeting mine.

"Papers, Family papers, dating back to the 18th century, some newer ones. A will among them."

Cara jerked her body forward and looked right at me for a change, "A will? By Charles?”

I nodded,

"What was in it?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know, it's been turned over to the courts."

"When was it dated?" Cara asked.

"I don't know that, either. Why?"

"No reason." She sat back and was quiet for a long time. As she waa leaving, Cara said, "I didn't know Charles had made a will. So he had a secret too."

At the door I said, "I realize all this is new and hard to bear, Cara, but you've got to take it easy. I don't like the things I see in your eyes. You've got to begin to accept it,"

She turned to me and touched me gently on the shoulder.

"You're a good man," she said. "I owe you a good deal, and so does Charles. Do me a favor — one more favor'" I nodded again. "Don't worry about me so much. I'II be all right, I promise. No matter what, please don't worry,"

"Okay, Cara," I said, and let her out. I watched her get into her car. She backed out through the falling snow, The tail lights turned the air red, and the flakes in the headlamps looked like a crystal curtain falling.

As it turned out, I was too busy at the college during the next few days to get to Charles' Journal. The Christmas holidays were upon us, and the snow was so heavy I had to spend to nights in one of the dorms, as I couldn't get back to Frankfort twenty-five miles away. Usually it was easy to commute —the Maine highway people know how to deal with winter. It was just as well, though, that things turned out as they did — a number of the students needed extra counseling, as they often do when they have to return to family situations after a few months away in comparative freedom. Too many of them get to thinking they are free, adult at last, and when it dawns on them that no one is free — a temporary revelation, until they come back to campus again — they have a struggle with conscience and guilt. It’s hard to feel snug again.

Wednesday, January 13th. As soon as I got Mrs, Hall's note I drove up to the trailer, which is quite small. At one end is the “living room," which is not separated from the kitchen. The kitchen table sits beside the door, up against the little heating unit. Separated from the kitchen-living room by a sliding plywood door is a small compartment with a bed in it — Clarissa's quarters, it turned out. At the other end of the trailer is Cara's bedroom — hardly big enough to hold the double bed. I had been inside the trailer only once before, just after Cara bought it.

"Where in the world have you been?" I asked her — and stopped speaking as soon as I saw the cat. Cara noticed the direction of my stare. I confess to a creepy feeling as I gazed at Catch — he had figured prominently in Charles' journal.

"He's come to live with us," Cara said, and I immediately felt foolish for being influenced, even for a moment, by a fantasy.

Clarissa was certainly no fantasy. I wish Mrs. Hall had prepared me a little. Cara's daughter came out of her alcove and stood looking up at me while I tried to focus my eyes on her. That weird feeling returned. Cara introduced us, and I sat down on a kitchen chair. I could think of nothing to say for a little while.

Clarissa is a beautiful child — dark- haired, brown-eyed, a slight frame like her mother's but with features that remind me strongly of Charles, a very feminine version of Charles. There is no doubt in my mind she is his daughter. Clarissa went over to sit on the couch with Catch and a doll, and Cara poured me some coffee.

Gradually, I came out of my daze or shock or revery — whatever it was -— and listened to Cara's story. Charles had never known about his second daughter. She had been born after Cara had graduated and her affair with Charles had come to an end. At the time of Clarissa's conception, Charles had gone on a month's reading-tour of colleges in the Middle West and had taken Cara with him,

When Cara had found she was pregnant, she had considered an abortion, but in some kind of romantic undergraduate agony, had decided to have the baby, which was born in August, 1968. Cara had kept silent about the child.

"Then," she said, "last September, when I heard that Charles had left Norine, I decided to come here and tell him about his other child." She sipped her coffee, which was getting cold — I had hardly touched my own cup,

"Why didn't you tell him?"

She shook her head, "When I saw the state he was in — all eaten up by guilt and his sense af failure as a writer and as a man — I felt I had to wait until he got back to some kind of normalcy. Then Norine and Melanie died, and he got worse instead — and then the fire...."

I couldn't think of anything to say.

"Well?" Cara looked at me. Her eyes seemed defiant or something — I couldn't place it, I put my hand over hers as it rested on the table. She flinched as I did it, but I kept my hand where it was.

"Why don't you get the hell out of this town?' asked. "Go back to grad school. This is no place to bring Clarissa. Sooner or later you're going to have to begin to forget.”

'        She took her hand out from under mine, leaned for-ward.

"Forget?" She was squinting, "How am I going to forget?" Without moving her eyes from mine Cara pointed to the couch, "Her name Is Ally. When she wss born I told them I was married to, Charles Ally — and was, for a months; and I: was again for a little while this fall, even if nothing was legal, But I was more his wife than Norine ever was.'

She sat back, still defiant. 'They're going to recognize that fact before I leave, if I ever do — Mrs, Hall and all the rest of these back-country New England blue-noses, Clarissa is Charles Ally's heiresss, and I can prove it, I will prove it, Charles left something behind besides a few poens and pieces of prose. He left flesh and blood. And he left me.” Cara began to cry softly.

I knew that Cara would need a job, so I made some inuiries in the biology department. I gave them her qualifications, and it looked rather hopeful that there might be a need for a lab supervisor next semester. No sooner had I gotten back to Frankfort the day vacation began, than Mrs. Hall showed up and came hustling into the house.

"Rev. Hawkins," she said, her matronly figure planted in an agitated posture in the middle of the living room, some kind of hostile worry on her face, "I've been hoping you'd get back soon."

I looked at her, She paused for a moment, and then she said, "Miss Cara has disappeared."

The trailer etood empty through the holidays while I read Charles' journal, not once but over and over, returning to pasaages to ponder them, Or, alternatively, to find my mind sliding off the page before me to wonder about Cara and her whereabouts. No letters came, no Christmas card even; she had left no note — that was the strangest Christmas I ever spent. For a while I began to think, sitting in my chair on Blind Man's Hill that I was beginning to sink out of sight into the pages Charles wrote there at the foot of the road, just as he had slowly sunken into the woodwork of his ancestors, into the old books that lined his library walls, into the 19th century and then into the 18th, and at last all the way into his delusions, guilt, sex-obsessions — you name it.

It was very hard for me to accept Charles' portrait of me as it rose off the blue-lined sheets to grin into my face like some distorted funhouse mirror caricature. I came off as a blonde, hip, tennis-racquet-swinging phony churchman out of a latter-day campus activist revival.

Even using all these adjectives doesn't begin to describe the cartoon of me Charles carried around in his head. He also saw me as his rival for Cara's affections, and in the end I was a priest in an orgiastic Satanic ceremony straight out of the most fantastic fiction available in a Forty-second Street paperback bookstore.

And he believed it all — or conned himself into believing it so that he could commit murder and suicide by rationalizing that he was ridding the world of a witch and of his own possessed soul.

But even that isn't certain. Perhaps — I think he must have — wanted to be saved in the end, and he wanted Cara to be saved too. Why else would he have arranged it so that the fire got underway just before our appointment for a second go at hypnotherapy? It is a fact that he imagined it so even though, according to his last pages, he thought my pounding on the door was Wesley Court returning to Frankfort from a 19th century stay in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, only Cara was saved. Charles was possessed. His trauma ran so much deeper than I had thought it did. He should have been institutionalized, and I feel tremendously guilty that I did not realize it in time. Maybe Charles was right about me in some ways. Perhaps I was blinded by pride and vanity into my own delusion — that I was capable of helping him because of my training in psychology.

And the portrait of Cara that emerges! Somehow, I managed to bring my mind back to reality for brief periods — long enough to conduct the Christmas services at the local church, at least. If it hadn't been for Mrs. Hall, I'd have forgotten to eat half the time.

I remember w perplexed she was at my behavior; how, at one point, as she was dusted she picked up the Journal, and I snatched it out of hor hand and mumbled something about neding to write a sermon in it. There was worry in her countenance, but something harder than that, too.

"You needn't worry so much about Miss Cara," she said, shaking her feather duster into the fireplace. "She can take care of herself, I'm sure."

I began to reply — not to what she had said, but to the tone of her voice, but thought better of it and left the room. Nothing I could have said would ave made sense to her. And it was true — I was worried about Cara. She was as much my concern as Charles had been, we were too closely involved with each other's histories to keep the distance Mrs. Hall would, I assume, have thought proper.

New Year's day came and went. School began again, and then, on the evening of Monday, January 11th, I got home and found a note from Mrs. Hall. It said that Cara had returned. "You'd better go see," she had added at the bottom of the page.

Tuesday, 12^th. Catch has come to live with us in the trailer, when he got back we found him sitting on the step, He was as big and black as ever. While I was away f had worried about him a good deal. I hoped he hadn't gotten too dependent on the meals I had been setting out for him, and I was relieved when I saw him. when we had gotten out of the car Catch let out a great meow of welcome and came over to lean against our legs.

It was chilly inside, but I had left the heat on enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and soon it was warm again.

“Mommy?" Clarissa said, "I'm hungry." Her smile was as bright as Christmas candles.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Twenty-One

Part Twenty-One

 

Monday. When I awoke yesterday morning, after the exorcism, I lay in bed and listened. I heard nothing but the ordinary sounds of Maine in llte autmn -- the wind, the water, the occasional distant sound of a csr or truck on the road. I looked around the house and everything was in its place -- the hallseat and the wardrobe, the fire, died to ash, in the fireplace, everything but the picture over the mantel. I went to look at the spot, and then I looked down into the grate: I saw the outline of a frame laid in ash. The canvas was entirely consumed.

I dressed and went looking for Cara. She was in the basement, just coming up the stairs as I entered the dining room. Without words, we greeted each other, and f kissed her. While she was making breakfast, I went up to the library and got out The Book of Common Prayer. Opening it to "All Saints Day," I read, "And f saw another angel ascending from the east…and he cried out with a loud voice to the other angels…, ‘Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.’ And I heard the number of them which were Sealed; and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand, of all tbe tribes of Israel.

"Of the tribe of ,ludah were sealed twelve thousand.

“Of ths tribe of Reuben, were sealed twelve thousand.

“Of the tribe of Gad were sealed twelvs thousand.

"Of the tribe of Aser were sealed twelve thousand.

"Of the tribe of Nepthalem were sealed twelve thousand.

"Of the tribe of Paneesee were sealed twelve thousand,

"Of the tribe af Simeon were sealed twelve thousand.

"Of the tribe of Levi were sealed twelve thousand.

“Of the tribe of Isaac were sealed twelve thousand,

“of the tribe of Joseph ware sealed twelve thousand.

“Of the tribe af Benjamin were sealed twelve thousand.

"After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all. nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, stood before the throne, before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.’ And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders, and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God, saying, Amen!”

Rafe joined us for breakfast, snd he patted Cara's hand as she served us. "Everything okay?" he asked. Cara nodded, and he turned his eyes on me.

"Yes, " I said. "I think everything's all right now."

"Good. but I want to continue the sessions for a while, just to be sure." I must have looked alarmed, but he laughed, holding out his cup for Cara to fill. "Don't worry about it, Charles." He pushed the hair out of his eyes. "The first is the worst. f'rom here on out, it's just insurance. I'l1 be along next Saturday night, and we'll have another go."

When ilafe had left, I went out for a walk in the fields. Csra was on the porch, calling for Wesley Cetch. I came up to her and asked what she was doing.

"Calling the cat, of course."

I felt a cold shudder run down my spine. "'Whatever for? He isn't coming back, not after last night."

Cara looked strangely at me. "Charles, what are you talklng about?

"You were there too," I said. "Didn't you see him run up the chimney?" I could not understand why she began to look-frightened. "The exorcism,' I said. "It worked. Asmodeus is gone."

She took me by the hand. "Charles," she said, very gently, "there was no exorcism, what are you ssying? Rafe put you to sleep and tried to make you see for yourself what was botherlng you, He didn't let you remember consciously this time, but he'll start to next time, now that he knows, and slowly you’ll be able to — Oh, Charles. he told ne all about it. You can't remember anything."

But I told her what I remembered, and she is feigning surprise. She must be, I havc worried about it all day. A while ago, I asked her why she thought Wesley Catch has disappeared.

"He’s just run off," Cara answered. "Toms will do that now and then, you know.”

When I: came into Uncle John's study to write this evening, I found a letter Iying opened an the desk:

"Lowell, April 10, 1860

"Friend Charles,

"I received your letter last week, but I trust you will excuse me for not answering it before, I had to write home last Sunday and I was too 1azy to write any more. Miss Tilly Huckford arrived here last week, I have not seen her yet I went to see the H…. O…. last Sunday evening had a nice time, Ellen Harrier is coming home in about three weeks I presume you will be happy to see her, William Weston was here about three days ago, I did see him. As I was looklng over the Boston Journal I saw that the Knotting house has burned last Saturday. I think you had better have a fire engine as they have one here that goes by steam.

I need a nice excuse to go over to the river since Louisa has movsd. I can stop over there when I come home. Wont that be nice

Charle? Is Ssrah Allen in Lowell? If she is let me know for I should

like to see her. How are all the boys in Frankfort? Have they begun to think about shaving yet? It smells kind of fishy here sometimes when the factory girls are out.

"Today business has been very good for a rainy one we have taken on the cash sales besides what we have cleared, I had a letter from Laura Jack last week of Richmond Me. I hear the steamer G was burnt at her harbor, I suppose they will have another on the river pretty soon.

“Give my respects to all. the girls & boys

"You will have to excuse me for not writing any more it is all most time to shut up.

"Good by

"Wesley"

Tuesday, 3rd. I am overwhelmingly relieved to be rid of Bodman. Tomorrow I will try to get back to my novel.

Wednesday, 4th.

THE BOOK OF THE BLACK HEART

Chaptor Six,

The Gunner's Story

         It was the Gunner's mount the sailors were using that night to spin their sea stories on, as the carrier plowed through the star-bitten Pacific, and it was the Gunner's turn.

         "Looking back on things," he said, "I guess life had been pretty good, at least for me, until my old man kicked the bucket. I might've even been able to live with that if I hadn't've found out how he died one night when my mother thought I was asleep and got yakking to her best friend, somebody she'd known since she was in school.

         "Dad used to take me out to the lake for a day's fishing. We'd float around out there, just dangling our lines and hauling in the black bass. When we got tired we'd lie back in the bottom of our big, flat-bottomed scow, pull our straw hats down over our eyes, and let the sun beat down on us. Man, that was the life. We'd be stripped to the waist and sweating like horses. I could feel the sun soothing the muscles where they ached from being bent over the side of the boat. The smell of the fish we'd caught mixed with the pinewood smell of the scow. It was sort of like a nice form of ether and made me doze off.

         "Every now and then a shore breeze would blow by, and we could smell the woods that bordered the lake. The breeze would rumple around our heads for a few minutes, and just as we'd be getting used to it it would stop and the sun would beat down as hard as ever.

         "Once in a while a horsefly would buzz around me and finally decide to land. You have to slap 'em fast or they get away and pretty soon come back to pester you again.

         "After a while the breezes would start to come up more often and the sides of the boat would block off the sun, and we'd know it was time to go home. Dad would row all the way to shore while I sat and watched the last of the sun glint on his skin. There would be purple splotches in the sky over the wood, and the ripples in the water were gold.

         "I was always first out of the scow. I'd sprint over the side, splash into the water, and wade the last few feet to the beach. The sand felt good. And then I'd watch Dad as he got our gear out of the boat and walked toward me. Before he caught up with me I'd stretch till I felt my bones creak, and then lead the way along the path through the woods.

         We had to walk along this pine-needle path to get to Dad's jalopy. Sometimes we'd stop and listen to the wind in the big trees, or look for animals or birds. Sometimes there was a stray bee on its last trip back to the hive.

         "But then he died. I was there when they brought him in off the lake. After that I used to have a hard time getting to sleep. I'd go to bed and just lay there listening to my heard pump blood. If my mom checked on me I'd keep my eyes closed and make like I was in Dreamland.

         "One night I heard my mother in the hall whispering to somebody, and then she opened the door a crack and I heard her say, 'Doesn't he look cunning, all curled up in bed like that? Oh, you wouldn't believe what an imp he can be sometimes, not when you see him like this, the little angel. You'd never believe he has bad dreams sometimes, poor dear, ever since his dad died in that accident.' I heard her sigh.

         "'Poor Sally,' her friend said — I think her name was Smith, Alice Smith. 'You've had a hard life, but it's coming out all right, isn't it? You've hooked another one, haven't you? That's why I dropped in. I'm dying to hear all about it.'

         "'Oh, all right,' I heard mom giggle. 'But you've got to promise never to tell anybody. Some people might misunderstand, but I know you won't. I stirred. 'Sshh,' she whispered. "Come into the living room before he wakes up. Honestly, I never get a minute to myself any more. Come on. I'll tell you how I reeled him in.'

         "When they closed the door again I got up and snuck out to the hall. I heard them in the living room, so I eased on down to the doorway and listened.

         "'Beer?' mom asked, 'or something stronger?"

         "'Stronger,' Mrs. Smith said. I chanced a look around the corner and I could see them sitting sideways to me. I could see Alice was all ears. 'What's he like?' she asked.

         "'Oh, he's great!' Mom got up to mix martinis. 'He's a big brute of a fella, with fat freckled cheeks and a grin as wide as a pound of bacon. Rrrufff!'

         "'Tell me more! Where'd you meet him?' Alice took her drink as mom settled into the scatter pillows on the couch. She rolled her eyes and faked a look around her for spies. I ducked.

         "'Don't tell a soul, now promise?' Alice gave a nod full of quick breaths. 'Actually,' mom said in what was supposed to be a low voice, 'I met him before big Mark died. Oh! He swept me right off my feet one day at Danny's Lunch downtown. He just up and sat down at my table — the place was crowded, and the next thing I knew, his knees were nudging me so cute-like while we ate our noodle soup. Oh,' she laughed, 'he's such a card. Just like a little boy, even though he's so big.' She rolled her eyes again. I sat down on the floor in the hall and didn't look at them any more.

         "'Goodness, that's so romantic,' Alice Smith said. I could imagine her teats bobbing and her face flushing. I didn't have to see. 'How I envy you!' she said in little breaths.

         "'Till then I'd just been feeling like any old sack. Mark never paid any attention to me, you know. All he ever wanted to do was take junior fishing. Honestly. Two ten-year-olds in the house was too much.' She giggled again and was quiet while she sipped her drink. In the corner the teevee belched and flickered — I could see the shadows coming out into the hall. Then mom said, 'So, while my two boys were out fishing, Harry would come visit me. I fell for him hook, line, and sinker.

         "'Well, this went on for about a month. I was getting about ready to get a lawyer when what should happen one day but Mark — big Mark I mean — walked in the door early from work.'

         "'No' said Mrs. Smith. I took a quick peek — the one eye I could see what as big and bright as a light bulb.

         "'Oh, yes,' said mother, 'and there we were all over the parlor rug, my skirts up around my hips and Harry huffing all over me, snorting like a....'" The Gunner stopped a minute to listen to the sea. Then, "Bull," he said.

         "'In a minute it was all over,' mom told Mrs. Smith. 'Mark got all red in the face and Harry got up. He was laughing. Oh, he knows how to take things. He zipped himself up and got ready for a fight.'

         "'Then what happened?' I heard Mrs. Smith gasp.

         "'Nothing. Mark just walked over to the closet and got his rod and things.'

         "'Rod!'

         "'Rod and reel.' Mom was quiet for another second. Then, '"I'm going fishing," Mark said. In his business suit, no less. '"In your business suit?" I asked. By this time I was decent again. But he didn't answer. He just walked to the door and out, and that's the last I saw of him.'

         "'Alive, anyhow.' I heard mom sip her drink and saw the flare of her lighter as she lit a cigarette. 'After big Mark left, about ten minutes later, maybe, little Mark came in just as Harry was about to leave. He just barely missed us finishing up the job big Mark had interrupted. I think he suspected something anyhow. He gave Harry a funny look and said, "Pop home yet?" I told him he'd gone fishing.

         "Without me?" Then he was out the door like a flash.' "I got up and went back to my room then," the Gunner said. "I slammed the door — I didn't give a shit if they heard me. Mom came in 'What was that door slamming?' she asked me, but I didn't answer. I just kept laying on the bed staring and remembering that day. I don't know how long mom stood there asking me how much I heard, I didn't even do anything when she shook me and bounced me up and down in the bed and slapped me. She finally stopped screaming and crying, and after a while there was the lake again, and it was late in the afternoon. something was wrong. I'd been running, or maybe pedaling my bike. I don't know how I got to the lake, because it was quite a way — I just knew I had to catch up.

         "By the time I was standing on the strip of beach I could feel the night starting to come on — the moon was already up flopping around in the tops of the pines like a sunfish. My legs hurt, and I couldn't breathe — it was like there was water in my chest. I looked for our scow, and it was out there, but there was something funny about it. And then I saw — it was upside-down, and there were a bunch of heads bobbing around it, and another boat. I started in to yell, 'Dad! Dad!' but nobody paid me any attention. Only when I took off my shoes and started to run into the water somebody grabbed me and said, 'Stay here, boy. They'll have him soon.'

         "But the moon was high before they brought him in, all soggy, and his eyes staring at me in the dark. His feet were all wound up in line and his metal gear box was caught in the line too. They all just stood around and looked at him, and sometimes they'd look at me too, and then away. I waited for something to happen, but nobody did anything. 'Why don't you all do something? Help him, help him! Jesus!' I said, but they all just shook their heads.

         ""'It's no use, son. He's been down there for three hours anyway, ' somebody said, a cop I think. 'The ambulance will be here soon.'

         "But I looked at him and I saw something. 'No, no, he's alive, don't you see?' I said. 'Look, his heart's beating, his heart...'

         "I managed to rip away from the guy that was holding me, and I fell down beside Dad and put my ear on his chest. I could feel it. His heart thumping, almost jumping out of his chest, trying to keep going. It was slimy wet against my ear, it was wriggling and squirming, even though you could see his face was beginning to bloat and it was all blue. I hugged him and looked up at them all standing around. 'Oh, Jesus, won't you help him!' I screamed. 'Look, his heart!' I tore open his shirt, still with his tie on.

         "And you could see it squirming and wiggling, see it with your naked eyes, — a fish caught in his undershirt, a big black bass, fighting to cut loose but losing, its head stuck out near the armpit, its bulgy eyes like to moons staring down at me out of the sky, out of the pines that reeled off into a dark voice that said, 'I wonder what mom will say when we get home for supper.' And then no more dreams, nothing," said the Gunner, "except night and the smell of pine."

         I can think of nowhere to go from here. I look ahead, and Nothus slips into nothingness; the ship looms across the indecipherable and unfathomable ocean without a helmsman. My books gather me in as though to say, "Time for a rest," but I am resisting them with all my power.

I have had another letter from Wesley Court, thank God:

"Lowell, May 10 1860

"Charles,

         "The top of the morning to you

         "How do you get along courting the girls now since the Snow went off. Last night we had a splendid fire about twelve O’Clock but did not go I can tell you X liked to lay abed too well. I went to see where if was this morning. Dont let any one see this I will tell you where it was.

         "It was a house of ill fame where they keep pretty Girls I saw two of them & the lady of the house this morning.

         "The old lady was telling how it caught afire.

         "You say it is very dry down in Frankfort, but not dryer than it is here. We have not had any rain for the last two months until yesterday. We had a slight rain of about four hours.

         "But I think real estate will rise to day again.

         "I suppose you still stick to the Sons of Temperance dont you. I had rather stick to the Daughters for my part.

         "The bells begin to ring & I must close

         "Give my love to all the girls

                                                      "Yours truly

                                                               Wesley Court

"Write Soon

"N.B.

         "Burn this as quick as you read it."

Thursday, 5th. Rafe stopped by for coffee this morning, and I joined him and Cara. He looked very cheerful.

         "Cara tells me you've been working on your book some more. How's it going?"

         Cara sat down with us, next to Rafe. "He typed all day yesterday, but he won't talk." She looked up at me and smiled. I love her eyes when they look like that — the color of clouds on a day like this one: gray, and a touch of blue sky behind them.

         "I wrote chapter six," I said. But I could not tell them the book will never be finished. I have reached the center of the circle, the eye of calm, and my voyage has ended in nothing, where it began in the heart of my protagonist.

         Rafe was happy. "The best therapy in the world," he said. "Write it out. It's good." He stretched like a cat. "I'll go over around ten Saturday evening for another session. That all right with you, Charles?" He shook his blond forelock back into place.

         I nodded.

         "I won't be by tomorrow morning," he said. "I have appointments all day, and I'm going to have to get to school early."

         Cara looked disappointed.

         "Sorry," he said. "There are a bunch of kids who need draft counseling. The war's still non, you know."

         "It'll be on forever," Cara said, touching her cup with her lip — a voluptuous gesture.

         "Well, Saturday night, then," I said.

         Rafe rose and waved as he went out to the kitchen. He stood a moment with his hand on the doorknob. He looked back at us, and a slight, troubled look overcast his blue glance. Then he smiled again and waved. "Be happy," he said, and left. We heard his car back out into the road and drive away.

         I have spent the day walking in the fields. I went to the falls and watched the water come down over the stones from Blind Man's Hill; I crossed to the cemetery to visit my family and my friend, but all was still — only a winter sparrow or two looking for seeds among the headstones and monuments. In the late afternoon I returned to the house and sat with the books awhile, not reading, just listening to the soft murmur of voices rising out of the leather covers and falling to silence in the house among the tickings of the clocks and the chimes, Cara humming softly in the rooms among her plants — watering and feeding the green life in this landscape of coming winter.

         "Burn this as soon as you read it Charles.

                                             Lowell may 30, 1860

"Friend Charles,

         "It is with the greatest pleasure that I now attempt to answer your kind letter which I received this afternoon

         "If Mrs. Small has got the P———— it is quite sure that they have been doing or try to do something for there Country. I did as you requested me to do with your letter & I want you to do the same. Wednesday night only comes once a week & that I have to do myself.

         "We are having a few drops of rain here to night & it is not very pleasant to be on the streets so I thought I would answer your letter as you requested me to write soon

         "I do not know as I have much news to tell you, but Ile try & scrabble a few lines

         "Yesterday there was afire over in Belvedere Charley Deming our book keeper & Mr. Washburn was ringing the fire bell. Some of the fixing gave way & it come through the floor, had it not hit upon some of the timbers it would of come through all the floors & probably killed them both. Another Accident I have to tell you but not of that kind, Mr. Loomis one of our customers hung himself yesterday about three O’Clock in his own shed, he was at the store to settle up his account the day previous. Another sad accident I have to tell you Mrs. Alden another of our customers fell down her steps and broke her hip. I believe she is doing well now.

         “Well Charles, that is all the sad news I have to relate to you, but I have some few lines more to say. There was two young ladies walking out the other day, & a young Gentleman wrinkled his nose as they passed. One of the girls looked around. Says She, ‘f you don't like the fashion, you may stick your nose in my arse.’ That is about the stile of one half of them. Do you have any such mistresses?

         “You say you have not heard from Fred Hawkins since you wrote me last. I have not written him since I have been in Lowell. I have forgotten how to superscribe my letters to him but Ile endeavor to write him a few little ditties. You said Frank was home, what made him so? You did not write half enough about him. I should like to here him spin some of his long yarns, I suppose he wlll have as much to say as old Sam Little ever did. Has Brad White got home yet? He wrote to me when he was in Charleston S. C. He wanted to buy my tools, said he would be home in the spring. As this is the 3Oth day of May I thought I would see whether he is ea home or not.

         ''You said you went on a ride last Sunday over on the neck did

you see any of the pretty girls that I should have looked after if I had been there? How are all the Carney girls do you ever see them except when they are at the division? Give my respects to them when you see them.

         “Charles to tell you the barest facts I have not been home with but two girls since I have been here.

         "It is getting along towards ten O’Clock & I must go over to my boarding house and go to bed

         “I still. remain your honest friend

                                             "Wes Court

"Write soon as you told me to; I did so. I shall be home for a visit before Thanksgivings day. Look for me at your door Charles I shall knock loud."

         Cara has come up behind me, holding two cob pipes, and she is waiting.

Friday, 6th. It is all very clear to me now. I must try to write it clearly as well, so that you may be prepared, reader, if by chance this journal should be spared, which I shall make every attempt to ensure. Last night, when I was done with my entry, I turned and followed Cara to her room. I lay down on the bed fully clothed and began to smoke. I felt clear enough of mind, so that I thought perhaps this time the leaves would not adversely affect me, as they are wont to do, strangely. At first, such was the case. As I inhaled and held the smoke in my lungs, my feelings began to rise, and Cara and I began to exchange quips. They were silly in nature, and we began to giggle like school children.

         "This won't work, Charles. We've goat to cool it if we're going to get serious." She tried to force her face into repose, but was not successful. We laughed again. But, after repeated efforts, and more deep draughts of the fumes, at last we quieted. I began to experience a sense of excitement, as did Cara, I believe.

         "Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee."

         "For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is an iniquity and idolatry: because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king."

         "And he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards. He wrought much wickedness in the sight of the LORD to provoke him to anger."

         "And it came to pass when He saw John, that he said, Is it peace, John? And he answered, What peace, so long as the wickedness of thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?"

         "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

         And in another book, Infernal Conference or, The Legions of Devils by "The Listener," published at Leominster for Josiah Thomas in 1808, this:

         "Know, then, that not far from this humble cot, there is a widely extended, most tremendous, and Lonely Vale, first formed, as is supposed, by some dreadful earthquake, or some other remarkable convulsion in nature. The confines of this valley, on the outside are every where nearly level with tbe surface of the ground; but the precipice within is to the last degree horrible, insomuch that few have had fortitude enough to approach it. The ancient bards very justly called it Horide Vallis, and we, from them, the Vale of Horrors. This horrid vale has long been supposed, by the credulous vulgar, to be the haunt of infernal spirits; and some people imagine that it is the only place on earth where they freely converse about the dark designs of their maladministration.

         "My curiosity continually prompting me, I at last conquered my native timidity, and I resolved, if possible, to find an entrance into this unfrequented, unknown, and dreadful place.

         "But many months, I may say some years, were spent in this fruitless search, and I despaired of success. At length, however, having entered a very eerie and unfrequented wood, one side of which led to the very edge of the precipice, as I walked a few furlongs down a steep descent, gloomy beyond whatever I had seen before, I came to a large rock, all overgrown with ivy and moss. It had the appearance of an ancient ruin, somewhat in the form of a pyramid; The bottom occupied a considerable space, and the very top was nearly concealed by the highest branches of the tall and ancient oaks, which surround it. Near the ground, by chance, I discovered an opening, almost choked up with baleful hemlock and nightshade.

         At first I thought that this could be no other than the cave of some ancient Druid; but approaching it, and having, with much toil, cleared away the noxious weeds, I found what I had long sought for, an entrance into the dreadful cavity.

         "Here my resolution almost failed me, and I was at the point of relinquishing the long projected enterprise. At length I recollected myself a little, and resolved to descend into the place, though, as I thought, not much less horrible than hell, The passage, a little within the entrance, led downwards almost in a perpendicular direction; but its straitness, and the natural unevenness of the rocks that formed it, rendered my descent more practicable and safe than I first expected. Down, however, I went, fathoms I know not how many, ere I found myself at the bottom, and from an easy opening entered the gloomy vale."

         I can read no more of it, remembering last night, despite its light and rational style, for it recalls to my mind a piece in the scrapbook Norine sent me out of my own childhood past:

FINALE

         "Satan sat on the peak of a tall mountain. Around him Great black clouds twisted and writhed, and the rain poured down, cooling the fire-fevered earth. Satan looked down from his throne. A mourning wind whispered along the once great forests of splintered trees. Not a breath of life stirred on all the Earth. The bodies of men and animals littered the ground in all directions.”

         Cara responded as I lay upon her, my arms and legs held by hands I could not see, and I was forced into her from behind. As Cara worked, I felt something round, with sharp edges, forced into my anus. Then, with a great cry, a rod of flesh plunged into me, crushing. In a moment I felt the semen rush out of Ally and into me, and I was no longer conscious of anything.

Saturday, 7th. I have laid my plans careful1y, in veriest secret. I have not spoken to Cara about last night, and she has gone about her business as though nothing had happened. I have spent all day on my books, reading and thinking, and I know what I must do.

         I have been examining Uncle John's 1816 Bible, and within it I have found these:

         "Know not them that have familiar spirits, neither be defiled by these: fear the LORD your God."

"And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.”

"A man also or a woman who hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stonc them with stones, their blood shell be upon the earth.

"There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or en enchanter, or a witch, nor shall ye use or seek after wizards.”

About Cara and the priest, in a semicircle, stood many people, some seeming to be solid flesh, others with outlines that wavered in the candlelight. Tituba stood there, and the minister with the noose about his neck, Norine end Melany, and another girl, a little older, with a woman who must have been her mother, both dressed in Puritan dresses. There were others, both men end women, all clothed in ancient garments, and one man naked, his body misshapen, holding a stone, blood running from his mouth, nose, and eyes.

And as the priest spoke the litany, he consecrated the wine over Cara's Os Externum, and drank. Then he took the host, blessed it, and pressed it into the lips of her vagina with his fingers. He rose and stood between Cara’s Iegs, lifted his cassock. Kneeling down, he went into her and, with a loud cry — an oath — plunged deeply and groaned as Cara cried out. When he rose, I saw that it was Rafe.

My eyes were transfixed, and I was struck to rock. It was some moments before I realized that the audience were no longer watching the altar, but were turned and staring at Me. Before I could move, I felt my arms pinioned, The crowd parted to let Rafe through. He approached and stood before me,

“You have sinned in your blood, Charles Ally," he said, his voice hollow. You are one of us.” He reached forward and tore my shirt, my trousers, and I could not move. When I was naked, Norine came forward and gave him a small jar, which I recognized. Rafe opened it and began to prepare me. He rubbed the salve into my genitalia, and I burned. When I was ready, I was propelled toward the altar and forced to kneel between its legs. Then, with a mighty thrust….

I returned to the dining room and sat down at my place, the empty dish before me, so that Cara when she came back up would believe I had eaten her food. And then I heard footsteps in the living room. I was astonished. I knew there was no one else in the house but Cara and me, and I knew she had not come back up out of the cellar. I got up to look, and found Cara in the living room sitting on the couch and looking into the fire.

"If you're in here," I asked, "Who’s in the cellar? "She looked up at me. "There's no one in the cellar, Charles. Come and sit beside me." She sighed. I'm sorry it went all wrong today. I’m sorry." She was weeping.

I went to her and touched her shoulder, "It’ll be all right," I said, or I think I said. "I'll be right back."

I returned to the dining room and went to the cellarway to reach for the 1ight switch, but there was none. There was a deep glow coming from below. I made some sort of hoarse noise in my throat, stepped back, and slammed the door.

When I turned about I saw I was standing in flickering lamplight. There is no possible way to describe those sensations of fear, though I fought them as strongly as I might. I went back to the living room and cried, Cara!"

Cara was Iying naked before the hearth, her legs spread. At her head and at each of her shoulders stood a black candle burning, and another at her feet.

A priest was kneeling, conducting the communion service, using Cara as the altar.

I began to fumble at her clothes, my hands busy with buttons and catches, Soon, she lay naked on the bad, end I lay back. Cara rose to her knees, bent above me, and undid my clothing, pulling and tugging, I gave but little help. As she worked, I began to experience a feeling of foreboding. I attempted to fight the sensation of down, but was unsuccessful. Rather, it wasn’t until I became certain that Cara was some sort of agent for malice, I cannot tell why, that I began to resist her.

"Charles, you’re not cooperating," she said. She looked at me out of an oval frame of darkness, her eyea luminous as grey moons. "Here," she said, "have another drag or two," and she held out the pipe I had put down. I was certain she was trying to poison me — or, no - to use herbs to corrupt me. I pushed her hand away, rose, and restored my clothing. I said nothing, The look of hurt in her eyes and countenance was great.

I left her room and went into mine. I sat on my bed for a while,

how long I cannot surely say. The weeds were still working in my brain – flashes of strange colors and sounds.

“Hello, Cberles," Norine said. Chill struck to my marrow. I looked up, and in the darkness there wes nothing to see but the glow of the fire in the hearth, and its reflection in the hallseat mirror beside the wardrobe, but malevolence was omnipresent in the house. As I gazed into the glass, above the flickering daggers of flame, as it were in the firmament, angels and clouds began to form and to whirl. Finally they resolved thamselves - I vas staring into the mask of Death.

“You see you've not gotten rid of us after all. Cara has seen to

that. How are you, Charles? How far have you gotten with The Book of the Black Heart?" And the mask grinned coldly out of mercury and glass.

         I rallied all my willopower and tried to dissipate the force of the

fumes. To some degree I succeeded, I think, for I rose and left the room. As I passed Cara's door I looked in. She had gone downstairs, but there was something peculiar about the light. Then I realized what it was — the house was filled with old lamps converted to electricity, but the one in aroom was burning with a flame, not a filament.

         The hall was dark. I groped for the light switch, intending to go to the library, hut I could not find it. Instead, I went downstairs. I went into the dining room, and Cara was there in electrical light, holding a dish.

         "Charles," she said, "you didn't eat your dessert at suppertime. Have some. It'll make you feel better. We shouldn't have smoked. I'm sorry. The stuff's no good for you," and she proffered the dish. I took it, feeling shamed. I realized at that moment that I had been hallucinating, and the knowledge came with a sense of relief.

         I took the dish and sat down. Cara passed behind me. I heard the cellar door open, I thought I heard her footsteps as she descended. I took a spoonful of the pudding and lifted it to my mouth — but all my premonitions returned ten-fold. I could not help it. This was another attempt to put me in her power. I had barely escaped once, I could not succumb now.

         I went into the kitchen and disposed of the pudding, feeling again no sense of relief — but at the same time a corner of my mind told me I was being foolish and that I mustn’t let myself be deceived by appearances conjured out of leaves. Back to my reading in the library:

“Correction. The corpses could not even decay, for all life, even the tiny microbes and bacteria that decompose flesh, had been destroyed in this last war-to-end-wars. And because of this Satan sat brooding on the mountain top, for now there was no-one for him to tempt into sin, and his future was bleak.

"Satan gazcd down upon the blood-soaked fields, fields which but a few days ago had flaunted ripe ears of corn like flags of peace end prosperity, but whiich now dolefully bore up mutilated csdavers, the fruit of war and hate.

"As Satan watched, a titanic river roared along a new course and swept the land clean of the mangled remains of a futile civilization. Rusted masses of metal began to rust under its turbulent surface, a last

memorial to the warped genius of men who had once forged this same metal into tcrrible weapons and implements of destruction,

"Great waves dashed against the base of Satan’s mountain, and the spray cooled his fevered brow, A boulder broke away from the side of the mountain and splashed heavily into the wate., From ths gash in the mountain where the boulder had been, a atream of crimson burst and plunged into the muddy river. Clouds of steam rose end swirled about the mountain.

"The flashing lightning cast a glare on Satan’s throne, and the

whirling mist twisted into grotesque, contorted likenesses of men, the ghosts of s once thriving world.

"The falling night made the scene even blacker then it had been, the thunder rose end filled the sky with its might. The night fell, and the thunder rose and Satan hearkened to what the thunder seemed to be saying. 'It is written that men shall one day destroy himself. And amidst the clash of the elements Satan sat and brooded on his fate."

I blush for the easy mysticism and self-serving sentimentality

of the piece, as I blush for the mysticism in The Book of the Black Heart. The difference between them is only immaturity of style in the latter, which reveals: not a black ile•rt, but a heart that is nearly empty. I have written two more pages longhand of the novel, but I will not paste them here, for I will never finish anyway. At least I have come to a point in my life where hardness

of spirit required a necessary act to be performed.

The clocks of the house have just begun to strike ten. I have tied Cara to her bed and scattered the coals from the fire about the house. I can hear flames behind me, and Cara crying out. At the kitchen door someone is knocking. I know who it is: Wesley Court has just come from Lowell, but he is too late.

As soon as I have done, I will put this journal into uncle John's safe, with his Salem journal and the other documents of the house, and I will wait.

         Now there is pounding, and glass, and blue moons in the center of the circle, Ouroboros spinning in darkness, devouring himself.

The Journal of Charles Ally, Part Twenty

        Part Twenty

                                                                                                                                                                      "Lowell, May 10 1860

"Charles,

         "The Top of the morning to you

         "How do you get along courting the girls now since the Snow went off. Last night we had a splendid fire about twelve Oclock but did not go I can tell you I liked to lay abed too well. I went to see whare it was this morning. Dont let any one see this I will tell you whare it was

         "It was a house of ilfame whare they keep pretty Girls I saw to of them & the lady of the house this morning.

         "The old lady was telling how it caught afire. She said she used to have the back door open & the boys used to come in after rags & c ——— I suppose they did dont you.

         "You say it is very dry down in Frankfort, but not dryer then it is here. we have not had any rain for the last two months untill yesterday. we had a slight rain of about four hours.

         "But I think real estate will rise to day again

         "I suppose you still stick to the Sons of Temperance dont you. I had rather stick to Daughters for my part

         "The bells begin to ring & I must Close.

         "Give my love to all the girls

                                                      "Yours truly

                                                               "Wesley Court

"Write Soon

"N. B.

       "Burn this as quick as you read it."

Thursday, 5^th. Rafe stopped by for coffee this morning and I joined him and Cara. He looked very cheerful.

         "Cara tells me you've been working on your book some more. How's it going?"

         Cara sat down with us, next to Rafe. "He typed all day yesterday, but he won't talk." She looked up at me and smiled. I love her eyes when they look like that — the color of clouds on a day like this one: gray, and a touch of blue sky behind them.

         "I wrote chapter six," I said. But I could not tell them the book will never be finished. I have reached the center of the circle, the eye of calm, and my voyage has ended in nothing, where it began in the heart of my protagonist.

         Rafe was happy. "The best therapy in the world," he said. "Write it out. It's good." He stretched like a cat. "I'll be over around ten Saturday for another session. That all right with you, Charles?" He shook his blond forelock back into place.

         I nodded.

         "I won't be by tomorrow morning," he said. "I have appointments all day, and I'm going to have to get to school early."

         Cara looked disappointed.

         "Sorry," he said. "There's a bunch of kids who need draft counseling. The war's still on, you know."

         "It'll be on forever," Cara said touching her cup with her lip — a voluptuous gesture.

         "Well, Saturday night, then," I said.

         Rafe rose and waved as he went out to the kitchen. He stood a moment with his hand on the doorknob. He looked back at us, and a slight, troubled look overcast his blue glance. Then he smiled again and waved. "Be happy," he said, and left. We heard his car back out into the road and drive away.

         I have spent the day walking in the fields. I went to the falls and watched the water come down over the stones from Blind Man's Hill; I crossed to the cemetery to visit my family and my friend, but all was still — only a winter sparrow or two looking for seeds among the headstones and monuments. In the late afternoon I returned to the house and sat with the books awhile, not reading, just listening to the soft murmur of voices rising out of the leather covers and falling to silence in the house among the tickings of the clocks and the chimres, Cara humming softly in the rooms among her plants. — watering and feeding the green life in this landscape of coming winter.

         "Burn this as soon as you read it Charles.

                                                               Lowell may 30, 1860

"Friend Charles,

         "It is with the greatest pleasure that I now attempt to answer your kind letter which I received this afternoon

         "If Mrs. Small has got the P———— it is quite sure that they have been doing or try to do something for there Country. I did as you requested me to do with your letter & I want you to do the same. Wednesday night only comes once a week & that I have to do myself.

         "We are haveing a few drops of rain here to night & it is not very pleasant to be on the streets so I thought I would answer your letter as you requested me to write soon

         "I do not know as I have much news to tell you, but Ile try & scrabble a few lines

         "Yesterday there was afire over in Belvedere Charley Deming our book keeper & Mr. Washburn was ringing the fire bell. Some of the fixing gave way & it come through thje floor, had it not hit upon some of the timbers it would of come through all the floors & probably killed them both. Another accident I have to tell you but not of that kind, Mr. Loomis one of our customers hung himself yesterday about three OClock in his own shed. he was at the store & settled up his account the day previous. Antother sad accident I have to tell you Mrs. Alden another of our customers fell down her steps & broke her him. I believe she is doing well now. Well Charles that is all the sad news I have to relate to you

         "But I have some few lines more to say, There was two young ladys walking out the other day, & they passed a young gentleman which the latter laughted, as he passed, the girls looked around. Says She, If you don't like the fasion, you may stick your nose in my arse.

         That is about the stile of one half of them. Do you have any such down east.

         "You say you have not heard from Fred Hawkins since you wrote me last I have not written him since I have been in Lowell I have gorgoten how to superscribe my letters to him & Ile endeavor to write him afew little dities, You sayd Frank was lame, what made him so. You did not write half enough about him

         "I should like to here him spin some of his long yarns, I suppose he will have as much to say as old Sam White ever did. Has Brad White got hom yet he wrote to me when he was in Charleston S. C. wanted to buy my tools, said he would be home in the spring, & as this is the 30th day of may thought I would see rather he is at home or not

         "You said you & Henry went on a ride last Sunday over on the neck did you see any of the prety girls that is what I should of looked after if I had been there, how are all the Carney Girls do you ever see them except when they are at the division, give my respects to them when you see them

         "Charles to tell you the barest facts I have not been home with but two girls since I have been here

         "It is geting along towords ten OClock & I must go over to my boarding house & go to bed

         "I still remane your honest friend

                                             "Wes Court

"Write soon as you told me & I did so. I shall be home for a visit before Thanksgivings day. Look for me at your door Charles I shall knock loud."

         Cara has come up behind me holding two cob pipes and she is waiting.

Friday, 6^th. It is all very clear to me now. I must try to write it clearly as well, so that you may be prepared, reader, if by chance this journal should be spared, which I shall make every attempt to ensure.

         Last night, when I was done with my entry, I turned and followed Cara to her room. We lay down on the bed fully clothed and began to smoke. I felt clear enough of mind, so that I thought perhaps this time the leaves would not adversely affect me, as they are wont to do, strangely.

         At first, this was the case. As I inhaled and held the smoke in my lungs, my feelings began to rise, and Cara and I began to exchange quips. They were silly in nture, and we began to giggle like schoolchildren.

         "This won't work, Charles. We've got to cool it if we're going to get serious." She tried to force her face into repose, but was not successful. We laughed again. But, after repeated efforts, and more deep draughts of the fumes, at last we quieted. I begain to experience a sense of excitement, as did Cara, I believe.

         I began to funble at her clothes, my hands busy with button and catches. Soon she lay naked on the bed and I lay back. Cara rose to her knees, bent above me, and undid my garments, pulling and tugging. I gave but little help.

         As she worked I began to experience a feeling of foreboding. I attempted to fight the sensation down but was unsuccessful. Rather, it grew until I became certain that Cara was some sort of agent for malice, I cannot tell why. I began to resist her.

         "Charles, you're not cooperating," she said. She looked at me out of an oval frame of darkness, her eyes luminous as gray moons. "Here," she said, "have another drag or two," and she held out the pipe I had put down. And I was certain she was trying to poison me — or, no — to use herbs to corrupt me. I pushed her hand a way, rose, and restored my clothing. I said nothing. The look of hurt in her eyes and countenance was great.

         I left her room and went into mine; I sat on my bed for a while — how long I cannot surely say. The weeds were still working in my brain — flashes of strange colors and sounds.

         "Hello, Charles," Norine said. Chill struck me to my marrow. I looked up, and in the darkness there was nothing to see but the glow of the fire in the hearth and its reflection in the hallseat mirror beside the wardrobe, but malevolence was omnipresent. As I gazed into the glass, above the flickering daggers of flame, as it were in the firmament, angels and clouds began to form and to whirl. At last they resolved themselves — I was staring into the mask of Death.

         "You see, you've not gotten rid of us after all. Cara has seen to that. How are you, Charles? How far have to gotten with The Book of the Black Heart?" And the mask grinned coldly out of mercury and glass.

         I rallied all my forces and tried to dissipate the force of the fumes. To some degree I succeeded, I think, for I rose and left the room. As I passed Cara's door I looked in. She had gone downstairs, but there was something peculiar about the light. Then I realized what it was — the house is filled with old lamps converted to electricity, but the one in Cara's room was burning with a flame, not a filament.

         The hall was dark. I groped for the light switch, intending to go to the library, but I could not find it. Instead, I went downstares. I went into the dining room, and Cara was there in electrical light, holding a dish.

         "Charles," she said, "you didn't eat your dessert at suppertime. Have some. It'll make you feel better. We shouldn't have smoked. I'm sorry. The stuff's no good for you." She proffered the dish. I took it, feeling shamed. I realized at the moment that I was hallucinating, and the knowledge came with a sense of relief.

         I took the dish and sat down. Cara passed behind me. I heard the cellar door open. I heard her footsteps as she descended, as I thought. I took a spoonful of the pudding and lifed it to my mouth — but all my premonitions returned ten-fold. I could not eat it. This was another attempt to put me in her power. I had barely escaped once, I could not succumb now.

         I went into the kitchen and disposed of the pudding, feeling again a sense of relief — but at the same time a corner of my mind told me I was being foolish and that I mustn't let myself be deeived by appearances conjured out of burning leaves.

         I returned to the dining room and sat down t my place, the empty dish before me, so that Cara when she came back up would believe I had eaten her food.

         And then I heard footsteps in the living room. I was astonished. I knew there was no one else in the house but Cara and me, and I knew she had not come back up out of the cellar. I got up to look and found Cara in the living room sitting on the couch and looking into the fire.

         "If you're in here," I asked, "who's in the cellar?"

         She looked up at me. "There's no one in the cellar, Charles. Come and sit beside me." She sighed. "I'm sorry it went all wrong. Really sorry." She was weeping.

         I went to her and touched her shoulder. "It'll be all right," I said, or I think I said. "I'll be right back."

         I returned to the dining room and went to the cellarway to reach for the light switch — there was none. There was a deep glow coming from below. I made some sort of hoarse noise in my throat, stepped back, and slammed the door.

         When I turned about I saw I was standing in flickering lamplight.

         There is no possible way to describe my sensations of fear, though I fought them as strongly as I might. I went back to the living room and called, "Cara —"

         My senses spun in my mind like dust devils.

         Cara was lying naked before the hearth, her legs spread. At her head and at each of her shoulders stood a black candle burning, and another at her feet.

         A priest was kneeling, conducting the communion, using Cara as the altar. About Cara and the priest, in a semicircle, stood many people, some seeming to be solid flesh, others with outlines that wavered in the candlelight. Tituba stood there, and the minister with the noose about his neck; Norine and Melany, and another girl, a little older, with a woman who must have been her mother, both dressed in Puritan costume. There were others, both men and women, all clothed in ancient garments, and one man naked, his body misshapen, holding a stone, blood running from his mouth, nose, and eyes,to one side. He slgnalled Cara, who doused tbe lights, and, from the sounds of her movements, one could tell she had settled onto the couch.

"Okay," Rafe said in a quiet voice, “I want you to relax and tell every part of your body to relax, and I want you to keep looking at the pendulum as it swings, Follow it with your eyes. Let yourself sink into the pendulum and the chair. Listen to the ticking of

the clock, and, when I speak, to my volce."

For a long time he said nothing except, now and thcn, "Relax." In the fireplace I heard the sound of embers falling. I heard Rafe's voice murmuring near me. At first I was very tense, but

I did as he asked, and eventually my limbs began to lighten and to tingle, and the disc grew larger until it was very big. Then Rafe began to speak again: "It is the moon. It is filling the room. Nothing is here but you, the moon, and my voice. Let it take you. I am hcre ta protect you and help you. Your eyes are growing wider and wider, to swallow the moon, and 'all you can hear is my voice end the ticking of time. The moon, only the moon.

"Your limbs are growing heavy, and you see only the moon,”

but I could no longer feel my limbs tingling, I was lying on the softest place in the sky, on the moon which was enormous.

"And now you are growing very sleepy, Charles, and your eyelids are

beavy. The moonlight is hurting them. Let them close agalnst the light, Charles, let them clase and 1isten to me. Are you slcepy, Charlcs?"

"Yes," I said, "Very. The moon is hurting my eyes.”

“You are ssleep, Charles, and you hear nothing but my voice.

Is that so?”

"Yes,” I said. “My eyes are closed,” but I could see through the lids. The moon was pale among the scudding clouds.

"Are you asleep?"

"Yes."

"'What do you see?"

“The dim moon in the night aky, and I am in the sky too."

Now the voice became hollow, like a heavy gong. "Rise up and face me, rise up, Charles Ally!" I felt myself rise and turn. I was standing on nothing. I saw, with my eyes still closed, a priest in robes and cassock, darkly in the moonlight.

"I am Raphael, minister of God, Charles, and then: Speak! Who art thou that has taken this man?"

A ereat groan burst from my lips. Coils in my bowels, knots and aches.

"In the name of the Father, speak! In the name of the Son, speak! In the name of the Holy Ghost, speak, viper!"

A great voice, deeper than any well: "f am Asmodeus.”

"And I am Raphael, How didst thou enter? Speak, in the nsme of Christl"

"I am Asmodeus, of the Order of Seraphim. I came Into this man through his organ of procreation.”

“Are there others with thee? Speak!"

“No others," said the deep voice.

"I, Raphael, command thee in the name of the Lord, what others are there with thee in this man?"

Silence.

"In the name of the Father!”

Coilings and gnashings.

"And of the Son!”

A babble of voices in my lungs.

"And of the Holy Ghost!"

"I am here," said a soft and haughty voice. "Belial of the Third

Hierarchy, Prince of the Order of Virtues fallen. I entered through his mind, and have clothed him in the raiment of arrogance,"

"I entered with Belial.” said a towering voice. "I am Beelzebub, of

the First Hierarchy, Prince of the Order of Seraphim Fallen, I have pierced his heart with the lance of pride."

"I, Verrine, of the First Hierarchy, Order of Thrones Fallen. I entered with the point of the lance, and poisoned his blood with Impatience.”

"And I, Gresael, af the First Hierarchy, Order of Thrones Fallen, came in with the haft. His heart is unsure."

"Cerrow, of the Second Hierarchy, Prince of Powers Fellen. His heart is stone. No one may remove the lance,"

"And I am the last, Carnivan, of the Second Hierarchy, Prince of Powers fallen. In the mirror of glass he sees me when he commits fornication with women."

Tho babble ceased. In the darkness was the ticking of the moon.

"Are there others? Speak! In the name of the Trinity, I, Raphael, command it.”

Silence again, as before; lightning and thunder,

"Why hast thou possessed this man?'

The deep voice answered: "He wished it. He forsook his Father

when he was twelve, after baptism. He heard no voice when he addressed the Throne of Grace. He commanded, and heard not the Lord, and celled out, ‘Thou art gone from the heavens, and I am forsaken. Therefore will I forsake thee,' and we began to enter."

"How long wilt thou possess this man? What is thy term?"

"'Until the final hour," the softest voice said.

''I command thee then, vipers of the Serpent, the Worm that destroys the flesh, in the name of the Judge of the word and the

deed, of the hosts of Torment and Earth, of Heaven and Hell, begonel"

In my bowels the mortal terror; the scent of smoke in my nostrils. I felt Rafe’s hand laid upon my head, and it was cool.

"I conjure thee, Princes of Seraphim fallen, of Cherubim end Throne

fallen, in the name of thy Maker, begone!" I fell and twisted, writhing in the dark air, but felt no pain; my limbs were as cedars in the wind.

"I conjure thee, Princes of Thrones Fallen, of Principalities and

Powers Fallen, in tho name of the Holy Ghost, begone!"

Terrible noises in my throat. The hand was ice on my forehead, and I shook in every' part, as though torn by wolves.

"I conjure thee, Princes of Virtues Fallen, of Archangels and Angels Fallen, in the name of the Lord thy God, Jehovah, begone!"

I cannot describe the storm that now shook me, the voices that shrieked and cursed me, overwhelming. me so that I could hardly hear Raphael.

"Beelzebub, in the name of thy adversary, St. Francis of Assisi; Asmodeus, in the name of thy adversary, St. John the Baptist; Verrine, in the name of thy adversary, St, Dominic; Gresael, in the name of thy adversary, St, Reynard; Cerrow, in the name of thy adversary, St. Vincent; Carnivan, in the name of thy adversary, St. John the Evangelist; Belial, in the name of thy adversary, St. Francis de Paul, - all ye that possess this man, by the power of the Holy Church and of the Lord of Heaven. I, Raphael, command thee to go forth and enter not again!"

As he named those names, each and every one, I felt part of a burden go with great wailing, and, at the last word, there was silence. Then, the bell behind the moon peeled twelve times, and I opened my eyes. The room was suffused with a fiery glow from the fireplace.

Suddenly, with a yowl of rage, Wesley Catch tore out of the shadows into the fireplace and I beard his claws scratching the chimney as he ran among a burst of wings that faded into the night above the house,

I remember that Rafe and Cara helped me upstairs and into bed. Cara kissed me goodnight. I am too tired, now, to continue the narrative, I have not seen Catch all day.