John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

"Ye'll be all right, with a day in bed," the lawyer said. "What I was about to say — nay, not there: my boat's that small sloop yonder by the post — what I was about to say, this great lout claims his name is — "

"Tom Tayloe!" roared a voice from the sloop. "Tom Tayloe o' Talbot County, damn your eyes, and ye know't as well as I, Dick Sowter!"

"St. Sebastian's pincushion, hear him rave!" chuckled Sowter. "Yet his name is writ on the indenture for all to see: 'tis John McEvoy, plain as day, from Puddledock in London."

Ebenezer clutched a piling for support. " 'Tis my delirium!"

"Aye, St. Pernel's ague, thou'rt not thyself," the lawyer admitted.

"Ye know full well I'm not McEvoy!" shouted the man in the boat. "McEvoy was the wretch that duped me!"

Focusing his eyes on the sloop, Ebenezer saw the complainant shackled by one wrist to the gunwale. His hair was red, as was his beard, but even through the swimming eyes of fever Ebenezer saw that he was not the John McEvoy he had feared. He was too old, for one thing — in his forties, at the least — and too fat: a mountain of flesh, twice the size of fat Ben Oliver, he was quite the most corpulent human the poet had beheld.

"That is not John McEvoy," he declared, as Sowter helped him into the sloop.

"There, now, ye blackguard!" the prisoner cried. "E'en this skinny wretch admits it, that ye doubtless bribed to swear me false!" He turned imploringly to Ebenezer. " 'Tis a double injury I've been done, sir: this Sowter knows I'm not McEvoy, but he got the papers cheap and means to carry out the fraud!"

"Tush," Sowter answered, and bade his crewmen, of whom there were two, get the sloop under way. "I'm going below to draw up certain papers," he said to Ebenezer. "Ye may take your ease in the cabin till we raise Cooke's Point."

"I beg ye hear me out," the servant pleaded. "Ye said already ye know I'm not McEvoy: haply ye'll believe this is unjust."

" 'Tis no rare name," Ebenezer murmured, moving toward the cabin. "I'll own the John McEvoy I once knew had your red hair, but he was slight and all befreckled, and a younger man than I."

"That is the one! I'Christ, Sowter, can ye go on now with your monstrous trick? This wight hath drawn the very likeness of the man that sold me!"

"By David's leek, man," Sowter said testily. "Ye may file complaint at court the day thou'rt settled on Cooke's Point, for all o' me. Till then thou'rt John McEvoy, and I've bought your papers honestly. Tell Mr. Cooke your troubles, if he cares to hear 'em."

With that he went below, followed by the prisoner's curses, but Ebenezer, at the first heel of the vessel, felt more ill than at any other time in his life except aboard the Poseidon, in the storm off the Canary Islands, and was obliged to remain in misery at the leeward rail.

"This McEvoy," he managed to say. " 'Tis quite impossible he's the one I know, for mine's in London."

"E'en so was mine, till six weeks past," the fat man said.

"But mine's no servant seller!"

"No more was mine, till late last night: 'tis I that sells redemptioners for my living, but this accursed young Irishman did me in, with Sowter's aid!"

Ebenezer shook his head. " 'Tis unthinkable!" Yet he knew, or believed, that Joan Toast had come to Maryland — for reasons he could only vaguely guess at — and also that at the time of his own departure from London, John McEvoy had had no word of his mistress for some days. "Would God my head were clear, so I might think on't, what it means!"

The prisoner interpreted this as an invitation to tell his tale, and so commenced:

"My name is not McEvoy, but Thomas Tayloe, out of Oxford in Talbot County. Every planter in Talbot knows me — "

"Why do you not complain in court, then," the poet interrupted thickly, "and call them in as witnesses?" He was seated on the deck, too ill to stand.

"Not with Sowter as defendant," Tayloe said. "For all his sainting he is crooked as the courts, and besides, the wretches would lie to spite me." He explained that his trade was selling redemptioners: poor folk in England desirous of traveling to the colonies would, in lieu of boat fare, indenture themselves to an enterprising sea captain, who in turn "redeemed" their indentures to the highest bidders in port — a lucrative speculation, since standard passenger fare for servants was only five pounds sterling, more or less, and the indenture-bonds of artisans, unmarried women, and healthy laborers could be sold for three to five times that amount. Those whom it was inconvenient or insufficiently profitable for the captain to sell directly he "wholesaled" to factors like Tayloe, who would then attempt to resell the hands to planters more removed from the port of call. Tayloe's own specialty, it seemed, was purchasing at an unusually low price servants who were old, infirm, unskilled, troublesome, or otherwise especially difficult for the captain to dispose of, and endeavoring to "retail" them before the expense of feeding them much raised his small investment.

" 'Tis a thankless job," he admitted. "Were't not for me those pinch-penny planters with their fifty-acre patches would have no hands at all, yet they'll pay six pounds for a palsied old scarecrow and hold me to account for't he is no Samson. And the wretched redemptioners claim I starve 'em, when they know very well I've saved their worthless lives: they're the scum o' the London docks, the half of 'em, and were spirited away drunk by the captain: if I didn't take them off his hands in Oxford, he'd sign 'em on as crewmen for the voyage home, and see to't they fell to the fishes ere the ship was three days out."

" 'Tis a charitable trade you practice, I'm persuaded," Ebenezer said in a dolorous voice.

"Well, sir," he declared, "just yesterday the Morpheides moored off Oxford with a troop o' redemptioners — "

"The Morpheides! Not Slye and Scurry's ship?"

"No other," Tayloe said. "Gerrard Slye's the grandest speculator in the trade, and Scurry is his equal. They are the only order-captains in the Province. Suppose thou'rt a planter, now, and need you a stonemason for four years' work: ye put your order in with Slye and Scurry, and on the next voyage there's your mason."

"No more: I grasp the principle."

"Well then, 'twas yesterday the Morpheides moored, and out we all went to bid for redemptioners. They were fetching 'em up as I boarded, and the crew was passing pots o' rum for us buyers. When they brought this redhaired wight on deck he took one look at the shore, broke away from the deckhands, and sprang o'er the side ere any man could stop him. 'Twas his ill luck to light beside the Morpheides's own boat; the mate and three others hauled him back aboard and clapped him into leg irons with promise of a flogging, and I knew then I'd have him ere the day was out."

"Poor McEvoy!" mumbled the Laureate.

" 'Twas his own doing," Tayloe said. "Would God they'd let the whoreson drown, so I'd not be shackled here in his place!" He sniffed and spat over the gunwale. "In any case, the captains filled their orders for bricklayers, cobblers, boat-wrights, and the like, and put up for bids a clutch o' cabinetmakers and carpenters, and a sailmaker that fetched 'em twenty-three pounds sterling. As a rule they'd have peddled off the lassies after that, but in this lot the only ladies were a brace o' forty-year spinsters out to catch husbands, so instead they brought their field hands out, and bid 'em off for twelve to sixteen pound. After the field hands came the ladies, and went for cooks at fourteen pounds apiece. When they were sold, only four souls remained, besides the red-head: three were too feeble for field work and too stupid for anything else, and the fourth was so ravaged with the smallpox, the look of him would retch a goat. 'Twas a lean day, for 'tis my wont to buy a dozen or more, but I dickered with Slye and Scurry till at last I got the five for twenty pounds — that's a pound a head less than 'twould've cost to bring 'em over if they'd eaten twice a day, but Slye and Scurry had so starved 'em they were fit for naught but scarecrows, and had some profit e'en at twenty pound.