The Snake-Oil Dickens Man. Ross Gilfillan
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that I was employed by Elijah Putnam as an agent of his own ambition and that I let my mother be abominably abused. Harder still to acknowledge that I owe my present eminence to an individual whose philosophy was markedly at odds with those who hold propriety and the law in reverence.
But now I have arrived at a time in my life when I would leave off pretence and apply myself to the task of understanding of what I am made. I shall begin today while my wife is in Mississippi, opening up the house in Natchez. She hardly needs two whole months to ready the place for Christmas – only an excuse to decamp from Washington DC. (She has never enjoyed playing the part of the politician’s wife.) However, her absence affords me ideal opportunity to begin my work. To this end I am seated at my great oaken desk, my inkpot brim-full and my nib poised above half a ream of white paper, fully resolved that I will not be distracted by my present great responsibilities or by the formless stain of black ink which despoils the oak and has proven the match of brush and polish alike.
But where to begin? A natural place might be with my mother and father but if I had known their histories in the first place this one would not be worth the candle. Nor was sense made of my childhood until its term had expired. Rather, I must overleap my dim origins and begin at a place which now seems pregnant with some significance, although I can offer no more apt beginning than this, with which you will surely be familiar:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
And so to make a start.
I
I HAD BEEN reading to Mr Putnam, same as I always did, right after supper and before I climbed the ladder to my bed beneath the rafters. I guessed he had something on his mind because this night he let me choose.
‘We’ll have the one about the feller with high hopes,’ I said, and settled down on the hard chair by the lamp and began to read.
Pip was still on the marshes, beside the graves of his five little brothers, when Mr Putnam, who had been quite unusually restless throughout, fidgeting and biting his fingernails, said, ‘That’s enough, boy. You must know it by heart. I had hoped you might have read us the latest part of his new one.’
I wanted to tell him that I had never liked that book and that when I had read its opening pages, which he bid me do as soon as the first instalment landed on American soil, I had been terrified out of my senses. I told no one that for weeks afterward, my bed became a boat whose dreadful occupants were black and faceless figures who sculled the river at night, fishing for the bloated corpses of suicides. I went to replace the volume but he heard my tread and sat me down.
‘Stay,’ he said. ‘On reflection, it occurs to me that the book will do very well for tonight.’
I took it up again and read of a marshland that I thought must bear resemblance to that which spread out beyond the limits of our own town – for how different can bogs be? – and of the hulks, which put me in mind of the captured ships tethered by the quay, here in Hayes, Missouri, and of the ranks of rebel prisoners that had shambled through the town only months ago. And of Magwitch; I thought I knew him, too.
I read mechanically, the narrative familiar and my mind more fully employed on matters closer to home. There was that about Mr Putnam tonight I was certain signified an urgency to communicate something to me. But it wasn’t my place to ask and I read on and let him bide his time. Pip had returned to the forge and to Joe, but also to his terrible sister and Tickler and still Elijah said nothing. He only continued to grip the copper head of the weather-worn old stick that he had come to rely and rest upon now that his eyes had untimely closed upon the world.
As I turned the pages, I saw he was no longer attending to the words I read but seemed instead to be listening to other voices and was murmuring and nodding in tune with conversations to which I could not be privy. I stopped the reading and he was immediately sensible of the closing of the book. I expected him to remark my temerity but instead, he waved me away and said only that it, whatever that was, would wait until another day. I snuffed out the lamp and found the handle of the door.
My eyes were still accustomed to the bright light and I was feeling my way along the black hallway, when I collided with a bulk I knew straightaways was Merriweather. I had run into him hard and he cuffed me, as I knew he would. I made to let him pass, thinking how it might teach him to be less mean with his gas, when he took me by the collar and whispered so close I could tell the grade of the whisky on his breath:
‘What did he say? ’Bout the lawyer he had up with him today?’
I said he hadn’t mentioned no lawyer to me, just gone and giv’n me my lesson, same as always. My sight had gotten used to the obscurity in time to see that this wasn’t going to satisfy the old goat tonight. I tried to dodge a blow he aimed at my head but either I was too slow or he wasn’t as drunk as I had judged because he caught me one, bang upon the temple and the black hall was lit up in flashes of lightning.
Even as a child, I had never considered Merriweather a strong man, but, reeling from his lucky blow, I couldn’t fail to notice that he had hefted me up by my shirt-collars and now had me pinned against the wall. He hissed spittle in my ear:
‘Mighty queer a man would see no visitors in three weeks and then spend three hours tucked up with a lawyer, ain’t it? And say nothing to no one?’
‘He didn’t mention no lawyer, I swear,’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’ and his stubby little finger poked my face so that my eye bulged. Again, it came to me that even a skinny stick like me could maybe take a fat runt like Merriweather if push came to shove. He must have known the direction my thoughts were taking because he spat out the name that always brought me up short and I swore I would never lie to him, though I reckon I must have lied my way through every day at Merriweather’s Particular Hotel.
I don’t know that he believed me. I have learnt since that you need to look steadily into the pits of a man’s eyes before you can be certain he has swallowed your line and that sometimes the act of looking itself is all that is needed to gull your mark. Merriweather’s eyes were normally the most polished and plated of any soul’s windows. They blinked ignorance and stupidity when faced with subjects beyond his purview of money and the baser forms of gratification and were slits of suspicion and avarice at most other times.
Tonight, though, they had been digested in the general pitchy gloom of that unlit hallway and I awaited his pleasure and my doom. He let go his grip and when he spoke he sounded mollified. Maybe he was just pleased with the bull’s-eye he had landed me.
‘Course, I reckoned he’d not be discussing his business with you anyways. It’d be me he would come to. But, for the sake of insurance, you be sure and tell me if Mr Putman ever mentions anything concerning that lawyer. Anything at all, you hear?’
I heard, for now, anyway. I waited until Merriweather had descended to the saloon and somewhere between stepping upon my ladder and crawling onto my old straw tick mattress, I swore that just as soon as I could arrange it, things would be different.
II
I knew quite soon what it was that Elijah Putnam had come so close to divulging to me that night. He had been sick for several weeks and he must have thought himself a lot worse than we did because he had indeed called in a lawyer and he had made his will. He was unwell, we all knew that. His failing sight, that had been so poor he had utilised my services as reader, amanuensis and discreet guide whenever he made a rare excursion from the hotel, was now entirely gone.
Elijah appeared to interpret his blindness as a terrible and significant portent, an indicator that his illness was progressing towards its final stages and that the next time he beheld a scene that was bright and clear and full of colour it would be in the Kingdom of Heaven.
By the next day I had clean forgotten about Elijah’s strange preoccupation, his suggestion that he had something to reveal to me and