Feast Day of the Cannibals Read online

  SELECT PRAISE FOR

  Norman Lock’s American Novels Series

  On The Boy in His Winter

  “Brilliant.… The Boy in His Winter is a glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love, a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously evolving world ‘when it strikes fire against the mind’s flint,’ and by profoundly moving novels like this.” —NPR

  “[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn’s journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America’s past—and future.” —Reader’s Digest

  “To call [The Boy in His Winter] a work of fiction is to tell only part of the story. This book is as much a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience.… Much of it wildly funny and extremely intelligent.” —Star Tribune

  “Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy—and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  On American Meteor

  “Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion.… [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse’s prophecy for life on earth at the end.” —NPR

  “[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain’s spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter.… Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.” —Wall Street Journal

  “[American Meteor] feels like a campfire story, an old-fashioned yarn full of rich historical detail about hard-earned lessons and learning to do right.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “American Meteor is, at its core, a spiritual treatise that forces its readers to examine their own role in history’s unceasing march forward [and] casts new and lyrical light on our nation’s violent past.” —Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review)

  On The Port-Wine Stain

  “Lock’s novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter] but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock’s story as [his novel’s narrator] is by Poe’s.… Echoes of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud’s theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.” —New York Times Book Review

  “As polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor.… An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “As lyrical and alluring as Poe’s own original work, The Port-Wine Stain captures the magic, mystery, and madness of the great American author while weaving an eerie and original tale in homage to him.” —Foreword Reviews

  “This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.” —Kirkus Reviews

  On A Fugitive in Walden Woods

  “A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now.… This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling

  “Bold and enlightening.… An important novel that creates a vivid social context for the masterpieces of such writers as Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne and also offers valuable insights about our current conscious and unconscious racism.” —Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

  “Bursts with intellectual energy, with moral urgency, and with human feeling.… Achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life.” —Millions

  “Demonstrates Lock’s uncanny ability to inhabit historical figures and meticulously capture the vernacular of the time like a transcendentalist ventriloquist.… Offer[s] profound insights that sharpen our understanding of American history.” —Booklist (starred review)

  On The Wreckage of Eden

  “Perceptive and contemplative.… Bring[s] the 1840–60s to life with shimmering prose.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “The lively passages of Emily’s letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery.… Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.” —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] consistently excellent series.… Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue.” —Booklist

  FEAST DAY

  of the

  CANNIBALS

  OTHER BOOKS IN THE AMERICAN NOVELS SERIES

  The Wreckage of Eden

  A Fugitive in Walden Woods

  The Port-Wine Stain

  American Meteor

  The Boy in His Winter

  ALSO BY NORMAN LOCK

  Love Among the Particles (stories)

  FEAST DAY

  of the

  CANNIBALS

  Norman Lock

  First published in the United States in 2019

  by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  90 Broad Street

  Suite 2100

  New York, NY 10004

  www.blpress.org

  © 2019 by Norman Lock

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lock, Norman, 1950– author.

  Title: Feast day of the cannibals / Norman Lock.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2019. | Series: The American novels

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017049430 (print) | LCCN 2017053627 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658474 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658467 (softcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—Social life and customs—19th century—Fiction. | United States—HIstory—19th century—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.O218 (ebook) | LCC PS3562.O218 F43 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049430

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possibl
e by the New York

  State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor

  Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-46-7

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-47-4

  For George and Harry Hub

  Contents

  Part One: Jonah & the Whale

  Part Two: Barnum & the Elephants

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The Town is taken by its rats—

  … already we have been the nothing we dread to be.

  Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?

  —Herman Melville

  FEAST DAY

  of the

  CANNIBALS

  From 1869 until its completion on May 24, 1883,

  Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge

  supervised its construction from a bedroom window

  overlooking the East River.

  On April 22, 1882, Shelby Ross, a customhouse

  appraiser serving under Herman Melville,

  visited Roebling.

  PART ONE

  JONAH & THE WHALE

  Washington Roebling’s Second-Story Room at 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, April 22, 1882

  HOW GOES THE GREAT BRIDGE? Will you finish it on time?

  Yes, let’s hope in my lifetime, too, Roebling. When the span is finally done, I’ll be as thrilled as the next man, although Melville may not share in the general delirium, which is sure to greet its completion after so many years. The New York and Brooklyn Bridge, like Cunard’s transatlantic steamers, augurs the end of the wild breed that spawned his Captain Ahab, as well as the seagoing rabble who, after having jumped ship, grew seedy and bedeviled on a godless island in the Pacific. Mark my words: One day writers will be setting their tales in Bushwick and their romances in Park Slope. Why, just the other day, he was telling me—

  Who? Herman Melville! You seem distracted this morning, Roebling. Are you sure the work is going well? I’d hate to think there could be something to delay the grand opening—an eventuality your arithmetic didn’t foresee. Perhaps you and your father relied too much on the mathematical sciences. I would have confirmed their predictions by having my palm read or my horoscope cast—my house is Mars, though I’ve never been to war. I’d have consulted the Fox sisters or the Witch of Endor, as well as Pythagoras and Euclid. What will you do, Roebling, if on the day when the bridge is finally open its granite towers fall into the East River? God, what an embarrassment!

  You’re right, my friend: It is no laughing matter. I’m glad you agreed to see me. It’s been a long time since we were boys together.

  As many as that? We’d barely begun to—What were we talking about? I’ve lost the thread.

  Melville—thank you. The strands of my thought have a tendency to tangle. Yours, I imagine, are as orderly and your ideas as rigorous as a Roebling wire cable. The scraps of your unfinished breakfast, on which that fly is about to fatten, remind me of a night I spent recently with him. By the way, Herman was disappointed not to have been allowed to see you when we came out from the city to visit last week. Your wife is a formidable doorkeeper. Frankly, I was surprised that you wrote to me after all this time.

  Our work at the customs office finished for the day, Melville and I stopped at an eating house on Broadway. The chops arrived fairly running with blood and, after having sent them back to the kitchen, the conversation turned into an unwholesome channel, steered by Melville, who is as salted as a herring in a barrel of brine from his years at sea. Evidently reminded of cannibalism by the bloody pork, he lectured me on the abomination, which, he said, could be extenuated by duress. He insisted that it is not only a practice among the headhunters of the Typee Valley, but was also a necessary last resort of the Donner Party, entombed by snow at Truckee Lake. This point of no return, where will and the appetite for life become predominant, has always fascinated him.

  Did you ever eat at the Carberry? Noxious place—the plates are shiny with grease.

  “I’m not always good company,” said Melville, his gaze transfixed by gaslight playing on his knife.

  I shrugged as if to say Who in his right mind is?

  “I’ve nothing against you, Shelby. Lately, I’ve been preoccupied. Forgive me if I cannot share my thoughts.” He looked up from his knife and said with a show of bonhomie, “You may ask me a question—anything within reason. No man can be entirely frank, not even with his wife. Perhaps her most of all. So what would you like to know? You may find out something useful that you can use for your advancement.”

  He sensed my indignation and apologized. “I beg your pardon. Life has given me reason to be cynical.”

  “Was it the War of the Rebellion that made you so?”

  “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys. The fratricide went on without me.”

  Later, I heard that his eyes, age, and a debilitating sciatica had kept Melville safely apart from the era’s greatest misadventure, which he’d have joined otherwise, hoping to find in its strife and tumult a whetstone with which to sharpen his dulled appetite.

  “Not that anyone cares. The world has forgotten me. Nowadays, my comings and goings are known only to the fraternity of shopkeepers to whom I owe money. Poor Lizzie takes the brunt of their humiliating treatment.” He rubbed the rim of his ear with a finger and said, “But perhaps you are curious about a morsel of gossip juicier than groceries.”

  Melville keeps most things to himself, although by this time I’d heard rumors about his past. I wondered if the memory of unspeakable feast days had struck a spark of madness in him. His eyes, as he regarded me across the table, had the unnatural brightness, the hectic quality of a lunatic’s. As we waited for our chops to be brought from the kitchen, I nearly asked him if he had ever eaten human flesh. Instead, I coughed and took a drink of water.

  Roebling, do you see those two women on the sidewalk standing next to the large policeman?

  In their crinolettes and whalebone, they look like overladen ships. If I were to call down to them and ask if either could imagine a case in which she’d forget her Christian self and eat her companion on the hoof or—to be less repulsive—steal the other’s diamond brooch to appease a gnawing hunger, how do you suppose she would answer me?

  Just so! I suspect they have never known a hunger that could not be satisfied with a Thompson Chocolate. At my lowest and most dismal, I’ve felt a razor in my gut for want of what the butcher might put by for a mongrel dog. I ought to give those well-fed ladies one of Melville’s books to chew on. It would be a very different sort of meal than any they have eaten heretofore, although I doubt either of them would read it after having seen the author’s name on the spine, which they would not recognize. Ah, for a meal of Mrs. Radcliffe!

  “Herman, I wonder what’s keeping our supper,” I said, trying to gather my wits.

  As if in answer, the landlord returned with our plates—the offending meat transmuted by fire into something like shoe leather. Thus do our inferiors exact their revenge. Still at a loss for an answer to Melville’s invitation, I made a show of mashing my potato with a fork.

  “Well?” he said, his eyes boring into mine like gimlets. You would never have guessed that they troubled him. “Aren’t you in the least curious about my past?”

  I wanted to ask him how he could be vain enough to think I ought to be. He had a sense of his own worth—buried, as it was, at the bottom of his soul, where the muck is. For whatever reason, it had surfaced in that smoky chophouse, like a boat raised up from the ocean floor after it’s been scuttled. I felt sorry for the man. Without his knowing, he’d revealed a secret about himself; I had stumbled onto his shame.

  “I can’t think of a single thing to ask you,” I replied.

  He l
et the matter drop, and for a while we gave ourselves to the conspicuous chewing of the overdone meat. The conversation became idle and desultory, confined to subjects that did not interest either of us. At last, it lost impetus, like flotsam caught in a slack tide, and silence fell over our small corner of the chophouse.

  “Herman,” I said, putting down my knife and fork in irritation. “Do you have anything to ask me?”

  “Do you have anything worth my knowing?” he replied, but not in the way you’re thinking, Roebling. There was no mockery in his voice. He might even have spoken kindly, as one man would to another whose life could only have seemed pointless in his estimation. Perhaps he had come to believe that every man’s life—every woman’s, too—was, finally, empty.

  I was determined to keep my secrets, harmless or otherwise, to myself. I don’t know why I’m telling them to you. Weighed against that marvel of yours on the river, my life amounts to scarcely anything at all. A feather, or a reed uprooted from the muddy bottom by the tide and left to float among stone towers—that, Roebling, is what I am, or would be if, having foreseen it, the ancient Greeks had turned my life into a myth—a reed, or a feather, such as might have belonged to one of Icarus’s wings, fashioned of wax and feathers by his father to escape the gravity of Crete.

  Not mine! Your father was Daedalus, and you are his ambitious son. My father and I were no better than prospectors grubbing in the dirt in the hope of finding another Comstock Lode. I briefly ascended, like Icarus, only to fail and fall—unlike you. Which of us, I wonder, has paid the higher price for his vaulting ambition? I, who lost a fortune, or you, who very nearly lost your life and now must endure a life of pain?

  If you were to unwind the history of the continent, like one of your steel cables, you’d find four strands: egalitarianism, self-reliance, contempt for nice manners and clean linen, and violence. While my linen may have been clean, my hands have not always been so. I was not one of Louisa May Alcott’s “little men,” unless it was Jack Ford, the rapscallion who robbed another schoolboy and allowed two others to take the blame. Jack was only following in his uncle’s footsteps. I followed in those of my father, whose shoes were too fine-grained and costly to admit propinquity with a cow.