John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

"This is outrageous!" Ebenezer complained. "I never dreamed such things still happened in 1694, in the very bosom of the Province!"

"Nor I," the Captain replied, from his post in the van of the prisoners. "Nor e'er heard tell of an Indian town on Bloodsworth Island. I'Christ, 'tis naught but marsh from stem to stern, and not dry ground enough to stand on."

"God save us!" Bertrand groaned — his first words since he'd fallen asleep some hours before. "They'll scalp our heads and burn us at the stake!"

"Whatever for?" the poet inquired. "We've done 'em no injury, that I can see."

" 'Tis e'er the salvages' wont," his valet insisted. "Ye've but to run afoul of one in your evening stroll, and bang! he'll skin your pate as ye'd skin a peach! Why, 'tis still the talk in Vansweringen's how a wench named Kersley was set upon by Indians in Charles County, year before last: she was crossing a field of sot-weed 'twixt her own house and her father's, with the sun still shining and a babe on her arm besides, but ere she reached her husband's door she had been scalped, stuck with a knife, and swived from whipple to Whitsuntide! And again, not far from Bohemia Manor — "

"Be still," the Captain snapped, "ere your own tales beshit ye."

" 'Tis all quite well for you to take your scalping without a word," Bertrand replied undaunted. " 'Twas you steered us hither in the first place — "

"I! 'Sblood and 'sbody, sir, 'tis thy good fortune the salvage hath belayed my two hands, else I'd have thy scalp myself!"

"Gentlemen!" Ebenezer interposed. "Our case is grave enough without such talk! 'Twas I that hired the passage; you may hold me answerable for everything if 'twill ease your minds to do so, though it strikes me we'd do better to give over wondering who got us into this pickle and bend our minds instead to getting out."

"Amen," the Captain grunted.

"Still and all," Bertrand said disconsolately, "I must hold Betsy Birdsall to some account, for had she not rescued me last March in such a deuced clever manner, I'd not be trussed up here like a trout on a gill string."

"Really!" the Captain cried. "Thou'rt unhinged!"

"Stay, prithee stay," Ebenezer pleaded. Since the Captain's first sharp words to Bertrand, the poet's brow had been knitting, and his admonitions were made distractedly. Now he asked the Captain, "Was't not the Straits of Limbo we entered yonder cove from, or did I mishear you?"

"That was my guess, sir," the older man said, "unless the tide fetched us down as low as Holland or Kedge's Straits, which I doubt."

"But if not, the name of the strait is Limbo? And is there a river mouth not far hence, with an Indian name?"

"A hatchful of 'em," the Captain replied, not greatly interested, "and they all have salvage names: Honga, Nanticoke, Wicomico, Manokin, Annamessex, Pocomoke — "

"Wicomico! Aye, Wicomico — 'tis the name Smith mentioned in his Historie!"

The Captain muttered something exasperated, and to avoid being thought deranged by fear like his servant, Ebenezer explained in the simplest way possible what he had been grasping for since the first mention of Limbo Straits and had recalled only with the help of the word beshit: that Captain John Smith of Virginia, almost ninety years previously, had discovered those same straits during his voyage of exploration up the Chesapeake; had, like themselves, encountered a furious storm therein and suffered the additional discomforts of a diarrhetic company; had in consequence of his ordeal bestowed the name Limbo on the place; and finally had been made prisoner, with all his party, by a band of warlike Indians — perhaps the grandfathers of their present captors!

"Ye don't tell me," the Captain said. Neither did Bertrand appear to be overwhelmed by the coincidence, for when to his single inquiry, "Prithee, what came of 'em?" his master confessed that he had not the slightest idea, the valet relapsed into gloom.

But once Ebenezer had wrested the Secret Historie from his memory he could not but marvel at the parallel between John Smith's experience and their own. Moreover, the existence of the Historie itself attested that Smith and at least some of his party had escaped or been freed by their captors. His reflections were interrupted at this point by their arrival at the Indians' town, an assemblage of mean little huts arranged in a thick circle upon an island of relatively high ground. There seemed to be well over a hundred in all, dome-shaped affairs of small logs and thatched twigs; surrounded as they were by the marsh, they resembled nothing so much as a colony of muskrat houses, the more since their occupants were cloaked and capped with fur. The citizenry appeared to be sleeping: except for a single hidden sentry who challenged their approach with a "Too- hoo!" from his post in a nearby brush clump, and was answered in kind, the town was as still as one deserted.

" 'Tis passing queer," the Captain grumbled. "Never saw an Indian town without a pack o' curs about."

But if the silence of the village was disconcerting, what broke it a few moments later was nothing less than extraordinary: they had passed through the ring of dwellings to a clearing or open court in the center of the town, and during a whispered colloquy between the leader and his black lieutenant there came from a hut not far away a sudden wailing that raised the poet's hackles. Through his fancy, in half a second, passed the various Indian cruelties he had learned of from Henry Burlingame: how they bit the nails from their victims' fingers, twisted the fingers themselves from the hands, drove skewers into the remaining stumps, pulled sinews from the arms, tore out the hair and beard, hung hot hatchets around the neck, and poured hot sand on scalped heads.

"Marry come up!" breathed the Captain, and Bertrand's teeth began to chatter. The wail changed pitch and tone and changed again a moment afterwards, and again, but not until the wailer drew fresh breath and recommenced did the prisoners grasp the nature of the sound.

"Dear God in Heav'n!" Ebenezer gasped. " 'Tis someone singing!"

And monstrous unlikelihood through it was, the prisoners recognized the sound to be in truth the voice of a singing man — a tenor, to be exact. This in itself was wonder enough; far more incongruous was the fact that his words (viewed retrospectively from this understanding) were not in a savage tongue at all, but in clear King's English: I. . saw. . my-y la-a-dy weep was the line he'd sung, and, having drawn his breath, he continued: And Sor-row proudt. . to be advanced so. .

"B'm'faith, 'tis another Englishman!"

"So much the worse for him," the Captain replied, "but no better for us."

"In those fair eyes," the singer went on, "in those. . fair eyes. ."

"I wonder he hath the spirit to sing," Bertrand marveled, "or his jailer's leave."

This latter, at least, it seemed he did not have after all, for in the course of his next asseveration — "Where all perfections keep. ." — he broke into an unmelodious cursing, the substance of which was that if the so-and-so salvages couldn't let a poor condemned so-and-so sing a so-and-so song without poking their pigstickers into his so-and-so B-flat, they had better cut his so-and-so throat that instant, and be damned to them.

"I swear," Ebenezer said, "I have heard that voice before!"

"Haply 'tis the ghost of your Captain What-ye-may-call-him," the Captain suggested sourly.

"Nay, i'God — " If he had intended to say more, he was prevented from doing so by the Indians, who, their parley finished, gave a jerk on the neck-tether and led the prisoners toward the very hut which held the disgruntled tenor. At its entrance they were unstrung and refettered individually as for the canoe-passage; throughout the operation Ebenezer squinted his face and shook his head incredulously, and when upon another armed Indian's emerging from the hut the tenor at once began his song afresh, the poet moaned again "I'God!" and trembled all over.