The Life of Hope (30 page)

Gregory Opdycke was a young boy when he first heard the tales, and although Isaiah soon had a wonderful story worked out (Ol’ Mossback was in reality a prince on the moon, but an evil witch had enchanted him, changed him into a fish, and thrown him into a lake on the earth), little Gregory’s reaction was, “I’m going to catch dat fish!” With minor variations, those were the only words Gregory Opdycke ever said for the rest of his life.

The homestead was full of books and empty bottles. All the shutters were drawn, and all the rooms were dark as midnight, despite the sunshine in the great outdoors. Lopsided candles set up here and there did the best they could.

Harvey Benson gave me a withering look. “Where are the other inmates, Paulie?”

I bent over and picked up one of the many volumes on the floor. It was
The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I set it down on top of a huge pile of books (the uppermost being the Rev. Dr. I. J. R. McDougall’s
The Lecher
) to show Harvey that I wasn’t totally negligent in my housekeeping duties.

The kitchen table was the worst, a foot deep in smudged and stained pages, dog-eared books and dirty glasses. Esther wandered over curiously while Benson proceeded to make coffee. I stood still and wondered about the whereabouts of this highly touted Irish whiskey.

“What are you working on?” asked Esther, sitting down at the table and touching my pages.

“Hope,” I answered.

“As in the emotion, or the town?”

I smiled cryptically.

“As in Joseph Benton Hope,” explained Harvey while puttering. “He was a religious leader who settled here with his followers. They were what they called Perfectionists, and they thought it was all right to sleep with each other’s wives.”

“Not a German among them,” I added.

“They all lived in a big house …”

“A Fourieristic Phalanstery.”

“… that’s still standing in town. It’s a tavern now. The Willing Mind.”

“Wow! Can we go there?” asked Esther.

“Surely,” answered Harvey.

“No,” I said, “we can’t go there.”

“Why the hell not?” demanded Professor Benson.

I shrugged. “The draft sucks.”

“I lived in a Free Love Commune,” announced Esther, “back when I was sixteen or seventeen. Out in B.C. It was okay. We did acid and fucked a lot. But,” Esther shrugged, “that got pretty boring after a while.”

“I was at Woodstock!” Benson piped up proudly.

“I was in the movie,” said Esther. “I’m one of the people skinny-dipping. I was so wasted, though, I don’t remember hardly any of it. Freaked me out when I saw the flick, boy. There’s my bare-naked ass, fifteen feet across.” Esther shook her head wistfully and started sorting through my reference books.

“I went skinny-dipping at Woodstock,” Harvey lied, “and I screwed some chick right in the middle of the crowd.”

Esther nodded vaguely. “People fucked a lot back then.”

The coffee was brewing merrily. I scowled at the chirping little percolator. Benson went to his satchel and took out a bottle of Jameson. “Your fave!” he said to me, holding up the whiskey.

Esther tried to be friendly. “Is that your favorite, Paul?”

I nodded and whispered, “Booze.”

“Well?” demanded Benson. “Are you going to stand there all night?”

“Do you understand,” I said suddenly to Esther, grabbing another chair and pulling it up to the table, “that Hope and his followers existed in the last half of the nineteenth century?”

“Wow!” exclaimed Esther. “Far out.”

“And do you know what else?” Harvey butted in. My trick worked; he was distracted. I pulled the bottle of Irish whiskey out of his hand. “Joseph Hope was murdered by one of his followers,” Benson went on eagerly, “and the guy was hanged.”

I pulled the bottle away from my lips long enough to add, “Twice.”

“Huh?”

I reluctantly stopped nursing. “The rope broke the first time they tried to hang him,” I explained, “so he was actually hanged twice.”

“Wow!”

“The ironic thing about it is this:” said Harvey, assuming his lecture hall tone and posture, “To support themselves, Hope and his Perfectionists began to make fishing equipment, as sport-angling was just then becoming popular in North America. Actually, they were responsible for a lot of innovations and developments.”

“Like what?” asked Esther.

“Lots of things,” I answered. The Jameson had returned me to the land of the living—at least, I wanted to talk. “They were the first to put ferrules on poles so that they could be easily taken apart and put back together. They were among the first to manufacture a crank/winch reel. They made lures, primitive ones admittedly, and one of the Perfectionists, Opdycke by name, is credited with inventing the Spoon.”

“The Spoon,” repeated Esther.

“The Perfectionists also started the tobacco industry in these parts,” Harvey took over, “and those two industries just kept growing. A & A Tobacco owns all the land for miles around, and today Updike is one of the largest, if not the largest, manufacturers of fishing gear and tackle in the world. So, even though their experiments in communal living failed, the descendants of the original Perfectionists are extremely rich people.”

“Do any of them live in town?” asked Esther.

I nodded but gave no further answer.

Harvey poured coffee into huge mugs.

“Farrr out!” said Esther. “So, like, what kind of research are you doing?” she asked me. “Everybody seems to know all about them already.”

“There are some …” I cast about in my mind for the right word. “There are some problematic areas.”

“Like for instance?” demanded Harvey.

Esther got down on her hands and knees in order to sift through the books on the floor. She touched them lovingly, especially the antique volumes, her long fingers lightly tracing the gilded words on the spines. Esther came to the biggest book, an enormous thing covered in night-black leather. She sucked in her breath; a hand went to her throat. “Oh, wow,” Esther said, opening the tome gingerly. The title page announced, in
ornate, curlicued print,
Magick in Theory and Practice
.

Benson looked at the title page and then cocked his granny-glassed eyeballs at me. “What the hell is that for?”

“Just, um, a theory I’m working on.”

“Namely?”

“Well, the theory is in its formative stages right now.”

“Come on, Paulie.”

“Are you into this stuff?” asked Esther, slowly turning the pages. “This is heavy-duty.”

“I’m just doing some reading about witchcraft, that’s all.” I smiled at Esther and Benson broadly. “Hey, boy, we can have some big fun. Drinking and fishing, my favorites!”

“What is with this shit, Paul?” asked Harvey.

I waved the bottle of whiskey around in the air as I said, “It’s just a theory that some of the original Perfectionists are still alive, and they’re still alive because they performed some magical rite involving cutting off some piece of Joseph Hope’s anatomy, namely his penis, and obviously they don’t want anyone to know about it, because they’re 200-year-old witches and warlocks who kill people, like Hope and Deedee and, anyway, it’s just a theory, there’s no harm in having theories, is there? Everybody has theories!”

“Paulie,” said Harvey Benson, “you are a sick puppy.”

“I was a witch for a while,” Esther said. “The black side can be very powerful.”

“Aw, for fuck’s sake,” muttered Harvey angrily. “For one thing, we know how J. B. Hope died. He was chopped to pieces with an axe. We know who did it and where it happened.”

“Where did it happen?” asked Esther.

“Here,” I said.

“Here in Hope, you mean?”

“Here. Right outside, up near the barn.”

“Oh, wow! That’s why I kept feeling all these strange vibes. And if you’re right, Paul—if these black magic people killed Hope so that they wouldn’t die, then his must be a very restless spirit. That’s why his presence is so strong.”

“Esther,” said Harvey, “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t act like this.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Harvey,” intoned
Esther, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

For a while we all drank in silence, they their coffee, me the Irish whiskey. Then Esther said, “Do you know who they are?”

“What ‘they’?” demanded Harvey testily.

“I’ll show you what ‘they’.” I almost shouted. I went and grabbed
The History of the Community at Hope, Ontario
, and pulled it open, turning the pages quickly to locate page 217, where there was a daguerreotype of Mr. Opdycke. He was a mean and haughty-looking individual, with a bald pate and enormous mutton-chop sideburns. “Okay?” Then I grabbed
Hook, Line and Sinker: The Updike Empire
and pulled it open to eight pages of photos in the centre. The final photograph showed the current president of the corporation, Bernard B. Updike. He was dressed in a three-piece suit and smiling at the camera.

“What,” said Harvey, “they’re supposed to look the same or something?”

“Just imagine Opdycke with those tinted glasses and a wig like the other guy’s.”

“Oh, wow …” whispered Esther.

“Oh, wow,
shit
,” scowled Benson. “Look, I’ll admit there’s a resemblance. A family resemblance.”

“I’ve seen this guy,” I pointed to the photo of Bernard B. Updike, “without his toupee and glasses on. And, believe you me, there’s more than a family resemblance.”

“But
this
guy,” Harvey said of Mr. Opdycke’s image, “looks like a prick, and
this
guy,” (Bernard B. Updike) “looks like a jerk.”

“That’s part of his devious disguise.” I flipped through some more pages of
The History of the Community at Hope, Ontario
, before Harvey could make any further objections. On page 341 was a reproduction of a painting, done by Mary Carter De-la-Noy. “Lookee there,” I instructed Harvey.

Harvey did, then demanded, “So?”

“So, don’t you recognize her?”

“If I ever saw her before,” said Harvey, “I’d remember.”

“You have seen her before, except not with long blond hair. Imagine her with short hair—short black hair.”

Harvey imagined this and admitted, “Okay, okay. It looks a little like that bimbo Mona.”

“It is that bimbo Mona!”

“It can’t be, you maroon. This Polyphilia died almost eighty years ago.”

“Not,” said Esther, “necessarily.”

“Esther, I really wish you wouldn’t encourage him.”

“And how’s about Jonathon Whitecrow?” I said. “You can find references to him in all of these books, in Cairine McDiarmid’s book, in McDougall’s book, and it sounds like the same guy who sits there every day in The Willing Mind having his goddam Visions.”

“I thought I explained once before about how some people have fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers and stuff like that.”

“But he’s gay, for Christ’s sake!”

“The current edition may be gay …”

“And they got a monster.”

“Who’s got a monster?”

“Hope has a monster. A town monster.”

“Paulie, you really are quite seriously ill.”

“It must have been some magic gone wrong,” I theorized, “and that’s why they keep him a secret, all hidden away.”

Esther asked, “What sort of monster?”

“A huge, hairless, immensely obese creature.”

“Are you talking about Louis Hope?” asked Harvey.

“Aha! You even know its name!”

“He’s not a monster, Paul.”

“What is he then, pray tell?”

“He’s a … huge, hairless, immensely obese creature.”

“Right on.”

“Wow,” said Esther, “a monster. Far fucking out.”

I stumbled over to the fridge, remembering suddenly that in a drunken stupor I’d hidden a bottle of beer in the vegetable crisper. Who I was hiding it from, I’ll never know. The beer was still there, nestled in among the carrots.

Harvey said, disgustedly, “I’m going to the can,” and Esther turned to the section headed “Disembodied Spirits” in
Magick in Theory and Practice
. I drank my beer and stared out one of the windows.

“Oh, wow,” said Esther. “It says here that sometimes a restless
spirit will take over the body of an animal.”

I had glanced down when Esther spoke, surprised by her voice. I had forgotten that I wasn’t alone. Moreover, I was disappointed that I wasn’t. I sullenly looked back to my window. The hawk sat on the windowsill and stared at me.

The land surrounding Hope, Ontario, is excellently suited to tobacco farming, a fact that Abram Skinner tried to impress upon Joseph Benton Hope. The fact was originally pointed out to Abram by Jonathon Whitecrow. The Indian had come by one day, while Abram labored in his oversized garden, puffing on a cigarette, but this was not one of his foul-smelling self-constructed ones, this was a slightly yellow and perfectly cylindrical tube with the word “CAPORAL” printed at one end. Jonathon had offered one to Abram. The Indian had many of them, all uniform, lying side by side in a tiny cardboard packet that likewise announced “CAPORAL;” Skinner was astounded, having never seen such a thing, and he had accepted.

Abram was, of course, an inveterate pipe smoker, for sucking on a pipestem suited his brooding, philosophical bent. The actual pipe-smoke Abram had always found a little distasteful. This cigarette, though, seemed to produce a cleaner taste; Abram pulled the puff all the way into his lungs and instantly felt giddy. Exhaling, Skinner discovered that he could produce a controlled and continuous stream of smoke, and for some reason this was more satisfying than the loose, ethereal clouds that leaked out of his pipe. Abram Skinner was through his
first cigarette in no time. Jonathon Whitecrow opened the cardboard box and offered him another.