John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

Not long after his arrival in the Province some months previously, Governor Francis Nicholson had declared his intention to move the seat of Maryland's government from St. Mary's City, which was unhappily associated with Lord Baltimore, the Jacobean and Carolingian kings, and the Roman Catholic Church, to Anne Arundel Town on the Severn River, which enjoyed the double merit of a central location on the Chesapeake and an altogether Protestant history. Although the actual transfer of government records and the official change of the capital's name from Anne Arundel Town to Annapolis were not to be effected until the end of February, the consequences of the decision were noticeable already in St. Mary's City: few people were on the streets; the capitol and other public buildings were virtually deserted; and some inns and private houses were abandoned or closed and boarded up.

Before the arched doorway of the Statehouse Burlingame said, " 'Twill hasten our search if we move in separate directions; you enquire at the wharves and taverns hereabouts, and I shall do likewise farther in the town. At dusk we'll meet here and go to supper — God grant your sister will be dining with us too!"

Ebenezer agreed to the proposal and to the wish as well, for though the prospect of confronting Anna, after Burlingame's revelations, was a disconcerting one, yet he feared for her safety alone in the Province.

"But if perchance we find her," he asked with a little smile, "what then?"

"Why, haply Coode will find some way to snatch Cooke's Point from William Smith, and then, when Andrew hath returned in peace to England, the three of us will make our home in Malden. Or haply we'll fly to Pennsylvania, as your father suspects already: Anna, if she'll have me, shall become Mrs. Nicholas Lowe, and you, under a nom de plume, poet laureate to William Penn! 'Tis a wondrous tonic for defeat, to murther an old self and beget a new! But we must hatch our chickens ere we count 'em."

The two then separated, Burlingame heading inland and Ebenezer towards an inn not far from where they stood. Upon entering he found a dozen or more townspeople eating and drinking and could not at once muster courage enough to make his inquiries. He had not the small, prerequisite effrontery of the journalist or canvasser, for one thing; for another, he was still too confounded by events of the immediate past to know clearly how he should feel about his present position. When was it he had finished The Sot-Weed Factor in his room at Malden? Only the previous evening, though it seemed a fortnight past; yet since that time he had been given to assimilate no fewer than twelve perfectly astounding facts, each warranting the most careful contemplations and modification of his position, and some requiring immediate and drastic action:

He had become the indentured servant of Malden's master.

His father was in Maryland and en route to Cooke's Point.

His wife Susan Warren was in fact his Joan Toast of London.

But she was a slave to opium, a victim of the pox, and a whore to the Indians of Dorchester.

Moreover she had been raped by the Moor Boabdil, and almost by Ebenezer himself.

He had in deserting her committed the most thoroughly and least equivocally dishonorable act of his entire life — indeed, the very first of any magnitude, not counting his thwarted ill intentions aboard the Cyprian and at Captain Mitchell's manor.

Lord Baltimore might not at all represent, as he had supposed, the very essence of Good, and Coode the essence of Evil, but vice versa, if Burlingame spoke truly; and Andrew might well be party to an enormously vicious plot.

His tutor Burlingame had been, perhaps, a loyal friend after all, and was inflamed with passion for Ebenezer and Anna as one.

His sister was at that moment somewhere in the Province.

She was a virgin to that day, despite her intimacy with Burlingame.

She loved not Burlingame but her brother, in a way too dark and deep for her cognition.

And he himself had no direction, aim, or prospect whatsoever for the future, but was as orphan in the world as Burlingame, without that gentleman's corporal, financial, intellectual, experiential, or spiritual resources.

With these propositions very nearly unhinging his Reason, how could he approach the strangers and calmly put his question? Even their mildly curious stare upon his entrance set his stomach a-quiver and his face afire. His small resolution vanished; with some of the money entrusted to him by Joan Toast he purchased his first meal since the previous day, and when it was eaten he left the inn. For some minutes he wandered unsystematically through the several rude streets of the town, as though in hopes of glimpsing Anna herself on one of them. Had the season permitted, he would doubtless have continued thus all day, for want of courage refusing to comprehend in what serious straits his sister might well languish, and then at sundown have reported with a sigh to Burlingame that his inquiries had borne no fruit. But the wet wind off St. Mary's River soon chilled him through; he was obliged to take refuge in another nameless public house, the only other tavern he had observed, and order rum to still the chattering of his teeth.

This establishment was, he observed, less elegantly appointed than its competitor: the floor was paved with oyster-shells, the tables were bare of cloths, and in the air hung a compound fragrance of stale smoke, stale beer, and stale seafood. This last smell seemed to come not so much from the tavern's cuisine as from the damp coats of its patrons, who in other respects as well appeared to be fishermen. They paid Ebenezer no notice whatever, but went on with their talk of seines and the weather, or fingered beards and brooded into their glasses. Although their indifference removed any possibility of Ebenezer's interrogating them, at the same time it permitted him to feel less uneasy in their presence; he was able to move his chair nearer the fireplace and was even emboldened, as he sipped his rum, to survey the other customers more closely.

In one corner of the room, he noticed a man sleeping with head, arms, and chest upon the table. Whether liquor, despair, or mere fatigue was the soporific, the poet could not tell, but his heart beat faster at the sight, for though the fellow was no cleaner nor less ragged than his companions, his coat in better days had been not the honest Scotch cloth of the laborer, but plum-colored serge and silver-grey prunella — a very twin to the one Ebenezer had worn to his audience with Lord Baltimore and had packed next day in his trunk to bring to Maryland! That there could be two such coats was most unlikely, for Ebenezer had chosen the goods himself and had them tailored to the style of the moment, which was scarcely to be seen outside London; nevertheless he dared not risk a scene by waking the fellow, and so signaled for more rum instead and asked the waiter who the slumbering chap might be.

"Haply 'tis Governor Nicholson, or King William," the man replied. " 'Tis not my wont to pry into my patrons' lives."

"To be sure, to be sure," Ebenezer persisted, and pressed two shillings into his hand. "But 'tis of some small importance that I know."

The waiter examined the coins and seemed to find them satisfactory. "The fact is," he declared, "nobody knows just who the wight may be, albeit he hires his bed upstairs and eats his meals at yonder table."

"What's this! Ye want two shillings for that news?"

The waiter held up an admonitory finger and explained that the sleeping man was no stranger to St. Mary's — indeed, he had frequented the tavern for some months past — but current rumor had it that his declared identity was false.

"He hath given all and sundry to believe his is the Laureate Poet of Maryland, name of Ebenezer Cooke, but either he's the grandest swindler that ever prowled St. Mary's, or else he is afraid of his very shadow."