The Sisters Brothers (19 page)

Chapter 51

In the evening I found myself resting before the fire with Warm, waiting for the sky to darken that we might use the gold-finding formula most effectively. To pass the time, he encouraged me to speak of my life, to recount for him my many dangerous adventures, only I had no wish to do this, and in fact wanted to forget about myself for a moment; I turned the questions back upon him, and he was all the more forthcoming than I. Warm enjoyed speaking of himself, though not in a proud or egotistical way. I think he merely recognized the tale as an uncommon one, and so was pleased to share it. As such, his life story was revealed to me in a single sitting.

He was born in 1815 in Westford, Massachusetts. His mother was fifteen years old and ran off after giving birth, just as soon as she was strong enough to carry herself away. She left Warm to the care of his father, Hans, a German immigrant, a watchmaker and inventor. ‘A great thinker, a tireless puzzler and problem solver. He could never crack his own private problems, however, and there was no shortage of these. He was . . .
difficult
to be around. Let me just say that Father had some unnatural habits.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Ugly things. A specific area of deviancy. It is too unpleasant to speak of. The visual would put you off your feed. Best to move along.’

‘I understand.’

‘No, you don’t, and be glad of that. But here was the reason he left Germany, and from what I gather he left quickly, under cover of night, taking a near-total financial loss in transit. He hated America on sight and continued to hate it with all his being until his death. I remember him looking out at that beautiful autumnal Massachusetts landscape and spitting on the ground, saying, “The sun and moon shame themselves by shining their lights upon it!” Berlin was a great metropolis and playground for him, you see. He felt relegated and undermined here, and that his new audience was not as respectful as the one he knew back home.’

‘What did he invent?’

‘He made small, practical improvements on existing inventions. A pocket watch with a compass built into its face, for example; another that he designed exclusively for ladies—a smaller model cast in a teardrop shape and painted in pastel colors. He was well paid and well liked before scandal ruined him, and he was forced to expatriate. When he arrived in America, dressed strangely and speaking almost no English, he found himself unwanted by even the lowliest watch companies, whom he believed were far beneath him; as he fell into poverty his mind grew darker, when it was already shades darker than your average man. Increasingly his inventions became diabolical, nonsensical. At last he focused his every energy on the refinement of torture and killing devices. The guillotine, he said, was the mechanical embodiment of man’s underachievement and aesthetic sloth. He updated it so that instead of simply removing a person’s head, the body would be cut into numberless tidy cubes. He named the great sheet of crisscrossing silver blades
Die Beweiskraft Bettdecke
—The Conclusive Blanket. He invented a gun with five barrels that fired simultaneously and covered three hundred degrees in one blast. A hail of bullets, with a slim part, or what he called
Das Dreieck des Wohlstands
—The Triangle of Prosperity—inside of which stood the triggerman himself.’

‘That’s not a bad idea, actually.’

‘Unless you are fighting five men at once who happen to be standing directly in front of each barrel, it is a terrible idea.’

‘It shows imagination.’

‘It shows a complete disregard for safety and practicality.’

‘Anyway, it’s interesting.’

‘That I will not deny, though at the time—I was thirteen years old—his work brought me little in the way of amusement. Actually, his inventions filled me with horror; I could not shake the notion he wanted to try them out on me, and even now I dare say this was not mere paranoia on my part. So I was not entirely unhappy when he packed a bag and left one spring morning, without any instruction or good-bye—not so much as a pat on the head from the old man. He later committed suicide, with an ax, in Boston.’

‘An ax? How is that possible?’

‘I don’t know. But here was what the letter said:
Woefully sorry to report your Hans Warm killed self with ax on 15th May. Possessions forthcoming.
’

‘Perhaps he was murdered.’

‘No, I don’t think so. If there was ever anyone who could find a way to kill himself with an ax, it was Father. They never did forward his things. I have often wondered what it was he held on to, there at the end.’

‘And after he left you, then what happened?’

‘I was alone for two weeks in our cabin when my mother arrived, standing in the doorway, twenty-eight years old, pretty as a picture. She had heard I’d been abandoned and came to fetch me back to Worcester, where she had been living all the while. She was awfully sorry to have left me, she said, but she had been deathly afraid of my father, who would drink too much and menace her with knives and forks and things. It was very much a forced or one-sided romance, was my understanding. She could not discuss their time together without revulsion. But that was past, and we were the both of us well pleased to be reunited. The whole first month in Worcester she simply held me and cried. This was the sum total of our relationship at the beginning. I wondered if it would ever stop.’

‘She sounds like a kind woman.’

‘Indeed she was. There were five years of blissful relations where our life was a kind of perfection. She had been given a legacy by her family in New York, and so I always had enough to eat, and my clothes were clean, and she encouraged me in my pursuit of knowledge, for even at that tender age, curiosity in most everything was strong in me, from mechanical engineering to botany to chemistry—yes, clearly that! Unfortunately this contented existence was not to last, for with my transformation to manhood it became clear to her that I was my father’s son, both in looks and temperament. I became obsessive with my studies, hardly ever leaving my room. When she tried to guide me toward healthier pastimes I was consumed by an anger that frightened the both of us. I took to drinking, not too terribly much at the start, but enough that I would become abusive and belittling, just as my father had. Having been through all this before, my mother understandably found my behavior repellent, and she removed her affections in wretched stages until there was nothing left between us, nothing but for me to go, which is what I did, taking my small sack of money and heading to St. Louis, or should I say my sack ran out in St. Louis, which forced me to cease traveling. It was wintertime, and I feared I would perish from cold or sadness or both. I sold my horse and married a fat woman I did not love, or even like, named Eunice.’

‘Why would you marry someone you didn’t like?’

‘She had an enormous potbellied stove in her cabin that emanated heat like the coals of hell. And by the looks of her she held a stockpile of food that might feed the both of us through to the spring. You’re smiling, but I assure you these were my lone motivations: Warmth and nourishment. I so longed for any manner of comfort, I would have married an alligator if only it would share its bed. And I might as well have married an alligator, for all the kindness Eunice showed me. She had no grace or charm whatsoever. She had noncharm, or anticharm. A bottomless well of antagonism and hostility. And she was terrifically ugly. And she smelled like rotten leaves. A brute, to put it briefly. When the money from my horse sale ran out, and when she understood I had no plans to copulate with her, she pushed me from the bed and onto the floor, where the heat from the stove burned my topside, while the draft coming up through the boards froze my bottom. Also, my hopes for a bountiful dinner table were soon dashed. Eunice was as protective as a mama bear about her biscuits. She gave me the occasional bowl of watery stew, so let’s say she wasn’t all bad, but the good was there in such measly quantities you had to keep a sharp watch lest you miss it entirely. But as I said, it was miserably cold, and I had made the decision to dig in my heels and pass the winter in that cabin, one way or the other. After the weather broke I would rob her and run away into the sunshine—I would have my last laugh. She recognized my plan, however, and got me one better before I could see it through. I came home from the saloon and found a large and angry-looking man sitting at the dinner table. He had a plateful of biscuits before him. I understood right away. I wished them good luck and left.’

‘That was sporting.’

‘I returned an hour later and tried to set the cabin alight. The man caught me huddled over my matchbox and kicked me so hard in the backside it lifted me from the earth. Eunice saw it all from the window. That was the only time I saw her laugh. She laughed a long time, too. Anyway, I am embarrassed to say it, but after this hurtful episode I became disenchanted, and turned for a time to common thievery. I could not get my mind around my misfortune, was the thing. Only months earlier I was alone with my books, clean and sheltered and well fed, happy as could be. And now, through no fault of my own, I found myself sneaking into barns at night and burrowing under manure-matted hay so as not to freeze to death. I said to myself, Hermann, the world has raised up its fist and struck you down! I resolved to strike back.’

‘What did you steal?’

‘At the start I was after the bare necessities. A loaf of bread here, a blanket there, a pair of wool socks—small things that no man should be denied. But with every passing crime I became more stealthy and cocksure and also greedy; after a time I began to take away anything I could get my hands on, just for the malicious pleasure I derived from it. I stole items I could never conceivably use. A pair of women’s boots. A crib. At one point I found myself running from an abattoir with a severed cow’s head in my arms. What for? What functional purpose might it serve? When it became too heavy I dropped the thing into a river. It bobbed along, then caromed off a rock and sank out of sight. Stealing became like a sickness. I think I saw it as a way to extract revenge against everyone who was
not
shivering and famished and alone. It was around this point my drinking began to take hold of me, body and spirit. You talk about your slippery roads.’

‘My father was a drinker. And Charlie is, also.’

‘It is something that plagues me still, and perhaps will always plague me. Of course it would be best to cork the bottle forever. I have recognized the problem. I know it doesn’t agree with me. Why not stop? Why not put an end to it? No, that would make too much sense. That would be entirely too reasonable. Oh, it’s a slippery road, all right, make no mistake about that. Well, days and months passed me by and I became dirtier and more depraved all the while, inside and out. You will meet some down-on-their-luck types who take pride in their pared and scrubbed nails, men who will boast of their once-per-week baths, financial hardships be damned. They attend church services regularly and sit patiently in the pews, awaiting their change in fate without a trace of bitterness, beards combed down just so. Let me say that I was not one of these. In fact I was the far opposite. I became increasingly drawn to filth. More and more I desired to lay and grovel in it, to actually
live within in
. My teeth fell out, and this pleased me. My hair dropped away in patches and I was glad. I was the raving and maniacal village idiot, in short, only the village was not a humble, thatched-roof township, but the United States of America. Finally I was seized by an unshakable preoccupation, namely the belief that I was actually composed of human waste.’

‘What?’

‘A living mold of waste, was my notion. Excrement. My bones were hardened excrement. My blood—was
liquid
excrement. Do not ask me to elucidate. It is something I will never be able to explain. I was suffering, if I’m not mistaken, from scurvy, which added together with the drinking and mental agitation brought about this queer idea.’

‘Living waste matter.’

‘I delighted in the thought of it. My favorite pastime was to push through a crowd, touching and groping the bare arms of unescorted women. The sight of my own grime on their pale wrists and hands was just as satisfying a thing as I could think of.’

‘I don’t suppose you were very popular.’

‘I was a popular point of discussion. Socially, though? No, I was not well thought of. But then I rarely stayed in one place long enough to become more than an alleyway myth. Mania or no, I was not a fool, and I knew enough that I should strike and move on at once, before any violence came against me. I would steal a horse and head for the next town, only to start my contamination campaign all over again. My days were ordure and ugliness and the blackest kind of sin, and I was only half living, just barely hanging on, waiting and hoping, I think, for death. And then one morning I woke up and found myself in a most curious place, and would you care to guess where that was? Don’t say jail.’

‘I was going to say it.’

‘Let me just tell you then. I awoke with the king mother of all whiskey headaches on a cot in militia barracks. I was washed and my beard had been shaved clean. My hair had been cut back and I wore a soldier’s uniform. The reveille was screaming in my ears, and I thought I would die, literally, of fright and confusion. Then a bright-faced soldier came by and gripped me by the arm. “Wake up, Hermann!” he said. “You miss roll call one more time you’ll wind up in the stockade!” ’

‘What in the world had happened?’

‘That was precisely what I wanted to know. But put yourself in my position. How would you find the answer to this?’

‘I suppose I would ask someone.’

Warm affected a serious posture and voice: ‘Pardon me, my good man, but would you mind telling me how it is I came to join the militia? It is only a slight detail, but I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.’

‘It would be an awkward way to start a conversation,’ I admitted. ‘But what else was there to do? You could not simply go along with it.’

‘But that is exactly what I did do. Fell right in line, as a matter of fact. You must understand, Eli, that I was disconcerted in the extreme. As a drunkard, I was used to losing an hour or two here and there, or even an entire evening. But how much time had passed for me to join the militia and establish relationships with the other soldiers, all of whom appeared to know me well? How could I not recall so drastic a change? I decided to keep my head down and go with the crowd until I could figure things out.’