The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (Volume 2): Part V

We wound through the meanders that led between stubbled mud-banks in no straight or seemly course.

I reached out and seized upon the gunwale of the boat.

Our revenant rowed to the side of a dock and held it with one hand.

It must be admitted that we presented an image little calculated to quell fears of the indigent and the beggar: a tall, gawky Negro boy in torn breeches and loose smock (and, as most certainly I was, wild-eyed with fatigue and the allure of the cook-fire within), and an aged man in tattered stockings and breeches so involved in mud that their color could no longer be descried.

The populace went unimpeded about their business, little regarding the detonations, betraying no notice that invisible to sight, all about us on the streets and the green sward of the hillside were extended sweeping the dotted lines of ordnance calculation and the hovering directrix, focus, and vector of martial geometry.

I am certain we looked to those we passed like a scene of utmost destitution and ruin; and indeed, perhaps we were: myself, newly liberated into penury; and Dr. Trefusis, who had, just twenty-four hours previous, sat drinking tea in a country house, surrounded by all the trappings of luxury, waited upon by servants and bondsmen, now stripped to his shirt.

We arrived at our destination; where our hostess, seeing the state of my quondam master, refused us the room.

“But he does have coin? Upon his person? Because I cannot pay for so much as victuals now, the salt-meat is become so dear. We are starving. No person will extend us credit.”

There was no employment I longed for so much as to play in a band of music—such was my thought; but the spirit accustomed to disparagement and humiliation, weaned upon castigation and contumely, relucts to believe itself capable of attainment—and relucts so in proportion to how much its aims are desired.

The word of his great latitude for motion is little consolation, when he might at any moment strike his head upon a ceiling he did not know dropped so low, or be precipitated into pits, and breathe his last broken on some umbrageous declivity.

The word of his great latitude for motion is little consolation, when he might at any moment strike his head upon a ceiling he did not know dropped so low, or be precipitated into pits, and breathe his last broken on some umbrageous declivity.

Did I continue my pretense of seeking work elsewhere, I was in great danger that I might find it, cruelly disappointed by success; and I knew that my gifts, such as they were, might not be of inconsiderable interest to whatever impresario now organized these symphonies and dances.

As it transpired, this demonstration was, I believe, not distasteful to Mr. Turner; except insofar as its excesses suggested an overweening vanity, it made no unpleasant effect upon that versatile and incisive individual, and he agreed to let me play in the orchestra, providing that I could rein in my over-exuberant fantasy and unseemly pride.

...I passed up and down the town’s byways, dreaming, as youth dreams, of Providence: that I should be suddenly supplied by a suit of clothes tossed into a garbage heap or lain in an alley, or that perhaps I should through some unexpected commerce with maid or char be heaped with a waistcoat hanging to dry which Master no longer desired. Though no such felicitous circumstance transpired, still I walked with light enough step.

The street seemed tilted in my fancy, and vertiginous, and there was knowledge in my nerves and in the muscles of hand and leg that, having poisoned my master just one day previous, I now would steal from his family; and yet, from this thought, terrible to utter—for which the Lord may forgive me—I felt only giddiness where justice met with pleasure.

Oft doth reason, enthroned in the pillowed seraglio of the brain, hang back; whereas the flesh, which must walk abroad in the streets, finds its own temerity.

I closed my eyes, for there is some subtle magnetism in the gaze that nudges the lambent spirit in those viewed and draws attention to those who watch concealed.

With all the pleasure of old acquaintance, I seized upon the Æneid, delighted, I having been transported through its channels and rough bays in my childhood; but then I espied several volumes of the philosopher Locke, of whom my tutor had spoke with such approbation, and I lay down Virgil’s epic, and took up those books instead.

“Excellent. Good boy. Nothing breeds fortune like a hat and jabot.”

And though we lay in a city starving; though we were surrounded by an implacable enemy; though we slept amidst the encampments of soldiers from afar, Scotsman and Mancunian, convict and younger son, all overwhelmed as we by the intimations of the coming strife when Boston should rouse itself and march...

When I arrived, I found the orchestra arranging themselves on chairs; the strings being a collection of civilians, the brass drawn from the military band of the 64th Regiment, which famed consort gave a strict and louring aspect to the proceedings, their uniforms being black shot through with white lace and red.

This debate went on for some minutes, me demurring, he requiring, until his demands became so violent I feared damage through apoplexy, and discerned that indeed, he perhaps would be aided by exsanguination; though it pleased me not at all to be administering that remedy myself, for I had never attempted it before, and so little was it a course I had considered, I trembled at my inexperience.

Still, I querulously assented, and, upon his order, went to seek a knife.

He did not watch the process, but surveyed the ceiling as my fingers, slippery now with his gore, worked to tighten the tourniquet.

They plied him with more questions.
He looked at me in supplication.

I considered his last sentences, his atheistic unction, and lamented that in his sight, the human character was itself little more than a sentence spoken, a succession of sounds that acquired meaning only with accretion; but which was only to be a succession, a train of one thing following another, rather than a thought entire and whole, as the soul should be, cohering beyond our breath; and looking at my tutor, I feared for that moment when the final word might be said and done.

The day after this Negro sweeping-bee, we were enjoined, such of us as wished employment, to lend our aid to the Army in erecting fortifications; which work I undertook with a fellow violinist from the orchestra—a fellow named Scipio and called Sip, a freeman and a father who spake always kindly to me in our rehearsals and observed my destitution was as great as his own.

Across the saltmarshes of the Neck, the blinds and redoubts, the flanks and faces of the bastions, the gates near us, armed with their anxious picket-guards, the reports of the conflict grew more insistent in their clamor—the rattle of musketry, the calling of commands.

Disturbed by the man’s alarum, we looked up from our labor and found a detachment of Redcoats running in formation for the gates.

The rebels had annoyed them with fire from the Roxbury lines; some contretemps had begun amidst the warehouses of the Neck; and, no ground won or lost, two had died.

And how much more superior still the transports, when one is surrounded by a community of brethren who share in the success, whose efforts and collaboration brought about this triumph of mechanism and spirit, this apotheosis of the animal.

Mr. 13-04 condoled with me on the death, so he said, of that blessed being, so accomplished in her conversation, so graceful in her carriage, and so charming in her person—once again, it taking me moments to recognize that he spake still of my mother—whom I saw before me as last she appeared, her skin brittle with sores, her tongue inanimate, her animal spirits in constant irritation from the depredations of the pox.

It appeared that he had two rooms, a sitting-room and another, the door to which was closed; he slept on a pallet, clearly, in the sitting-room, next to his spinet.

Vainly, I cast my eye over the sheets; but like the first, I saw that they were rife with equivocations and parentheses, notes that Mr. 13-04 had made in ignorance, attempting to capture turns of melody and vocal tricks that could not be rendered.

One song was written clearly in harmony, runs of thirds; but she had also beat a rhythm which he had assayed to reproduce, and this was nothing but scratchings and clumsy scribblings, revisions he had not ever returned to review and apply methodically.

There being a call for a halt to the music, so that a collation might be laid out and eaten, my fellows and I retired from our instruments and sat upon our tub, articulating our tired fingers.

At some length, I responded, “If you are asked, you may relate that most of our numbers shall swear fealty to whoever offers emancipation with the greatest celerity.”

The men appeared anxious; Sip was not wholly pleased with my frankness and probity.

But still, I was transported, envisioning ranks upon ranks of men of my Africk nation, marching forth from ships, armed and disciplined, halloed from plantations, met with rejoicing, as streaks of liberation spread like verdigris across this tarnished colonial sky.

I thought drearily on the clamoring of rebels in the streets of Williamsburg, the flight of royal authority from that beleaguered capital; I thought on the rebels who surrounded us, baying for liberty and offering none themselves...

...I found myself surprised with hope that the siege should never end—for did it end, there ended also my freedom in this band, this glorious exercise of all I found most pleasant and agreeable; and I absurdly wished we could remain here, ever stranded, nestled in this tenuous moment...

...and yet, at the selfsame instant, I thought on those who encircled us, threatening, and wished my joy at the liberties I now took could blast them where they stood, that the brilliance of defiance might destroy forever those who prated of freedom and denied it so coarsely...

...we had seen also a bumptious dialogue between two ragged colonial majors, one a shoemaker by trade, the other a dentist’s apprentice, each protesting their fellow-feeling while picking the other’s pocket.

Gradually, the theater emptied, Mr. Turner shouting to us that we, at least, must remain stationary and minimize, rather than enhance, the violence of the rout.

They had, in impudence, chosen this night, the night of our festive lampoon, for their attack, knowing our officers engaged in the drama; there could be little question of that.