God's Fool
Authors: Mark Slouka
Tags: #American, #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Historical, #Biographical
ACCLAIM FOR MARK SLOUKA AND
GOD’S FOOL
“Few books in recent memory have offered as much in terms of fully-formed characters, and fewer authors share Slouka’s gift to render the extraordinary in ordinary terms without sacrificing its potency.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“A gifted stylist.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A poetic rumination on love and family.… We are constantly moved to tears by Slouka’s spare and heart-breaking novel.”
—
Anniston Star
“Exceptional … fascinating … powerful.”
—Library Journal
Mark Slouka
GOD’S FOOL
Mark Slouka’s story “The Woodcarver’s Tale” won a National Magazine Award in Fiction for
Harper’s
in 1995. He is a graduate of Columbia University, and he has taught at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego. He currently teaches at Columbia and lives in New York City with his wife and children.
BOOKS BY MARK SLOUKA
Lost Lake
God’s Fool
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Mark Slouka
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopfedition as follows:
Slouka, Mark.
God’s fool / Mark Slouka.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78975-4
1. Bunker, Chang, 1811–1874—Fiction. 2. Bunker, Eng, 1811–1874—Fiction.
3. North Carolina—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction.
4. Rural families—Fiction. 5. Married people—Fiction. 6. Siamese twins—Fiction.
7. Freak shows—Fiction. 8. Farm life—Fiction. 9. Brothers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.L697 G63 2002
813′.54—dc21 2001053975
v3.1
For my wife, Leslie, and our children, Zack and Maya
,
who make
this
world all a man could want
,
my parents, Olga and Zdenek
,
who know about the ties that bind
,
and for Sacvan Bercovitch
,
who introduced me to America
.
Into the air, as breath into
the wind. Would they had stay’d
.
—William Shakespeare
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks—yet again—to Sloan Harris, Jordan Pavlin, and Colin Harrison, exhorter extraordinaire, my students and colleagues at the Columbia University Writing Division, for providing encouragement or commiseration as needed, and the National Endowment for the Arts, for shrinking the bills.
I am indebted, however, not only to friends and governmental agencies, but to certain books as well, particularly Lawrence Weschler’s
Dr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders
, which sharpened my sense of the nineteenth century’s appetite for “curiosities,” and Henry Mayhew’s magisterial
London Labour and the London Poor
, which made the costermongers’ stalls along Petticoat-lane as vivid and familiar to me as anything on Broadway.
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
PART ONE
I.
In a vertical world, a world of men like pines, or posts, more separate than they know, we were born with a bridge. A small, fleshy bridge, a hand span long and half as thick (thick enough for a boy to march his soldiers across if he watched their steps and they kept in file), forever connecting our two principalities like an act of God, the will of the citizens to hate one another be damned. If a life were measured by the number of metaphors it gives occasion to, the opportunities it presents to journalistic hacks and carnival barkers, ours has been rich indeed; in the field of grammar alone we have been wealthy beyond measure, a veritable primer made flesh. We were the hyphenated twins, as that nice young man writing for
La Quotidienne
once put it. We were a living conjunction, an
if
or an
and
or a
but
where a full stop would have been both correct and kind. We were separate sentences spliced with a comma, an error come alive. I could go on.
The day we were born, the midwives ran from our monstrous birth, leaving our mother to cut her own cord, untwist and bathe us. Twenty years later, the citizens of two continents came running to stare. I despised them about equally. I never changed. I see this now as my essential trait: Pushed to the wall by man or God, I pushed back. If the world showed its teeth, I rubbed it against the fur. I was born that way, and if I were to live to be as old as Methuselah, I’d be that way still.
Little Charlie Stratton, who could stand in a teacup, once preached me a sermon on Christian acceptance. “We must accept our fate with humility and gra-titude,” he hectored me in that mad-duck voice of his, and I remember being tempted to add, “and milk it like an udder until it runs dry,” but didn’t, distracted, I suppose, by the furious little digit he poked at my stomach with each stressed syllable (ac-cept our
fate
with hu-
mi
-lity and gratitude), like a schoolteacher trapped in a child’s dream. Oh, but how he made us cringe, Barnum’s “little brick,” posing and primping for councillors and queens: now Romulus bravely attacking a vase, now Cain with a club the size of a quill, now Crusoe in furs like a shipwrecked squirrel. But we were separate cases, Charlie and I. Humility is prudent when you’re the size of a hat.
Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the heart, and though I knew the heart would lose, I couldn’t bear to call it right. It seemed unjust to me that those we had come to know should have to leave us, that the mowers resting in the shade had to rise, that perfection passed. Gideon liked to claim that my melancholy grew the more I watered it, but it wasn’t the wine that made the passing of things so hard for me, just as it isn’t the port by my side that makes me miss him now. No, like God, I had a jealous nature. I would have kept him here, you see. Drawn a circle around him, as I would around all the ones I’ve known and loved. And some besides. And in that circle, their heads thrown back through a warm ray of sun (the mark of my benediction), the mowers could laugh forever, one leg up and one leg out as the handles of their tools slowly moldered to dust and the blades of their scythes sank down in the grass. But the circle didn’t hold. I couldn’t hold it. Except once, maybe.
Before the attack on Cemetery Ridge, they say, Pickett’s men waited in the woods by the edge of the open fields, watching the milkweed drifting in the air like a lost squall. They knew. Every man and boy among them. Some scribbled quick notes against the stocks of their rifles or their brothers’ backs or the stones of the old mossed walls that ran
through those woods like a stitch through a quilt, marking borders long forgotten—“To Miss Masie,” “To My Father,” “In Case of My Death”—then pinned them to their shirts. Most just sat with their backs against the trees, their caps hung lightly on their bayonets, waiting.
No one spoke. A bee buzzed on a turtlehead blooming in the damp, climbed up the tongue. A hot blade of sun lit the moss on a boulder, cut the toes off a boot. Here and there men lay sprawled on the previous season’s leaves, staring up through the layered branches as if into the milky eye of heaven itself. Further off, where an old road cut light through the roof of leaves, a photographer in a black vest and a wide-brimmed hat went about his business, hurrying back and forth from a small, square wagon.
Suddenly a canteen went over with a clank; a cut leaf twirled slowly to the ground. Like sleepers waking, they raised their heads. A private’s hat flew from a branch. They leaped to their feet. The floor of the forest, an overgrown orchard, was stippled with apples, small and hard as hickory nuts. Within seconds the shade was alive with joyful, savage shouting. Men sprinted for the breastworks of pasture walls and broken trees, one hand holding their caps to their heads, the other cradling their bulging shirts, lumpy with ammunition. Some said afterward that a strange sort of dream seemed to come over that glade. For a short space of time, they one and all seemed to forget where they were. The wavering heat, the ridge, the order—soon to come—to advance across the open fields (an order Longstreet himself would have to give with a nod, unable to bring himself to speak): All these faded away like distance on a summer afternoon, and they played. As children will play. As though death were a story to scare them to bed, and scarce worth believing.