Feast Day of the Cannibals by Norman Lock

Author:Norman Lock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Two years have passed since Ross related

the first part of his story.

The Brooklyn Bridge is now finished.

On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum leads

a troupe of elephants across it.

On this day, Ross narrates

the end of his story.

PART TWO

BARNUM & THE ELEPHANTS

Washington Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, May 17, 1884

TWO YEARS HAVE PASSED since we were together in this room. You finished your work and went home to Trenton. I finished mine and went to prison. Much has happened, but I dare say we are much the same as before. The rise and fall—of a man or an empire—takes time to accomplish. Rome wasn’t built—nor did it end—in a day. I expect to go on awhile longer.

Melville? He goes on as always. He’s the rock on which he dashes himself to pieces.

In my cell, I read his adventure stories, Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. I’ll read them again on lonely, damp winter nights with the coal stove roaring like Ahab’s own ocean or curses. I’m no Ahab, Roebling, except in the immensity of the hatred I conceived for John Gibbs. It had been simmering for months, but the boiling over seems to have taken hardly any time at all. Three weeks … four. When it did rise up in me, it was scalding.

Ahab. A man with such a name could never be a cringer, a worrier after his virtue and his purse, a petitioner whose whimper has turned hoarse in supplication, whose trouser knees are worn, whose head is bowed and back is bent, whose element is a slurry of cinders, wet ash, and horses’ stale staining the winter snow through which he tramps resignedly from almshouse to poorhouse until he is carried to his last and smallest house, a plain coffin in a pauper’s grave. Not that I’m any of those things, mind you; I never once begged the judge for mercy. But my fury did not last, and, like a pot taken off the boil, the hatred subsided when the cause was removed.

What a name is Ahab! To be called thus must sever a boy from dependency, put iron in his marrow, and make a cold forge of the heart. It is a name to blow him out of childhood into the fullness of life, never mind the cost. Only a man of uncommon strength of will can bear the name of the seventh king of Israel and the ruler of Moab, whose corpse was defiled by dogs and swine, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, and whom God hated.

I shouldn’t mind being hated by Him if I could be in the company of such a man, even if he was laid waste in Gilead and buried in a sty. King Ahab roared his defiance, as I would wish to do mine when the time comes. Melville’s famous captain did the same, although I’d sooner have been in the retinue of the Israelite than aboard the Pequod with its crazed master and crew. Ahab—raised in the Holy Land or in Nantucket—was accursed by God.

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