The Life of Hope (21 page)

Whose idea was this?
they all demanded.

My tiny heart remained silent, muffled in the sharp, pointed pain. I ran faster.

To take my mind off the pain, I lifted my eyes skyward. One lone fubsy cloud sat in the sky. I prayed that some wind would blow it over the face of the sun. I was sweating from my ears, and in another mile I was sweating from my eyes.

By the time I reached Lookout Lake I was sweated out, so hot I was chilly and goose-pimpled. My body insisted on throwing up, even though I was as dry as snake-dust, empty except for the sharp, pointed pain. After many long minutes of dry heaving I lay down by the water and went to sleep.

I dreamed, for the first time, of Joseph Benton Hope.

The men were fishing.

This was one way they’d found to supplement the House’s pitiful income, pulling fish out of the Merrimack. If not for their proximity to the dark river, Hope and his Perfectionists would likely have starved to death. Their periodical,
The Theocratic Watchman
, was supported by private donation, and after its weekly publication there were few dollars left over. George Quinton brought in some money, earned doing odd jobs and chores throughout the city. The De-la-Noys performed the occasional melodrama, but Lowell, a brand-new city of stonework factories, had no taste for either Adam’s heroics or Mary’s bosom-pitching.

Abram Skinner fished the river most frequently, virtually every waking hour. He felt useless in the city and longed for his rows of grain, the huge steaming mountains of compost. Hope encouraged Abram to contribute articles to
The Theocratic Watchman
, and Abram had tried, but he found he always became whatever the stylographic equivalent of tongue-tied was,
producing smudgy pages of sentence fragments that made no real sense. So Abram had started fishing the Merrimack, not only for the meat, but for the comfort he found beside the water.

Abram often had company. Mr. Opdycke enjoyed fishing for the same reason schoolboys enjoy fishing—that is, he was usually supposed to be doing something else. Opdycke had certain house responsibilities, mostly janitorial, but he fobbed them off on George Quinton and always had much time on his hands. Mr. Opdycke was an ingenious, if lazy, angler, a great one for setting out a series of trotlines and then snoozing beneath the sun. The deceit and treachery of the new sport appealed to Opdycke; he delighted in discovering new ways of concealing hooks inside tiny fishes, in discovering the most tantalizing way of dancing them in the water.

George Quinton, those times he was free, was an avid fisherman, although his clumsiness cost him a lot of his potential catch (and, the others felt, their’s as well; Quinton was incapable of doing anything quietly, and even his tiptoeing and whispering likely drove the fish miles downstream). George was always welcome, though. The men would give him a dangling seining dish and order him to find bait. George had a knack for catching fingerlings and minnows, supplying the anglers with more than they could ever use, and the odd thing about it (something George kept a secret from them) was that he didn’t use the net at all. George knelt by the water, bearlike and patient, and scooped out the fish with his massive hands.

Another of George’s responsibilities was pole assembly. The men’s rods were cane, two four- to five-foot pieces that had to be tied together. Everyone made George do this for them; Mr. Opdycke out of slothfulness, Abram Skinner because he thought that George enjoyed doing such things, and Adam De-la-Noy because he couldn’t master the trick of knotting the sections together for himself.

Before becoming a Perfectionist, Adam De-la-Noy had never fished. He had never considered it. “Angling” was a decidedly ungentlemanly sport to engage in, not to mention malodorous. Adam disliked baiting his lure (usually Mr. Opdycke did it for him anyway, running the hook’s shank down the little creatures’ gullets) and the few times Adam had caught something he’d
become alarmed, even frightened, handing his quivering rod to whoever happened to be standing nearby. Still, Adam seemed to prefer the company of the men to that of the women, and he spent much time with them beside the Merrimack River.

Surprisingly, even amazingly, J. B. Hope was perhaps the most enthusiastic practitioner of the Art of the Angle. Each dawn would find Joseph on the riverbank, his line in the water, his tiny eye glaring at the surface. Hope claimed to be able to see a fish approach his bait, and his performance bore him out. Hope was a “snap-fisherman,” pulling the fish out of the water as soon as the bait was touched. The others were “pouchers,” waiting until the bait was all but swallowed before hauling the prize upward. And there were never any false-sets or errant jerks when Joseph fished, just one sure, quick lift and the thing was landed. What the others wondered at most was Hope’s expertise, the deft way he made his horsehair line, small perfect knots that never broke, the manner in which he grabbed fishes by their gills and plucked out the hook.

Hope alone fished for something other than food. As he waved his line out upon the water, Joseph would cackle, heckle and taunt the prey. “Come now!” J. B. Hope would call. “Let’s don’t dally! You are peckish, don’t deny it!” Hope’s boyish teasing alarmed the men somehow, and each was saddened in his heart, for Joseph was more open and friendly with the fish than ever he’d been with them.

Sometimes Joseph Hope would fish for a monster. According to Hope, the water contained a colussus, a veritable leviathan, a mammoth as big as a man. Hope never told them why he thought such a beast existed, but none ever doubted his faith. When fishing for this brute, Hope would turn each successive catch into bait, so that he took progressively bigger fish. He often ended up fishing with a massive sucker on the end of his line, a hulk so big that only a whale would be tempted.

On this particular day, all five men were fishing, and Joseph Hope was being outfished. Hope was not a competitive fisherman, at least not in terms of his fellow human beings (he enjoyed confronting the animals, one on one) but he couldn’t help wondering what he was doing wrongly that Mr. Opdycke was doing right. Opdycke (on lip-hooked minnows; a departure for
Opdycke, but Hope’s usual manner) had taken seven fish in an hour —Hope had pulled out four. Joseph, though, was too aloof to ask. He simply rebaited his hook and tried again.

Abram Skinner had taken two out of the river, one a fat female, puffy with roe. Abram had killed this fish by beating her against a rock until she was lifeless, and then he’d carved out her egg-sac and fixed it to his hook. As he did this, Abram felt vaguely angry, and somewhere in his mind he remembered Abigal’s stillborn babies.

George Quinton hadn’t caught anything. The pole felt awkward and fragile in his hands, making him nervous. George wished he could throw it away. He wanted to strip off his clothes and dance into the water, to feel the cold freedom kissing his body. He would catch fish then, gather them up like apples.

Adam De-la-Noy, his rod balanced across a foot, lay on the ground and studied the clouds above. He saw a bird slice through them. It was a goshawk, but Adam poetically took it for a swan, and quoted, “ ‘So doth the swan her downy cygnets save,/Keeping them prisoners underneath her wings.’ ”

George Quinton was baffled.

This was all how a fishing day usually was, all except for Opdycke’s unprecedented fortune. Opdycke seemed hardly aware of how well he was doing. Instead, he wanted to discuss certain tenets of Perfectionist theory.

“Exclusiveness,” Mr. Opdycke paraphrased the infamous “Boston Letter,” “has no place when the will of God is done on earth. Amn’t I right, Reverend?”

Hope nodded.

“It just seems to me,” said Opdycke, pulling in another fish, “that some of us are being mighty exclusive.”

“How can you say that?” demanded Hope testily. (Opdycke’s catch was at least three pounds. Mr. Opdycke dispatched it dispassionately, sinking a knife into the small brain.) “What exclusivity exists?”

“The normal exclusivity,” said Mr. Opdycke, “vis-à-vis the state of matrimony.” Mr. Opdycke realized almost giddily that he was much better educated than he’d previously suspected.

“Nonsense,” said Hope. “My wife is in almost every sense your wife.”

“Almost,” Opdycke echoed, putting another minnow on his hook.

“Ho, there!” said Hope suddenly. “What are you doing?”

Opdycke looked to where Hope was pointing, that is, Mr. Opdycke looked down into his own hands. Opdycke’s thick thumbnail was imbedded into the minnow’s side, splitting the flesh and cracking the backbone. “Oh.” Mr. Opdycke threw the minnow into the water, where it jerked in a desperate, dying way. “I’ve found that helps. I don’t know why.”

Eagerly Hope stabbed his own minnow and then returned him to the water. Almost immediately he felt an enormous tug, and he flipped out a large brownie, landing the creature gently behind him.

George Quinton took a minnow and poked his finger at its side. He squashed the little fishy, rendering it to mush.

Abram Skinner didn’t bother. He was thinking about what Opdycke had said. His corporal relations with Abigal were decidedly uninspired. For one thing, Abigal’s body reminded him of pudding, all puckered and jellied, pale, pale flesh. More than that, though, whenever they had amorous congress Abram felt called upon to perform a duty, to plant a seed above all else. It was a duty, Abram felt, that he’d been performing inadequately; in his mind, Abigal’s miscarriages and stillbirths were all his fault, the result of flawed making matter. What Skinner wanted to do was play at pickle-me-tickle-me, Adamize and zig-zag, rut with and otherwise splice a female, and, truth to be told, he wanted to do it to Mary De-la-Noy. Mary had a way of staring vacantly into space, her mouth half-open and her eyes half-shut, that drove Abram Skinner to distraction. That is, if Abram Skinner were the sort of man who could be driven to distraction, and he wasn’t, this look of Mary’s is what would do it. So Abram Skinner said, “I see what Opdycke is saying, Reverend Hope.”

“I see what he’s saying, as well,” remarked Hope. “And in theory he makes a valid point. But the thing of it is, we are trying to exist within the constructs of a society.”

“But,” said George Quinton, delighted to be able to make this point, even though he couldn’t see what Mr. Opdycke was saying, “we must live accohding to God’s law, not accohding to the laws of man.” George knew that some fish had stolen his minnow, but he didn’t bother rebaiting.

“True, George,” said Hope. “At the same time, it is our spiritual life that is of uppermost import. What we are discussing is not a spiritual matter.” Indeed, thought Joseph, it was perhaps the hardest work he’d ever done in his life. Making love to Martha (which he’d done exactly once) was like conquering the Matterhorn (Hope meant no irony in this reflection) except that the mountain didn’t sweat, tremble or try to swallow one into oddly smelling crooks and crannies.

“Perhaps,” said Adam De-la-Noy, “we should examine more closely the word ‘exclusivity.’ ”

No one knew what Adam meant by that; the word was not examined more closely.

“I wonder why this works,” muttered Joseph. He was referring to the trick of stabbing the live minnows. He’d just taken another fish, and now had six to Mr. Opdycke’s eight. Opdycke was bogging down, chewing on a stalk of grass, staring at Abram Skinner. “Skinner,” said Mr. Opdycke, “what do you think?”

Abram shrugged and turned to De-la-Noy. “Adam?”

Adam stared at the water. Then he glanced up at J. B. Hope.

Suddenly the end of Hope’s pole bent, and began to point straight down at the surface of the water. The river seemed to boil around the line. “I’ve got him!” shouted Hope, and it was obvious from his tone that this was the monster. The men all leapt to their feet.

Then the knots slipped where George had tied the two sections of the pole together. In an instant the separate sections were floating on the Merrimack, the horsehair line twisted loosely in the ripples.

“Quinton!” bellowed Hope, enraged. “You great oaf!”

As Joseph Hope stormed away, George Quinton began softly to weep.

That night, while the others slept and dreamed their dreams, George Quinton tore apart most of the plumbing in the house. In the morning, Martha would give him hell for it, would even give him a good old-fashioned roundhouse that blackened George’s left eye, but he would be unrepentant. He had found what he was looking for, namely two sections of pipe that differed in size by only a fraction of an inch. George cut an inch-long segment from each (chewing up his mammoth fingers in
the process) and then fitted them on to the pieces of Reverend Hope’s fishing pole. George found to his great delight that the pole could now be speedily assembled, and that the jointed rod was as strong as a single length of cane.

The women had their own ideas.

Cairine McDiarmid fancied herself a naturalist, and every so often she’d decide it was time for one of her expeditions. Cairine would rally the other women, and out they would go. One might imagine that an expedition was little more than a stroll through some gentle greenery, the women all petticoated and parasoled, armed with only pencils and sketchbooks. One would be wrong. The three other women (Abigal Skinner, Mary De-la-Noy and Martha Q. Hope) hated Cairine’s expeditions because they were really wilderness safaris, and they’d have to wear men’s clothing. Mary De-la-Noy especially hated this. While they did indeed carry sketchbooks, they also toted nets, jars, bottles, knives, spyglasses and one or two firearms. Being a self-styled naturalist was hard work in those days, because nature itself was different—wild and living outside of libraries and encyclopedias. It was still possible, back then, to turn over a rock and find some furry, winged, and grinning lizard.