An Embarrassment of Riches. James Howard Kunstler

“When they come to their senses, I shall explain to this miscreant Bilbo—who shows signs of being a Republican ardent—that we are agents of President Jefferson.”

      “These are pirates, Uncle. They don’t give a damn about Mr. Jefferson.”

      “I don’t know—he sounded patriotic to me. At worst, I think, we shall be robbed of our expeditionary necessaries.”

      “How could we continue without rifles? Without powder, blankets, or food?”

      “Sammy, in my sojourn to Labrador misfortune also deprived me of….” And Uncle began a long, harrowing tale of miraculous reprieve from the jaws of death. Meanwhile, one of the loose specimen jars rolled back and forth across the cabin floor as the hull rocked in the current. As the best ideas often do, one now flared in my imagination like a rocket in the dark night above a storm-tossed sea.

      “Uncle … Uncle!” I interrupted him, growing more excited by the second. “I have a plan!”

      I woke with a start. Sunlight blazed down the hatch like the yellow-hot tip of a torturer’s brand. I remembered at once where I was, and our predicament. Uncle’s eyes were bloodshot with sleeplessness. At our feet snored the contemptible scoundrel Bilbo and his odious accomplices.

      “Pssst, Sammy,” Uncle whispered and presented his back to me. “Try if thee can gnaw through these bindings.”

      No sooner had I leaned forward than our oppressor-in-chief stirred, issuing first a belch, then a fart, each in its own way so noxiously fetid that they called to mind the everlasting miasmas of hell. It also had the effect of rousing from his stupor the dwarf, Neddy. The harelip, Bessie, lay upon her back against a mealsack, her unique mouth parts issuing a not unmusical whistle with every exhalation.

      “Don’t forget the plan!” I reminded Uncle of the scheme I had proposed before dawn. “From now on I shall address you as ‘brother.’ You shall answer only to ‘brother.’”

      The villainous trio verged upon awakening.

      “Sshhh. He rises….”

      Bilbo’s left eyelid rolled up like a shade jerked open in the window of a ruined, vermin-infested house. The white of that organ was jaundiced and reticulated with angry red veins. The pupil within the mud-colored iris dilated and contracted as though it were utterly unable to adjust to the light. Bilbo lifted his massive, grizzled head. A terrible groan rumbled out of his powdery, cracked lips and resounded in the cramped cabin. Moments later he was crawling up the steps of the companionway out onto the deck, and we could hear a vertiable Niagara as he urinated over the gunwale. He returned soon after, staggered back into the cabin and poured himself a specimen jar of the Monongahela. This he consumed, tremblingly, with the reverence of a long-sick sufferer for a potent curative. He settled briefly upon his haunches while the medicine took effect, then looked up at us, smiled dreamily, and heaved a great sigh of relief.

      “Gentlemen,” he growled. “I am my gay old self again.” And so saying, he fetched the dwarf a powerful slap on the hindquarters. “Up Neddy! Up my boy! A glorious new day beckons. There is work to be done, guests to entertain. Up, I say!”

      The dwarf sat up and rubbed his eyes.

      “That’s a good lad,” Bilbo trilled and shook the harelip’s leg. “Wake to the lark’s song, my darling daughter,” he roused her musically.

      “Daughter…?” muttered I.

      “Ain’t she a prize, though?” Bilbo declared, not facetiously but with the true, blind admiration of a parent for its offspring. “She shall make some lucky fellow very happy, my Bess will. Don’t be misled, young fellow. Though our manner of living has, perforce, fallen upon the impecunious, we were not always so, will not always be. The day will come when I shall see my Bessie dressed in Paris silks. Later I shall have her recite for us.”

      “She recites?” said I in disbelief.

      “Most winningly, I assure you, sir. But we fall a’prattling, my hearties. Up, up, I say,” Bilbo enjoined us, unsheathing his dagger and cutting, at last, our painful bonds. “For we must get the boat ’round the back of the island ’fore someone else chances along—”

      “Thou abominable bandit,” Uncle spat.

      “Must we have these maledictions?”

      “Thou consummate, worthless scum!”

      At this, Bilbo rapped Uncle smartly upon the crown with a heavy ring of Spanish silver.

      “Ooooooch!” cried Uncle and kicked Bilbo soundly upon the shin.

      “Aiyeee!” howled Bilbo, and the next thing I knew, Neddy was upon Uncle, all flashing teeth and slaver. Bilbo importuned the dwarf to stop while Bessie honked shrilly in the general melee. At last, all combatants ceased as Bilbo bellowed out the command to desist. Afterward, he held the two sides of his head as though they might split apart.

      “A dram, my little apple,” he murmured. The harelip poured him a jar and he downed it, then groaned. “That’s better.” He squinched his eyes in obvious pain. “We get to [O2]little news of the day here in … the country. Please do not force me to take measures that you would (ahem) … not live to see me regret,” he concluded, and his meaning was inescapable.

      For the next several hours we were kept busy transferring our vital supplies from the keelboat to shore. To obviate any question of escape, Bilbo had Uncle (“Brother,” I called him) and I bound to each other, my right wrist to his left and ditto our ankles, which permitted us to labor in an awkward manner.

      When we had unloaded Megatherium, she was light enough to raise off her shoal. Bilbo ran lines off her bow and stern and secured them to a pair of sturdy oaks ashore. Then, working the trunk of a young beech tree into the plaint sand beneath her keel, Bilbo managed to lever her off the shoal. It was a procedure with which he clearly enjoyed prior experience.

      Finally, all five of us manned the lines and hauled the boat through the silty shallows around the head of the Island and down the lee shore to a small cove. It was the dwarf’s misfortune to have to labor in water up to his neck. To my shame, I could not help noticing the full figure of the otherwise frightful Bessie. From the neck up she was a monster; but from the shoulders down she was an outstanding specimen of the young female of her species. My eyes were hopelessly riveted to the sight of those fleshy orbs clingingly revealed inside the wet fabric of her shabby calico dress.

      Our craft was anchored in the little cove alongside a flatboat of recent vintage. We were forced to return to the head of the island and commence portaging our supplies and equipments, their booty, that is to say, down a quarter-mile-long path to the pirate’s lair, this lair being a most singular habitation.

      The little cottage in its sunny glade of oak and walnut was constructed entirely from the timbers and planks of abducted river craft. Here, for instance, in place of a shutter, was the transom of a flatboat, its very name, Plain Jane, visible in faded yellow paint. In place of posts supporting the modest portico were the lateen masts of an half dozen scuttled gundalows, the cleats and running tackle brazenly in place as though they were objects of decoration. The motley clapboards, some red, some green, some white-washed, others varnished or weathered gray, were salvaged from the bulwarks of captured prizes and bore the appellations of their plundered namesakes: the Goforth, the Livonia, the Westering Star, and the pathetic Child of Destiny. The vision of a plank inscribed Megatherium nailed up amongst them filled me with gall.

      But I was also struck by the undeniably charming aspect of this dwelling in the wilderness. Whatever their barbarity, swinishness, or habits of turpitude, one could not help but admire the domestic art evinced by the little cottage. In its dooryard grew a profusion of wild flowers—yellow trout lilies (Erythronium americanum), little white spring-beauties (Claytonia virginica), lovely wood sorrel (Oxalis montana), trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens), red lousewort (Pedicularis canadensis), scarlet columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), cranesbill (Geranium maculatum), while three kinds of phlox (glaberrima, pilosa, maculate) bloomed in the window boxes. Violet-green bank swallows