John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

" 'Twas only a few days later, so Roxie told me, this half-breed Indian buck came into Church Creek. As a rule, the salvages travel in pairs when they come to town, but this wight was alone; he strode into Russecks's store as bold as ye please, put a coin on the table, and called for rum!"

"Ah, that can't be Cohunkowprets, can it, John?" Ebenezer asked McEvoy. "I doubt he knew English enough to order rum."

But McEvoy was not so certain. "He might have learned from Dick Parker, ye know; Dick Parker himself learned decent English in two or three months."

"And Charley Mattassin in less time yet," Mary added, and continued her narration. "This salvage was so fierce-looking, Harry Russecks gave him his rum with no argument, and he drank it off like water. 'Twas plain he'd never tasted liquor before, for he gagged and choked on't, but when 'twas down he called for another to follow the first. (All this is my Charley to the letter, Mister Cooke — bold as brass and bound to learn all in a single gulp.) By this time the men saw a chance for some sport with him. They poured him his rum and asked his name, which he gave as Bill-o'-the-Goose — "

"That's it!" Ebenezer and McEvoy cried out at once.

"The Tayac Chicamec told us Cohunkowprets means Goosebeak" Ebenezer explained. "Why he bears the name I shan't tell here, only that — " He blushed. "I shall say this, Mary, you declared his manner resembled Mattassin's; know then, that save for the lighter hue of his skin, Bill-o'-the-Goose is the likeness of his brother in every particular of his person."

Mary's eyes filled with tears. " 'Sheart, then he is in sooth poor Charley's brother!" She shook her head. "How clear I see it in his behavior, now I know it to be so! Why, marry come up, 'tis Charley and I all over again, after a fashion!"

Bill-o'-the-Goose, she went on tearfully to say, had not got into his second glass of rum before Miss Bromly, the Church Creek Virgin, happening to pass through the room on her way outdoors from her quarters, encountered him face to face. Until that moment she had preserved through all their catcalls and lubricities the iciest demeanor; but by the testimony of every man present in Russecks's tavern, when she beheld the Indian she drew back, shrieked out some unintelligible name, and tottered for some moments on the verge of a swoon; yet when a patron made to assist her she regained her composure as quickly as she had lost it, drove the Samaritan back by reaching under her cape — where the whole town knew she carried her famous pistol — and made her exit with a tight-lipped threat to the company. Bill-o'-the-Goose, like all the others, had stared after her and was the first to speak when she was gone.

"Bill-o'-the-Goose no longer wishes to be Bill-o'-the-Goose," he had declared. "You tell Bill-o'-the-Goose what ordeals he must brave to be an English Devil."

These, Mary Mungummory swore, were his very words as reported to her. Everyone agreed on the context of his statement; they remembered it so exactly because Bill-o'-the-Goose had had difficulty finding an English word for the initiation rites to which, in many Indian nations, young men were subjected as prerequisites to official manhood. A trapper present had at length supplied the word ordeal, to the great delight of the company when they grasped the Indian's meaning.

"Ye say ye want to become an Englishman?" one of them had asked gleefully.

"Yes."

"An English Devil, ye say?" had asked another.

"Yes."

"And ye want to know what tests a salvage has to pass ere we look on him as our brother?" demanded the miller.

"Yes."

The men had exchanged glances then and found unanimous design in one another's eyes. By tacit agreement the miller had proceeded with the sport.

"Well now," he had said thoughtfully, "first off ye must show yourself a man o' means; we want no ne'er-do-wells about — unless they're pretty as the Virgin, eh, gentlemen?"

The Indian had been unable to follow this speech, but when he was made to understand that they wished him to show his money he produced five pounds in assorted English currency — acquired no man knew where — and a quantity of wompompeag, all of which the miller Russecks had promptly pocketed.

"Now, then, ye must have a proper English name, mustn't he, lads?"

It was short work for the men to change Bill-o'-the-Goose into Billy, but the problem of a fitting surname required much debate. Some, impressed by the stench of the bear-grease with which their victim was larded, held out for Billy Goat; others, with his naïveté in mind, preferred William Goose. While they deliberated, Bill-o'-the-Goose drank down his rum — with less difficulty than before — and was commanded to take another on the grounds that a proper subject of Their Majesties should be able to put away half a rundlet of Barbados without ill effect. It was this third drink, and the solemnity with which the Indian, already gripping the table-edge to steady himself, had raised his glass like a ceremonial grail, that had inspired the miller with a third suggestion.

"He hath the makings of a proper rummy, hath our Bill," he had remarked, and added when the Indian gave up just then — in the manner of all the Ahatchwhoops — a raucous, unstifled belch: "Hi, there, he's nimbly with the spirit already!"

And since no man present cared to defend his own preference in the matter against the miller's, Bill-o'-the-Goose's new English name became Billy Rumbly, and was bestowed on him with much blasphemous mumbo-jumbo and a baptism of cider vinegar.

"Then they shaved off his hair," Mary said, and Ebenezer guessed that in earlier tellings of the story her voice had been marked by nothing like its present bitterness; "shaved it off to the scalp, poured another glass o' rum in his guts, and told him no civil English gentleman e'er reeked o' bear-fat. There was naught for't, they declared, but he must hie himself down to the creek — in mid-December, mind — strip off his clothes, wade out to his neck, and swab himself sweet with a horse-brush they provided. 'Twas the miller's idea, o' course — br-r-r, how I loathe the bully! — and they packed Billy off to crown their pranks, never dreaming they'd see him again; if he didn't freeze or drown, they reckoned, he'd be shocked fair sober by the creek and skulk away home."

In fact, however, she said, they laughed not half an hour at their wit before the butt of it reappeared, returned the horse-brush, and called for more rum: his skin was rubbed raw, but every trace of the bear-grease was gone, and his liquor as well, and he showed no sign of chill or other discomfort. While they marveled, Billy pressed them to set him his next ordeal, and by unhappy coincidence Miss Bromly chose this moment to re-enter the tavern from wherever she had been, cross the room in disdainful silence, and disappear up the stairway to her loft. Even so, nothing further might have come of it, it was Billy who undid himself by demanding to know whose woman she was.

"Why, Billy Rumbly, that's the Church Creek Virgin," the miller had answered. "She's nobody's woman but her own, is that piece yonder."

"Now she is Billy Rumbly's woman," the Indian had declared, and had drawn a knife from his belt. "How doth an English Devil take a wife? What man must I fight? Where is the Tayac to give her to me?"

Not until then had the men drawn their breath at the vistas of new sport that lay before them. Not surprisingly, it was Harry Russecks who had spoken first.

"Ye say — ye claim the Church Creek Virgin for your wife?"

At once Billy had moved on him with the knife. "Is she your woman? Do you speak for her?"

"Now, now," the miller had soothed, "put up your knife, Billy Rumbly, and behave like a decent Englishman, or she'll have naught of ye. So she's to be Mrs. Billy Rumbly, is she? Well, now!" And after repeating his earlier assertion, that Miss Bromly had none to answer to but her own good conscience, Russecks declared his huge satisfaction with the match, a sentiment echoed by the company to a man.