An Embarrassment of Riches (6 page)

“I will meet you like a gentleman.”

“I am ready to get your pistols,” said I.

Bilbo glared at me across the succulent viands. His eyes flickered with malice. I did my best to return his gaze, as though my face were a mirror. The clock ticked loudly on the mantle. Neddy growled. Finally, Bilbo blinked. It was like seeing a pair of live coals extinguished under two wet rags. An ominous chortling rose from deep in his throat.

“By Gad, if you ain't a saucy boy!” he said and erupted in laughter. A great gob of spittle ran down his chin and he farted with abandon, such was his merriment. The dwarf and Bessie also erupted, the one barking and the other honking with glee.

“He is a rude puppy,” Uncle inserted.

“Puppy!” said I. “Mind how you talk, baby brother!”

“Baby brother…?” Bilbo said quizzically. “What is this nonsense? All day long you have been calling this old goat brother.”

“So? What of it?” I retorted, thanking God that he had finally taken the bait. “How could he possibly be your ‘baby brother?'” the villain asked.

“'Tis none of your business,” I said.

“Wait. I see. Madness descends on the poor lad as his hour draws nigh. I've seen it before, sad to say.” Then to Uncle: “They go to pieces.”

I kicked Uncle's foot under the table. He seemed dazed.

“No, 'tis true,” he finally joined in the ruse, to my relief. “What appears to thee a mere saucy stripling of a boy is, in fact, my older brother.”

Bilbo recoiled. “Why, I may be a fraud, but do you take me for numskull as well?”

“Not at all,” Uncle rejoined. “For we bear a secret so strange and marvelous that logic herself trembles at its utterance.”

“A secret? What secret?”

“'Twouldn't be a secret anymore if we told you, now would it?” I set the hook.

“Let's have it, by the blistering Jesus!” Bilbo pounded the table with his fist and the entire house shook.

Uncle furrowed his brow, chewed upon his lip, coughed, cleared his throat, and finally gestured to me in deference.

“Well…?” Bilbo pressed me. He brandished his knife. “Speak if you wish to continue breathing!”

“Er … you have heard, I'm sure, the old Spanish legend of the enchanted spring whence—”

“I knew it!” Bilbo cried triumphantly. “The fountain! The fountain of youth!”

“Well, yes, actually—”

“Where? Where!” Bilbo lunged across the table, clutching desperately the folds of my bearskin robe.

“It is hard to describe—”

“You must have a map!”

“There is a map, but—”

“Hand it over this instant!”

“It is in here.” I pointed to my head. “The map is graven only upon my memory.”

“You have been there yourself, though?”

“Why, manifestly so, Bilbo,” I affirmed.

Uncle could not resist muttering, “Thou dunce….”

“You slaver on my supper, Captain.”

Bilbo let go of my robe and sat primly in his own chair. “I am all ears,” he declared.

“Where shall I start?”

“We have … all night.”

“Some years ago,” I began prevaricating, “whilst on a botanical ramble down Zane's Trace in the Ohio country, I came upon an humble springhole amid a shady grove of ancient beeches—”

“Beeches, you say?”

“
Fagus grandifolia
,” Uncle inserted.

“I drank of it. Its water was pure, sweet, most of all refreshing to the weary, aged traveler—but no more so than that of a thousand other wilderness springholes tasted in a lifetime of sojourning—”

“Er, just how long in the tooth were you?” Bilbo asked.

“How old was I? Three score and twelve, sir. And this was back in '96, mind you.”

Bilbo rolled his eyes in calculation.

I beat him to it. “I shall be eighty on the first of October next.”

“By Jehovah's short hairs!” Bilbo exclaimed. “Ain't it a marvel, though! Go on, lad.”

“Yes. Well, the effect was almost instantaneous. I experienced it as a fugue of bodily sensations, not altogether pleasant. Frankly, I thought myself at first in the grip of an apoplexy, a
coupe de sang
as it were. I seized a trunk of a young box elder”—

“
Acer negundo
,” Uncle said.

—“and the attack passed. I climbed back upon Old Tom, my horse, and went my way.”

“This was on Zane's Trace?” Bilbo inquired avidly.

“This was off the Trace,” I replied.

“Hard
by
the Trace, perhaps?”

“Some distance from it. A day's march, at least.”

“Dear me,” Bilbo shrank back into his seat. “Well, what happened next?”

“I became aware, in a very vivid degree, of the aroma of sassafras, of wild roses, of bear dung—all the scents of the woods—and realized it had been long since I had enjoyed such olfactory delights. Years. Decades! I was near besotted with it. That is no exaggeration, sir. Soon, I began to feel a tingling in every joint in my body. My eyes were assaulted by a clarity, a brightness of vision—”

“Like the effect of phrensyweed,” Uncle inserted.
“Furor muscaetoxicus.”

“Thank you, brother.
Ahem
. It was then that I chanced to look down at my hands, gripping the pommel of my saddle, and damn me if all the gnarls of gout, all the deformities of arthritis, all the liver spots and blue veins of dotage had vanished! Suddenly, I gasped for my very breath, and realized that my cravat was like to choke the life out of me. I reached for my throat and ripped the collar open. But all my clothes were now tight beyond endurance. My frock coat bit into my shoulders as if it had suddenly shrunk two full sizes. My breeches went slack at the waist. Without that premeditation of movement that is a hallmark of old age, I leaped from Old Tom to the ground and landed on legs that had the spring of a young roebuck's, then at once cast off my clothing. Had this occurred on any civilized highway or city street, I would have been trundled off to the nearest lunatics' asylum, no doubt. But I looked down upon myself and, by heaven, I was a youth again! Gone were the sagging gut, the teatlike bosoms, the broomhandle arms and spindly legs. I reached for my face and ran my fingers across it like a blind man feeling the face of a long-gone loved one. The dewlaps and wattles had vanished! I was transfigured!”

“By Jupiter's thundering bungchute!”

“Indeed, sir, my very sentiments—”

“Sammy!”

“I must be candid, brother, though it pollute your morals. But, there I was: a new man. Being of a lifelong skeptical bent, I puzzled my brains to discover what might be the cause of this momentous transformation. For breakfast I had consumed the ham of a bear and a cupful of mulberries—nothing more. It had to be something in that spring, thought I. I hastened to retrace my steps to it, and this time brought up Old Tom to sip from its modest pool. In a matter of moments he too began to submit to the most startling transformation. Where his coat had been dull and listless, it suddenly shone like waxed mahogany. Where his old spine had swayed under two decades of saddlery, it became as straight as an oak beam. Where mane and tail had hung in graying tatters was suddenly luxurious black hair, as stiff as that of a hussar's charger—”

“By God's flaming gorget!”

“My thoughts exactly, sir. But Old Tom's throes did not end there, for he was seized by such a thirst that he would not stop guzzling of the spring, and in a matter of minutes he was reduced to a spindle-legged colt. He collapsed under the weight of the saddle and fell a'bawling and a'neighing beside the pool; and luckily so, Bilbo, for had he continued, no doubt he would have departed this world by retroactive birth, rather than merely gained a new lease on the life he already owned. Damn me, sir, if I didn't have to carry all my own necessaries for weeks afterward—not to mention the trouble of milking a she-deer twice a day for the little brute's sustenance.”

Uncle rolled his eyes at this outlandish embroidery. I confess I was carried away.

“Had I not the stamina of a youth, Bilbo, I would have had to abandon my dear companion to the wolves.”

“You've a heart o'gold, by the Lamb o'Nazareth,” our captor said.

“In conclusion, Bilbo, those jars you plundered from our boat were intended for that marvelous fountain of the wilderness. We were going to bottle the stuff, return with it to Philadelphia, and make a fortune, not to mention the dividend of enjoying eternal life—but since you plan instead to blow out our brains, then I suppose it is just another promising business scheme gone up in a vapor—”

“Just a moment there, friend,” Bilbo stopped me. “Has it ever occurred to you to take on a partner? Someone with a good business head?”

And so did Captain Melancton Bilbo
et famille
become our partners in a venture calculated only to gain us freedom from the clutches of said Bilbo and his brood of freaks.

“Gentlemen,” Bilbo stood up at his place, “or should I say
partners
? A toast to our consociation!” He hoisted his cup and grinned malefically, revealing a mouth full of green and black teeth as mossy as so many timeworn stumps in an old river bottom. We clanked cups. Bilbo belched. “Let's to our slumbers, for tomorrow we embark on the trail to riches and life everlasting!”

Uncle was tethered by means of a length of rope to the vigilant Neddy, who lay curled upon a rug at the hearthside like one of Father's water spaniels, one hooded eye glinting ever-watchfully. Of course, Uncle did not submit to this indignity without protest.

“If this is how thee treats a partner, then thee deserved all thy misfortunes in the silkworm debacle.”

“Sir,” Bilbo riposted in a pedantic tone, “is trust founded on such shifting sands as would tempt you, after only minutes of formal consociation, to speak in such spiteful and censorious terms to he who bears only your best interests in his bosom?”

“And is partnership founded on so mushy a soil that thee would treat thine associate as a mere captive?”

“You object to your bedding?” Bilbo laughed. “Let me remind you, sir, that this is the frontier and that you are lucky to have a roof over your head, let alone a hearth to warm your feet, not to mention the protection of this vigilant stalwart.”

“Grrrrr,” Neddy said.

“I am as familiar with the ways of the wild woodland as thou art acquainted with the habits of perfidy and crime,” Uncle countered. “It is the bonds I object to.”

“A most regrettable but necessary precaution,” Bilbo said with a sigh. “Had I only a strand of potato stalk borer thread securing me to that rascal Voorhees in the silkworks fiasco … well, gentlemen, why prate on about what
might have been
, for 'tis the vision of what
will be
that drives the venture at hand. Come now, old fellow,” Bilbo took me by the elbow and guided me up the ladder to the sleeping loft at the far end of the cottage. Once upstairs, he bid me lie down on the wooden bed.

“Am I to sleep in your daughter's bed?”

“Nothing is too good for such a worthy gentleman as yourself,” Bilbo said, binding my wrists and ankles to the four posts. “Sweet dreams.”

He climbed downstairs, taking the candle with him. Soon the house was dark, save the flickering glow of the hearth. Despite my bindings, sleep quickly overwhelmed me. I don't know how much later it was that I awoke to the sensation of hands creeping across my breast, opening my shirt buttons, then foraging in my breeches.

“O, no!” I cried before the monster stuffed a rag in my mouth. I next felt her soft, warm, feminine flesh bear its weight upon me, while her mouth issued the telltale whistling exhalations.

But her face was not visible to me in that near-total darkness, and I would be less than candid to aver that I was not seized by a most shameful and uncontrollable priapism, the climax of which was a taste of the life everlasting that makes us all links in the Great Chain of Being.

I awoke to the screams of quarreling blue jays
(Cyanocitta cristata)
and the scratching of squirrels
(Sciurus carolinensis)
as they scurried over the roof. I realized at once, and to my horror, where I was. Bessie snuggled beside me. She stirred, lifted her frightful visage, and tenderly whistled words that, after lengthy cogitation, I made out to be “good morning, sweetheart.” My heart swam amongst my liver and lights.

“Be kind, my pet, and untie these bonds,” said I cajolingly. She stuffed the rag back in my mouth and had her wicked way with me again, under the steamy bearskin robe. The human mind is a curious engine, for in her repeated, furious assaults I began to imagine that I was at the mercy of a gigantic rabbit. The delusion was, I regret to confess, not wholly unpleasant, for, as rabbits go, she would have made an handsome one. Far into age, the mere sight of
Lepus americanus
browsing on a greensward has prompted in me a shameful excitation.

Soon voices were audible below and the cottage filled with the aroma of boiled coffee. Bessie loosed my bonds, put on one of her tattered dresses, and departed down the ladder. I waited what I hoped would seem a decent interval, and went down myself. Bilbo was fussing at the fireside. The doors and windows were flung open. Outside it was a beautiful spring day, the woods ringing with birdsong. Uncle sat grumpily at the dining table.

Bilbo, for his part, had awakened in spirits exceedingly buoyant. With a breakfast of venison chops and biscuits drenched in molasses, he pored over the map President Jefferson had given us.

“Hmmmmm. Ahhhhh. Ummmmm.”

He decided at length, on the basis of my prevarications, that we should embark down the Ohio thirty leagues, turn north up the Dismal River, now called the Scioto, into the country of the Shannoah, and there search around the vicinity of that wilderness footpath known as Zane's Trace for the fountain of youth. I assured him that I would recognize the spot when we arrived nearby.

It was midmorning when we had reloaded our keelboat with many of the supplies lately pillaged by our business partner. It was Bilbo's idea to drain the cask of Monongahela into our specimen jars.

“We shall be needing both whiskey and jars,” he reasoned, “and by the time we have drained all these vessels of whiskey, we shall have reached our grail of fortune, so to speak, and the bottles will be ready to receive that stronger liquor that shall be the wonder and benefactor of all mankind.”

By noon, we were ready to go. Bilbo stood on the silty beach facing his stolid little cottage in the verdure. He called to those two oddities of nature who constituted his kith and kin, put one prehensile arm around his daughter's shoulder, placed his other hands [O3]upon the dwarf's black-curled head, and bid adieu to that little island haven that had been his home in the wilderness lo these many years. Uncle and I stood mutely aside whilst the trio had their little ceremony, Bilbo himself weeping great drafts of parting tears. It was a very affecting scene—until one remembered that his happiness had been purchased at the expense of Lord knows how many waylaid innocents, such as ourselves. In any case, he evidently did not expect to return. The formality concluded, we waded out to
Megatherium
, cast off our lines, hoisted the anchor, and poled out into the current.

Captive or not, it buoyed my heart to be back out upon the mainstream, floating swiftly under a fleece-dotted sky, amid the teeming waterfowls and stately vistas of the hills clothed with infinite thick woods. We had not been on the river two hours when what would we spy at the head of an island but a family of five signaling distress from the prow of a half-submerged flatboat.

“Why, boil me in bear piss!” Bilbo cried with equal parts delight and affront. “Look what's doing over on Cathead Island. Nowadays I guess everyone wants to go freebooting it. Ain't that so, Neddy?”

“Arrruk arrruk!” Neddy replied.

Bilbo drew his pistol and sent a ball whistling over the family's heads. The quintet leaped for their lives into the river, while Bilbo reloaded. The current carried us closer. Unlike Bilbo's trap of a derelict, this craft showed no saplings sprouting in the deck, nor moss grown upon the gunwales. Bilbo gleefully discharged shot after shot, as fast as he could reload, blowing huge splinters out of the hull while the family remained hidden. We never did learn whether they were troubled pilgrims, or trouble incarnate, as we had lately met to our continuing woe.

At twilight, we turned our craft into one of the innumerable coves that scallop the river's banks, and in a fine grove of ancient walnut trees
(Juglans nigra)
and pin oak
(Quercus phellos)
we made our camp for the night. We were gathered 'round the fire enjoying a ragout of opossum
(Didelphus viginiana)
, procured by Neddy in his mysterious fashion, when a brisk wind very suddenly arose out of the north, rattling the treetops and causing their swaying trunks to groan ominously, like the ancient druidical spirits we read about in the chronicles of Ossian. It sent a chill through all of us, including especially that poltroon, Bilbo, who halted yet another implausible braggadocio of his youthful exploits—this one placing him on the high seas as gunnery officer to none other than John Paul Jones.

“A spring zephyr, heh heh,” he remarked unconvincingly.

We resumed eating. A minute later something rustled the laurels at the penumbra of our firelight. Neddy growled. Bilbo drew his pistol.

“Indians …?” I wondered aloud.

“W-w-w-who g-g-goes there?” Bilbo called out.

In the next instant, a figure flew out of the shrubbery with all the faultless physical grace of an acrobat. He turned an handspring, vaulted the campfire, caracoled swiftly around, performed several cartwheels, and finally leaped atop the sturdy overhanging bough of an oak. Doffing his skunkskin hat, he bowed. Our company could only gaze up at him in utter thrall.

The figure on the limb rose from his bow. Dressed in a fringed, snow-white doeskin tunic with lapis-colored beadwork sewn at the yoke and matching leggings, he was a lean and muscular white man in the prime of life. His hair, worn shoulder length in the frontier fashion, hung in golden curls. In the flaring firelight it glittered almost like precious metal. His face, with its solid, clefted jaw, its sparkling, even rows of pearly teeth, aquiline nose as straight as a splitter's froe, wide, noble brow, and lustrous blue eyes, was the embodiment of those qualities we Americans idealize as the essence of manhood.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he declared in a ringing, virile baritone. “And madam,” he added upon ascertaining with some difficulty the sex of Bessie, who had been wrapped against the chill in a blanket. “How fortunate to meet a party of my countrymen 'round the cheering campfire this fine night.” He struck an attitude out upon the limb, hand on hip, jaw stuck out, Kentucky rifle held akimbo. His posturing reminded me of the
tableaux vivants
of the New York theaters.

Uncle gazed at him as an old owl might regard some passing curiosity of the forest. Bilbo looked up with undisguised suspicion. Neddy growled lowly. It was impossible to interpret the look on Bessie's face other than that of an hare stunned by the light of a poacher's lamp.

“W-w-who are you, stranger?” Bilbo inquired timidly. The intruder struck a new pose. I was amazed that he could balance himself so easily upon the limb with nothing to hold on to.

“Who am I?” the stranger echoed him and struck yet a new attitude, one of self-bemused incredulity. “Some call me Pathfinder. Some call me Deerslayer. Others know me as Natty-o'-the-wilds. The Injun calls me O-wari-aka Yunno-kwat-haw.”

“'Tis Tuscarora,” Uncle explained aside, while our visitor struck new tableaux.

“What's it mean?” Bilbo asked.

“The rough translation would be White Buffalo Mystery Man,” Uncle said.

“What shall
we
call you?” I inquired.

“You may call me …” he paused portentously, “… Woodsman.” His face lit up in an immense smile of satisfaction. With that, he leaped acrobatically from his perch and landed upon his feet as though he weighed little more than a bird. “Do I detect ragout of opossum?” he said, sniffing the air, and with a flutter of his long-lashed eyelids.

“You do, sir,” Bilbo avouched, a trifle coolly. “Would you do us the honor of joining in our repast?”

“The honor is mine,” the Woodsman said and sat down immediately by the fireside, legs crossed in the Indian style. He produced from his necessaries pouch a buffalo horn cup and a carved horn spoon. Bilbo ladled him a portion of the stew and he sampled it with attendant groans and hums of delectation. “Why, this is first-rate,” he pronounced. “But you have used a freshly killed varmint in it. I can tell.”

“Naught but the best will suit our company,” Bilbo boasted.

“I admire the sentiment, friend, but nothing flavors a ragout so well as a 'possum hung a few days. It gives the sauce a piquancy like none other. I learnt the recipe from my friends, the Wyandots, who esteem the critter above all other viands save buffalo's tongue and wolf's liver.”

“Have you ever, by chance, seen such a prodigy as this?” I asked, hastily producing my sketch of megatherium.

“Why, I have wrestled with them by the legions,” the Woodsman declared. “And won each match, by our George.”

“You have!” said I, astounded. “Do you know what this portrait is supposed to represent?”

“Beaver, o'course,” he stated with certainty, then stole another glance at the paper. “Isn't it?”

“'Tis megatherium,” I informed him. “Or ground sloth. As big as an ox. A massive but retiring brute who dwells in caves.”

The Woodsman studied the sketch carefully once again, scratching his brow.

“Might I have a glance, friend?” Bilbo asked unctuously, and the stranger obliged by handing it over. The pirate examined the sketch with complete absorption, brought it close to his eyes, held it out at arm's length, turned it to one side, then the other, and finally turned it upside down, all the while pursing his lips and uttering noises of cogitation. “Hmmmmmmm … hummmmmm … huhhhhhh … hmmmmmm …”

“I admit the sketch is crude.”

“'Tis a queer-looking devil,” he concluded.

“Think of the fortune in pelts, Bilbo,” I added, trying to excite his cupidity. “Why, 'twould compare to your former silkworm prospects as a gold mine to a mere doubloon.”

At the mention of the word silkworms, he turned an ashen shade of green.

“I'd prefer to stopper mere jars o'water than grapple with some two-ton son o'Satan,” he declared with a distasteful air and handed the portrait back to the blonde-headed nimrod.

“I can tell ye this much about your strange beasts o'the forest,” the Woodsman addressed us in a yarn-spinning tone. “Not ten days ago did I lodge a night at the trading station of Francis Bottomley on the junction of the Ohio and Dismal Rivers, an hundred miles from here. There I met two other men, Messers Jukes and Roundtree, whom the said Bottomley had given an order upon for two teeth of a large beast that they were bringing from the falls of the Ohio for delivery to the Ohio Company at Fort Harner. These teeth and the bones of three large beasts were found in a salt lick upon a small creek that runs into the Ohio fifteen miles below the mouth of the Great Miamee—”

“Dost hear, Sammy,” Uncle interrupted excitedly, “hard by the Great Miamee!”

“I hear, brother,” said I, affecting disdain at his ferment. “For I am deaf no longer.”

“Did you say you were cured from deafness?” the Woodsman himself joined the digression. “And that the two of you are brothers?”

“What…?” said I.

“Are we not all brothers here in the wild?” Bilbo remarked deviously.

“Save those that are piratical scum,” I observed, hoping this Woodsman might infer my meaning and the nature of our predicament, but he merely stared across the fire in perplexity. Bilbo thereupon made pretense to guffaw, as though I had launched a jest, and poked me in my ribs. I looked down at my side and saw that the instrument of this poking was not his elbow, but the muzzle of his ever-ready pistol. The hammer was cocked and it was aimed straight at my liver.

“Pray continue, Woodsman,” Bilbo importuned him.

“Do I have your complete attention?” he asked.

“Yes,” we all said. Neddy affirmed with a bark. This Woodsman's vanity was extreme, I thought. He cleared his throat.

“I was permitted a look at these teeth by Jukes and Roundtree. Each was better than four pounds in weight, appearing to be the farthest tooth in the jaw, a molar, but the size of a loaf o'bread and all acrinkle on top. It had the look of fine ivory about it. Jukes assured me that the rib bones of the largest of these beasts were eleven feet long, and the skull bone six feet across the forehead, and the other bones in proportion, and that there were several other teeth upon the site, some of which he called ‘horns' that were upward of five feet long, and as much as a man could well carry. One of these he hid at a creek some distance from the place, lest the Indians should carry it away.”