John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

But for all he called the notion unthinkable, it was already thought, and the more he reviled and railed against it, the more tenacious grew its hold upon his fancy. After forty-five minutes or so he found himself saying, " 'Twas nowise her doing that the great Moor split her, and poxed her, and got a black babe in her, for all her opium and whoring, she is the same Joan Toast I love, nor was her character disfigured by Mitchell's purgatives and abuse, that ruined her hair and teeth. 'Twas saintly faith and charity to leave me this money, e'en though 'twas my own father she had it from, and that by fraud. What's more she is my wife: it matters naught in the eyes of Heaven that Richard Sowter may not be empowered to make marriages, or that I wed her under duress and she me under a false name, or that in the eyes of the law she hath committed scores and hundreds of adulteries, while our marriage hath not e'en been consummated! I must wait for her return, and in the event she hath not poxed six pounds-worth of filthy salvages, I must in conscience give Father's money back to her, and suffer his wrath after all — which will be so much the greater for her jilting him! Thus runs our Christian code of honor, and though as poet I'm but a guest, as't were, in Christendom, still a guest is bound to honor the rules of the house."

Yet bound by what, if not the very code in question? As best he could estimate, his time was running short: he rose from the bed, put a heavy coat about his shoulders, and searched out his ledger-book. Though he could not make out the verses in the dark, he sang in his head the fierce conclusion of his satire and hugged the notebook to his breast.

But at the darkened exitway he was flooded with a sweat of shame. "Nay, what am I doing! For all I'm more a poet now than ever in my life (and thus obliged to no soul save my muse nor any institution save my craft), and for all my pledge runs counter to the poet's creed and to the vow made long before to Anna, yet damn it, I have given my word, and sealed it with the rings!"

This was the final anguish. As he tiptoed down the stairs and out the back door of the house, he saw his sister's drawn and hardening features; as he stalked across the dark yard to the stables he recalled her presentation of the ring, and his answering nervous vow to make her dowry flourish. By the time he found some visitor's saddled horse and mounted, the image of Joan Toast had somehow got blurred with that of Burlingame, on the one hand, and his own cause merged in some way with Anna's on the other, so that the two pairs stood in an opposition no less positive for its being, presently at least, not quite identifiable.

A cold December wind swept over Cooke's Point and froze the tears on the poet's cheeks. He pressed his heels into the horse and cried "May some god strike me dead!" but clutched the bank note tightly lest he lose it in the dark.

Throughout the frozen fifteen miles between Cooke's Point and the wharf at Cambridge, Ebenezer shivered not from the wind alone, nor again from the simple self-revulsion that came and went in clonic spasms, and between the seizures of which he could affirm the cardinal value of his art and the corollary value of his independence; what shook him mainly was his fear that Joan might follow, or that he would be recognized, apprehended, and returned to Malden as a fugitive from his late indenture. It was not yet dawn when he arrived at the county seat: the inn and courthouse were dark, but in the creek-mouth loomed the Pilgrim, her ports and masthead lanterns lit, and about her decks as well as on the wharf men toiled by lamplight to fit her out for the turning of the tide. Now nearly set, the moon hid all but the morning star; it pleased Ebenezer to imagine that it hung over the meridian of London like the star of old over Bethlehem, guiding him to the cradle of his destiny.

"There's a figure Henry Burlingame would make mincemeat of," he reflected, and tethering his horse, made his way nervously towards the wharf. "I know not whether I am Magus, Messiah, Lazarus, or the Prodigal."

He had not gone far through the laboring stevedores before a hand fell lightly on his shoulder and someone behind him asked, "Are ye quitting Cooke's Point so soon, Master Laureate?"

Ebenezer spun around to face his captor, but the man he saw, though distantly familiar, was no one whose intentions he could confidently assume to be hostile. It was a dirty, ragged old fellow with much untrimmed beard and no wig, thin as a skeleton, who had been coiling lines nearby.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

The fellow showed great surprise. "Ye do not even know me?" he cried, as though the possibility were too good to be true.

Ebenezer scrutinized him uncomfortably: barring a metamorphosis nothing short of miraculous, the man was not Burlingame, McEvoy, Sowter, Smith, or Andrew Cooke, and neither his dress nor his occupation suggested the county sheriff.

"I do not, nor why you accost me."

"Ah now, fear not, Mister Cooke, sir. I care not whether or wherefore ye sail, nor would it matter if I did: ye can see yourself I'm but a wharf rat, and could not stop ye."

"Then prithee let me go," Ebenezer said. "I must find passage out to yonder ship at once."

"Indeed?" The stevedore smiled a toothless smile and squeezed the poet's arm. "Is Madame Cooke sailing with ye, or doth her business keep her at Malden?"

"Put by your hand and your impertinence this instant," Ebenezer threatened, "or I'll have you sacked!" His voice was angry, but in truth he was terrified at the prospect of apprehension. Already a gentleman standing some distance behind the stevedore was watching them with interest.

"There's little ye can do to injure me," the stevedore sneered. "At my wages 'tis no threat to sack me, and I can't sink lower when I'm already on the bottom. Ye might say I am a man with naught to lose, for I've lost it all ere now."

"That is a pity," Ebenezer began, "but I do not see — "

"Know that not long since I was a gentleman, Master Poet, with horse and dog, wig and waistcoat, and sot-weed fields a-plenty in my charge; but now, thanks to you, sir, 'tis a good day when my work so wearies me that I sleep o'er the growling of my gut, and I go in tatters, and harvest naught but vermin, chilblains, and blisters."

Ebenezer frowned incredulously. "Thanks to me?" Suddenly he recognized his detainer and tingled with alarm. "Thou'rt Spurdance, my father's overseer!"

"No other soul than he, that was deceived by your father, conspired against by your unholy friend Tim Mitchell, and ruined by yourself!"

"Nay, nay!" Ebenezer protested. "There is more to't than you know!" To his distress he saw the interested gentleman moving nearer. " 'Twas my poor innocence undid you!"

" 'Tis you, not I, that are benighted," insisted the stevedore. "I know ye granted Malden away in ignorance, and I know as well as you Tim Mitchell is not Tim Mitchell, nor Susan Warren Susan Warren. But I know too old Captain Mitchell, for all he was erst a wicked and unnatural rogue till some years past, hath lately been in the power of your friend Tim! 'Tis Tim Mitchell that is the grand high whoremaster, whoe'er he is and whoe'er he works for; 'tis he that oversees the opium trade from New York to Carolina; 'tis he conspires with Monsieur Casteene and the Naked Indians; 'tis he made the contracts with your father and the rest to turn their manors into brothels and opium-houses, now the sot-weed market's fallen, and woe betide the honest overseer that will have none of't!" He grasped Ebenezer's other arm as well and crowded him backwards toward the bulkhead. "If he be not ruined by some ninny like yourself, that knows not black from white, he will be sacked by's crooked master; if he make the evil public, all his neighbors will turn on him as one man, lest their pleasures be curtailed, and if he dare make trouble for your nameless friend — "