The Peckerwood Manichee

Chapter 1 from the novel Natural Bone
by David S. Warren

 

A tall young divinity student and his tutor stood at opposite ends of a bench on the Cambridge bank of the Charles River, looking out over the water to where two scullers rested on their oars and gaped up at the bank of clouds, shifting and darkening over all New England, late in the afternoon of April 17, 1774.
When the first large drops of rain began to ring the water, the two boats strode away like water spiders, but the young man continued to stare into the space which the two boats had left, while his tutor’s eyes darted from one rain splat to the next. Black spots like holes began to appear on the older man’s wide black hat. He shifted in his suit, leaned slightly forward, and said, “Ahem!”
The young man turned his had to face the other, blinked, then looked back into the space where the two boats had rested, his mouth drawn up in a thin line on the left side of his face.

“Good will prevail in the world, my son, just as, in the end, God will, “ said the tutor. “There is no contest.” He turned and looked into his student’s wet ear. “The only question for you to be concerned with, young man, is whether or not you will prevail with him!” The tutor caught his hands behind his back and turned again to the river. “You have put your soul into grave danger with this Manichean heresy of yours,” he said. The young man did not reply.

“As for me,” proceeded the tutor, pulling his left hand from the grip of the right, “it is only common sense that I would betray a lack of conviction were I to argue the question with the Devil’s advocate!”

As the tutor raised his forefinger, rested it against the side of his nose, and stared into the growing thicket of rain where there had been a river, the young man secretly pulled a burnt cork from his coat pocket, and used it to draw a rough cross on his face, from ear to ear, and forehead to chin, then he dropped the cork into his pocket and inhaled forcibly.

The tutor looked again across the bench at the cross-face.

“What is the meaning of this!” the tutor exclaimed, looking quickly away into the rain.

There was no reply, and the tutor could not avoid looking back at the face. After a moment of struggle, he tore his eyes away, released the bench, and walked right down into the river as if either he or the river were not really there.

When he was up to his vest pockets, he turned and glided down the current, turning and drifting into the rain.
The young man looked down the river and up the river. The rowers were gone; there were no witnesses, and what he himself had seen was way beyond his expectations for the burnt cork ploy. But it proved his point, at least to himself. Nothing is certain and everything is possible. He hid his hands in his pockets and strode off into the obscuring rain.
.

Editor's Note:
Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process which takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian gnostic and religious movements.

Because prominent Christian sects believed that God, who cast the angel Satin out of heaven, ruled absolutely, forever and ever without a doubt, they considered it heresy to claim that, except in the souls of individual people, there was any real contest between good and evil, between God and any part of his creation. There was no argument to be made, God trumps any angel, and no question about it.

One Friday morning later in April, the sun, as yellow as a chick at his window in Peckerwood, Vermont, cheered the Reverend Severn Keel Davies out of bed, led him out and off across the fields at the corner of the house and down to Peckerwood Creek where he sat for half an hour with his feet in a shallow run, brushing his teeth with a chewed willow twig and meditating his next Sunday’s sermon. One good thing led, however, to another, and he was soon browsing up through the riffle, pawing rocks over, and collecting Helgramites for his insectarium.

All of Peckerwood knew that it was most often Mrs. Reverend Davies who actually wrote the sermons. Mrs. Davies was known for her great hope of heaven and her ability to foresee the weather. When she was a child, and her father a sea captain for the East India Company, her dreams had been full of his hurricanes and his typhoons.

When Mrs. Davies saw the sun that morning on her windowsill, she knew that the Reverend Davies had gone off down to Peckerwood Creek, that one thing had led to another again, and that he would not be back in time for breakfast, although it was to be the first hot day of the year and, in her advance judgment, not a good day to go outside. In fact, Mrs. Davies seldom stepped off the front porch, unless it were to go down the hill to church, and even some Sundays she preferred to stay home and pray.
“Very well,” she said, “there shall be no breakfast!”

She pulled her night-gown over her head, snapped it into folds and slipped it neatly under her pillow.
Naked, she built a fire in the stove and made Cedar tea. Still naked later, she took the tea to the corner of the kitchen in which she had built a prayer cage of the bamboo poles the captain, her father, had brought back from God knew where. Straight as the bamboo, she sat on an old flour keg with her feet on a packing box. The Cedar tea steamed forgotten on the floor.

On the near wall Christ stretched his arms out to her from a picture she herself had painted. Held behind the corner of the picture was a bunch of Cattail leaves which she had gathered one Palm Sunday with her son Noah when he was six years old. Her hands gripped her knees, she lifted her chin, looked up through the ceiling, and prayed for Noah in his divine studies.

But just then the bundle of cattail leaves stirred and scratched the wall like little fingernails. Mrs. Davies felt a draft on the right side of her body and turned toward the door. Her son Noah entered, lugging the carpetbag with which he had gone off to divinity school the previous September. He stopped inside the door when his long shadow had almost entered the cage.

“Oh My Dear!” said Mrs. Davies, “I was just about to pray for you in your studies!”

Noah stepped forward out of the light of the door and set his carpetbag in front of him, closer to the sound of his mother’s voice. When he straightened up, he saw that she was naked as was usual when she sought beatitude through prayer. That and the prayer cage were an embarrassment to Noah, who looked back down at his carpetbag. Just then, a stomping and a boot-squishing from the doorway behind Noah announced the Reverend Severn Keel Davies who trod in place on the threshold to squeeze some of Peckerwood Creek from his boots. He looked up at his hat brim and no further, until he had stepped into the house and removed his hat. Then, seeing Noah, the Reverend’s eyes rocked from side to side.

Noah leaned slightly backwards to pick up his carpetbag.


“Where are you going?” asked the Reverend.

“Don’t come in here if you have been around any dogs,” said Mrs. Davies.

“What dog, my Dear? There are no dogs” said the Reverend, carefully walking around Noah and entering the cage.

He removed his coat, and put it over her shoulders
.
“What happened to Divinity School?” asked the Reverend.

Noah felt his nose and then examined his fingers.”Nothing happened. It is still there. But my tutor vanished,” he said. He straightened, almost smiled, then sagged back.

“And so you have come home!” said the Reverend.

“Vanished!” said Mrs. Davies. She looked at the Reverend.

“Well,” he continued, “you have always a home here with us.”

“Not,” said Mrs. Davies, “if you are not at bivinity school as you are suppose to be!” No one knew why Mrs. Davies could say “vanish” correctly, but always pronounced divinity as “bivinity;” which she never admitted, heard, or believed she did.

Noah had long ago given up correcting his mother. He changed the bag from his right hand to the left, then put his right hand into his pocket and found the cork.

“I have come to ask if I might move into Rose Hollow to pursue some studies on my own.”

“I will not hear of it!” declared Mrs. Davies and she covered her ears with her hands.

“No one has lived there in twenty years and more,” said Reverend Davies.

“Just so,” said Noah, “And with hives in the barn and an orchard full of good trees yet!”

“No!” insisted Mrs. Davies, her hands still over her ears.

“The well has been sealed,” said the Reverend. Noah sucked his lips so his beard bristled and, for a moment it would seem he had no mouth at all.

“Well, I would open it up,” said Noah, unsealing his mouth.

The Reverend straightened behind Mrs. Davies and rested his hand on top of her head as if it were banister knob.

“Pray now,” he whispered to her, and stepped out of the cage. Reverend Davies walked past Noah, then beckoned for him to follow out onto the porch.

“There is a confession I must make to you,” he said.

“Confession?” Noah wondered, staring at the Reverend’s hat.

Reverend Davies walked to the bottom of the porch stairs.

“An explanation,” he said. He picked a tall grass stem, and chewed it half way to the caterpillar-like seedhead. He put it into pocket with the moss and Helgramites.

“An apology,” he said after an intense revery among gnats orbiting under his hat brim. “I am deeply sorry, but you were raised in circumstances a trifle misrepresented to your young conception, though your mother and I have always given you to understand as much as we felt you could, and our intentions were as they had to be and we have always prayed that you would be done no harm.”

Noah felt his nose as if for damage.

“I am terribly sorry!” said the Reverend, refreshing his sorrow, “but to put it as briefly and frankly as I am able.... I am your uncle!” His own mouth fell open with self-surprise at this disclosure.

Noah stood up away from the man, picking up his carpetbag.

“Who is she?” Noah demanded, pointing into the house.

“Your mother! Of course!” cried the Reverend, “and she loves you as ever!”


“I don’t understand. Who is my father?” Noah said.
“I’m sorry,” said the Reverend, “but I cannot tell you why I cannot tell you. I am just not able.”
Noah stepped disjointedly off the porch.

“Whatever injustice may have been done, only the Lord knows fully,” said the Reverend Uncle, “but the fact remains that your mother is your mother, that I am Father’s heir and you are mine, and if you must have it, Rose Cottage is yours.”

“And my father is who?”

“The key,” said the Reverend, ignoring the question “is in the iron box under the seat of the buckboard, and Lucy can still get out and pull it. We don’t often ask much of her anymore, but she is still very attached to the buckboard.”

Noah went into the barn and found Lucy asleep in the back of the buckboard, as was her habit. The horse pretended at first that she did not recognize Noah, but he took her by the nostrils, hitched her up, and drove to the front of the house.
The Reverend was standing on the porch.

“Come back if you wish to return to school,” said the Reverend.

“When my tutor returns,” said Noah.

 

When Noah was gone, Reverend Davies went back into the house and into the cage with Mrs. Davies. He stood behind her, patted the top of her head, and looked at the door.

“Not so hard!” said Mrs. Davies, pulling his hand away and down to his side. “I just had a dream.”
“Good,” said the Reverend, “Noah’s gone. What was the dream?
“I dreamt that July will be partly cloudy, though very bright at her noon.” Mrs. Davies lifted her chin, closed her eyes, and smiled up through the ceiling.

Noah drove up the two marshy ruts full of singing toads into Rose Hollow. A cloud of Passenger Pigeons swirled into the sky and stayed overhead until old Lucy pulled up in front of the sagging brown cottage where Noah had been born but had never lived. Then the pigeons settled into the tall Chestnuts and Basswoods around the orchard.
Noah stood with his hand on Lucy’s flank, looking at the rose vines that climbed the shutters and the day lilies that crowded the lawn under the porch and seemed about to mount the steps.
Noah unhitched Lucy in front of the house, and she headed directly for the well, across the yard in the angle formed by the house and the bee barn, pulling through the soft earth as if she were still hitched to the buckboard. Noah threw his carpetbag up onto the porch and walked after Lucy, across the yard bare except for moss islands, earth worm casts, and several clumps of cattails, stepping here and there on rotted boards which had once capped the well.
There was no cap at all on the well now, no pump and no bucket. He looked down in, saw two eyes like glowing chestnuts, and he smelled something dead.
“Get out of my water!” Noah shouted into the well. “Otter, Otter, Odder,” echoed the rocks up the well.
The animal down there closed its eyes and could not be seen.
Noah stood perplexed, and looked to the sky again, as if there were an answer.
A pair of robins hop-zagged across the yard listening for worms and, hearing none, flew off into the orchard.
Something in the well whined softly.
Noah went to the barn, and brought back a pointed orchard ladder , which he let, point down, into the well.
“Out of there!” said Noah,” to no effect.

Smelling the brook, Lucy trotted off into the orchard. The pigeons thundered slowly out of the chestnuts and basswoods, lifted into a cloud over the orchard and house, and swirled out of Rose Hollow.

When the sun came down into the tops of basswoods, he called once more for Lucy, but the horse did not appear.

Noah fetched the key from the buckboard box and unlocked the door to Rose Cottage.

He pushed the door open into the dim foyer,where he gradually discerned a few empty coats hanging over a dusky gathering of boots. As Noah walked into the parlor, the entry door swung slowly in, and shut out most of the light. Noah moved ahead with the carpetbag leading in the dark, until it was caught by the thorny arms of a rose intruding through the broken shutters..

He freed himself and looked through the split shutters out to the orchard where the sun was a big gold fruit in the apple trees. Very soon it would be quite dark in the thorny Rose Hollow.

Noah walked back into the foyer just as a knock came, “THUNK,” at the outer door.

He halted, his shoes in line with the boots around the room. His hands dropped to his side. There came three more thunks.

Noah crossed the arms and drew his mouth into a tight, blue line. “Thunk, Thunk Thunk” went the door.
“Who do you want?” said Noah to the door.

“I beg ter escuse me, Sar,” said a feminine voice, “Oim lokin fer me dog Loosefur!”

“Lucifer!” exclaimed Noah, glancing hurriedly around in the dark and moving out of the passageway, up against the coat hooks. “Why do you call him that?”

“Fer when Oi calls em at, e comes!” said the voice.

Noah moved forward off a coat hook which was probing the middle of his back.

“What?” said the voice through the door
.
Noah dropped his arms and waited a moment.

“Where do you come from?” he shouted more loudly than necessary, seeing as the door was not even tightly closed.

“Oim frum where Oi yam,” said the voice, “fer Oim a Tinker Gurl, Oi yam!”

Noah folded his arms, stood back on his heels, and cleared his throat; “Ahem,” he said, “are you a Gypsy?”
“Oi beg ter scuse me, Sar,” she said, “but thars thiser door atween uns!”

Noah did not reply, but just stood where he was, trying to breathe inaudibly. He could hear no one else, even when he held his breath.

After a few moments, he stepped forward and put his carpetbag on the hat-stand beside the door.

He waited and then whispered, “Are you there?” Though he waited silently for another moment there was no answer. When he suspected that he must be alone, he opened the door and discovered that he was not. A tall girl in a blue dress full of dusky holes smirked at him. She had lips as brown as her bare toes and a nose like a pear.

“Pshaw Sar!” she said, darting her hands about, “Oi beg ter escuse me, but yuz ought ta eyer the place once ter a while!”

“What?” said Noah, looking into each of her eyes, “Where are the Gypsies?”

“Innum wagons ahind me,” said the girl, clasping her hands in front of her and casting her eyes down to the threshold.

Noah leaned forward through the doorway depressing his nose on his lip and peering over her sloping shoulder into the darkness.

“I see no wagons,” he said, settling back on his heels and noticing her odor of melons only as she whirled around, threw up her hands, and ran off the porch into the dark at the end of the driveway where Noah could not even see her.

“Hello!” he shouted.

At that, the girl came zig-zagging back, her arms writhing in her long black hair.

“Oh me Cripes,” she moaned, as she came up onto the porch, “Oive been squandered!”

“Squandered?” said Noah.

“Squandered like me Muther were,” she said, “Trided, n’ doubt fer a mare!”


“Trided fur a mare?” said Noah, grabbing his beard and bringing it to a fine point.
“Like me Muther were when me Fodder rid off’n th’ mare, leavin only me!’ She closed her eyes and stroked the door frame consolingly.

Noah dropped his eyes to the threshold between them and continued to worry his beard, as the girl woman left off whimpering, straightened up, her hand resting between her breasts.

Noah looked up suddenly, pulling his hand from his beard.


“I am Noah Davies, he said, “I . . . live here. May I help you in some fashion?”

She leaned forward from the hips and looked to the left into the living room and to the right into the kitchen, where Noah could see nothing now.

“Yer can take em shutters off’n th’ winders,” she said

“Well, said Noah, “I do not in actuality live here.”

“Wall,” she said, putting her hands on her hips and stepping up onto the threshold. “In that axually, Oi lives here, fer ain’t Oi here?!”

“I mean to say that I own this place,” he said.

“Wal,” she said, “are guess yer owns me too, now.” With that she stepped forward into the house, like someone boarding a moving vehicle.
.
“July’s me noime, Sar,” she said, and brushed by him into the house. She wore a blue apron backwards, like a bustle on the rump, and the pockets bulged. July looked at the circle of boots and shoes around the room. She walked around bent over until she came to a pair of well heeled boots of thin black leather, tried them on her hands, then put them on her feet and and tottered in them out onto the porch, where she stood at top of the porch steps. Noah touched his carpet bag on the hat stand then came out and stood beside her.

“Loosefur!” she called.

The moon was just appearing, but no dog.

“Lucifer!” called Noah, but the answer was only frogs singing from
the ruts and ditches .

July stepped off the porch, walked to the middle of the soft yard and called, “Loosefur!” sinking in her sharp boots. Noah walked in her tracks to the well.

She leaned over the sill, put her head down into the well, and called,

“Loosefur!”

“What do you hear?” asked Noah, but she did not seem to hear him. Noah stepped up beside her, leaned over the sill and hung down his head, too, into the well. Her hair hung further than he could see.
He heard nothing but the sound of them breathing, and smelled only mellons.

They spent the night on a bed of lap blankets July improvised in the kitchen. Unaccustomed to women, Noah was quickly excited. July finished him with one hand and he fell asleep.

Later that night, a blue black dog climbed the upside-down orchard ladder and appeared at the well sill, or would have appeared had anyone been there to see it: skinny but shaggy, yet with naked, veined ears like bat wings.

When Noah awoke, July was not there, but he soon heard her bustling about the house. She raised her skirts and wiggled her toes as she passed him in the kitchen. “Spider cobs, dust possums and witch roses!” she said, “I’ll not live in no hole w’dust possums!”
Noah looked through the barn for a while, and then stood on the porch, surveying Rose Hollow and clasping his hands behind him. July whisked out onto the porch every once in a while with a sweep of dust possums and spider webs.

It was just about noon, and Noah was still standing on the porch, when a horse pulling a cask wagon and trailing a cloud of bees thundered around the bend. The horse was Lucy. There was no driver in the wagon seat, nor any other sign of the horse thief. Lucy cut across the yard between the well and the barn, and right into the orchard, where she finally stopped, caught up in brambles.
Later, when the bees had settled down, Noah went out and unhitched Lucy from the cask wagon. He let her run, and she went straight to the buckboard, leapt up, and lay down in it.
Noah spent the later part of the day, confident that due to his wildly good luck, the cask wagon bees were making honey in the orchard.
“This is the life for me!” Noah shouted when July appeared at the kitchen window.

Toward evening, Noah heard a pulsing hum that vibrated the window panes. He ran out to the yard and stood looking up, expecting to see great revolving spheres.

Just then a red wasp big as a Weasel flew over the peak of the house, lit on the lip of the round attic vent, and crawled inside. Then came another wasp, and another and six more, each carrying a gob of honey.
Then, one by one, the wasps appeared at the window sill, peeled off and flew back to the orchard.
Noah ran back into the house.
“Get out, get out, we’re leaving!!”
“But Oi thaught this wasa liferya!” said July, snapping out of her stretch; but quicker than that, Noah was down the stairs.
July grabbed the best of the boots and shoes, knotted them together by the laces, and threw them out the door onto the lawn.
Then she brought out a cradle painted with roses and full of kitchen implements, and lifted it into the buckboard, while Noah took the charred cork in his pocket and wrote on the on the door of Rose cottage:

SMALL POX
CONDEMNED
DO NOT TOUCH

They set off in a slow hurry toward the great blue West.
.
In Peckerwood that morning, the Mrs. Severn Keel Davies took down the last jar of Aunt Patty’s cherries and, using her fists instead of a rolling pin, baked a cherry pie in the time that it took the Reverend himself to eat his oats, dress for the road, and draw off a jug of lamp oil, which he set on the porch beside a small grindstone he had brought out the night before.
The Reverend went out to the barn, hitched the dappled gelding to the two wheeled trap, and horsed it across the muddy, rutted yard to the front of the house. He brought the grindstone off the porch and set it on the floor of the trap
Mrs. Davies appeared in the doorway with the cherry pie steaming on a towel as the Reverend came back up onto the porch and set it on the floor of the trap.
“I do wish you would come with me!” he said.
“Certainly not,” declared Mrs. Davies, waving likewise. “There wouldn’t be room for myself and this pie as well! He sat in the trap with the pie cooling beside him, a cloud of black flies hanging under his hat brim like bats under a ledge. He waved them away,
“Well, goodbye then,” he said, but quicker than that, the black flies were again, dancing before each of his eyes.

As soon as the Reverend had left, Mrs. Davies shivered and went back inside. She put the kettle on for cedar tea, then went to the wardrobe and put on the the Reverend’s winter Sunday coat over her own grey dress. She sat on her keg in the prayer cage, held herself rigid with her hands on her knees so that she would not shiver, and she watched the pot.
She stared as the water boiled, and stared still as the water boiled off completely, the pot scorching , creaking, and popping on the stove. She would have seemed to be watching the pot still when the stove had cooled an the Reverend Davies was just arriving at Rose Cottage; but, in a vision, as if she were actually in the seat of the carriage, what she saw was the Reverend Davies walking toward the sagging brown cottage.
As if under water, or as if in a dream, and he WAS in a dream, the Reverend Davies walked through crushed day lilies, stepped into the hole where the first step had been, stumbled on the second and up onto the porch, recovered himself and waved off his company of gnats. He paused at the door and stood staring at it as if he were reading a tombstone.

A red wasp the size of a mink crawled out of the attic vent and took to the air.
The Reverend could not have seen it from where he was and there was no sound in Mrs. Davies dream, but Reverend Davies must have heard something; because he turned and fled back toward the horse and carriage with his arms outstretched.
She saw into his eyes as they rolled up into his head.
Another and another giant wasp emerged and launched over the yard, another and another; and they bore down upon the Reverend like madness, darkness, and death.

As Aunt Patty scattered Calamus leaves in the aisles and out onto the steps of the Peckerwood Church on Sunday morning several days later, a carriage pulled by the Reverend’s gelding pulled up in front, and it was without a driver.
There was a cherry pie on the front seat. Aunt Patty recognized it immediately as one of Mrs. Davies pies because of the imprint of her fists on the crust. She took the pie in her apron and waddled with it up Rectory Hill where she found Mrs. Davies still sitting in the prayer cage. Her feet were blue and gnarled, her eyes small and grey, pointing up through the ceiling. Her ribs sighed like a ship’s timbers when she breathed. She managed to tell Aunt Patty (who was nobody’s actual Aunt) that she had sent the pie to Rose Hollow with the Reverend.
Aunt Patty ran to the window. The only person in sight and the only black man for miles around was Black Jim Worms, down behind a neighbor’s outhouse digging worms.
Aunt Patty opened the window, hollered him up, and gave him instructions to run down to the church drive the trap to Rose Hollow, and to tell Noah Davies there that the horse and carriage had come back without the Reverend.
Jim Worms found no Reverend Davies, no Noah, and, lucky for him, no giant red wasps.
Jim raced back to Peckerwood, arriving at the church shortly before the service would normally begin. He ran up the steps and shouted from the rear of the church. “De Reberend is Banished!” then ran back down the steps, leapt into the trap, and whipped away.
“What?” asked the congregation. “Banished!”
“He’s gone!”
“He can’t say that !” “Stop him!”
“STOP JIM WORMS!”
Some of the men ran out to hitch up their carriages, but then they couldn’t agree on which direction Jim Worms had taken.

Aunt Patty returned to the rectory and stayed with the vision-stricken Mrs. Davies.

Mre. Davies did not speak or seem to breathe, but Aunt Patty continued to pour cedar tea between her teeth and to rub her grey skin with sweet rushes.

Days and weeks, passed this way and no one but Aunt Patty even came to sit politely by Mrs. Davies for a few minutes.

Then one day a child came to the door and asked Aunt Patty for a drink of sugar water. When Aunt Patty went to fetch the water, the child followed after her into the house and wandered into Mrs. Davie’s cage.

“Why is she made of wood?” the child asked.

“She’s not made of wood!” said Aunt Patty, “She is gone to her reward!”

The child would not take the glass of water. She frowned at Mrs. Davies and ran home to tell.

Mrs. Davies’ fame spread over all New England. She was reported in the March 14, 1796 issue of Gerald’s Boston Weekly as “The Peckerwood Manikin; A Morbid Hoax,” but many who believed, or were just curious, came from far away just to see and touch her, though they were all turned away by Aunt Patty .

And then, only a week after the newspaper article had appeared, Aunt Patty rose one morning to find no sign or remnent of Mrs. Davies. The next night Aunt Patty passed away in her sleep and went to her reward. Black Jim Worms (or Jim Worms Freedman d’Beeman, as he called himself) never returned. And Noah Davies was never heard of again. At least, not in Peckerwood, Vermont.

Natural Bone, Chapter One • The Peckerwood Manichee
Metaphysical TimesVolume IX number 3 •  Summer 2014