Mr. Eternity (20 page)

And so, standing beneath the coco palm in the yard, Quaco discovered his plan, and it was so extraordinary that I was persuaded in an instant of its Inevitable Success, and could imagine no other outcome. It was in five parts, as follows:

1
I myself would steal the coins, having watch’d for my opportunity, and picking a night upon which Mr. Galsworthy was in wine, or better yet had fallen down the cellar stares, as he did with such unaccountable regularity.

Then,
2
Having simulat’d illness upon my earlier cue, such that he now could dye without suspicion, Dr. Dan would now dye, tho only half-way, which outcome Quaco could arrange very easily by administering to him a
Zombi Powder
.

And then,
3
Quaco (being now free according to Dr. Dan’s will, the Doctor having dyed to all appearances) would fix all the coins to Dr. Dan’s skin, and this prior to dressing our friend in that very suit which he had said was fit to be buried in, so that now when he was buried – for buried he must be – the coins would be with-in the coffin, and e’en within his
cloathes
, and no search of the property would turn them up.

After which
4
the coins not being found, & no attempt to search and apprehend the delinquents being successful, & any suspicion devolving to me having now evaporat’d, we would bring Dr. Dan back from the dead, the doctor then hastening under cloud of night to the town of Kings Harbor, there to escape to New Providence and thence to any place on the globe, & I to follow in good time, to collect from him my share of the treasure, with Quaco remaining upon Babylon until the matter of his manumission was concluded, for he was content to leave his own share in trust of Dr. Dan.

And then finally
5
Dr. Dan would sell his own share and employ an agent to secure Anna Gloria’s release from her indenture.

It was not only my debts which disposed me to this criminoid venture, but also distressful nights at Babylon itself, in which atmosphere I enjoyed myself less than previously, and was less able to perceive the outlines of that
beautiful idea
– the dream of living as a white man among white men – that had impelled me to leave the Barbados in the first place. For this was a season of frightful turmoil upon the plantation, and my own frequent sotting and gaming attracted little note in the atmosphere of violence and commotion that obtained generally. For ex. one night we had trouble with a clerk, Mr. Bonapple, a decayed kinsman to the proprietor, who one night came home in liquor, his mouth bloodie, as if he had been eating raw flesh. First he undertook to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, and next he was like a
Madman
in his desire for Ebo Sally, chasing her through the house, & shouting, & all this before the astonish’d eyes of my dear Mrs. Galsworthy and some other women of the island. After his crude behavior, he sat upon the back veranda fanning himself with his forelap, as he had observed Mr. Galsworthy to do, and talking with
himself aloud, before at last accepting the invitations of Morpheus. Quaco poysoned him after this, which I thought a very just punishment, and no one was ever the wiser, because Mr. Bonapple was just out from England, unseasoned and timid of disease, and was expected to die of the climate in any case.

Further, while it is true the lives of the slaves had improved now we were growing rats instead of sugar, yet the gentle labor of rat husbandry did nothing to improve the relations of slaves and overseers. These relations were soured by ancient animosities, and not subject to amelioration, with the result that dreadful punishments were yet meted out, though in secret & without the cognizance of our enlightened proprietor. You must not believe the faerie tales of the planters, for no matter how kind-intentioned a master may be, there is not a one among all his slaves does not long to be free as the roes of the forest, instead of what they are, which is whipp’d like dogs with the
dried penous of a bull
. One morning I heard – from a slave, one Vitus, who had been allowed to cut his hair in a Mohican style – a story beside which this business of Mr. Bonapple was but
cakes and gingerbread
, and it was this, that an old woman, Martha, having stolen from the overseer Mr. Prue one chicken, was buried to her neck in the dirt, and painted with molasses, and left for the flies & ants & rats.

And I, dear Reader, even in this atmosphere of
Horror
, even as I schemed with Quaco and felt my time on Little Salt drawing near its ignominious close, I was assailed with the midges of Love, and prosecuted an illegal courtship of Mrs. Galsworthy, the recklessness of which it is today a wonder to contemplate. At first this sensitive woman was not inclined to repeat our drunken game of hunt the slipper, yet I promised it would be more enjoyable for her this time, and I gave her many tenders of my affection, repeating to her ludicrous and diverting tales I had heard from Dr. Dan. I said that I possessed a coat woven from salamander wool, and she could have it if she wished. I told her of mermaids, those beauteous scaly poissardes. I spoke in rhapsodic tones of a monster called the kraken, which ate for one year, & voided itself for one year
more, & its excrement was a delicious exhalation that attracted all the fish in the sea. I told her I would make myself rich selling kraken faeces for bait and then buy her an island all her own. She laughed a sweet laugh at all my tales, and one day finally relented, saying enough talk meat me in my chamber when the Lord is fallen down the stares. So I did, and so I did once and twice more, each time this prettie woman growing more fond of me, and I of her if truth be told, so that now I was loath to flee, and knew I should miss her more than all the neats’ tongues and Westphalian hams of the planter’s life. And yet flee I must, not only from my debt but from this very love, for my fear that Mr. Galsworthy would discover us only increased in proportion with the affection I bore his wife.

I still believ’d that Dr. Dan shared my urgency, though he had not spoken of Anna Gloria for some time, and I felt confirmed in this belief by a peculiar conversation we had at this time. One day I found him sleeping in a hammock, idly pendant beneath the sweet-scented tamarind tree, and when he woke he fixed me with a meaningful look and said, Ah, there you are, I have been waiting.

You have been waiting for me? said I.

There is a Portuguese ship lying at anchor in the lee of the island, all undiscovered I think, and we shall hasten thither and persuade them to carry us away. It is our best method to escape this city.

There is no city here, said I. None that I see.

Is there not? said he, looking about. I mistook this place for another.

I allowed these things were easily mistaken, and we seemed to understand each other, yet now he frowned and said, How came we to escape the Turks, in that case?

Seeing that his mind was turned, and believing him deranged by grief (though he seemed well enough afterward, and laughed at his foolishness), I told him I could wait no longer and I believed we should move forward with Quaco’s plan. He seemed less than perfectly eager to do so, suggesting that he had the more difficult part, for this plan required of him his death. Is there not another way? said he. He proposed
that we might bring down the whole house in a great conflagration, which would destroy the timber frame and yet spare the metals within. I reminded him it was not a timber-framed house, but coquina, and I felt there were other problems with such a plan, though I could think of no better one myself.

You must be right, said he. In any case it would not do to affront our friend Quaco, for none is more dangerous when affronted than he.

After the demise of Anthony Fucking Corvette, I had a vacation of six months from obligatory political fornications, but the following summer I was pledged and affianced to the next wealthiest eligible bachelor, a senator’s son named George Washington. He was crazy as peaches, and very ugly, and so stricken by jitters and worries that he never looked anyone in the eye and could only burble incoherencies. The first time I had to do it with him, he was trembling like a camel foal and I felt an overweening sympathy, although I was also repulsed by his soft thighs and hands. I had to drink poppy juice until I was too smackered to know who was doing it with who.

“The president moves you around like a pawn,” said Edward Halloween.

“I don’t care anymore.”

“You don’t care? You don’t care?” He shook his delicate eunuch’s fists. “You are not a hooker to be traded around! Time to espouse anarchy! Time to draw angry faces on the chess pawns of our souls!”

He was garbed in a suit made of yellow feathers. It had a variety of beak, which was made of heavy paper. It swung up over his head and his huge black eyes peeped out from underneath. It was poignant to see that he was so furious on my behalf, but I did not share his feelings. George Washington was not a vicious chimerical monster, like Anthony Fucking Corvette, and I intended to resign myself to the dispensations of providence. I was already becoming old, after all. Edward Halloween had even located two aberrant gray hairs on my head. And I had no faith of persuading Daniel Defoe to abandon his quest for Anna Gloria, which had occupied him already for a thousand years. I was only a passing shadow in the grand narrative of his love story.

Also, and more important, I considered it improvident to fixate on my own misfortunes when the river fell farther every month and our grain reserves dwindled away. I was not starving, nor famishing for want of water, nor forced to live on poppy juice, which stopped you up back and front, and this minimum comfort was all a person could ask for in such times. These months burned away one after another and time brought only increased suffering. The river lands were stressed by salt, and farther inland the banana trees were all dead, and the millet was tiny, and the sorghum became poisonous. Then November came again, and again the skies were clear and bright. It had transitioned from a familiar periodic routine drought to an emergency of agricultural famine, and the city was rife with periodical grain riots, long water queues, and righteous fury. My father had to increase the guards around the strategic dikes and waterworks. His singular fear was that a well-regulated militia would rise up and break the social contract.

“What thrives in a drought?” said Edward Halloween. “Poppies, mama beans, and revolution.”

Since we were forbidden from leaving the palace, the calamity was mostly just a distant murmur on the dry wind. In the mornings, when I slipped out to the roof with my hot caffeine, all I could truly see of it was a featureless blue sky without depth or blemish. There should have been mist and rain and roistering clouds, but there was only a feverish sun, which at its low declension cast all the world in deep golden sunset shadows, and the enigma was that it was very beautiful, even though it was the drought, even though it was the end of the world.

My father said the answer was more intensive farming, and he decreed that no land could lie fallow, not even steep hillsides. But how could a more intensive agricultural scheme produce a plenteous crop if we didn’t have enough water for the previous level of agriculture? Then he instituted a variety of strategically repressive measures. He arrogated to the government the whole sum of our meager harvest and placed the city on a ration system, as he had already done with sesame oil. He preached austerity in food consumption. He required brigades of
children to haul water from the river in buckets. But he also decreed that citizens had to smelt iron in their yards and deliver a certain quota each month, and no one could grasp his intention in this. Then he decreed that it was unlawful to speak of his decrees. All of these decrees were enforced with coercive violence.

“Drought or no drought,” he said to his senatorial friends, “we are making a great leap forward into the modern past. We are a western industrial democracy and burgeoning economic superpower, not a pre-capitalist pastoral farming community.”

I think he did not understand what was happening, or else his big picture visionary agenda had crowded out the quotidian realities of governance. He had once again ceased reading books, for example, but he started to write one of his own. It was called
A Boys’ Guide to Remodernization and Development Economics
. Often it seemed that he had gone around the bend and come back with fireflies in his hair. He slept in the tomb every night.

One day he was illuminated by the sunlight of genius, or so he said, and gathered us all together, including the servants and slaves and vice-secretaries, to announce an original scheme for irrigating the unirrigible lands far from the river. We would use an infrastructure of rubber hoses! He passed around an ancient piece of paper which showed a man spraying water from a coiled tube. This picture was profoundly melancholic, for it depicted a vanished world of consumer choice. The words “XHose Pro Expandable” were legible in fading red ink, but only a low percentage of the gathered crowd knew how to read.

President Roulette stood up on his throne and shouted that we would create hoses that were ten miles long. We would connect them to wind pumps and run them to the arid desiccated devastated farmlands, and our country would once again be fruitful and teem with corn and cassava and even bananas. We would grow the rubber ourselves, in the south, and sell the excess to the MDC.

“We’ll gouge them on prices!” he shouted. “They deserve nothing better. They make love to their goats and drape themselves in red cloth.”

Now he called upon Daniel Defoe to help him decide where the rubber plantations should go. Together they scrutinized some maps and charts. Then Daniel Defoe said, “Here’s the city of El Dorado. Was it always in Arkansas?”

“If the map says so, then that’s the truth,” said my father.

“I didn’t remember it was in Arkansas. I thought it was up the Orinoco. I must be all turned around.”

He said that was the place where rubber originated, so that was the proper place for our own trees. It was also good because El Dorado was on the Delta Bay, so the rubber could be floated to the river and then poled all the way up to St. Louis. The only problem was that these lands were said to have reverted to barbarity, but my father had a solution for that. He would decree a special type of colony, which would be called the Extractive Rubber State of El Dorado. He would send an expedition down the river to forcibly nationalize some cropland, and when the trees were planted he would have guards enforce Reunited States law exclusively within the rubber groves. That meant he would only have to project power into one small enclosed area. He said it was a limited liability. It was like filling up a jar of water instead of pouring that same volume of water over a large flat expanse of dirt. Would you rather drink from the jar or lick the earth?