Nightshade and Damnations (20 page)

“Is that something?” he asked.

“Is that something!” I cried. “Why, good God, I’m no medical man, but I can see that the least of those wounds you’ve got down there ought to be enough to kill any man. How do you manage to be alive, Cuckoo? How is it possible?”

“You think you’ve seen something? Listen, you’ve seen nothing till you see my back. But never mind about that now.”

“Tell me,” I said, “how the devil did you come by all that? They’re old scars. You couldn’t have got them in this war—”

He slid down the knot of his tie, unbuttoned his collar, pulled his shirt aside, and said, dispassionately: “No. Look—this is all I got this time.” He pointed nonchalantly to his throat. I counted five bullet scars in a cluster, spaced like fingertips of a half-opened hand, at the base of the throat. “Light machine-gun,” he said.

“But this is impossible!” I said, while he readjusted his tie. “That little packet there must have cut one or two big arteries and smashed your spine to smithereens.”

“Sure it did,” said Corporal Cuckoo.

“And how old did you say you were?” I asked.

Corporal Cuckoo replied: “Round about four hundred and thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight?”

“I said, four hundred and thirty-eight.”

The man is mad
, I thought. “Born
1907
?” I asked.

“
1507
,” said Corporal Cuckoo, fingering the dent in his skull. Then he went on, half-dreamily. How am I to describe his manner? It was repulsively compounded of thick stupidity, low cunning, anxiety, suspicion, and sordid calculation—it made me remember a certain peasant who tried to sell me an American wristwatch near Saint Jacques in
1944
. But Corporal Cuckoo talked American, at first leering at me in the dim light, and feeling his shirt as if to assure himself that all his scars were safely buttoned away. He said, slowly: “Look . . . I’ll give you the outline. It’s no use you trying to sell the outline, see? You’re a newspaper man. Though you might know what the whole story would be worth, there’s no use you trying to sell what I’m giving you now, because you haven’t got a hope in hell. But I’ve got to get back to work, see? I want some dough.”

I said: “For roses, chickens, bees, and turpentine?”

He hesitated, and then said: “Well, yes,” and rubbed his head again.

“Does it bother you?” I asked.

“Not if I don’t touch that stuff you gave me,” he replied, dreamily resentful.

“Where did you get that scar?” I asked.

“Battle of Turin,” he said.

“I don’t remember any Battle of Turin, Corporal Cuckoo. When was that?”

“Why,
the
Battle of Turin. I got this in the Pass of Suze.”

“You were wounded in the Pass of Suze at the Battle of Turin, is that right? When was that?” I asked.

“
1536
or
1537
. King François sent us up against the Marquess de Guast. The enemy was holding the pass, but we broke through. That was my first smell of gunpowder.”

“You were there of course, Corporal Cuckoo.”

“Sure I was there. But I wasn’t a corporal then, and my name was not Cuckoo. They called me Le Cocu. My real name was Lecoq. I came from Yvetot. I used to work for a man that made linen—Nicholas, the . . .”

Two or three minutes passed, while the Corporal told me what he thought of Nicholas. Then, having come down curse by curse out of a red cloud of passion, he continued:

“. . . To cut it short Denise ran off, and all the kids in the town were singing:

Lecoq
,
lecoq
,
lecoq
,

Lecoq
,
lecoq
,
lecoq
. . .

I got the hell out of it and joined the army. . . . I’m not giving you anything you can make anything of, see? This is the layout, see? . . . Okay. I was about thirty, then, and in pretty good shape. Well, so when King François sent us to Turin—Monsieur de Montegan was Colonel-General of Infantry—my commander, Captain Le Rat, led us up a hill to a position, and we sure had a hot five minutes! It was anybody’s battle until the rest cut through, and then we advanced, and I got
this
.”

The corporal touched his head. I asked: “How?”

“From a halberdier. You know what a halberd is, don’t you? It’s a sort of heavy axe on the end of a ten-foot pole. You can split a man down to the waist with a halberd, if you know how to handle it. See? If it had landed straight . . . well, I guess I wouldn’t be here right now. But I saw it coming, see, and I ducked, and just as I ducked my foot slipped in some blood, and I fell sideways. But all the same that halberdier got me. Right here, just where the scar is. See? Then everything went sort of black-and-white, and black, and I passed out. But I wasn’t dead, see? I woke up, and there was the army doctor, with a cheap steel breastplate on—no helmet—soaked with blood up to the elbows.
Our
blood, you can bet your life—you know what medical officers are?”

I said soothingly: “Oh yes. I know, I know. And this, you say, was in
1537
?”

“In
1536
or
7
. I don’t remember exactly. As I was saying, I woke up, and I saw the doctor, and he was talking to some other doctor that I couldn’t see, and all around men were shouting their heads off—asking their friends to cut their throats and put them out of their misery . . . asking for priests . . . I thought I was in hell. My head was split wide open, and I could feel a sort of draft playing through my brains, and everything was going
bump
-
bump
,
bumpety
-
bump
,
bump
-
bump
-
bump
. But although I couldn’t move or speak I could see and hear what was going on. The doctor looked at me and said . . .”

Corporal Cuckoo paused. “He said?” I asked, gently.

“Well,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with scorn. “You don’t even know the meaning of what you were reading in your little book—
Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez
,
and all that—even when it’s put down in cold print. I’ll put it so that you’ll understand. The doctor said something like this: ‘Come here and look, sir, come and see! This fellow’s brains were bursting out of his head. If I had applied theriac, he would be buried and forgotten by now. Instead, having no theriac, for want of something better, I applied my digestive. And see what has happened. His eyes have opened! Observe, also, that the bones are creeping together, and over this beating brain a sort of skin is forming. My treatment must be right, because God is healing him!’ Then the one I couldn’t see said something like: ‘Don’t be a fool, Ambroise. You’re wasting your time and your medicine on a corpse.’ Well, the doctor looked down at me, and touched my eyes with the ends of his fingers . . . like this . . . and I blinked. But the one I couldn’t see said: ‘Must you waste time and medicine on the dead?’

“After I blinked my eyes, I couldn’t open them again. I couldn’t see. But I could still hear, and when I heard that I was as scared as hell they were going to bury me alive. And I couldn’t move. But the doctor I’d seen said: ‘After five days this poor soldier’s flesh is still sweet, and, weary as I am, I have my wits about me, and I swear to you that I saw his eyes open.’ Then he called out: ‘Jehan! Bring the digestive! . . . By your leave, sir, I will keep this man, until he comes back to life, or begins to stink. And into this wound I am going to pour some more of my digestive.’

“Then I felt something running into my head. It hurt like hell. It was like ice water dripped into your brains. I thought
This is it
!—and then I went numb all over, and then I went dead again, until I woke up later in another place. The young doctor was there, without his armor this time, but he had a sort of soft hat on. This time I could move and talk, and I asked for something to drink. When he heard me talk, the doctor opened his mouth to let out a shout, but stopped himself, and gave me some wine out of a cup. But his hands were shaking so that I got more wine in my beard than in my mouth. I used to wear a beard in those days, just like you—only a bigger one, all over my face. I heard somebody come running from the other end of the room. I saw a boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. This kid opened his mouth and started to say something, but the doctor got him by the throat and said . . . put it like this: ‘For your life, Jehan, be quiet!’

“The kid said: ‘Master! You have brought him back from the dead!’

“Then the doctor said: ‘Silence, for your life, or do you want to smell burning faggots?’

“Then I went to sleep again, and when I woke up I was in a little room, with all the windows shut, and a big fire burning so that it was hotter than hell. The doctor was there, and his name was Ambroise Paré. Maybe you have read about Ambroise Paré?”

“Do you mean the Ambroise Paré who became an army surgeon under Anne de Montmorency in the army of Francis I?”

Corporal Cuckoo said: “That’s what I was saying, wasn’t it? François Premier, Francis I de Montmorency was our Lieutenant-General, when we got mixed up with Charles V. The whole thing started between France and Italy, and that is how I came to get my head cracked when we went down the hill near Turin. I told you, didn’t I?”

“Corporal Cuckoo,” I said, “you have told me that you are four hundred and thirty-eight years old. You were born in
1507
, and left Yvetot to join the army after your wife made a fool of you with a linen merchant named Nicholas. Your name was Lecoq, and the children called you ‘Le Cocu.’ You fought at the Battle of Turin, and were wounded in the Pass of Suze about
1537
. Your head was cut open with a halberd, or pole-axe, and your brains came out. A surgeon named Ambroise Paré poured into the wound in your head what you call a digestive. So you came back to life—more than four hundred years ago! Is this right?”

“You’ve got it,” said Corporal Cuckoo, nodding. “I knew you’d get it.”

I was stupefied by the preposterousness of it all, and could only say, with what must have been a silly giggle: “Well, my venerable friend, by all accounts, after four hundred and thirty odd years of life you ought to be tremendously wise—as full of wisdom, learning, and experience as the British Museum Library.”

“Why?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.

“Why? Well,” I said, “it’s an old story. A philosopher, let us say, or a scientist, doesn’t really begin to learn anything until his life is almost ended. What wouldn’t he give for five hundred extra years of life? For five hundred years of life he’d sell his soul, because given that much time, knowledge being power, he could be master of the whole world.”

Corporal Cuckoo said: “Baloney! You can take it from me, bub, because I know, see? What you say might go for philosophers, and all that. They’d just go on doing what they were interested in, and they might . . . well, learn how to turn iron into gold, or something. But what about, well, for instance a baseball player, or a boxer. What would they do with five hundred years? What they were fit to do—swing bats or throw leather! What would
you
do?”

“Why, of course, you’re right, Corporal Cuckoo,” I said. “I’d just go on and on banging on a typewriter and chucking my money down the drain, so that in five hundred years from now I’d be no wiser and no richer than I am at this moment.”

“No, wait a minute,” he said, tapping my arm with a finger that felt like a rod of iron, and leering at me shrewdly. “You’d go on writing books and things. You’re paid on a percentage basis, so in five hundred years you’d have more than you could spend. But how about me? All I’m fit for is to be in the army. I don’t give a damn for philosophy, and all that stuff. It don’t mean a thing to me. I’m no wiser now than I was when I was thirty. I never did go in for reading, and all that stuff, and I never will. My ambition is to get me a place like Jack Dempsey’s on Broadway.”

“I thought you said you wanted to grow roses, and chickens, and bees, and turpentine trees, and whatnot,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“How do you reconcile the two? . . . I mean, how does a restaurant on Broadway fit in with bees and roses, etcetera?”

“Well, it’s like this . . .” said Corporal Cuckoo.

“. . . I told you about how Doctor Paré healed up my head when it was split open so that my brains were coming out. Well, after I could walk about a bit he let me stay in his house, and I can tell you, he fed me on the fat of the land, though he didn’t live any too damn well himself. Yeahp, he looked after me like a son—a hell of a lot better than my old man ever looked after me . . . chickens, eggs in wine, anything I wanted. If I said ‘I guess I’d like a pie made with skylarks for dinner,’ I had it. If I said: ‘Doc, this wine is kind of sour,’ up came a bottle of Alicante, or something. Inside two or three weeks, I was fitter and stronger than I’d ever been before. So then I got kind of restless and said I wanted to go. Well, Doctor Paré said he wanted me to stay. I said to him: ‘I’m an active man, Doc, and I’ve got my living to get; and before I got this little crack on the head I heard that there was money to be made in one army or another right now.’

“Well, then Doctor Paré offered me a couple of pieces of gold to stay in his house for another month. I took the money, but I knew then that he was up to something, and I went out of my way to find out. I mean, he was an army surgeon, and I was nothing but a lousy infantryman. There was a catch in it somewhere, see? So I acted dumb, but I kept my eyes open, and made friends with Jehan, the kid that helped around the doctor’s office. This Jehan was a big-eyed, skinny kid, with one leg a bit shorter than the other, and he thought I was a hell of a fellow when I cracked a walnut between two fingers, and lifted up the big table, that must have weighed about five hundred pounds, on my back. This Jehan, he told me he’d always wanted to be a powerful guy like me. But he’d been sick since before he was born, and might not have lived at all if Doctor Paré hadn’t saved his life. Well, so I went to work on Jehan, and I found out what the doctor’s game was. You know doctors, eh?”

Corporal Cuckoo nudged me, and I said: “Uhuh, go on.”

“Well it seems that up to the time when we got through the Pass of Suze, they’d treated what they called ‘poisoned wounds’ with boiling oil of elder with a dash of what they called theriac. Theriac was nothing much more than honey and herbs. Well, so it seems that by the time we went up the hill, Doctor Paré had run out of the oil of elder and theriac, and so, for want of something better, he mixed up what he called a digestive.