William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

Will took me on my first visit in sunlight to the city of Albany several weeks after The Great Fire. The weeks of the new year had been deep with cold, snow, and ice that was at last giving way to a spring thaw, permitting a view of the cold ashes of disaster: the center of Albany’s ancient commerce and density, its quays, its Great Pier, so many canalboats and sloops, all reduced to char and cinders save for an odd chimney fragment untoppled, or a lone house standing because of its owner’s grit in bringing hundreds of buckets of water to wet down his walls and to douse the blankets on his roof, upon which flying embers would futilely spend their heat.

The good weather was also catalyzing the area’s charred garbage, sending aromatic blossoms abroad to the citizenry, and this brought out packs of dogs and cats, and herds of roaming pigs, those enduring scavengers who joined the city workers in the ruins. The searchers sought three citizens still unaccounted for, and about whom I had read in Will’s newspaper. Then, as Will and I picked our steps through the soft rubble, there before me rooted a pig, snuffling in the sludge. The animal brought forth with its jaws first the arm of an infant and then the attached torso, dragging it up from the dire muck and about to make off with it when I intervened, whacked the waddling ghoul with a charred board, distracting it, but insufficiently, for it would not open its jaws. I struck again and again at its back, but its jaws remained clenched, and then in desperation I kicked at its throat, whereupon it yielded up its booty and squealed off into deeper ashes, soon slowing to a lope and snuffling once again in the ruins.

Will and I stared down at the infant corpse, a black doll, rigid with ice, more rigid with death: hairless, faceless, sexless, yet a residual presence demanding attention. Will summoned a constable patrolling the erstwhile street and the dead child was taken by authority to a place of more secure rest.

“The child’s father will thank you for what you did,” Will said to me. “I know the man. His name is Bailey.”

“How could anyone know whose child that was?”

“Only one child is missing. Would you object if I included a report of what you did in the newspaper?”

“It’s what anyone would have done.”

“Perhaps. But you did it, and there are people who loathe the pigs, and fear them, and would never do such a thing. Pigs can be nasty.”

We walked to Will’s newspaper office on lower Broadway, a street that sometimes flooded when the river overflowed its banks, but the newspaper was safe on the second floor. Three young printers were actually bouncing as they worked at the typecase and stones, and among the tables that bore long metal galleys of copper-faced type. They all wore long white smocks and black derby hats, the smocks as protection against ink stains, the hats against the crumbling ceiling’s falling plaster, which, as all know, rots the follicles in the scalp and, as some say, sends carbonic acid to the brain.

Will led me into his own work area, where his desk stood under a gas jet, next to a window, and beneath a vivid assemblage of chaos. Atop, beside, and on shelves adjacent to his desk lay a strew of magazines, clippings and letters, stacks of encyclopedias, dictionaries, new books, old books, boxed files, files not-so-boxed, with dust on some but not much of this clutter, and in the center of it all, an unopened copy of the morning Chronicle : the perfect centerpiece for the anarchy out of which it had come.

At an adjacent slanted desk, a model of neatness, sat a man writing in a ledger. Will introduced me and I made the acquaintance of Dirck Staats, the son of Hillegond. Will said to him, “Dirck, this young man is one of the guests in your house.”

I extended my hand and said, “Daniel Quinn is my name, sir, and I am enjoying your house.”

“I wish I could say the same,” said Dirck, “but that she-devil of a mother of mine won’t allow it.”

“I recognize you from your portrait,” I said to him.

“I was told she had my portraits turned to the wall.”

“Oh, she has,” I said, “but I turned one about to see the looks of a man who could rile a woman to such a point.”

Dirck smiled at Will. “You speak directly,” he said to me. “Are you a devotee of the word?”

“I can’t be sure,” I said, “since I don’t know what ‘devotee’ means.”

“It means you like something quite well and you pay close attention to it. Something such as words. I myself am such a devotee of words that I’m writing a book full of them.”

“Words are useful,” I said. “My dog might not have died if he’d been able to tell us what ailed him.”

Dirck laughed at that and said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and I was equally amused, for I’d never owned a dog.

Dirck Staats: if Will Canaday was a slender citizen, then Dirck was Will halved. He had a wild crop of dark hair around the back and sides of his head, his legs were long, his trousers not long enough, his waist no larger ’round than my own, and as a result of this design he looked as top-heavy as a hatstand. His face and high forehead were half as long as his chest, he wore unusually small spectacles across the top of his broad forehead when he was not reading, and, if such a thing were possible, his clothes fit him worse than did Will’s. But I liked Dirck Staats during our meeting, and I liked even more the ambition with which he confronted the arcane elements of the life around him.

“What is your book about?” I asked.

“It reveals a mystery,” he said, “but the people in it would like to keep it a mystery.”

“Give the boy something to read while I write a piece about him,” said Will. “He retrieved a child’s corpse from the pigs awhile ago. A hero in the city’s ashes.”

“I am always glad to meet a hero,” said Dirck, bowing profusely before me, offering me his chair at the desk. “By all means read what I am writing and give me your candid opinion. I confess I am at a loss for an intelligent response.”

He went off then and I sat down in front of his two large red ledger books and looked at his writing. It is now, in memory, very like the mirror writing of da Vinci, the runes of the old Norsemen, the cuneiform writing of the Assyrians. It had about it a world of its own design, an impenetrable architecture that was a fascination by itself. What eventually I came to know was that this was his own language, invented for the purpose of composing this secret book about the secrecy that had come to obsess him. I studied his figures and letters-of-a-kind but could understand nothing. He came back at length and smiled at me.

“What have you discovered?”

“That I cannot read even one word.”

“Excellent.”

I stood up and offered him his chair, but he reached for his coat, which hung on a hook beside his desk. “We must to lunch,” he said, and I knew not whether this included me and Will, whether he was speaking of another group entirely, or of himself as the collective.

“Is it all right that I can’t read a word?” I asked.

“Of course it is.”

“I do understand the print in Will’s newspaper.”

“Of course you do.”

“Why do you draw pictures when you write?”

“So no one will understand what I say.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, that is an odd reason to write things.”

“I am as odd as ripe birdseed,” said Dirck.

That was the last word Dirck spoke personally to me, for people were coming up the stairs and as Dirck made ready to leave he was confronted by a man I knew later to be the sheriff. Two other men were with him, one a deputy, the other a citizen of Utica named Babcock. The latter seemed to be the cause of this doing in that he claimed Dirck owed him four dollars, the value of a shirt and cravat Dirck had borrowed from him two years previous and not returned. Will Canaday heard the commotion and joined it, and I hung back and listened.