The Ballad of Dingus Maggee (1965) by David Markson

Author:David Markson [Markson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The next cousin was crazy, Dingus saw that immediately, although he could not have said precisely how. She was about forty, quite gray, and her skin was oddly colorless also, the hue of wet cardboard. She lived in an enormous old house, not her own, built in the Mexican style with linked, contiguous rooms facing an open inner courtyard, and before his arrival she had been completely alone.

But it wasn’t that. Nor did he mind the prayers either, to which she woke him the first morning and which he learned he was expected to endure each evening as well, in dumb formal ritual not before any altar or image but in the unroofed garden itself, under the sky. “It is not God,” the cousin said. “It is nature — the trees, the stars, the flowers — the all-embracing, transcendental oneness of things.”

“Yes’m,” Dingus said. “Nor do I speak words when I kneel,” she added. “I merely commune.”

“Yes’m,” Dingus repeated.

So it took him a few days, and then he had to go to a keyhole to find out. It was wine. She had a bottle in her hand which she was just opening. When he went back to the door two hours later she was removing the cork from a second one.

Her name was Eustacia. He did not know what she lived on, and she complained repeatedly of poverty. “Moreover it costs a pretty penny to feed an extra mouth,” she informed him, “although I do it gladly, out of a sense of the transcendental oneness of earth’s creatures. I merely hope that you appreciate it.” Frequently she had visitors, a group of anonymous and undifferentiated women of her own age and of an equal drabness who came singly or in clusters to sit for an hour. They were all unwed.

Like Magee, this cousin gave no thought to sending him to school either, although she finally did remark something she felt ought to be contributed to his up-bringing. This was just after he had gone to bed of an evening, perhaps at nine o’clock. He had not yet reached his fourteenth birthday. The cousin came into the doorway, considering him dubiously from beneath an upraised lamp. “I believe it is time you became cognizant of the facts of life,” she said.

“What’s them?” Dingus asked sleepily.

“Miss Grimshaw has volunteered to explain.” Miss Grim-shaw was one of the drab ladies, although Dingus could not have said which, even after the several years. Certain of them were teachers, and he expected her to appear with a book. But it was the cousin, Eustacia, who reappeared first, carrying a bottle of the wine instead. “Drink this,” she told him.

“Drink it?” Dingus said.

“Drink it all,” she insisted.

So when he awakened the next morning he still could not have said which one was Miss Grimshaw. “That’s quite all right,” the cousin said, “Miss Youngblood has volunteered to give you some further instruction tonight.”

It went on for a year or so. More often than not it occupied six nights in each week also, since there were six of the drab ladies in all.

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