Fool School (19 page)

Actually, now that I've posed the question to myself,
the answer is obvious. French pride. We are too prideful to allow
simplicity or sense to impede our flowery written language. I
conceive of a dozen men with gilded quills, reclining in indecent
chaises, discussing over
blancmange
and Bordeaux how to add
new and fanciful letters to the ends of already-finished words. I
see in my mind the outrage over the way Veliquessen has become
ligatured to Vexin, and the conspiracies to turn it back.
Conspiracies and conspirators. There must be a pair of keys, brass;
a love interest, perhaps the widow of a young knight, carrying
letters of the alphabet between her bosoms; there must be a
bird--no, not a bird, I decide, a cat--Stan says one can train
anything, if one is patient--with a collar with a hidden
compartment, and poison, yes, there
must
be a
poisoning--

"TOM!" Crack. "Drat it, this is what I get for
allowing a lunch break, is it? Very well, no more lunch
breaks."

My knuckle swells, and I return to my lines.

As I depart the library, deciding whether to kick the
dish of bunny skull and vomit down the stairs, I nearly stumble
into Nuncle, who has faded into shadow just outside the music
room.

"Here, Tom." I adhere to him, and we sit on the
steps. "You caused no problems today, and left Dag alone. Thank
you."

"You're welcome, sir," I say.

"Dag's in bed, and will be for probably two weeks,"
says Nuncle.

"Yessir."

"See that he remains alive, would you?"

"Yessir."

"Also. The harvest fair is a month away. Your friend
Malcolm is clearly not ready to put on a show, but you . . . Do you
have any japes or routines that you know well by heart?"

I consider this. As far as music is concerned, I can
play a steady tune well enough, especially if it's simple, and I
know several of Papa's favorite humorous monologues, and, well,
I've been onstage nearly every day of my life. I decide to say
these things to Nuncle.

"Onstage every day of your life, then? That's an
advantage. Tom, I want to hear you perform. Fetch your good
recorder."

I am a strike of lightning, thundering down the
stairs.

Nuncle and the whole class (less Dag) wait for me in
the music room. "Class, today Thomas is going to be showing off his
accumulated skills," Nuncle begins.

Perille laughs with a wide-open mouth. I think I hate
him. The girl-boy looks disgusted, she shies away and turns
sideways. I don't understand her. Or him? I didn't expect Nuncle to
have me perform in front of everyone. The air is heightened now,
and I feel a cloud holding my feet up, instead of the stone floor.
I cannot screw it up. There is no failure waiting for me, I let
myself know this. There is the awe of every student waiting for me
right around the corner. What piece to perform--?

My mind blanks.

I remember nothing. I'm akin to the wolf-clerk's
blank slate. All my practiced pieces, all the notes and fingerings
a white powder smudge on a sleeve. I know nothing. I'm beside a
desk at the front corner of the music room, and I say: "Ha, Nuncle,
very funny. Hand me a tambrel and I'll show you all the skills I've
accumulated in my three days."

Nobody laughs. Nuncle doesn't laugh. Nuncle slams a
hand on the desk, which makes a loud sound, and I drop the
recorder.

We all see it drop. Nuncle reacts and does a forward
roll, but he's far away, and one roll doesn't bring him close
enough to catch it. I fumble, trying to arrange my body parts in a
useful way, and I get a foot under the falling instrument, and I
catch the instrument by the bell and fling it with my curly
toe.

Oh dear father in heaven don't let it catch a desk or
a wall--

With a twist of his curly snake arms, Perille lets my
recorder land safely in his big palm. My recorder is safe. It's
safe. It hasn't broken. Breath escapes me for a second; I wheeze.
Nuncle glares as he rises. Perille puts the recorder to his lips
and plays exceptionally well. If I weren't French, I'd give him the
recorder as a gift, he plays it much better than I ever will.
Laughing with the scruff of a child's moustache that he has, he
stands and lays the recorder in its case, sticking out the side. He
points to me and says, "Good instrument."

I am mortified. I run out the doorway and down the
stairs and here is a great oak door, locked, I fling myself at it
and a Tom-shaped hole breaks through and I run out across the field
and past the hooded figure standing over Father Bellows' grave and
the hood turns and I catch a glimpse of slavering foamy lips and
the hooded figure drops to the ground and lithe haunches and black
fur leap through the hood and the wolf chases me and I run away and
onto cobbles and slip into the steamy anteroom of the bathhouse
blocked by the trident tapestry but the wolf can smell me and I
open the door to the deep baths where his nose will be full of
steam but a steam pipe is malfunctioning and I'm sucked down the
drain and

"Play, Tom," says Nuncle.

I match my thumb to the base of the recorder, lift
the intact instrument to my lips, both hands very firm grip here I
go--

Papa received requests for "Riding by Rybbesdale" at
least once a week. There's always one very dense man in any
audience who feels a profound longing to participate in the
proceedings but is too great a coward to learn an instrument
himself, so he will inevitably shout out one of maybe three
universal jesting songs, "Rybbesdale" or "Bird on a Bough" or
"Women," and think himself quite a dapper fellow for suggesting it.
Papa hated "Rybbesdale" with a fiery passion, but there was coin in
it, too, so Papa prepared a very different version, with trill
notes and syncopation and several passages where he would invent a
thousand notes to play in a flurry. If he wasn't too sotted when he
got the request, it was really a sight to see. And he taught me
it.

"Rybbesdale" is a love song. I'll tell you the
lyrics, but you have to understand that everybody in the room knows
the lyrics, and everyone in a good bar expects you to play or sing
all the way up to the dirty parts, take a deep breath, and then all
the dirty old men sing the dirty bit all together. On a good night,
the whole bar will get going.

The lyrics are these:

"When I ride through the roads of Rybbesdale

Any woman in the world I dream I might wed

But there's one lady I'd call the fairest

Who ever was built of bone and blood

Her hair is the color of sunbeams, it seems

Her forehead a half of the moon,

Her eyebrows arch upward, woven of feather

Her eyes outshine the sun at noon

Her nose the right size and right shape

Her lips are red, made for romance

Her teeth are ivory, she still has them all

A swan's neck, the whitest in all of France

Her arms are made for embracing,

Hands white as lilies for mine to entwine

(Here's the first part where all the men like to join
in)

Breasts like two apples of Paradise

Supple and soft, ample and fine

A slim waist is bound by an emerald belt

With rubies glowing like wine,

The buckle is carven from ivory,

With amethysts all in a line

(It's good to draw this part out, maybe even say a
second verse about the belt)

(Here's everyone's favorite verse)

But the best of the best, the part I dream of,

Her sheath's like an orchid in bloom

Pretty and pink, soft as a glove,

Come in boys, there's plenty of room!

Christ made her perfect, from bottom to top,

Come in boys, there's plenty of room!

You can see why drunken losers like it so much.

Anyway, I play it pretty fair, and I see Perille sort
of going tumpty-ta tumpty-ta, saying the lyrics to himself, and
Nuncle is nodding, suitably impressed, and the girl-boy's kind of
scowling. Malcolm doesn't know the song, but seems pleased with me,
and the song ends and I
very
carefully lay down my recorder,
and Nuncle says, "Yes, that'll do, Tom. Be ready with that next
month."

And now it's shawm lessons and I stupidly run back
downstairs to get my shawm--

Dag has woken.

Sitting in the open hall with his back to the shut
door of his room, Dag sips cold broth, wincing with each sip. I try
to mosey past him to my room, but I hear: "Barliwine." My heart
fails and I turn to the sallow yellow eyes.

"Yeah?" I say, pretending I sound tough.

"My men won't really break you in half," he wheezes,
"like they said. I told 'em not to."

I give him half-a-dozen nods.

"Could you steady me to the johns?" he asks. Despite
a big urge to leave him there to crawl, which I tell myself is an
ignoble thought and a sin and I'll confess it--to, um, whoever
replaces Father Bellows--I cross the hall and give Dag my arm and
expect some treachery, a blade to the back or perhaps a needle
coated with poison, but instead I have an unsteady yellow fool on
my arm and we brace our way into the bathrooms, and I set Dag on
the guardrobe and turn to leave, but he says, "Wait," and I wait as
he forces some apparently painful urine out and pulls his breeches
up and he's weak and his hand slips and he drops backward into the
hole of the guardrobe and pulls it back, luckily the regular
flushing means the pot isn't appalling, but it's sticky with
yellow, and I reluctantly brace him over to the bath while he
cleans his hands.

As I lead him back to his seat by the broth, I hear:
"Thanks, Tom Barliwine."

I have nothing to say to that, so I hand him his
broth and get my shawm and run upstairs.

Stan gives me a cursory look. "Took you awhile," he
says.

"I was helping a friend," I say, and I give Nuncle a
faux wink, he seems to get it, and I add to Stan, "Oh, and thanks
for the rabbit," and he gives me an expression I don't recognize
and I suck on reeds.

Oboe lessons go apace--I don't know how to narrate a
lugubrious hour of going up and down scales, listening to Malcolm
squeak and curse--and when we're done, Nuncle nods me upstairs and
I put my shawm and recorder just outside the library entryway and
Hamlin greets me, and I write familiar words with unfamiliar
letters, and the evening begins to the distant tune of Nuncle's
recorder.

As the bells of Bath once again thrum Vespers, I rise
to leave, but Hamlin stops me.

"I have spoken to Weatherford," he says dryly, "and I
have spoken of your very commendable progress--"

"Thank you, sir--"

"Don't interrupt."

I've learned to indulge Hamlin in his game of
pretending he's a cold and terrible form.

"Weatherford has decided to permit you to return to
studies. He expects you to do your best to write the words that are
spoken. He understands you will spell unevenly. He will not ask you
to read. Is this acceptable?"

"Yessir. Thank you, sir."

"Gratitude noted. If you would slide up to one of the
desks, then? Perhaps one in the back."

Hamlin's stubby fingers roll up my parchment of words
and he fades into the furniture. Strange how some people have that
skill. Stan can make himself vanish like that, too. I wonder if
perhaps Hamlin was once a fool.

Other students file in, and at last here is
Weatherford, his face catlike--or no, not a housecat. Perhaps his
face is that of a pine marten. Yes, I feel certain that's it. His
pine marten eyes take in the sight of me, flicker, a shadow of a
nod, perhaps merely to himself.

A flare of sleeves and the two books lay themselves
out on the desk. A pile of quills, pared with his knife. Ink mixed,
and the black-robed form becomes very still once again. I try to
make myself vanish. I don't know whether it works.

"I will speak about the importance of the Greek
stories to our learning. What is it about Ilium that so fascinates?
Is it the heights of passion that men felt for the lovely Helen? Is
it the concept of an unkillable warrior who fights for justice, in
the figure of Achilles? Is it the stolid familiarity of trusted
Hector? The fabled ruse of the wooden horse, a gift to the gods in
which treachery is concealed? Is it the constance of Penelope, the
persistence of Odysseus? Or is it," he continues, "is it the very
language in which the words are written? Let us examine a passage
and we will consider the elements of rhetoric which the Greeks have
bestowed upon us."

Weatherford begins to write in his books.

"At the beginning of the Ilium saga, a priest's
daughter has been captured by Agamemnon, who has invaded. The
priest wants his daughter back, and offers Agamemnon money for her
return. The priest declares, 'May the gods permit you to capture
the city of Priam, but release my daughter from her capture and
accept her ransom, in reverence of the gods.' The first half of the
declaration begins with
gods
and ends in capture; the second
half begins with release from capture and ends in
gods
. This
structure is called a crossing, which in the Greek is termed
chiasmus
, while the repeating of the word 'gods' exactly is
termed
anadiplosis
."

The professor turns the page.

"Now Agamemnon doesn't want to give up the girl.
She's pretty. So he retorts, 'Sceptre and wreath won't protect you
from me.' These are of course the tools of priesthood. Representing
a priest this way is
metonymy
, the tool standing for the
position. Today we might say of a modern priest, 'Your black robe
won't protect you from me.' The priest runs to the shore and calls
on the god Apollo to avenge his kidnapped daughter. 'Hear me, O god
of the silver bow,' the priest cries, directing his voice toward
another character while facing us, a figure called
apostrophe
. 'If I have ever served you well, if I have ever
burnt the fat of animals for you,' he says, asking a rhetorical
question that has a known answer, a figure called
anacoenosis
, 'then avenge my tears upon those who have taken
my daughter!' Avenge my tears, rather than avenge
me--
metonymy
again.