William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

Beyond the outhouse I saw a shed that probably once held pigs, or possibly chickens, or both, and I went toward it with renewed trepidation, but also thinking I should run for help, find someone with a wagon. But run where? Find whom? The Plum house was near nothing and no one. Will Canaday’s house was miles away. Emmett Daugherty was perhaps a bit closer, but of that I was uncertain. Would either of them be home? How long would it take to run those miles? And what if. .?

The chicken-pig house door was open and I entered through it into a black dream, finding a man lying spread-eagled on the floor, a railroad spike driven into each of his hands, each of his feet. He was long dead and much of him was absent, but his red hair, his muttonchops, and his ear partially sliced or bitten away identified him to me as the man who had stolen Dirck’s ledgers from Will’s office. He had been stripped to below the waist, slit up the middle, and now a globular rat was eating his liver. When I came in, the rat scurried off, then paused near an exit hole to observe me, waiting for me to decide whether he should, or should not, be allowed to resume his gluttony.

I am impressed by the practicality of the human mind, even in times of terror. I do not join with those who see terror superseding all other emotions, for what I did at this moment was to cast my glance dutifully about the henhouse and discover a four-sided barrow with wheel and handles: a vehicle. Sent. I glanced anew at the sliced man to reassure myself it was he, to convince myself that he had indeed been crucified and split and was now rat-ridden, proving it to my incredulous eye so I would not later think I had merely imagined it. Then I lunged toward the barrow with sufficiently broad gesture to scare the rat into his exit hole, and I wheeled my vehicle out the door and toward the livid lump that Dirck Staats had become.

Dirck had not moved, but his eyes were open when I arrived.

“Can you move at all? Can you stand?”

He tried valiantly to sit up, but his pain had stupefied him, and he fell back. I heaped straw into the barrow as a cushion for him, then lifted him so he was sitting in the barrow’s center. His legs dangled and touched the ground, making it impossible to wheel him. I found a filthy tethering rope in one stall, wrapped it ’round Dirck’s ankles, and then pulled it taut and fastened it to the barrow’s handles, thus lifting his legs and pointing them straight ahead. I wrapped the rest of the rope around his arms and torso and secured that also to the handles, making him my somewhat upright prisoner. His head was bouncing up, down, and sideward, but that seemed to me irrelevant to his safe passage.

I wheeled him out of the barn and off Plum land, then went a mile at least before I saw another dwelling, high on a hillside. I left Dirck on the road, climbed the hill and knocked at the door. A bearded old man leaning on half a crutch answered.

“What is it, boy?”

“An injured man,” I said, “very badly hurt and bleeding. I have him tied up in that barrow down there. Could I borrow a horse or wagon, or could you take me to get help?”

“What kind of thing is that, tying up a sick man in a barrow?”

“It’s all there was, and I couldn’t carry him, or even lift him. Is there a doctor near here?”

“No doctor’d put a sick man in a barrow.”

“You don’t understand. I’m trying to help him. He’ll die if he doesn’t get help.”

“Whatever ails him, that barrow’ll make him worse. Who is he?”

“His name is Dirck Staats.”

“Never heard of him.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said with maximum exasperation. “Can you help him?”

“Where’d you get him?”

“About a mile up the road. In a barn.”

“The Plums’?”

“It used to be their place but they’re all gone now.”

“Plums are gone? Where’d they go?”

“I don’t know. Can you please, please , help us?”

“I wouldn’t help a Plum if he was dyin’ on my doorstep.”

“He’s not a Plum! ” I yelled. “His name is Dirck Staats! The Plums are the ones who hurt him!”

“Why’d they hurt him?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know! ”

“I wouldn’t help a Plum if he was dyin’ in my barn. If a Plum got kicked by a horse right in front of me I’d let him lay. If a Plum was being pecked to death by woodpeckers I’d buy a ticket and watch.”

Then he closed the door on me.

I wheeled Dirck toward the main road, another half mile at least, some of it uphill and much of it through mud. I often had to go off the road into a field to get past the mud, and climbing crisscross on a hill, I almost lost Dirck overboard twice, his head bobbing like a dead chicken’s.

When I got to the highway I waved down two carriages, but they both kept on. A man carrying a sack of flour on his shoulder stopped to look at Dirck, then went on his way without a word. I sensed Dirck was giving forth an efflux of dread to all who came near him, and felt also that the Christian virtues of charity and compassion were little heeded by my neighbors.

At the next house I roused only a barking dog. At the next I found a feeble woman, useless to my cause except for her remark that I was near the West Troy Road, and so I knew I could find my way to Emmett Daugherty’s. Fixing on Emmett as my destination seemed superior to the futile beseeching of strangers, and so I pushed our barrow with renewed vigor, trying not to dwell on Dirck’s painful descent into hell. I grew impermeable to all glances, certain that any imagined court of mercy along the way would turn into a waste of Dirck’s diminishing time.

I was not even sure Dirck could still hear me. But if he was alive I knew he’d welcome distraction from his pain and discomfort, and so I talked to him aloud of my meeting with Joseph Moran and of our duet on “Kathleen Mavourneen.” I involved Dirck in my future plans at the newspaper and said I hoped he would tutor me in the writing arts. I told him I was grateful beyond measure for this chance to help him, especially after being allowed to live in his own house with his mother, to whom I was growing very close, and as well to Will Canaday, who, through his newspaper and his tutelage, was opening my eyes to the world in ways not accessible to the being I used to be. I gave thanks to Dirck himself for his revelation to me of the significance of the word, which, I could now see, releases boundless emotion and mystery, even into the lives of such folk as the Plums. I did not mention the fate of the sliced man. I focused on Dirck as someone who could change the world with his writing: a maestro of language, a champion of the heroic sentence. Of course I said these things in my limited way, and Dirck had no choice but to accept them in that form.

I ended my monologue wondering silently whether I should tell Dirck about my love for Maud, and my loss of her, but then we were at Main Street, entering into the most easeful steps of my life: that short walk down the sloping grade to Emmett’s house. I saw Emmett sitting on his front step as I turned the corner. He was smoking his pipe, and when I saw smoke rise from it, I knew salvation.

“We’re here, Dirck,” I said, and I almost broke into laughter, for he raised his head and blinked vitally at me.

Quickly now I sharpen my point. We put Dirck to bed in fresh nightclothes, washed him, made him warm. When Josie saw Dirck’s condition she blessed herself, said a silent prayer, and went to a cupboard for a ball of string. With a length of it she took Dirck’s measure from scalp to toe, cut the string, then went to the yard, dug a hole, and buried it.

“They’ll not now take his soul,” she told us.

Emmett sent Josie for the doctor and gave Dirck a warm spoonful of the chicken soup Josie had made. Dirck ejected it violently, at the same time loosening a ball of coagulated blood and straw that had settled in the front of his mouth. Emmett moved the oil lamp close to Dirck’s face to study his wound, and when he turned to me, his eyes were afloat in tears.