The Snake-Oil Dickens Man. Ross Gilfillan
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certainly have married Cissy Bullock and maybe now be lying in her arms had not our secret liaison and moonlight encounters been brought to an unsatisfactory close when Mr Bullock discovered us on their porch one night. I was returning her from a dance where we had contrived to lose her Aunt Louise and reckoned her folks would all be asleep by that time. Events had been taking a romantic course and I was hopeful of pressing my suit.
But Pop Bullock had found us and he was furious. He rounded on me like a mad dog. Foolishly, I tried to explain and lost all my standing. There wasn’t anything that needed excusing. I had behaved honourably and didn’t deserve this. But he had a head of steam up and was hollering for all the neighbourhood to hear, ‘I guess I’ve heard more than I ever want to about you and yours. Particular indeed! No one respectable goes up there any more. Travelling gentlemen and sharpers maybe but church folk don’t and my daughter won’t neither. You come around here again and I’ll fill you full of buckshot, understand?’
Pop Bullock had forbidden any further congress between Cissy and me and that was all because of the way Melik Merriweather ran his affairs. Or at least, so I believed at the time. I kicked stones down the track, like each one was a little granite head of Melik Merriweather. That morning I had been galled that he had ridiculed my mother as if her son had not been standing before him. ‘As ill-educated a crittur as ever crawled from the swamp,’ he had said.
Merriweather never gave a damn that my mother couldn’t read or write and had at best a basic understanding of life. I supposed he was just excusing himself to Silas Amory. But that she and I came from the swamp was undeniable. The oldest, faintest memory I have is the smell of the swamp. I don’t even know if it is a real memory. Maybe it came later, when I knew a little more, but that makes no odds: the stench of something rotten is too strong and too pervasive to be dismissed as fancy. The odour is sickly sweet and I seem to know it again – in the air on the marshes where the trees are stunted and toppled and the roads are still mud and corduroy – or strangely, in the stale smoke that is ever-present in Merriweather’s parlour.
Other memories are of equally doubtful provenance. Sometimes I think I remember the stage coach in which I know I travelled from Cairo but I know that can hardly be as I was still a babe in arms when I was taken away and installed with my mother at Merriweather’s Particular Hotel.
Within sight of the town, I was sensible, suddenly, of the thunder of hooves. I had been so lost in thought as I approached the church and burial ground that marked the town’s limits that I didn’t hear a thing until horse and rider were upon me and had nearly run me down. The Particular’s chestnut mare with its rider, cloaked and masked for the dust, galloped past. It wasn’t common to see anyone in a great hurry in these parts and I watched until he was out of sight.
III
Before my eyes were opened I was the lowest creature of evolution and I’m sure Mr Darwin would have recognised in me then some hairy antecedent of my present evolvement. My lot was better than that which had lately belonged to slaves and also than that of most new freedmen but I was a child strangely and harshly circumstanced and what might be supportable now, was infinitely less so then.
You will wonder how this came to be and to answer that I must go back to the beginning of all things and return to the smell of the swamp, which might or might not be my oldest surviving memory. There is that and I can summon its noxious vapour even now but what else of that time survives? Not much. The mingling of images and impressions and half-remembered speech that I retain must date from two or three years after I was brought to the hotel as a babe in arms and in what order they occurred I have not the slightest idea. But they are as follows.
I am pulled from my mother’s arms and someone is crying, no, howling and whether it is me or my mother who keens so piteously, I don’t know. This, I now believe, must have been the moment I was taken from my mother to live at the house of Elijah Putnam. A woman’s hands grip my wrists as she teaches me to use knife and fork. She leans across my shoulders, her breasts brushing my neck and her sweet-smelling breath whispers encouragement in my ear and I am grateful. The same woman is talking, loudly enough for me to hear clearly from the top of the stairs on which I sit, ‘Don’t take him away from me, Elijah, he’s all I have.’
And I remember the smoking and acrid-smelling remains of the house in which she died: the blackened doorframe and uprights that still stood among great heaps of charcoal and ashes and the half-burned artefacts and knick-knacks I rescued from the ruins and were my damaged records of a time when I had been happy.
There is the schoolroom, too, in which Elijah Putnam, appearing little different in my memory than he did when last I saw him, strides up and down between the desks. Stopping at my own with much greater regularity than at others, he points out this or that in a book or corrects marks I am making on a slate. There are many schoolroom memories: of reading aloud before the class or standing upon a chair with a sign about my neck that advertises that I am slothful; of my classmates finding me alone one day and taking their turns to cuff me about the ears … Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet ringing in the ears they stung so long ago.
It must have been soon after Mrs Putnam died that I left my room at his house and first slept beneath the roof of the Particular Hotel. My history is quite distinct after this date. After living a relatively ordered and peaceful life with Mr and Mrs Putnam, I found myself plunged into a chaotic world in which my function appeared to be to scrub floors, fetch and carry wash-basins, empty chamber-pots, change bed-linen, polish the boots, help the cook, wait on and clear away the tables, run errands, help Henry with the livery horses, clean the saloon and do any number of jobs, all at once, that would probably have taken three people to get done anywhere else.
I don’t know when I first encountered Merriweather but he seems a part of every memory I have of my new existence at the hotel. My life was quite suddenly, utterly changed. It seemed no stranger to be working my hands to the bone in the role of unpaid factotum to a hotelier than it did to find myself receiving personal tuition from Elijah Putnam, who had retired from his position as schoolteacher and had taken rooms in the Particular, to which I repaired every day.
But it wasn’t the work, exhausting as it always was, that made my days so miserable. I think I could have borne that well and enjoyed some parts of it, too, had I known that Merriweather were not always somewhere about the building, ready to box my ears or make threats of violence that would be directed not at me but at someone else and these I feared more than anything Merriweather might do to me.
I knew that the woman who worked mostly in the laundry and whom I sometimes caught stealing along the corridors was my mother. She cut the strangest figure of the establishment. It wasn’t just her worn-out appearance: she was taller than her posture suggested, her hands wrinkled from her work, rather than by nature, although what age she had then attained was hard to guess. Her clothes were patched and stained and she and they smelt strongly of the wash-house.
What was more extraordinary was the way she carried herself – like a whipped animal. She kept closely to herself and could even sometimes be heard running ahead of footfalls in an effort to conceal herself from any approach. She rarely met a glance and her eyes that were normally cast down were often shielded anyway by the wild mess of lank locks that fell about and often concealed her physiognomy. It could be a shock for a stranger to catch her with her face unobscured and find that she was actually pretty.
I discovered that this was my mother not long after I moved from Elijah’s house to the Particular Hotel. I had been helping Mary Ann, the cook’s girl, to knead the dough. The kitchen was warm with the baking and Merriweather, whom I had already identified as an enemy to children, was playing at cards in the saloon. I was happy to be there with Mary Ann. She wasn’t more than a few years older than I was and had become my only ally in this inhospitable place.
There was fun to be had when Cook wasn’t about and as she was napping, the bread-making had become a great game. Water was splashed and flour was spilt. Just as we were becoming so riotous that Mary was saying ‘Hush, you’ll wake Cook’, I caught sight of a figure in the corner of my eye and stopped everything, fearing Cook or Merriweather had caught us fooling.
But it was the woman I had seen skulking in the corridors.