SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

"You and Grandp’twua accomplished a lot, including making our big family."

"Yes, doll, we made our own kind of music. Grandp’twua Ruk tells me I’m laverty much of the time now. Unfortunately, all Sonjec’s achievements couldn’t give her that."

From the "Common Lexicon of Perceptual Communication"

by Ruk Tur*ki’tua and Carinth Kellen

Laverty—lavendersilver-velvety: satisfied old-age .

END

Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, no. 117, April 16, 2015

Mr. Stutley Northup is not a magistrate. Why, he’s not even a lawyer. But if people are free to come to him with their controversies, he is just as free to offer his opinion; and if they choose to act on it, well, that’s their own lookout. Little Hope, Pennsylvania, is not the sort of place to go about your business expecting not to have it talked about. If someone goes to see “Old Stuck-Up,” it must be because that business is a stubborn one. And urgent, too.

Mr. James E. (for Ezeziel, although he believes that only his parents and perhaps some nameless county clerk know that) Chambers rides the Freeport Road south from the lake, on past the jog it takes at the shingle mill at the creekside, way on past Enoch Parmenter’s place, past the Bemiss farm, over fields and hills and wooded slopes, to just over the township line into Greenfield.

He follows the road that Judah Colt cut forty-some years ago towards the end of the previous century, said to be the first road since the French army abandoned the region. From the cabin he built with his own hands—abandoned in 1804 but still called Colt’s Station whether a church, store, tavern, or even, in the winter of 1821, a schoolhouse—it runs due north to the lake at Freeport. Winters, some folks still log the ridge, skid their haul to Little Hope, and, come the spring floods, lash together a raft and float it down French Creek past Amity and on into the Allegheny River, and past the confluences of the Clarion and Kiskaminentas, all the way to Pittsburgh, or farther, even (…Saint Louis!…New Orleans!).

Old Northup’s place, now: isolated, sure, but his own. No, he tells anyone who asks, he’s not lonely, he’s got his books to lend him human warmth; a few cows, a hired man or two as they might be needed; he does well enough for himself nowadays. Niece of his stops by to look after him, good girl too, not like—well, there’s no call to name names.

Once he’s all properly seated and settled and served with refreshment, Chambers asks: What think you of the Canadian Republic and its likely fate? I hear tell that MacKenzie has lately fled to Navy Island, in the Niagara, and the British have seized and fired an American ship conveying supplies to them there.

Northup says: Don’t let’s beat around the bush, Chambers, tell me what you come here for.

Not to be hurried along, as befits the inherent dignity of the new Justice of the Peace for Harbor Creek Township, just this year appointed by Governor Ritner himself, and so young, too—J. E. Chambers takes his time with a few more sips of Northup’s locally famous boiled milk coffee. He suspects Northup ekes it out with roasted acorns. The old man watches him amiably enough, despite his tone.

Chambers, when he’s good and ready, says: You remember the Dusseau brothers.

Course I do. Pair of fools. French, too.

And their great sea serpent…?

Northup laughs bitterly.

You know of it then, Chambers presses.

Know of it? I saw it! Mind you don’t be smashing the crockery, Chambers.

James Chambers has set his cup down so abruptly that it threatens to shatter the saucer.

Northup says, Can’t afford to be replacing it all the time. Come from England, you know.

Chambers says, So sorry.

He mops up the spilled coffee with his spare handkerchief.

He goes on: But how could you have seen it? They said it must have died.

They lied. French, you know.

Well, then, what did they see there?

Probably it was just like they said.

Chambers regards the old man gravely. He slips his fingers into a pocket of his tobacco-brown coat and withdraws a paper packet. This he unfolds slowly and studies carefully. He looks up at Northup again, then back at his papers. He clears his throat.

He reads out: There is great excitement among the French inhabitants along the lake shore in North East Township over the reported discovery of a marine monster by two French fishermen named Dusseau. It was between twenty and thirty feet long and shaped like a sturgeon, but it had arms which it tossed wildly in the air.

He looks up: That was the Phoenix and Reflector . Last May. Local paper, you know. Gossip fills a column up as well as truth does.

Northup shrugs.

Chambers places this scrap of paper on the table and studies the next one.

He says: Now this is one of the New York papers. Last June, I believe.

He reads: Special from Presque-Isle, Pennsylvania. The French settlers along the lake shore, in North East Township, Erie County, a few miles east of here, were surprised and amazed on May Twelfth over the appearance of an unknown fish of mammoth size. Two brothers named Dusseau, both fishermen, were returning from the fishing grounds, when they discovered a phosphorescent mass upon the beach. It was late in the evening, but they succeeded in making their boat fast to the shore, and, upon examination, discovered a lake monster writhing in agony.

Northup remarks: Amazing what finds its way into print these days.

Chambers keeps reading: The brothers say that it was like a large sturgeon in shape, but that it had long arms, which it threw wildly in the air. While they were watching it, the great fish apparently died, and the Dusseau boys, badly frightened, hurried away for aid. When they returned with ropes the fish had disappeared. In its dying efforts it had succeeded in tumbling into the lake and had been carried away by the waves. The marks left by its wild thrashings on the muddy shore indicate that the serpent was between twenty and thirty feet in length. Several scales as large as silver dollars which were cast off were picked up.

Chambers places this on the table atop the first. I have more, he says.

Northup sighs, shakes his head. He says: Not wild thrashings in the mud. Writing. And not scales, Chambers. Eggs.

His father, born Stukely Northup but renamed Stutley by a regimental clerk’s error and an officious paymaster’s refusal to admit it ( You want your pay? Then you’re Stutley! Stutley! ), had named his son after the error to confound the new government’s record-keepers. The war had done more than rename him; it had left him feeling hollowed out, uncertain of most things, and with a frail left arm. Discharged in January 1777 at Trenton, New Jersey, he’d made his way back through the bitter winter to a Rhode Island, a wife and young child, that he hardly recognized, not because they had changed but because they had not.

On May Fourteen, 1780, a fine spring Sunday in Little Rest, R.I. (formerly King’s Towne), he was hailed in the street by a young woman strangely togged out, all in black, mannish and vaguely Quaker, and cloaked in a long black gown, like a preacher’s, tied at the throat with a flowing white cravat. She was riding a white horse and sporting a preposterous hat of white beaver with a flat crown and broad brim, tied down with a purple kerchief. Friend, she called to him, dost love thy neighbor?

Thinking of all the men he had so recently shot at, not in anger but out of righteous principle, he answered: No.