Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The main feature of the Marchia , besides the itsy-bitsy game, were the wells, a veritable forest constructed of large locust trees lugged from the foothills and topped so that only the main fork remained. After the trunk was wedged in the sod, a hickory log exactly three times the length of the forked tree was laid at the fulcrum, creating a natural lever. The hickory log had been wrapped in burlap and soaked in hot lard at its friction point, and a weight, if possible a Roman millstone, was then lashed to the shorter end for ballast. At the lifting end of the pole a leather thong was noosed and attached to a brass swivel, and from there a rope fell spiraling upon the ground. Only then, where the noose dropped, was the actual well-digging begun, dirt being slung around in great arcs by the diggers, and in no time at all, one meter at the most, the shallow aquifer was exposed, the mud taking on a silken, vulvaic sheen. Then a box of oaken slats was built to keep the bubbling gloss pure from grazing game. Once this reservoir filled, a wooden bucket was attached to the rope, and a good fellow might leap up and grasp the pole just ahead of the stone, and hanging there, his arms clasped about the hickory lever, observe the log rise slowly as a bucket of sweetish, slightly carbolic water would be hauled from the Marchlands — an elemental brew.

The strange thing about these wells was that no man or animal really had need of them. No one had ever gone thirsty in that country, and of the thousands of wells erected on that plain I sincerely doubt if more than a handful ever swung a drink upward to anyone.

Eventually, the “Y” of the locusts sprouted new limbs and shoots, the pivotal architecture of the redundant pump slowly refashioning itself back into a tree. On the hickory fulcrums the bark shredded and fell off, the treegut glistening and hardening to a coarse gray like wet stone. And not a few were carved, whether by the horns of rutting animals or the steel of idle men, it is difficult to say.

In the spring, great irregular seepage pools formed about the rectangular boxes, so that the lifting mechanism was reflected in them, and yet they never even earned a proper noun. There was no name for them. “You know, the —-!” the Astingi would say with a smile and a shrug, holding up two fingers, one less than their usual salute.

Lopsided crosses, shattered capitals, polylifts, inadvertent art, machinery not born of a function but in search of one — it was this woodland of unmanned, unnamed drooping poles, this no-man’s land of pointless ionic hydraulics and arrested pumping, this forest of levers with its unsettling religious quality, that the Professor had to traverse to turn homeward, until at the northern border of the Mze the fields suddenly began to whimper and submit to the ambience of dovecotes and lighthouses, as prettiness broke out.

We proceeded with impeded canter and the jingling of curb chains toward the ferry landing. Although the Professor had been given the gentlest of the piebald mares, every time her hoof struck a stone it went directly to his heart. His hands had begun to hurt, and I gave him my riding gloves. He shifted to ride in the burdock beside the road, but I warned him to return to the roadway, as the prickly burrs would accumulate in the joint behind the hoof and cause infection. Finally, he found his seat, and the mare pointed her ears and settled into an affected, dance-like gait. On the ferry, pestered by midges, she became restless and kicked out her hindquarters. I made a low whistle, putting one hand upon the mare’s brain, and the other soothingly between her flank and the Professor’s knee, and she quieted down. On the far bank not a carriage was to be seen, so I suggested we proceed to Sare by the old military road.

The periphery of the Marchlands was not without its history of bloody stalemates, the Marches themselves being too soft a terrain for a battle proper. Offering no vantage, no cover, and such fragility, only a single man with a good dog leading a good horse might traverse it and not sink into the hidden river. While the wars of the last century had made not a dent in the wildlife, the unburied dead routinely surfaced in the floods, skeletons with their helmets and boots intact, a perfect row of steel buttons between the ribs. Even halberds, swords, spears, and cannonballs were occasionally belched up from furious geysers. This band of warring, serpentine rivers coiling back upon one another, where every property had a water view, was noted on the ancient maps as Inter Canum et Lupus . It was open country where the fool for love might gambol, and the loathed ex-lover might lick his wounds. And though many a flag had been hoisted on the horizon, no battle had actually been concluded on that ground. The monotony of the landscape was only superficial, for it was home to an enormous variety of species and held an equal variety of enormous, submerged hatreds. If no actual ruins were to be seen, traces of every form of failed social architecture had survived in a twilight where one might ponder the most astounding things. For between the dog and the wolf, as between their human versions, there are really only two stories — that of the wild being tamed, and the tame reverting to the wild.

We passed through a toll gate at the military border. Constructed in a bad imitation of the wells, its crotch sank lower in the ground, and the lever forming the gate was fir, three times the length of the well standard, with a cargo net full of cannonballs for the counterweight. The fir was squared off and thinned with an ax down to the tip, where the rope, connected by a chain apparatus, fell not to water but to a cogwheel to haul the gate down. It took great strength to crank a gate, which is why they invariably remained open at forty-five degrees perpendicular, an angle high enough that the tallest hayrick might pass beneath. Once beneath a gate, hat in hand, passport in the other, the primitive leverage of the wells seemed benign, big check marks in the sky, as if you had accounted for all the inventory before you left and could now do business without anxiety.

Of course, there were times when distant artillery shook the already tremulous ground in these fields of nothingness. The well levers in the Marches would seem to rise on their own, the locust sprouts shocked into bloom, and the toll gates would be cranked down, at which point no amount of love or money could open them. There existed no document lucid or authoritative enough to get you through that station, but when finally released, the two-ton gate would spring up like some child’s toy.

The two armies manning the borders had similar uniforms; only the colors of the epaulets and the weave of their braid differed, and both had a defeated look — puzzled faces and broad, unreferenced gestures, many of them maimed and on crutches, sitting around waiting to be demobbed or disembarked to another front. Occasionally they would form up and fan out in a long column, two abreast, simulating a withdrawal or reconnaissance around an empty field. And semi-occasionally a file of these hangdog men in full battle gear, packs sagging at the small of their backs, rifles slung butt-up over a rounded shoulder, would appear like phantoms out of the fog, but they would never look you in the eye, much less threaten. Another day you might find them all on one knee, service caps crumpled in one fist, at Mass. But their most common and dignified maneuver, it appeared, was squatting on their field latrines, half a dozen at a time, those waiting in line knocking pipes out on their rifle butts, bayonets stuck in the ground, staring out over an embankment or a half-filled trench, writing letters on each other’s backs.

On anniversaries of major battles the two adversaries would have a soccer match among the wells, or a boxing competition on a tarpaulin stretched from stump to stump in a patch of woods. But more often than not they would simply lounge around the benches by the gatehouse, holding hands sometimes, lagging the coins of the realm, which depreciated before they even hit the ground. Theoretically, they were locked in primordial and eternal combat, but in fact both were armies in full desultory retreat from politics, ideology, and nationalism, from the cant of every discipline, comical but serene.