Mason & Dixon (67 page)

52

The crossing of Conococheague, with its dismal history, proves particularly unsettling. Providentially, no ten minutes of Arc terminate upon either Bank,— that burn'd and bloodied little huddle of Cabins, can provide no Object of Pilgrimage, any Prospect of lingering as much as a Fortnight, among these Ghosts, and the Desolation in which they wait, would have sent the Expedition on to some Station less haunted,— extra Chaining and Calculating and all.

Lancaster as a scene of horror had been bearable because of the secular Town upon ev'ry side, pursuing its Business, begging Attendance at ev'ry turn,— yet what in Lancaster was but an hour's Thrill, out here in this sternly exact Desert might become an uncontrollable descent into whatever the Visto was suppos'd to deny,— the covetousness of all that liv'd.. .that continued to press in at either side, wishing simply to breach the long rectified Absence wherever it might,— to insist upon itself.

Between two roads leading to different ferries across Potowmack, they calculate and change course, and at last, 117 miles, 12 chains, and 97 links west of the Post Mark'd West, they fetch up against the flank of the North Mountain, having enter'd the personal Zone of Influence of Capt. Evan Shelby. They pack the Instruments and leave them in his Care, for the Winter.

Not till they turn and head east again, do they find any time for rememb'ring anything. Going west has been all Futurity. Now, moving against the Sun, they may take up again the past.

Trudging one day into the wind, all hats impossible, hair in streams, struggling to keep the brass instrument on its tripod over one shoulder, Dixon at last saw the logic of Emerson's notorious back-to-front coat.

"Of course 'tis back-to front," Emerson had sigh'd, "Plutonians, give some Brain to it,— in all animals, isn't it the Ventral or Belly-side that needs most protection,— the Dorsal or Back-side being stronger and harder? And won't half the walking I'm to do in my Life, be into the Wind? Bonny. At such times, then, I'd rather be a few degrees above Freezing, thankee, and let me Back look after itself."

"Then why does ev'ryone else go about with Coats open in front?"

Emerson gazed upon the assembl'd young Scholars with a great pretense of mildness and forbearance. "My entire life as a Teacher, lesson after futile lesson, is time thus pitiably squander'd,— an old man's Folly. Not that I ever was a Teacher, really, I'm a Man of Science, between patrons at the moment, only doing this so I can pay my laboratory expenses, tho' Mrs. Emerson takes a slightly different View...' 'Tis the Grub-Street of Philosophy!' she laments. 'Durham Prison were better!' Howsobeit, the Question, mercifully, was not about Marriage— The Modern Coat, as we know it," he explain'd, "is bas'd upon the attire of the Nobility and Gentry and other assorted Thieves, who could ever afford Servants to put their clothes on for them. At such intimate moments, 'twas believ'd more prudent to keep a Servant in front of one, than allow him behind. For today's Discussion, therefore, speculate for me if yese will, what might have happen'd to the Structure of England, had ev'rything fasten'd in back, obliging Servants,— let us here include America, the Indies, and black Slaves as well,— to spend more time behind their Masters than before, and so close as to be invisible?"

Long before the Soldiers came in sight, People in their Path could hear the drums, upon fitfully directed Winds, clattering off the walls of old quarries where Weld flower'd in glows of orange, yellow, and green, raking the hillside pastures all but empty, with the lambs just sold and the breeding ewes resting up for winter, their cull'd sisters off to auctions and fates less ritual, whilst the rams were soon to go up to spend winter

 
in the hills. Vast flights of starlings, fleeing the racket, beat across the sky at high speed, like Squall-clouds,— Evening at Noon-tide. In the little one-street villages, women stood among the laundry they'd just put out, looking at the Light, reckoning drying time and marching time, and Cloud-speed, and how wet ev'rything might be when they'd have to bring it in again. Soon the mercilessly even drumbeat fill'd the Day, replacing the accustom'd rhythms of country People with the controlling Pulse of military Clock-time, announcing that all events would now occur at the army's Pleasure, upon the army's schedule.

"Then they began with the Bagpipes." For demonstrative purposes,
Wolfe from time to time in the easy march up to Stroud would order his
troopers to dismount, take up skirmish positions, and fire at whatever
took their Fancy. Later, in Pennsylvania, deep within the Glades of
Death, crossing the road upon which Braddock and his forces had met
their unhappy end, Mason would wonder if the effects of the late Tragedy
in America upon Army morale in general, and upon Wolfe in particular,
might not also have play'd their part in this idle Musketry, which left
splash'd behind them a path scarlet with hundreds of small innocent
lives wild and domestic,— far beneath the notice of a dragoon, of course,
but often of moment to local residents,— the Fowl running into the
Fields, no sleep for fear of ev'rything that might happen
             

"For all we know, Wolfe may have felt the same contempt for British Weavers as did Braddock for American Indians,— treacherous Natives, disrespectful, rebellious, waiting in Ambuscado, behind ev'ry stone wall."

"British firing upon British,— " Dixon charging his Pipe absently, "I thought thah' was all done with. Are your Weavers Jacobites, then?"

"They're people, Dixon, whom I saw daily, they work'd, they ate when they came off-shift, good for a Cob or a Batch-Loaf a day. Or a Mason's Bap,— that was my Dad's own specialty, baked upon the bottom of the Oven, white Flour in clouds, he'd sell 'em whole, or by the Slice.

"Some aspir'd to be master-weavers, most would have settl'd for a living wage, but their desires how betray'd, when in 'fifty-six the Justices of the Peace, upon easily imagin'd arrangements with the Clothiers, reduced by half the Wages set by law, and the troubles came to a head.”

He pauses as if reaching a small decision. "Rebekah's people were weavers."

Dixon lighting his Pipe, "Hahdn't knoawn thah'."

"Wool-workers upon her father's side, silk upon her mother's,— she liked to say it accompted for the way she was."

Dixon puffs, nodding slowly, evenly, eyes cross'd as if scrying in the glow of his pipe-bowl.

And that wondrous night, in the High Street, they were all there, brothers and cousins and uncles,"— Mason's pause seems but for breath, tho' Dixon already is beaming an unmistakable inquiry,— "/ was there, now that I think of it."

Dixon nods. "Been out upon the Pavement m'self.. .Tyne Keelmen, back in 'fifty. No business over there, understand, none at all, yet..."

Mason reaches for his Pipe. "Oh, aye."

"More than once, perhaps...?"

"I have look'd on Worlds far distant, their Beauty how pitiless."

"Yet thah' night— "

"The Streets, Jere! thousands of angry men in Streets that ordinarily see no more than, oh, a dozen a day,— 'twas back'd up to Slad Brook! it spill'd out into both branches of the High Street,— " he puffs, in a sub-merriment Dixon recognizes, "— down the Lower Street, and up Parliament, and all that Hill-side between,— torches ev'rywhere, Looms dress'd in Mourning, songs of the 'Forty-five (their Throbbing within those prim corridors of Stone, how savage), effigies of hated Master Weavers, hang'd in their own Bar-chains so dishonorably set, and the Murmur,— ever, unceasingly, the great, crisp, serene Roar,— of a Mobility focus'd upon a just purpose."

"Aye...aye, of course in Newcastle 'twas more the Brick type of wall,— quite different sound,— more like Philadelphia...?"

"What did they do in Durham with the ones they caught?"

"The Keelmen? transported,— I know, not as entertaining as the gallows in Painswick,— yet, as we aren't quite such devotees of the Noose in Durham, a good many Tyneside Keel-men ended up in America,— hereabouts, in fact. If we'd stopp'd longer in Philadelphia, we'd've run into a few of 'em by now....”

"And, would I've enjoy'd that?"

"Tha might not've been along...? I mean, of course, having at the last minute decided they weren't thy sort, all that coal-grime and ale-drinking and such,— nor as clean as thy Loom-worker, out there by the babbling Brook, neat as a Pin and All,—

"Wait. You're saying that ceteris paribus, the Company of Keelmen is preferable to that of Weavers? That's clearly impossible, for 'tis widely allow'd, that Weavers are the soul of Jollification."

"You've nothing in Gloucester nay, nor in the Kingdom, to match the night Billy Snowball thought the Old dasher's head was an Ale-Can! Eeh! Eeh! Eeh!"

Mason gazes until the laughter subsides. "Tho' evidently a source of Cheery Memories for you,— ''

"Kept grabbin' him by his Noahse...? 'And whah's this?' Eeeh! Eeh!"

"— yet in Stroud, how ill-advis'd,— even in so tolerant and cosmopolitan a Room as The George Inn,—

"Where, let us recall, back in 'fifty-six, tha witness'd a Congress of Clothiers leaping from the Upstairs windows,—

"Thankee,— some indeed with their Punch-cups still upon their Fingers, and lit Pipes in their Mouths, and the Cards scatt'ring ev'ry-where,— '

At home he found his father in some Anxiety. "Weavers a-riot, troops coming in,—

"I ought to stay, then."

"What'll you do, point your Telescope at them? You'll be worse than useless, they'll shoot you the moment you present them that vacant Face."

"Perhaps I can ask them at Greenwich for another—

"Release yourself,— your mother and I will get through, between the thieving Mob and the thieving Soldiers, there're still places to hide an odd Loaf...but you,— better that you repair to Greenwich, Kent, young Sirr,— remain upon your Hill-top, farr from this poorr defeated place."

He sought his Mother's eyes,— receiving only a quick Sweep, as from a Broom, her face distress'd, as if whispering, You see how you distress him...

The open countryside seem'd made only to pull coal out of and run a few sheep on, and to harbor all the terrors imaginable to a boy. "I was only comfortable in the towns," Dixon one day would admit, "or in Raby, protected by the Castle,—yet never car'd for the territory between."

Mason looks on in some perplexity. "Rum affliction for a Surveyor, isn't it?"

"Say that it provided me an incentive, to enclose that which had hitherto been without Form, and hence haunted by anything and ev'rything, if you grasp my meaning,— anything and ev'rything, Sir."

"I was well acquainted with such terrors, whilst yet I crept and bab-bl'd, Sir. Despite the roads steep and toilsome, was I taken, like most children born in that part of Bisley Parish, truly bouncing Babes all, to Sapperton Church, to be Christen'd,— for Bisley lies across a great treeless Plain, known at our end as Oakridge Common, and at the other as Bisley Common, haunted by wild men and murderers, and its Wind never ceasing,— a source of limitless Fear."

"Cockfield Fell to the double-dot," Dixon recalls. "Ev'ryone put in great effort to avoid crossing it."

"When I got older and began watching the Stars, of course, 'twas another Story. The Sky was suddenly all there, in its full Display. I couldn't wait for Night, to be out under it."

"Eeh, stop, I'm a-shiver now."

"Nothing for Miles, unprotected 'neath those Leagues innumerable, in which, at any moment,—

"Eeeehh!" Dixon, to appearance in a true Panick, runs about the Tent looking for someplace to hide, and finding nothing but a Feed-Sack handy, attempts to insert himself into it.

Emerson smoaked it all right away. "If it's but the empty places between the Towns," he advis'd Dixon, "your worries are at an end, for look what you can do. You can get above it." He spoke these words with an emphasis Dixon cannot describe the full strangeness of. Something was up,— as so, shortly, would he and his classmates be,— but before they learn'd to fly, they had to learn about Maps, for Maps are the Aides-memoires of flight. So Dixon came to discover as well the great Invari-

 
ance whereby, aloft, one gains exactitude of Length and Breadth, only to lose much of the land's Relievo, or Dimension of Height,— whilst back at ground level, traveling about the Country, one regains bodily the realities of up and down, only to lose any but a rough sense of the other two Dimensions, now all about one.

"Earthbound," Emerson continued, "we are limited to our Horizon, which sometimes is to be measur'd but in inches.—
 
We are bound withal to Time, and the amounts of it spent getting from one end of a journey to another. Yet aloft, in Map-space, origins, destinations, any Termini, hardly seem to matter,— one can apprehend all at once the entire plexity of possible journeys, set as one is above Distance, above Time itself."

"Altitude!" cried out a couple of alert youths,— as, in Emerson's class they were encourag'd to do.

"Altitude, being the Price we pay for this great Exemption, is consid-er'd as an in-house Expense, to be absorb'd in an inner term of a lengthy Expression describing Location, Course, and Speed. If you're interested, wait for my book upon Navigation, currently all but in Galley-proofs, for a detail'd Account."

Some were preoccupied with questions less modern. "Where is Hob Headless in this aerial View?" Dixon was not alone in wanting to know. "What of the Shotton Dobby, and the Old Hell-Cat of Raby with her black Coach and six? She can rise above the Land-scape too,— how does an innocent Cartographer deal with that?"

"Professional courtesy is the usual rule," Emerson replied. "You salute in the other her Gift of Flight, and move on. Briskly, if possible."

"And uhm, vice versa, too, you're quite sure of that, Sir...?"

"Tut, tut, alas and what shall we do, 0 the Lamentations of Jeremiah.—
 
Have you then been squandering your precious Skepticism, over at Raby, upon this Gothickal Clap-trap?"

Why aye, and so he had, and even worse than that, he'd fallen into a Fascination with the "Old Hell-Cat" herself,— Elizabeth, Lady Barnard, who'd died back in '42 after a life of embitter'd family warfare over who was to inherit the Castle, whose Battlements she continued to walk with a pair of brass knitting-needles, whilst awaiting her Coach. The great thing, of these Needles, was, that they glow'd in the Dark, because they were Very Hot, hotter than a Coal-fire, more like the fires