Parrot and Olivier in America (15 page)

By the time Maman returned we were at peace and then the three of us did homage to the flagon and retired, the old lady to her iron cot behind the portrait, and we to our corner which resembled, more than anything, a pile of costumes for an opera or dance. When the last lantern was snuffed, the colors of the castoffs glowed all around us, blood and anthracite in the velvet night.

We went to sleep at peace, in each other's arms, and there you would think the matter over with, all the sweet familiarity of each other's skins sucked into our pink receptive lungs. Yet to see ourselves this way it is necessary to forget--that although my strange beloved slept, she never did stop living, or arguing, or fighting, or fleeing, and there was always a drama of life and death that occupied her dreams and was no less real than anything that occurred before her open eyes.

Thus she moved from peace to war through that particular night and even though I was asleep, flat on my back, snoring a storm to shake the vineyards of the Loire, I felt her move, as if tugged from me on the tides of sleep, out of my arms, onto her side, her back toward me, and when we woke with the clatter of the streets outside, a hard cold stretch of bed separated us, and she rose without even looking at me and I listened to her heavy footfall shake the boards and, like a traveler who has been hit from behind, robbed and kicked in darkness, I felt not so much the pain or indignity but the injustice of it all. I pulled on my shirt. She was already at her canvas, painting without coffee or bread.

I glimpsed the old lady curled beneath her quilt, hands over her head, fingers in her ears. I should have paid attention, for Maman knew her daughter from the womb and what a holy hell she must have made.

I touched Mathilde's bare shoulder, and gently drew back her hair.

"Go," she cried. "Just go."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She did not look at me but went to our bed, picked up my trousers, and threw them down into the street.

"What have I done?"

She was my treasure, my ball of pain and beauty--her luminous eyes, her little curved belly, her perfect thigh. Who she was fighting I did not know, but I was old enough, had scars on my ankles and my arms, a piece missing from my ear, and saw how the moment had come, like an unexpected death, like God striking, the lightning hitting, and I was a man tipped from his bunk on the ship to find not floor but death water, bubbles, the fierce cold fingers of the salty night. There, die. Rise no more.

There was no point in asking is it fair that I should lose everything I love again. I took my duffel and threw in my tools, my better clothes, a book, and with no word to Maman I made off down the giddy seasick stairs, emerging half naked into the courtyard where the children were already playing with the trousers, from whose pockets all coin, even my good-luck acorn, was gone. It had only taken ten minutes to have my body flayed, my bones stripped clean, my squiddy soul out in the sun to dry.

I headed for my English printers, for where else could I go? The day was sunny and cruelly pleasant. Along the way I spied, in every cafe, the sweet familiarity of couples who had spent the night happily in each other's arms and I, who had been for six years one of them, was cast beyond the pale, a poor lonely foreign wretch. I found my friends all gone to work, and the landlady, who had always been so pleasant to me, said her house was full. Reluctantly she brought me some bottled ale and wrote the tab on my friend's account.

Then I removed to a hotel on the rue Richelieu, where, on the strength of Monsieur's famous name and my good clothes--which I was forced to lay out on the bed--I was given, for twelve francs every month, a "parlor next to the sky."

It sickens me to tell the rest, my many trips back to the faubourg Saint-Antoine where Mathilde finally softened enough to lend me a hundred sous. There is little that is not pathetic but in the end, no matter what injustice he suffers, a man is still a man and cannot be a sniveling wretch forever, and I set out, at an age when one expects this shit to be well past, to present myself at the
petite maison
, declaring myself ready to travel to America or Hell, whatever would remove me from my present state.

IV

THE TROUBLE with the general class of de Garmonts is that they cannot imagine the life of anyone outside the circle of their arse. They will hand out the Maundy money, thank you sir, but for the rest of the time you must abandon your own story for their own, and you are nothing better than an ink-dipped ant who must scurry around the page at their command.

So wait a minute. Sit down, find a chair and pour yourself a tot of rum and think what I am telling you before they call me to serve their noble needs.

I was in Devon, years and years before, in 1793. My daddy had been arrested and the flames of the printery were in the night, the fir tree igniting. You have forgotten? For Christ's sake--the secret forgers were all bursting from the roof, up through the tiles, alive and dying all at once, such screams. The Parrot Larrit was a frightened boy, running, encouraged by his da and the other printers chained together. Up the hill I went, a musket ball whizzing past me like a hornet on the chase, and into the very patch of woods that had been spared the barley axe, jumping across the smoking body of a man who I, in my terror, decided was asleep. I tore through brambles, ripping skin, not daring to stop, unable to breathe, up the hill, from where I could see the fire, then down to the bank of the River Dart and along the soft path, heading always against the current, unable to think of anything but Dartmoor at the end. That I should make so wise a choice was no thanks to myself, a shitting shivering boy, but to my da who had taught me the utility of Dartmoor and the sense in keeping it nearby, for Dartmoor is a land of solitude and silence--or
almost silence
for you may hear the murmur of a torrent far below or the drowsy hum of an insect, but there will be no human voice unless it is your own.

Another boy may have run home to his mother, but the moor, in all its weathers, was my mother and I ran toward its arms. It was not until the stitch in my side brought me to a stop that I tried to understand if I was followed, but there was no sound to be heard above the River Dart, which was none other than the total of the scores of rivulets and brooks of Dartmoor, each one of which carried that haunted weirdness in their note which my daddy called the
whisht
and which here, in the dark just out of Dittisham, produced a vast melancholic wash, a dark sac of grief inside which I cried my heart out, throwing myself down on dirt and thistles, weeping until at last the moon rose on the water and I--having nothing else in life to look forward to--set off along the path which I knew would lead me, sooner or later, to Totnes, Buckfast, East Dart, and West Dart at Dartmeet on the Moor.

"Bonjour, monsieur."

If the language had been my own I might have fled, leaping like a goat, a moorland sheep, bleating in terror as I plunged into the dark, but it was as you have already guessed--the one-armed man. I stayed, quivering while he, in all his huge dark foreign bulk laid his single hand very gently on my shoulder, and although I could not make out the meaning of a word he said, I knew he meant to make me tame.

In all my sniveling confusion I did not know which way to turn and it was not until he pushed--or rather
encouraged
--me along the track that I understood he expected me to know a place to hide.

I walked all that night, still against the current of the river, losing paths, finding new ones, sinking up to my waist in swamps, more and more tired, walking weary and careless through Totnes, the entire town dark and not a single candle in one window, and I walked until I felt myself lifted in his mighty arm and held.

"Faut-il suivre le fleuve?"
Something like that, for he was certainly asking should we follow the course of the river but I had as much French as I had Latin and could not answer.

I was carried by him through the night, sound asleep, somehow aware of his steady tread and then not even that.

I woke in a different season, shivering, my back pushed hard against a wall of rock. Before me a vast solitude--long ridges rising in dusky sweeps against the sky, line beyond line of them like the waves of ocean and from these waves, the rocky islands, tors, more like lions, sphinxes, and other strange monsters, and down the slope, in wild confusion, huge blocks of splintered rock. And the foreground, so achingly familiar, so forlorn without my da--brilliant green bits of bog, purple clumps of heather, red and brown rushes, and waving cotton grass in which we had once trapped rabbits and birds and eaten by the fire beneath the stars and known ourselves, a man and boy, blessed to be so free.

"Bonjour."

I had already heard the crackling of his fire, but it was now a sound so sad I could not bear to turn, and would rather believe it was another man, another fire.

"Regard-la."

He was squatting, filthy, ash smeared across his face, his curly hair pushed sideways like his grin, and he had called me to
Regard
in reference to two links of butcher's sausage which he had procured, perhaps from Mr. Piggott's house or somewhere along the road at night.

His plan was not a good one, for he poked a stick into the sausage and was about to spoil our meal. I let him know I had a better idea, and so made a
Cornish pit
as my daddy had taught me, that is a little rock oven that you build the fire atop.

He let me do what I wished, although when he understood he would be waiting longer for his breakfast he puffed out his lips and rolled his eyes as I have seen him do ten thousand times since. It was then, as I dug the pit, I unwittingly entered his employ.

V

HE WAS A GREAT HUGE ANIMAL, the Frenchman, like a seal or horse, strong-smelling, with thighs as big as posts. As he had carried me and fed me I imagined him my protector, while of course he was a baby. He had a brass compass but could neither speak nor know where he was toddling, leaning forward against the wind, eyes streaming--Mama, Mama here I am--but as I had followed my father happily for so many years, I now followed him.

"O nord, O nord," he cried. "Monjay, monjay." Clearly he knew nothing. The northern part of Dartmoor is a proper pig, covered by blanket bogs, peat gullies, tussocks, and hidden holes, heaven sent for cattle thieves but no place for a bawling boy and a Frenchman without a map. Thus it was revealed that Monsieur Monjay was in no way the equal of my father, who had snared and tickled and poached and fed me, dear Daddy, with whom I had traversed the wilds near Black Tor and Yes Tor, the pair of us the only humans in the whole empty world with sheep and rabbits and grouse--the ground exploding at our feet. My da and I would talk till our throats were sore and the silence of the heather moor would be broken only by the spectral whisht and perhaps a guttural call--the grouse again--
come out, come out, come out
they cried. At those times no more was said than what you could signal by means of a loving nudge.

Monsieur tried to bring me back toward the north, striking me with his compass, straining north like a furry-footed draft horse wanting to go home. But northward I would not go. Instead I pointed across the miles of moor, toward Princetown.

"Monjay," said I.

I was cold and dirty, dark with grief, but I hopped like a bunny rabbit and made my hand swim like a fish. I was a scoundrel and a liar. I understood I must give him food, but by nightfall I had found nothing but a big bull oak, a single isolated tree with a hollow trunk inside which generations of cattle had sheltered. Here I made a big show of looking at the Frenchman's compass and staring in the direction of the setting sun. Showing myself by various signs to be well satisfied, I went to sleep.

We slept in our dark and dung, while outside the night sky was filled with the wild clanging of migrating birds, their hearts pumping blood I would have gladly drunk while I roasted their living flesh on a roaring fire.

In the morning we had what is called a tramp's breakfast, that is a piss and a look around, my daddy's joke.

I did not know what would be done to me if I did not find us monjay soon. Of course you are a moorsman, sir, or your uncle was before he went to Van Diemen's Land. You know there was good eating all around us at every step, the hush and the breath of food of every description--moles, pheasants, great fat pigeons--and what I needed was not a compass but a handful of corn or a little roll of wire. Certainly my da would never travel without corn to lure the pheasants to his bag. There were also, as I am well aware, very good lamb chops on Dartmoor, great bounding sheep like mountain goats. My da would lay a loop of rope along their paths and connect it to a young sapling whose top was bent down. When the silly sheep stepped on the loop it would release the sapling, and she would be wrenched upward and left hanging by her leg. In the past I hated these traps, the terror and cruelty of them, for the sheep might be there for days before we found them, raging and tearing around and scratching the skin off their legs, but now I must watch the foolish Frenchman throwing rocks, or galloping down into a bog while his prey danced easily away.

We came upon a little moorland stream. I was so cold, my skin like plucked goose, and I lay flat on my stomach looking into the water, thinking I might vomit if I had another sip, and there I saw the shadow and then the long-jawed brown trout that owned it. As I watched, the fish slid beneath the very rock on which I lay. And now I required no fowling piece or net, just gently gently catchee monkey. I held my arms as far apart as they would go and slid them into the cold water in what you might call a pincer movement. And there he was--quite peaceful--and I rubbed his underbelly with just my forefinger while I made polite inquiry which end was which and when I knew his arse from his head, I moved my hands up to the gills and, smoothly, tightened them like a vise around his head.