A Bloodsmoor Romance

  Bawling his wares. Alone or with one of his wives or with his little boy John Quincy. Like father, like son. Five years old, he was. A dwarf, twenty years old. Obedient, quick to duck from his father’s fist, staggering beneath the weight of the backpack like a sickly little mule. Leather belts, earrings, wedding rings, “French perfume.” Wax candles, candlestick holders, darning eggs, sleigh bells, tin crickets, magnifying glasses, pocket knives and paring knives and quill pens and India ink. Jacob’s Antikink Medicine, Curtis’s Manhood. Gold fillings did work their way out of your teeth, soon as you heard John Jay’s bawling out in the road. He fed a sweet orange-tasting medicine to the blacksmith’s thirteen-year-old daughter, out behind the cemetery, and walked away scot-free, disappeared around the bend in the road. He read aloud, laughing and wheezing, from The Rip Snorter, for customers who couldn’t read. A face carved out of hickory, a breath dank and musty as a cellar, unblinking squinting eyes, grizzled eyebrows, the damned cheating lying Yankee, spreading influenza from Quakertown to Penns Grove on the Delaware to Cape May on the Atlantic. White hairs stiff as wires sprouting in his ears. Playing the mouth organ. The backpack swung to the ground with a groan, the black preacher’s coat pale with dust, God damn if it isn’t him again! Lock your doors and bolt your shutters and plug up the chimney! The foothills of the Blue Mountains, the steep red-clay roads of the Catskills, twilight in the Poconos, the smell of snow, the smell of winter, a blood blister on the child’s left heel, John Jay Zinn treating all the men at the gunpowder mill, John Jay Zinn dragging the child (asleep on his feet) into a corner of the tavern, John Jay Zinn slapping the hysterical woman across each cheek, matching blow for blow as she slapped him: You got to admire Zinn, playing the game like he was in it to save his life.

  Fancy pocket knives with five blades, bolts of calico, ladies’ hats pretty as the ones worn in Boston, pots and pans guaranteed never to tarnish, Dr. Elton’s Never-Fail Kidney Pills, paper collars, leather shoes, hairbrushes, tortoise-shell combs. Aquashicola on the Appalachian Trail, Geneva on Seneca Lake, Chazy Landing on Lake Champlain, that cold crafty unmistakable smile, tobacco-stained and gat-toothed, his own false teeth, dentures made of wood. Sometimes with the unprotesting child whose mouth was slack with fatigue, sometimes alone, in his thigh-high fisherman’s boots, striding over the hill whistling a tuneless song, or sleeping in a ditch motionless as a dead man. (Nearby were three buzzards on a fence—not watching Zinn but watching over him.) But is he dead? Is that real blood?—the damned Yankee.

  Spring mist, a pitiless August sun, cracks in the red soil, The Old Farmer’s for sale cheap, Rhode Island and Connecticut, pewter mugs with grinning teeth and ears for handles, the five-year-old boy, six years old, husky in the shoulders, shy, a curious birthmark on his temple, the sign of the Devil, New Hampshire and sleet and dogs tearing at their legs, Maine and fever, gloves missing fingers, shoes with paper-thin soles, razors that cut your face so you find yourself bleeding from a dozen little wounds—John Jay Zinn the pedlar, the Yankee crook. Cheating at cards but no one saw how. Walking away with so many gold and silver coins, his heels dragged. And around the bend—nothing! Disappeared into the air. Into a raven squawking and jeering overhead. And the little boy—turned into a starling. Flying away, flying overhead, jeering and squawking. Buckshot can’t touch them.

  A bigamist many times over. Wives in Portland and Concord and Hartford and Shaheen and Wilmington and New Hope and Shenandoah, Dr. Petersham’s Home Remedy for Ailments of the Digestive System, Heart Pains, Shredded Nerves, Female Complaints, a sure-fire cure for carbuncles warts inflamed moles cancers of the skin. A spy of King Andrew’s. Chest hollow as a drum, nothing behind the eyeglasses, ears baked and cracked like crockery, spreading syphilis, spreading consumption, toes amputated for frostbite, cuckoo clocks that fall apart in a week, razors that cut your fingers as soon as you pick them up, cotton nightcaps stained with blood, the wide slow mocking grin, the tobacco-stained teeth, Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am, I have here, ma’am, let me show you, ma’am, bolts of raw silk from China direct off the ship, buttons of all sizes and kinds—mother-of-pearl and bone and tortoise-shell and jade—he peddled false teeth to the fools in Christiana that never needed them, he peddled tin crosses to the fools in Portsmouth to cure them of influenza, he betook himself ten miles up the road to sell henna rinse to three old baldheaded spinsters, he got married to the old dragon-widow who ran the Three Bells, and she up and died and he inherited, the same thing happened at West Almond Creek, and in Laurel, Delaware, but her sons got wind of it and chased him hell to leather, would have rode him on a pike if they’d caught him, that was only last year. Forty years old, forty-seven years old, fifty, bastards up and down the coast, nigger brats, the rich Carolina valleys, rain in the Adirondacks, outlaw rum, tobacco chews, spools of thread, beads and sequins and pearls and rhinestones for the ladies, Dr. Roley’s Brazilian Hair Curling Liquid, bawling at the top of his lungs, coughing, wheezing, spitting bloody phlegm onto the sawdust floor, Guerlain’s Lustral Water, Rowland’s Essence of Tyre, Jones’s Oil of Coral Circassia, Balm of Columbia, Cream of Lilies, Dr. Kiely’s Pomatum, Ring’s Verbena, Henry’s Chinese Cream, Brown’s Windsor Soap, Esprit de Cédrat for the Complexion, Sirop de Boubie, Blanc de Neige, Micheaux’s Freckle Wash. Measuring spoons that wouldn’t measure, matches that wouldn’t light, doorknobs that wouldn’t turn, needles that wouldn’t pierce the flimsiest cloth, bedbug poison the bedbugs lapped up like gruel. He never blinked when a steel fishing knife slammed into the wall beside his head, he never did more than cough and sputter when his nose was broke, and gushed blood, he eased himself up all six feet ten inches weighing maybe one hundred twenty pounds and walked to the door and stepped outside into the moonlight and disappeared: just disappeared into the air: and only the blood-splashes left behind.

  Taking orders for portable prebuilt houses (Louisiana French style), $10 deposit, reading from Mrs. Unger’s Manual of Social and Business Forms for the ladies who couldn’t read, playing the harmonica, playing the fiddle, tapping his foot, the dancers whipping past him, his eyeglasses winking. Arrested for selling untaxed rum and beaten to death on the road and left in the ditch and the next year there he was again!—big as life striding over the hill, raising dust, leaning on his staff, Lock your doors and bolt your windows, it’s the Yankee pedlar again, hat racks for sale, satin cravats only a little soiled, floral-printed oilcloth, last year’s calendar, The Frugal Housewife’s Almanack, slop jars, children’s boots, glass bells, tincture of benzoin, ginger cough lozenges, heavy carbonate magnesia, oil of aniseed, Cascara Sagrada Pills, Paregoric Elixir, ammoniated quinine, oxalic acid powder, essence of pennyroyal, essence of cloves, eucalyptus oil, belladonna, sugar of lead, liquorice, Buckthorn’s Syrup, flower of sulphur. Bedwarmers, wool-flock, ambergris for fertility, Florentine orris-root for toothache, gentlemen’s embroidered waistcoats, aigrettes for the ladies, of tinted feathers, shawls of Spanish rabbit skin, black plush purses, lace collars and cuffs, Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am, I have here, ma’am, let me shut the door, ma’am, no pupils in his eyes, no heartbeat in his chest, the boy isn’t his son, they don’t look alike, he must be kidnapped, taken somewhere along the road, buckshot can’t touch them.

  In Shinnecock, Virginia, the sheriff arrested him and locked him in jail and by morning the pedlar had beat him at cards so bad, the inside of the jail was stripped, even the corn-shuck mattress, even the sheriff’s glass eye, and in Oriskany on the Hudson they thought to play a practical joke on him, put a noose around his neck and dragged him out of the tavern, and halfway to where they were going he talked them out of all the coins in their pockets and the noose, and ain’t been back since.

  The boy was crying and the tears looked real but the birthmark on the side of his face gave the game away. The Devil’s own. A flintlock fired in the face, his head ducked in the cattle dung pond, Is that real blood?—that ain’t never real blood, and next April turning the bend in the road, dry September hawking Bibles and gla
ss paperweights and water-diviners along the Trenton Pike, through the Delaware Valley leading a sickly mule, in Virginia marshlands where the mosquitoes that bit him dropped dead at his feet, in Allegheny County, in Stowe Creek Landing, along the Schuylkill, the boy helping him walk, the boy carrying the heavier of the backpacks, cheeks glistening with tears, like father like son, they ain’t never father and son, You can’t hurt them you can’t touch them Yankees how did they escape so fast where did they go . . . ?

  TWENTY-TWO

  In the tumultuous weeks and months before their engagement was officially announced, before, indeed, John Quincy Zinn had so publicly claimed her for his own, Miss Prudence Kidde­master was disturbed by rumors involving not only her suitor’s interest in other young heiresses, but his background itself: detractors whispered that the famous experimental school in the hills was less of a success than radical educators knew, and that the Zinns were shrouded in ignominy, as it were, a male Zinn having been executed as a common felon, and John Quincy Zinn, motherless and fatherless, shipped away to an orphanage . . . a Catholic orphanage, in Baltimore, perhaps; or in Wilmington; or New York.

  Pride contended with curiosity, in our restless young lady, who refused for a considerable space of time to honor such vaporous rumors by so much as recording them in her diary. I know not what to think, Prudence Kidde­master wrote, but I know—ah, surely!—what to feel. She might have followed the example of the self-assured Horace Bayard who, in his role as public educator, invested with a good deal of authority, had for decades airily dismissed all doubts, and many facts, that ran counter to his own interpretation of the world; she might have sought out the source of the rumors—to discover, no doubt, that they were concocted by men jealous of young Zinn’s rapid rise to prominence as a popular lecturer, much admired by the ladies, and a member of Dr. Bayard’s Association for the Reform of Common Schools, and a man-about-town of sorts, lionized in the very smartest circles. That her reputation—indeed, her very life—would someday be linked to his, the impetuous young woman fantasized almost hourly; and her heart was storm-toss’d with doubt. For tho’ she loved him, and thrilled to his words, she was not always certain that she comprehended those words—or could safely believe them.

  So discreetly, however, did she broach the subject of Catholicism to John Quincy (by way of a warm inquiry into the background of his boardinghouse acquaintance Mr. Guiteau, an admitted Catholic, but one no longer practicing his gothic rite), and learn to her satisfaction that he knew very little about it, and very little he found encouraging, that her sensitive suitor never guessed she was interrogating him; discreetly, too, she inquired after his parents, only to learn that his dear mother had been carried away by tuberculosis, shortly after John Quincy’s birth, and that his father had died a martyr’s death at an Abolitionists’ rally, upon the occasion of the passage of that unspeakable act of 1850, but that, for many reasons, he did not wish to publicize the fact.

  “I see!—ah yes, I see!” Prudence exclaimed, quite stricken. “You would not—you must not—wish to capitalize, or to seem to capitalize, upon such tragedy.”

  “Miss Kidde­master,” John Quincy said, flushing, and lowering his eyes, “you understand me thoroughly.”

  IF, AS THE faithful chronicler of the Zinns’ destinies, I frequently draw back in trepidation at the task before me, and torture myself with the question—as, indeed, glorious Milton must oft have tortured himself, and the great Bard, and our courageous Harriet Beecher Stowe, to name one close to home, and of my own humble sex—the question of whether Evil may be liquefied in Moral Art; if, as one laboring to suggest the fructuousness of even the most dismaying and self-serving acts amongst these persons, I am subject to moments, nay, hours and days, of doubt, I hope the reader will grant me patience, and some sympathy. For if the Evil I must in all sincerity transcribe (being not entirely of Mr. Zinn’s admirable Transcendentalist belief that Evil by its very nature cannot share the universe with God) is to be truly comprehended, and thereby, as it were, liquefied, in the service of a Moral Art, how may the chronicler proceed except by way of a fastidious recounting of all that transpires . . . no matter how hideous? For I cannot believe that Evil for all its power is finally inexpungible, in art as in life.

  But here is the great Cowper, to express this sentiment in verse—

  But though life’s valley be a vale of tears,

  A brighter scene beyond that vale appears,

  Whose glory, with a light that never fades,

  Shoots between scatter’d rocks and opening shades.

  IT WAS ON a chill October night, by the austere irradiation of the harvest moon, on the outskirts of a nameless little hamlet in the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania, that the pedlar John Jay Zinn met his sad fate, and the eight-year-old John Quincy became, indeed, an orphan—tho’ the reader will be relieved to know that he was certainly not shipped to a Catholic orphanage, in Baltimore or anywhere else, but was brought up in a Christian home, amidst good country people who had taken pity on him, and did not tar him—as it were—with his father’s sins.

  It may indeed have been as a consequence of Abolitionist quarreling, or a false, febrific rumor, to the effect that the Yankee pedlar was in fact a Masonic spy (for these were the curious years of the Anti-Masons, led by the fiery Thaddeus Stevens of Gettysburg); tho’ it is more reasonable to suspect that the murderers of John Jay Zinn simply wished to punish him, because he had cheated them a twelve-month before—he or another Yankee pedlar who closely resembled him, attired similarly in a black broadcloth coat, and a misshapen hat (now white, now gray, now black, now decorated with a pheasant feather in the band, now plain as that of a Baptist preacher’s), and accompanied by a child so abash’dly silent, he was believed to be mute. It is reasonable too to suspect that, given the degree of drunkenness of the murderers, and the unspeakably cruel torture to which they subjected their victim, before merciful death at last blotted out his suffering, that alcohol itself may stand indicted; and that the pleas of the Temperance Movement, tho’ oft derided in the popular press, and even by gentlemen of culture and social standing, must heretofore be granted a greater authority.

  Indeed, John Jay Zinn’s unfortunate demise may be directly traced to his having entered a lowlife establishment that served alcoholic beverages, including cheap gin, beer, and ale; and to his having unwisely joined with a group of revelers, who noisily welcomed him to their party. (This party must not have seemed at first to be hostile, let alone dangerous, if we are to credit the pedlar with the shrewdness for which he was so widely known.) Soon falling in with their camaraderie, tho’, at the age of about fifty, he was some twenty years older than the eldest, he treated them to a round of drinks, as is the custom, I believe, in such establishments; and to another; and yet another—as a stratagem to win their good will, perhaps, or out of simple vainglory. (For John Jay Zinn thought well of himself and could not resist, at such times, throwing his money around, as the colorful expression goes: and how imprudently, at this particular time!)

  And all the while, in an unheated haybarn a quarter-mile distant, little John Quincy slumbered, protected by the deep, dreamless sleep of the child who is both pure of heart and drained of strength by recent physical exertion, for his father had forced him to walk a great many miles that day, burdened by a backpack inordinately heavy with iron kitchen utensils. So exhausted was the child he had fallen asleep midway through his simple repast of stewed mutton and potatoes, and had been slapped awake by his father, never one to cosset the weak, and anxious as ever to reward himself for a day’s labor by partaking of alcoholic beverages. (Sleep away, poor child—for you are shortly to be awakened by bestial shouts and screams, which will pursue you for much of your life!)

  That John Jay Zinn would willingly step foot inside a crude country tavern, let alone join with a group of drunken ruffians of the tribe who swept Andrew Jackson into office, and rejoiced at the destruction of Mr. Biddle’s bank, testifies to something very much amiss
in his nature; that he would drink for five or six hours, forgetting his son, and neglecting his own need for sleep, testifies to a want of sense we must judge ominous. Unsurprising it is, that the mood of the party gradually altered as the participants grew ever more intoxicated and began to bait the pedlar with various accusations and charges—some of them too shameful to be recorded; nor is it surprising that the foolish man, so overcome with drink that he staggered and all but toppled to the filthy sawdust floor, should have attempted to defend himself, by shouting and waving his fists and attempting to outshine his opponents with sheer vituperative wit. They jeered, and mocked, and grew more restive, and were joined by other louts, and at the closing of the tavern still others came by, there being now a general outcry of sorts, that the criminal Yankee pedlar had been caught, who had, some time previously, perpetrated a fraud upon certain members of the settlement by “divining” spring water for a considerable payment (tho’ the sum greatly varied, growing as voice was added to voice in the excitement of the moment). He had promised them a well—a well of the sweetest and purest spring water—he had strode about with his divining rod held high, and a crafty-dreamy expression on his face, and after some hours, having traversed the village, and making a great show of the procedure, he had found it: allowing them to see how the divining rod fairly leapt in his hands, its fork jerking downward. And they had dug at that spot for water, and found it; and had, in all gratitude, paid the pedlar generously for his service.