A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

the god existed Socrates held to be true with an honest uncertainty and deep feeling. We, too, believe at the same risk, caught in the same contradiction of an uncertain certainty. But now the uncertainty is different, for it is absurd, and to believe with deep feeling in the absurd is faith. Socrates's knowing that he did not know is high humor when compared to something as serious as the absurd, and Socrates's deep feeling for the existential is cool Greek wit when compared to the will to believe.

 

 

O Gadjo Niglo

 

 

In the summer they bring the artillery and fire out to sea. The officers in their red coats arrive the day before on glossy horses. The caissons and powder wagons come through the woods at night. In the morning the cannons sit battery by battery on the beach.

The sergeants give the orders for unlimbering and spreading trails. The gunner opens the breech and seats the shell and charge. A lieutenant gives the quadrant and deflection to a corporal who shouts them to the gunners who run the barrels up and wind them to the side with a crank on a wheel. An order to fire at the top of the corporal's lungs and the gunners pull the lanyards. The cannons crack and jump. A line of splashes far out at sea.

I watched all this from my place in the bushes on the hill above. The old officer pulled his moustache. There was a grand haze into which the cannon smoke ran like ink in water. The thrushes and sparrows ripped from the bushes when the cannons boomed. The gulls fluttered and scattered. I was Robinson Crusoe observing from my covert the army of the emperor that had come to practise its aim on the shores of my island.

Once when an officer came to the door I could see close up his sword and shoulder belt. His eyes were grey with lashes like a girl. The colonel would be obliged for the loan of a lemon had we such an article to spare. Thesmond glided away and returned with a lemon on a salver. It was wrapped in a twist of tissue. Thesmond nodded briefly to the charm of his smile.

Why ever a lemon? Matilda would ask such a question. It was her nature. She gave me one of her looks. Thesmond said that it was for the colonel's drink before dinner. To Papa he would have said for the colonel's preprandial impotation. Tie your tongue. So colonels had dinner out there in their tents on the scrub. I had seen the soldiers file past the field kitchens and eat on the rocks out of tin plates. Sometimes they wrestled.

Toward evening they stripped naked and swam in the sea. Some were as white as plaster and some were as brown as an acorn. The officers bathed separately. Orderlies had towels for them when they came panting and knocking water from their ears.

The officer who came to the door on his roan was as hairy as a rug down his front when he undressed for the sea. Thickest just under his throat and across his chest and between his legs. I saw his peter good.

I could still hear the cannon at night along with the dull roar of the sea. Over two hills and a valley. The road to the beach is off our road to the turnpike. The caissons rattle and creak along it back to wherever they come from. Back to Stockholm. Back to Goteborg. In a week the ruts and marks will be smoothed by the wind.

Next day the gypsies go over the place looking and picking up. They come from nowhere like the artillery and go off as suddenly. They will steal me if I let them see me. Matilda can recall the names of boys taken off by the gypsies. Nor must I go near the artillery because of the gunpowder and the talk.

The artillery came this year after Stilt. How could I have escaped Stilt to see them? He comes in the winter and stays for months. He replaced Fröken Gomber who taught me when I was little. Svensk and arithmetic. Geography and history. Stilt teaches me geometry and rhetoric. Latin and compound interest. He himself goes to school when he is not here. He is writing a thesis in divinity which is about matters which he says I could not yet begin to comprehend. Free will and destiny. Election and grace.

Stilt bends and kisses Grandmama's old hand to her merriment though her scrunch of fun is all gone when he stands straight again. He comments on the golden weather. She says that it will change. She asks him to witness the instability of the candle flames and the thickness of the squirrels' coats. There is moreover an early red in the larches.

For Stilt I am ordered into jacket and tie. I must have clean fingernails. He cleans his while we read Latin. He smells of peppermint. Vercingetorix. Helvetia. Cisalpine Gauls.

In the summer there is no Stilt.

Papa comes and goes and stays only a little while. He is very busy. He always brings wonderful things. The microscope which Stilt has taught me to use is the most wonderful though I have liked better my model ship.

Grandmama is in her room. She is little and cold all the time. Every morning we kneel around her and say our prayers. We hear Scripture and we hear Swedenborg. And she gets off the subject. She will say in the middle of scripture that titled coaches used to come to the door. Thesmond brings the big bible and opens it on a table that sits over Grandmama's knees. Thessalonians. Galatians. We hear that all of heaven is one angel just as all of mankind is one man except that he fell away from grace.

With Stilt I look at leaves under the microscope. I draw a stoma. An arrangement of cells at the stem and at the edge of the leaf.

Papa looks like Sir Charles Wheatstone in the stereopticon.

In the summer with no Stilt I found it easy to sneak away to the stables to find Tarpy the miller's son. He is not the miller's son but the miller's bastard. The miller flies into a rage if you tease him about whose son he is. I have