This Side of Jordan (20 page)

Once the pitchman had collected the muddy disks, he climbed back up onto the podium and called out the next number: “18, LADIES AND GENTS, 18!” The woman in the Sunday bonnet scowled behind his back.

“Oh, your uncle must've been awfully brave,” Bertha remarked. She found a place for another bean on her card. Alvin saw she had three now in a vertical column.

“Of course he was,” Margaret said, clearly disgusted with her own card that had no more than two beans side by side anywhere across its surface. “Now, stop interrupting!”

Suddenly, the woman in the Sunday bonnet snatched a handful of disks from the cigar box. The pitchman reached for them, but the woman refused to give them back. As the caller grabbed at them again, she backed away. Alvin heard cackling from another table.

“The sea was rising and falling almost by the minute now. Lightning glowed in the smoke over the volcano and warm pumice littered the water. Aboard the
Loudon
, Uncle Augustus inquired as to Louis Hurlburt and was told he'd left the steamship at Anjer. His companion apparently intended to row north to a secret telegraph station in a sugar mill near the port of Merak to send a message to the Queen, informing her of the great cataclysm. However, the
Loudon
had already heard from the telegraph master at Anjer, reporting damage at the drawbridge there, boats smashed everywhere, and word that high waves had entirely destroyed the Chinese camp at Merak. Sometime after midnight, Uncle Augustus and the crew of the
Loudon
saw another great wave rise from Lampong Bay and sweep toward the port, destroying the harbor light and the warehouse and a coal storage on the pier and briefly capsizing the
Marie
, throwing the admiral's gunboat
Berouw
from the east side of the pier clear over to the other.”

Still lacking a handful of disks, the caller took one from the cigar box. “64, LADIES AND GENTS, 64!”

Margaret scowled over her card. “Oh, fiddle-faddle!” Shuffling another bean onto his card, the ruddy fellow tapped ash off his cigar, then asked, “Didn't no one there know how to drop an anchor?”

“Yeah, how about that?” Alvin agreed, hoping to see Rascal squirm over this dumbbell story of his.

“Of course,” the dwarf replied, adding another bean to his own card, “but the volcanic waves were so enormous, not even an anchor could hold the ships against their fury. Why, Uncle Augustus said he'd never been so frightened in all his life. Blue flames of St. Elmo's fire flew about the sky and the wind that swept over the
Loudon
smelled of hot sulphur like Hades itself. The sea was so rough, Uncle Augustus was obliged to remain aboard the mail steamer until dawn, listening all night long to the explosions from Krakatau becoming louder and louder until half past five when a blast unlike anything Uncle Augustus had heard on this earth shook the
Loudon
and knocked out the ear drums on half the members of the ship's crew. He saw the admiral's gunboat beached high up on the shore and insisted the ship's boat take him back across the bay to the
Berouw
to help his old Dutch friend. Well, of course, the journey was trying beyond faith. The sea was filled with masses of floating pumice, and lightning struck the mast conductor repeatedly, and a furious wind tore at the decks. When the first mate refused to bring the boat any closer than a quarter mile from the port, Uncle Augustus dove into the bay once again and swam alone to shore through the dangerous surf. All was chaos aboard the stranded
Berouw
. Several members of the gunboat's crew had been swept overboard by the wave that had carried them onto the beach and the admiral had been struck in the head by a fallen cocoa-nut tree and knocked unconscious.”

Alvin asked, “Were there any wild monkeys in the tree that hit him?”

Bertha and Hazel both giggled.

A scowl on his face, the pitchman took two disks from the cigar box. “58, LADIES AND GENTS, 58! DO WE HAVE A WINNER YET?”

“No, I don't believe so,” replied the dwarf, sounding testy now. “Would you mind awfully not interrupting? Poor Uncle Augustus was in a terrible scrape. Why, it's one of God's greatest miracles that he came out alive.”

“When does he get the malaria?” Alvin asked.

“Soon!” growled the dwarf. “For heaven sakes, will you please keep quiet?”

“Go on,” said the ruddy fellow, “finish the story.”

“Thank you, sir. Now, where were we?”

“A scrape in a cocoa-nut tree.”

“17, LADIES AND GENTS, 17!”

The dwarf shifted a bean onto the middle of his card, and continued with his story. “Oh, yes. Well, those fortunate souls at Telok Betong who survived the initial sea-waves returned to the village again to gather up their remaining possessions while Uncle Augustus labored furiously with the crew of the
Berouw
to get her back into the bay. More boats were washed ashore from the harbor and Uncle Augustus said the sky was blacker than the blackest night and hot pumice big as pumpkins rained down upon them as they worked. Of course, the effort was hopeless. Within the hour, four more volcanic waves rolled over the port, stranding the
Berouw
farther up on the beach and drowning another half-dozen members of the crew, including the poor old admiral, the captain, and his first navigating officer. Uncle Augustus felt quite terrible. He advised everyone to abandon the gunboat and find safe shelter from the waves and the mud rains and the furious wind. The
Marie
had already pulled up anchor and left for deeper waters. Then came a sound Uncle Augustus described as God Himself clapping His hands together, and the black smoke clouds brightened to a fearsome crimson over Krakatau as the volcano gave a mighty roar and blew itself to heaven with the greatest explosion ever witnessed by mortal man! Within minutes, Uncle Augustus saw a gigantic wave emerge from the briny deep and rush toward the shore. Most of the crew ran in panic for the jungle. Knowing he had no chance to escape on foot, Uncle Augustus hid down alone in the captain's cabin, closing himself in and awaiting his fate in the dark. When the huge sea wave struck the
Berouw
, Uncle Augustus was praying to the Lord for deliverance from the tempest. It washed completely over Telok Betong, leaving nothing but rough seas in its frightful wake.”

“47, LADIES AND GENTS, 47!”

“My heavens!” Alice cried. “How dreadful!”

“Everybody was killed, weren't they?” the ruddy fellow asked, looking over his card.

The dwarf nodded, his voice somber now. “Nothing survived. Uncle Augustus recalled the gunboat tumbling over and over in the roaring water, himself hurled about the small cabin like a child's toy until at last he lost consciousness. When he awoke, all was quiet. The great wave had receded, leaving the battered gunboat perched thirty-feet above sea level on the River Koeripan, more than a mile and a half inland. Uncle Augustus crawled from his hiding place and used a rope to climb down off the gunboat. Hot ash still rained from the dark sky. Where once fields of rice had grown, Uncle Augustus saw nothing but mud and boulders. So, too, had all the lovely Javanese villages been washed away. Not even the paroquets cackled in the jungle. When Uncle Augustus called out for help, no one answered. He was quite alone. Having little idea where he was, Uncle Augustus determined to stay put until the clouds broke, so he climbed back up onto the gunboat.”

“87, LADIES AND GENTS, 87!”

Hazel added a bean to her card. Bertha frowned at hers.

“The next morning he built a fire, then killed a wild hog and ate it with crackers from the crew's rations. Not until the moon lit the night sky nearly two days later, was he able to see Lampong Bay and walk out of the jungle along the Koeripan to the appalling ruin of Telok Betong. At the first of September, Uncle Augustus took a ferry across the Straits of Sunda to locate Louis Hurlburt. The volcanic island of Krakatau had mostly disappeared, as had the seaports of Anjer and Merak, along with the Dutch admiral's pretty daughter, her collection of Java sparrows, and more than thirty thousand poor souls. Though Uncle Augustus searched the west coast of Java for a month from Tjeringen to Bantam Bay, he never found his companion, and the malaria he contracted from tramping through those damp jungles of paradise remained with him for the rest of his days.”

“12, LADIES AND GENTS, 12!”

Nobody spoke at the table. Rain dribbled off the tent sides, and the electric lanterns shook in the damp breeze. Then the ruddy fellow shoved his chair back and stood up. He tossed his burnt cigar out into the mud and stared the dwarf in the eye and began clapping. The four ladies remained seating, but they joined in, too, with a fine round of applause. Rascal acknowledged their admiration with a stiff bow from his seat.

When they were through clapping, the farm boy remarked, “Well, that's a swell story. Was any part of it true?”

“Of course,” replied the dwarf, sliding a bean to the bottom row of his card. He added, “Uncle Augustus wrote it all down in a private diary which was bequeathed to me after a Prussian sniper took his life at Delville Wood. I value no possession of mine more greatly and it's been immensely instructive these past few years. Dear old Uncle Augustus believed that our lives bear irrefutable testimony to the immortal purpose of character and courage in this world, and he held selflessness as the pinnacle of virtues. Indeed, his epitaph on the family mausoleum at Hannibal reads most eloquently:
We owe respect to the living; to the dead, we owe only truth.”

“13, LADIES AND GENTS, 13.” The pitchman's voice sounded weary.

The dwarf slid another bean across his bottom row, then cried, “Why, I believe I've won!” He stood and shouted loudly enough for everyone under the tent to hear, “BEANO!”

Alvin got up and walked off into the rainy dark.

 

The breeze felt warmer somehow, but the drizzle persisted. When he was sickest with consumption, Alvin had dreamt of angels in gauze masks wandering the halls of the sanitarium in search of those whose failing lungs would lead them to God's bright countenance, or eternal night, depending upon whether the Bible was true or not. Now he wondered how it felt to be carried away by a giant sea wave. He imagined a blast of wind and the sky of stars disappearing, his body thrust suddenly upwards like a bird in flight.

Alvin walked out to the front of the muddy camp where the roadside stand was crowded with motorcars and people. He smelled liquor in the dark and burning pipe tobacco. The woman he had seen with the child under the beano tent sat in the rear seat of a brown DeSoto. She held a cup of coffee to her lips, sipping like a cat. A pack of men in suits and neckties stood behind the automobile just under the rear awning, yammering away about Jack Johnson and Kansas blue laws. Another crowd of fellows in a Ford runabout pulled in off the road, soaking wet and singing “Alabamy Bound” at the top of their lungs. Getting to the short order counter ahead of them, Alvin bought a hotdog and a Coca-Cola from the change in his pocket and went off to the side of the building. A large truck roared by on the wet road. Alvin felt the damp draft on his face as it passed. Stifling a cough, he ate the hotdog and drank his soda pop and threw the empty bottle into a thick growth of sumac. An angry voice cursed back at him from the dark and a sturdy-looking man in mudcaked overalls and a denim jacket came out of the bushes, buttoning up his fly. Looking Alvin square in the eye, he produced the empty pop bottle. “Fill this up with corn liquor, young fellow, and I won't crack you in the head like you just done me.” Then he bent forward so Alvin could see a bloody laceration at the hairline.

“I didn't even know you was there,” the farm boy said, though he might have supposed in a place such as this there would be someone lurking in the bushes.

“You ain't been around all that long, have you?”

“What of it?”

“You been sick, ain't you? Don't lie to me. I can see it in your eyes. You got the cure, but it ain't made you well, so you gone looking for another and all you found is more trouble, and now you're sicker'n you ever been, and that's the plain truth, ain't it?”

Alvin wiped his nose with the back of a sleeve and shook his head as the rain began to fall harder again. “I catched a cold this morning, that's all.”

The man took a sniff of the pop bottle. “I had the whooping cough once, and that wasn't nothing but a sidetrack. Am I better off for it? Well, I can still do a pretty fair buck-and-wing when the fiddler plays, and peddle bananas enough for a suit of up-to-the-minute clothes and a swell lay every other week or so with any little slip-shoe lovey I like, if that's ‘better off' in your lingo.”

“I ain't said nothing about that,” Alvin replied, watching another automobile streak past. The man tossed Alvin's empty pop bottle back into the sumac. He smelled like onions when the wet breeze shifted and one of his eyes sagged unnaturally and Alvin guessed he had a kink from too much back-stall booze.

“Who was it that run you off? Your daddy? Is that how come you're looking all blue? He tan your britches once too often?” The man chuckled.

“What's it to you?” the farm boy answered. He didn't care for this fellow and wished he hadn't begun gabbing with him in the first place. He felt his fever coming on, maybe even a coughing fit.

The man stared at Alvin like he had a bug on his face. “Well, don't pay no mind to that. We all done things we ain't proud of. We like to be held up to our better angels, but it ain't always that simple, is it? Why, I seen men so beaten down with shame that life become just a dark cloud they couldn't see out of no more, and I'm here to tell you liquor don't cure it, neither, though some of us surely believed that's so. Truth is, nobody's wise to how cold-blooded and mean this world can be when a fellow's out of sorts with the straight and narrow and can't see his way back and there ain't no forgiveness waiting up the road.”