The Snake-Oil Dickens Man

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1998

Copyright © Ross Gilfillan 1998

Ross Gilfillan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781857028140

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007485062

Version: 2017-02-03

Praise

‘A quality romp set in the America of the late 1860s … Robustly written, and with plenty of Dickensian resonances, Gilfillan’s first novel is an ingenious and entertaining read.’ Mail on Sunday

‘Weaves a fascinating tale … The atmosphere of 1867 is brilliantly captured.’ Oxford Mail

‘Compulsive, quirky, beautifully constructed, a read that has you wondering why no one has ever tried it before.’ Birmingham Post

Dedication

To my wife Lisaand Fae, Tom and Alice

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

Ces Américains qui aiment tant à être dupés Baudelaire

NO ONE DOES something for nothing any more.

So the smart money says, anyway. If this is true then I suppose there is no reason why I should not be well recompensed for the hours I will sit at this desk, removed from spheres of more certainly remunerative activity. There are infinite ways in which wealth can be acquired with much less expenditure of effort than by the writing of a memoir. No, the profit I hope for here will be of another kind. I relate what follows not for pecuniary gain but rather that I might by the process of autobiography come to understand more of myself and see the beginning of the thread that has woven the thing that now I am.

Let me begin as I mean to continue – honestly – and say right out that I am not as I seem. No doubt you know me by my reputation and my office but even were we strangers, you might observe my English-cut suit and my fancy waistcoat and hear my knowing tones and mistake me for a man of consequence. And if I’m offering you some deal that’s going to make you rich quick and won’t jeopardise your capital one little bit then that’s exactly how you would have me. For all the world, I am prosperous, refined and respected. I am solid and that is all you need to know.

But perhaps what you now see really is me. Perhaps money has made me one of you: just as prosperous and as solid as any of the speculators, private investors and city tycoons I have lately lived off so well. All I know for certain is that once I thought I was different and that this journal shall be my testimony.

At this distance it is hard for me to credit that I was once a veritable slave to a low hotelier; that I was employed by Elijah Putnam as an agent of his own ambition and that I let my mother be abominably abused. Harder still to acknowledge that I owe my present eminence to an individual whose philosophy was markedly at odds with those who hold propriety and the law in reverence.

But now I have arrived at a time in my life when I would leave off pretence and apply myself to the task of understanding of what I am made. I shall begin today while my wife is in Mississippi, opening up the house in Natchez. She hardly needs two whole months to ready the place for Christmas – only an excuse to decamp from Washington DC. (She has never enjoyed playing the part of the politician’s wife.) However, her absence affords me ideal opportunity to begin my work. To this end I am seated at my great oaken desk, my inkpot brim-full and my nib poised above half a ream of white paper, fully resolved that I will not be distracted by my present great responsibilities or by the formless stain of black ink which despoils the oak and has proven the match of brush and polish alike.

But where to begin? A natural place might be with my mother and father but if I had known their histories in the first place this one would not be worth the candle. Nor was sense made of my childhood until its term had expired. Rather, I must overleap my dim origins and begin at a place which now seems pregnant with some significance, although I can offer no more apt beginning than this, with which you will surely be familiar:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

And so to make a start.

Chapter One

I

I HAD BEEN reading to Mr Putnam, same as I always did, right after supper and before I climbed the ladder to my bed beneath the rafters. I guessed he had something on his mind because this night he let me choose.

‘We’ll have the one about the feller with high hopes,’ I said, and settled down on the hard chair by the lamp and began to read.

Pip was still on the marshes, beside the graves of his five little brothers, when Mr Putnam, who had been quite unusually restless throughout, fidgeting and biting his fingernails, said, ‘That’s enough, boy. You must know it by heart. I had hoped you might have read us the latest part of his new one.’

I wanted to tell him that I had never liked that book and that when I had read its opening pages, which he bid me do as soon as the first instalment landed on American soil, I had been terrified out of my senses. I told no one that for weeks afterward, my bed became a boat whose dreadful occupants were black and faceless figures who sculled the river at night, fishing for the bloated corpses of suicides. I went to replace the volume but he heard my tread and sat me down.

‘Stay,’ he said. ‘On reflection, it occurs to me that the book will do very well for tonight.’

I took it up again and read of a marshland that I thought must bear resemblance to that which spread out beyond the limits of our own town – for how different can bogs be? – and of the hulks, which put me in mind of the captured ships tethered by the quay, here in Hayes, Missouri, and of the ranks of rebel prisoners that had shambled through the town only months ago. And of Magwitch; I thought I knew him, too.

I read mechanically, the narrative familiar and my mind more fully employed on matters closer to home. There was that about Mr Putnam tonight I was certain signified an urgency to communicate something to me. But it wasn’t my place to ask and I read on and let him bide his time. Pip had returned to the forge and to Joe, but also to his terrible sister and Tickler and still Elijah said nothing. He only continued to grip the copper head of the weather-worn old stick that he had come to rely and rest upon now that his eyes had untimely closed upon the world.

As I turned the pages, I saw he was no longer attending to the words I read but seemed instead to be listening to other voices and was murmuring and nodding in tune with conversations to which I could not be privy. I stopped the reading and he was immediately sensible of the closing of the book. I expected him to remark my temerity but instead, he waved me away and said only that it, whatever that was, would wait until another day. I snuffed out the lamp and found the handle of the door.

My eyes were still accustomed to the bright light and I was feeling my way along the black hallway, when I collided with a bulk I knew straightaways was Merriweather. I had run into him hard and he cuffed me, as I knew he would. I made to let him pass, thinking how it might teach him to be less mean with his gas, when he took me by the collar and whispered so close I could tell the grade of the whisky on his breath:

‘What did he say? ’Bout the lawyer he had up with him today?’

I said he hadn’t mentioned no lawyer to me, just gone and giv’n me my lesson, same as always. My sight had gotten used to the obscurity in time to see that this wasn’t going to satisfy the old goat tonight. I tried to dodge a blow he aimed at my head but either I was too slow or he wasn’t as drunk as I had judged because he caught me one, bang upon the temple and the black hall was lit up in flashes of lightning.

Even as a child, I had never considered Merriweather a strong man, but, reeling from his lucky blow, I couldn’t fail to notice that he had hefted me up by my shirt-collars and now had me pinned against the wall. He hissed spittle in my ear:

‘Mighty queer a man would see no visitors in three weeks and then spend three hours tucked up with a lawyer, ain’t it? And say nothing to no one?’

‘He didn’t mention no lawyer, I swear,’ I said.

‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’ and his stubby little finger poked my face so that my eye bulged. Again, it came to me that even a skinny stick like me could maybe take a fat runt like Merriweather if push came to shove. He must have known the direction my thoughts were taking because he spat out the name that always brought me up short and I swore I would never lie to him, though I reckon I must have lied my way through every day at Merriweather’s Particular Hotel.

I don’t know that he believed me. I have learnt since that you need to look steadily into the pits of a man’s eyes before you can be certain he has swallowed your line and that sometimes the act of looking itself is all that is needed to gull your mark. Merriweather’s eyes were normally the most polished and plated of any soul’s windows. They blinked ignorance and stupidity when faced with subjects beyond his purview of money and the baser forms of gratification and were slits of suspicion and avarice at most other times.

Tonight, though, they had been digested in the general pitchy gloom of that unlit hallway and I awaited his pleasure and my doom. He let go his grip and when he spoke he sounded mollified. Maybe he was just pleased with the bull’s-eye he had landed me.

‘Course, I reckoned he’d not be discussing his business with you anyways. It’d be me he would come to. But, for the sake of insurance, you be sure and tell me if Mr Putman ever mentions anything concerning that lawyer. Anything at all, you hear?’

I heard, for now, anyway. I waited until Merriweather had descended to the saloon and somewhere between stepping upon my ladder and crawling onto my old straw tick mattress, I swore that just as soon as I could arrange it, things would be different.

II

I knew quite soon what it was that Elijah Putnam had come so close to divulging to me that night. He had been sick for several weeks and he must have thought himself a lot worse than we did because he had indeed called in a lawyer and he had made his will. He was unwell, we all knew that. His failing sight, that had been so poor he had utilised my services as reader, amanuensis and discreet guide whenever he made a rare excursion from the hotel, was now entirely gone.

Elijah appeared to interpret his blindness as a terrible and significant portent, an indicator that his illness was progressing towards its final stages and that the next time he beheld a scene that was bright and clear and full of colour it would be in the Kingdom of Heaven.

By the next day I had clean forgotten about Elijah’s strange preoccupation, his suggestion that he had something to reveal to me and the behaviour of Merriweather in the hallway. My daily routine was one that left no time for idle imaginings.

I rose, as usual, to the sound of the roosters in the yard and shimmied down the stairs to the front hall where I unlocked the doors and swept the front step. I hung out the sign that advertised that we had vacancies and that our vittles were always hot and fresh, which stretched the truth a little, and fixed up the saloon. I washed up the glasses, righted the chairs, collected up the stubs of cigars and cleaned out the spit-boxes. Next I made a swift inventory of the stock and made sure that Irving, who kept bar, hadn’t been cheating. Not that Merriweather considered this a bad business practice – it was he who saw to it that I qualified every bottle of liquor we kept – it only became a problem when someone else got the benefit.

By the time the saloon was shipshape there were stirrings in the kitchen. I wouldn’t get anything to eat before I had prepared the table for the commercial gentlemen’s breakfasts and assisted in the laying on and clearing away of the plates of ham, pickles, salmon, shad, liver, steaks, sausages and other sundry items that these voracious salesmen and drummers demanded every time they sat down to board. I had emptied the pail of leftovers into the hogs’ trough and helped myself to bread and butter before changing out of my overalls to run errands in the town. We all had to look our best in town; Merriweather’s wasn’t called the ‘Particular’ for nothing and appearance counted for a lot.

There was a mirror in the porch, which was there for the gentlemen to set themselves aright before sallying forth to engage the town’s merchants. The glass swung on a central pivot and depending on how he placed it, a fellow could check the arrangement of his neckwear and hat, or the shine on his shoes. I always inspected my turnout thoroughly in case I should, accidentally on purpose, run into Cissy Bullock.

I can’t say that using the glass ever boosted my self-esteem. My store-bought clothes were good enough when they were gotten me, but now I had grown and the pants were too short, the sleeves the same and the ill-fitting stove-pipe hat, which Merriweather passed on to me, now served mainly as a challenging target for small boys with slingshots. But I thought that no mere apparel could mitigate the physiognomy with which I had been cursed. The deep-set blue eyes were much too big and doubtless I appeared as if perpetually amazed. The nose was sharp and much too small and my lips, I was told by a schoolfellow, were like a girl’s. This montage of errors was crowned with a tangle of tumbleweed that served as hair. I mustered what dignity the application of a little bears’ grease would afford and took up my basket.

On that occasion, the morning after the encounter with Merriweather, I had a small list of items to buy, a couple of letters to mail and some bills to settle. Then I planned to attend to a little business of my own: I traded in the gossip of the commercial gentlemen; in this way some merchants were able to hold out for better terms when they came to dealing with our guests and I was able, sometimes, to make fifty cents or even a dollar for myself.

Meantime, I would need cash to transact the business of the hotel. I could hear Merriweather in conversation in his parlour and considered postponing my departure. I preferred to encounter him on other ground; there had been times when a summons to Merriweather’s parlour had occasioned terror. It wasn’t that the room with its huge and heavy furniture and a crimson wallpaper such as Satan himself might have picked out was ugly and reeked of the sweet and stale smell of Merriweather’s cigars. Nor that he had beaten me in that place. There was something else about that room, some childhood memory that time had erased, but whose palimpsest was still traceable on the adult mind, which made me strangely awkward and uncomfortable whenever I addressed Merriweather in his private sanctum.

Merriweather was breakfasting in his shirt-sleeves, his black moustache twitching and collecting crumbs as he ate buttered toast and listened to what Silas Amory, the newspaper editor, was saying. ‘Now this town has the railroad, we need to give the city folk a reason to use it, get ’em coming into the town. Trading, settling, starting up businesses. It’s not happening yet. Tell me, Merriweather, has the railroad brought you the business they said it would?’

Amory’s slight and angular figure perched upon his chair. Only his small dark eyes showed animation as he awaited Merriweather’s reply. I thought he looked like a thieving magpie, intent on stealing morsels from the hotelier’s plate. Merriweather sneered and swallowed. ‘Waal, I allow it might have done that,’ he said, reaching for his cigar-box, ‘had not the railroad company gone and erected its own hotel hard by the depot. They never said nothing about that and I call it low-down and irregular.’

‘Sharp, too, though,’ said Amory. ‘So I guess you have to lower your prices to secure the custom.’

‘That I do, and allow for some little expenditure on advertising that fact, too. There just ain’t enough people coming through this town. Not for us all to turn a good profit.’ He swallowed some coffee and said, ‘What this place needs is a magnet of some kind. I don’t know, s’posin’ someone was to let on, to a newspaper, perhaps, that a little gold had been found in the creek?’

‘We’d get the wrong kind of people,’ Amory said, ‘and they’d be gone soon as they knew the truth.’

‘I reckon you’re right at that. This business needs some kind of a shove, though. Couple more years like this one and I’ll be looking for a job at the Central Pacific.’

‘Bad as that?’ said Amory.

‘Close to it,’ said Merriweather. ‘You know I got a little capital left. It ain’t much but maybe the time has come to venture it. Find some sure-fire investment opportunity. How about precious minerals?’

‘Nothing sure about that line. Lot of people lose their shirts. You might reconsider that matter we spoke of last fall. I’d still welcome a backer if you’d like to make your investment in me.’

‘You?’

‘I’m running for mayor whether or not you stake me, Melik. I’ll get the money if I have to put the Bugle in hock. But if you come in with me now, you won’t see no new hotels going up in Hayes. When I’m mayor I can put all kinds of interesting business your way.’

I cleared my throat and asked Merriweather for the money and I thought I saw Silas Amory damning me with his eyes.

‘Gaul-durn it, boy, allus asking for this or that. I tell you, Silas, this boy has drained me of a sizeable fortune since I took him ’n’ his mother in, nigh on twenty years ago. Twenty years of feeding and clothing. Sizeable, I tell you. Ah, but that’s the cross a true Christian has to bear, I suppose.’

‘Well, you got yourself a wife into the bargain, kind of,’ said Amory, with a leer to which Merriweather refused to respond. Instead, he spat out the end of the cigar and snapped, ‘Charity, Amory. You seen her, as ill-educated a crittur as ever crawled from the swamp. What I done, I mostly done for charity. Never mind what people might say.’

‘So long as you don’t go extending your charity to other women hereabouts.’

Merriweather choked on a crust, and his features broke into a leer that was quite as lascivious as Amory’s. He said Amory was a card and no two ways about it and then he pulled out his purse and warned me to account for every penny. I took the money and skedaddled down the steps. Old Henry, who had worked in the neighbouring livery stable for ever, probably, was being walked around to the front door by his chestnut mare.

‘That for me?’ I said.

‘No, t’ain’t, as well you know,’ Henry said. ‘It’s hired to the gennulman as arrived late last night.’

‘Well, ain’t you got some broken-down old nag you could lend me? I have to go to town.’

‘Elsa an’t broken-down, jest old,’ said Henry. ‘An’t your learnin’ taught you no respect for age?’

‘I’ll try and acquire some,’ I told him. As I started for town, I tried to summon up instances in which I had considered that respect was due. I was probably of a cynical disposition then but my short history had given me few occasions to be otherwise. I was twenty-four years old and young men of my age had already established themselves in lines of work and some were succeeding in their own concerns. Others were married.

I walked on towards town, lamenting my own single state, which I considered was partly the fault of older folk. I would most certainly have married Cissy Bullock and maybe now be lying in her arms had not our secret liaison and moonlight encounters been brought to an unsatisfactory close when Mr Bullock discovered us on their porch one night. I was returning her from a dance where we had contrived to lose her Aunt Louise and reckoned her folks would all be asleep by that time. Events had been taking a romantic course and I was hopeful of pressing my suit.

But Pop Bullock had found us and he was furious. He rounded on me like a mad dog. Foolishly, I tried to explain and lost all my standing. There wasn’t anything that needed excusing. I had behaved honourably and didn’t deserve this. But he had a head of steam up and was hollering for all the neighbourhood to hear, ‘I guess I’ve heard more than I ever want to about you and yours. Particular indeed! No one respectable goes up there any more. Travelling gentlemen and sharpers maybe but church folk don’t and my daughter won’t neither. You come around here again and I’ll fill you full of buckshot, understand?’

Pop Bullock had forbidden any further congress between Cissy and me and that was all because of the way Melik Merriweather ran his affairs. Or at least, so I believed at the time. I kicked stones down the track, like each one was a little granite head of Melik Merriweather. That morning I had been galled that he had ridiculed my mother as if her son had not been standing before him. ‘As ill-educated a crittur as ever crawled from the swamp,’ he had said.

Merriweather never gave a damn that my mother couldn’t read or write and had at best a basic understanding of life. I supposed he was just excusing himself to Silas Amory. But that she and I came from the swamp was undeniable. The oldest, faintest memory I have is the smell of the swamp. I don’t even know if it is a real memory. Maybe it came later, when I knew a little more, but that makes no odds: the stench of something rotten is too strong and too pervasive to be dismissed as fancy. The odour is sickly sweet and I seem to know it again – in the air on the marshes where the trees are stunted and toppled and the roads are still mud and corduroy – or strangely, in the stale smoke that is ever-present in Merriweather’s parlour.

Other memories are of equally doubtful provenance. Sometimes I think I remember the stage coach in which I know I travelled from Cairo but I know that can hardly be as I was still a babe in arms when I was taken away and installed with my mother at Merriweather’s Particular Hotel.

Within sight of the town, I was sensible, suddenly, of the thunder of hooves. I had been so lost in thought as I approached the church and burial ground that marked the town’s limits that I didn’t hear a thing until horse and rider were upon me and had nearly run me down. The Particular’s chestnut mare with its rider, cloaked and masked for the dust, galloped past. It wasn’t common to see anyone in a great hurry in these parts and I watched until he was out of sight.

III

Before my eyes were opened I was the lowest creature of evolution and I’m sure Mr Darwin would have recognised in me then some hairy antecedent of my present evolvement. My lot was better than that which had lately belonged to slaves and also than that of most new freedmen but I was a child strangely and harshly circumstanced and what might be supportable now, was infinitely less so then.

You will wonder how this came to be and to answer that I must go back to the beginning of all things and return to the smell of the swamp, which might or might not be my oldest surviving memory. There is that and I can summon its noxious vapour even now but what else of that time survives? Not much. The mingling of images and impressions and half-remembered speech that I retain must date from two or three years after I was brought to the hotel as a babe in arms and in what order they occurred I have not the slightest idea. But they are as follows.

I am pulled from my mother’s arms and someone is crying, no, howling and whether it is me or my mother who keens so piteously, I don’t know. This, I now believe, must have been the moment I was taken from my mother to live at the house of Elijah Putnam. A woman’s hands grip my wrists as she teaches me to use knife and fork. She leans across my shoulders, her breasts brushing my neck and her sweet-smelling breath whispers encouragement in my ear and I am grateful. The same woman is talking, loudly enough for me to hear clearly from the top of the stairs on which I sit, ‘Don’t take him away from me, Elijah, he’s all I have.’

And I remember the smoking and acrid-smelling remains of the house in which she died: the blackened doorframe and uprights that still stood among great heaps of charcoal and ashes and the half-burned artefacts and knick-knacks I rescued from the ruins and were my damaged records of a time when I had been happy.

There is the schoolroom, too, in which Elijah Putnam, appearing little different in my memory than he did when last I saw him, strides up and down between the desks. Stopping at my own with much greater regularity than at others, he points out this or that in a book or corrects marks I am making on a slate. There are many schoolroom memories: of reading aloud before the class or standing upon a chair with a sign about my neck that advertises that I am slothful; of my classmates finding me alone one day and taking their turns to cuff me about the ears … Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet ringing in the ears they stung so long ago.

It must have been soon after Mrs Putnam died that I left my room at his house and first slept beneath the roof of the Particular Hotel. My history is quite distinct after this date. After living a relatively ordered and peaceful life with Mr and Mrs Putnam, I found myself plunged into a chaotic world in which my function appeared to be to scrub floors, fetch and carry wash-basins, empty chamber-pots, change bed-linen, polish the boots, help the cook, wait on and clear away the tables, run errands, help Henry with the livery horses, clean the saloon and do any number of jobs, all at once, that would probably have taken three people to get done anywhere else.

I don’t know when I first encountered Merriweather but he seems a part of every memory I have of my new existence at the hotel. My life was quite suddenly, utterly changed. It seemed no stranger to be working my hands to the bone in the role of unpaid factotum to a hotelier than it did to find myself receiving personal tuition from Elijah Putnam, who had retired from his position as schoolteacher and had taken rooms in the Particular, to which I repaired every day.

But it wasn’t the work, exhausting as it always was, that made my days so miserable. I think I could have borne that well and enjoyed some parts of it, too, had I known that Merriweather were not always somewhere about the building, ready to box my ears or make threats of violence that would be directed not at me but at someone else and these I feared more than anything Merriweather might do to me.

I knew that the woman who worked mostly in the laundry and whom I sometimes caught stealing along the corridors was my mother. She cut the strangest figure of the establishment. It wasn’t just her worn-out appearance: she was taller than her posture suggested, her hands wrinkled from her work, rather than by nature, although what age she had then attained was hard to guess. Her clothes were patched and stained and she and they smelt strongly of the wash-house.

What was more extraordinary was the way she carried herself – like a whipped animal. She kept closely to herself and could even sometimes be heard running ahead of footfalls in an effort to conceal herself from any approach. She rarely met a glance and her eyes that were normally cast down were often shielded anyway by the wild mess of lank locks that fell about and often concealed her physiognomy. It could be a shock for a stranger to catch her with her face unobscured and find that she was actually pretty.

I discovered that this was my mother not long after I moved from Elijah’s house to the Particular Hotel. I had been helping Mary Ann, the cook’s girl, to knead the dough. The kitchen was warm with the baking and Merriweather, whom I had already identified as an enemy to children, was playing at cards in the saloon. I was happy to be there with Mary Ann. She wasn’t more than a few years older than I was and had become my only ally in this inhospitable place.