An Agent of Utopia Read online

  Her husband looked again.

  “He is much diminished,” Roper said. “And yet.”

  “Enough,” Madame said, stepping away. “The task is concluded. Take him.”

  I thought this meant concealed guards, that the moment had come, and I was ready. But she only watched as Roper gently lifted the satchel off my shoulder.

  “When they told me he was gone,” she said, half to me and half to no one, “my own head went a-rolling. I had no mind, no purpose. I wanted only to be in the street, in the crowds. In my slippers I walked through the muck, seeing nothing, facing no one, until I was brought up short . . . by whiteness. White on white, like a heap of saint-souls. I stood, marveling, before a shop-window full of Low Country linen. So, so beautiful. Mother used to say, ah, Meg, it’s a shame to bring it home, it ne’er can be so pure again. I suddenly had a single thought: a winding-sheet. Father must be wrapped for burial. Of course. But I had no purse. I had left the house in such grief and such haste, I had come away with nothing. Yet I pointlessly, automatically patted the little sewing-pocket of my skirts, and pulled from that pocket three gold sovereigns, which were not there before. And so I came home no longer mad and pitiable, but sensible, and done with my errand, and this winding-sheet was worth two pounds at the most.” She flapped at me the bit of cloth she’d been a-worrying. “Just look at it! Little better than dagswain. Such is the world without my father, friend Aliquo: petty miracles, and petty frauds.” She shook her head, seemed to focus on me. “But my household will e’er remember your good offices. I pray you, seek your perfect homeland. I hope it exists—but you’ll not find it here.” Her eyes ceased to see me. “Ay, not here.”

  She and her man turned and walked away. “We’ll pickle him, I think,” I heard her say, “with some elderflower.”

  As that grim burden swung at Roper’s hip, down the alley and into the street, her father’s not-voice resumed its wailing.

  God damn you. God damn you! God damn you ALL!

  I stood at the alley’s mouth and watched them grow smaller in the distance, the voice diminishing all the while, until they could not be seen, and More could not be heard.

  Freed of my burden, freed of my hopes, I walked southward, away from the city, toward the sea. I moved among women and men, but saw no one, heard nothing.

  Two days later, I crouched on a quay on the wet lip of England, hidden behind shipping-barrels, and removed from my pouch the not-More head I had carried all that way.

  “Farewell, friend Zapolet,” I told it, and laid it onto the surface of the water, as gently as More must have laid his firstborn babe, wiggling and shiny, ’pon her coverlet. I watched the Zapolet’s staring head roll ’neath the waves, as the babe sinks into the adult. Then it was gone forever.

  I re-entered the crowd and found a line to stand in, waiting to book passage. Something tugged at my breeches. A grimy child, of indeterminate sex, holding a tray of sweetmeats.

  “Suckets, Milord?”

  Suckets, repeated More.

  I bellowed and whirled, my feet crushing the scattered sweetmeats as the child fled. I stared into the incredulous faces of strangers jostling to get away from me. Gulls shrieked. The ocean heaved. Ships’ colors whipped in the hot wind.

  Thou fool, said More. Whose head do you think I’m in?

  I write this letter in an English inn, a half-day’s walk from London.

  I said at the outset that I had failed, and so I believed at the time. Perhaps I will believe that again. In the meantime, with every northward step away from home, questions roil in my head—philosophical questions, such as those chewed after dinner, in the refectories of Aircastle. I will pose them to you.

  Was I treated well, or ill, when my lover’s husband discovered me in the arms of his wife, and assumed the entire fault was mine?

  Was I treated well, or ill, when I, a mere girl, was charged with “forbidden embraces,” with “defiling the marriage bed”? When my lover was persuaded to swear untruths against me, to save herself?

  Was I treated well, or ill, when I was sentenced to slavery? When I was assured my bondage would be temporary if I was good, and if I denied my nature forevermore? When I was told, moreover, that I was fortunate, that voyagers stepped onto our docks daily in hopes of achieving slavery in Utopia, so preferable to freedom elsewhere?

  Was I treated well, or ill, when my natural strength and agility placed me in endless daily training, in service to a citizenry that viewed combat and assassination as tasks fit only for mercenaries and slaves?

  Was I treated well, or ill, when I was ordered to rescue a half-mythical figure in a faraway land where even my sex must be denied and disguised, if I am to function at all, and promised my freedom if I succeeded?

  It is true, my former fellow citizens, my former masters and mistresses, I did not rescue More. He is dead. He reminds me daily of this fact, and of the impossibility of a better world to come, though in an ever fainter voice, one that I am growing used to. Mostly, now, he speaks a single name.

  More is unsaved, and yet, I write you today as a free woman, to say farewell.

  Our homeland is not perfect. No homeland is. But all lands can be made more perfect—even this England. And all lands have perfection within them: somewhere, sometime, someone.

  Thus ends my story and my service, ye Prince and Tranibors of our good land, ye Syphogrants and families thereof. May my example be instructive to you and to your assigns. Though I never return to Utopia, never walk again beside the Waterless Stream, I will feel my people with me always, all those stern and rational generations. I will always be your agent, but I serve another now.

  Joe Diabo’s Farewell

  In April 1926, my gang was working the thirtieth floor of the Fred F. French Building, on 45th Street midtown, where the Church of the Heavenly Rest used to be. It was a Thursday. Joe Diabo was riveter, the best I ever saw. I swear that when Joe had the hammer I could feel it in my knees from ten feet away, and him grinning the whole time. The rest of the gang was Tom Two Ax, who was the sticker-in, and Orvis Goodleaf, who was the bucker-up, and me, Eddie Two Rivers DeLisle, which is too many names for anyone, even a Mohawk, even a Caughnawaga Mohawk. I was the heater, which is why I got to see it when it happened.

  Since most of you don’t go up high unless our work is done, when you have enclosed elevators and carpets and pretty girls behind desks and thick tinted windows and air-conditioning and can persuade yourselves you’re on the ground, nearly, let me explain what our gang was doing that morning.

  It all started with me. I plucked out of the coals the reddest rivet I could find. If it made the ends of the tongs red, too, that was about right. I tossed it ten feet across and three feet down right into Tom’s bucket, and Tom winked to say, Good going, Eddie, so close to the rivet going plunk that it was like an iron eyelid slamming down. Tom and I had been practicing on the reservation, standing on slippery rocks in the St. Lawrence, me with the bucket and him with the hammer, and then switching, ever since we were old enough to see the future.

  During the plunk, Orvis had yanked out the temporary bolt, so when Tom plucked the rivet out of the bucket, there was the hole in the beam, waiting. In went the bolt until the buttonhead was flush with the steel, which meant about an inch of red tip sticking out the other side of the beam, where Joe Diabo was ready with his gun. But he had to wait for Orvis to fit the dolly bar over the buttonhead, brace himself and yell, “OK.”

  Then Joe Diabo leaned on the hammer until the red tip was smashed out like a second buttonhead. That was what I felt in my knees, what made Joe Diabo grin. He lifted his gun and wiped his forehead. Already the rivet was dulling down to gray.

  “That one ain’t going noplace,” Joe Diabo said.

  Then it was time to move to the next hole, but Tom and Orvis waited for Joe Diabo to move first. When he shuffled sideways, they shuffled sideways, too, on
the other side of the beam.

  The forge and I stayed where we were. You can’t just pick up a forge and move it a foot at a time. It’s not worth it. I felt comfortable tossing rivets up to about forty feet, which, come to think of it, is about the width of the St. Lawrence at Caughnawaga village. When Tom and his bucket had shuffled forty feet away, it was time to move the forge. That meant time for a break, because we also had to move the planks the forge was sitting on.

  I forgot to mention the planks. They were your basic two-by-tens. The forge and I stood on a dozen of them, laid across two beams. The other guys in the gang had to make do with three planks on each side of the beam, less room if they tried to stand parallel to it, and no room to do anything else, like sit, or walk normally. If you wanted to take a stroll, you used one of the beams, which compared to the planks felt like the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue.

  As I said, we were working the thirtieth floor. There were other gangs above and below. If I looked up or down, not that I had the time, I saw two dozen men in each direction getting smaller and smaller, like reflections in a department-store mirror, their jackets ballooning out in the wind.

  A girl once made me take her to a pirate movie. Those pirates climbing the sails with their shirts rippling, yeah, I told her, that’s what my job is like. She popped her gum and said, “They don’t make movies about rivet gangs, Eddie Two Rivers DeLisle,” and she was right about that.

  Joe Diabo lifted the gun and wiped his forehead. “That one ain’t going noplace.”

  They were about forty feet away. Before Joe Diabo could shuffle sideways, I yelled:

  “Break time!”

  After we moved the platform and the forge, we took five, sitting on the beam and smoking. Tom and Orvis and I let our feet dangle, but Joe Diabo sat with his legs folded, his feet in his lap, like one of the old-timers. Maybe he was pretending he was sitting on the ground, I don’t know. We were from the same village, but only Joe Diabo was one of the longhouse people, the followers of the old ways. He didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t talk about anything much, when we were in high steel, and that was the only place I ever hung out with Joe Diabo. He was older than the rest of us, and had left Caughnawaga when I was a kid, and I don’t recall ever having a conversation with him on the ground. Tom was Catholic, and Orvis, well, I don’t remember what Orvis was, nothing probably, and us DeLisles were Presbyterian. But I doubt any of us was thinking of religion that morning when Al, the rivet boy, clambered into view, his helmet down over his eyes nearly.

  “Get ’em while they’re hot, Mr. Eddie,” he said. Watching Al trot along the beams, the one-strap sack swaying at his side, you’d think he was delivering the Times, not thirty pounds of rivets.

  “Thank you, Al,” I said, lifting the sack off his shoulder. His jacket was plastered to his thin frame with sweat.

  Al turned to Orvis and asked, “Got a smoke?”

  Orvis already had three cigarettes in hand. He gave two to Al, who pocketed one and wedged the other into the corner of his mouth, then leaned forward, squinting, for Orvis to light it. It was a ritual. Al hardly flinched at all now, when Orvis’s flaring match neared his face.

  “You got a big weekend planned, Alphonse?” Orvis asked.

  Al winced. He hated his full name, but was too small to fight about it. “Big enough,” he said. Coughing, he pulled from another pocket a ragged patch of newsprint. “Papa and I are going to the movie premiere. Here, take a look.”

  I looked at the advertisement. A spraddle-legged, buckskin-wearing white man with a flamboyant mustache fired his pistols into the letter “O” of

  THE FLAMING FRONTIER

  Mightiest of thrillers—A Glorious Epic

  of America’s Last Wilderness

  The Last Word in Great Westerns

  With This Great Assembly of Stars—HOOT GIBSON

  —ANNE CORNWALL

  —DUSTIN FARNUM as Custer

  Be the First in New York to EXPERIENCE

  THE FLAMING FRONTIER

  Midnight Saturday, April 3, 1926

  Colony Theater

  “I don’t know, Al,” I said, exchanging a look with the others. “That’s pretty late for you to be out.”

  “Says who?” Al snarled, right on cue, and we all laughed. Al was older than he looked, I guess, in some ways. We’d all heard Papa DiNunzio was a bad drunk, and mean.

  The others passed his paper around.

  “Custer, huh?” Tom said.

  Joe Diabo pointed to the mighty figure. “Looks like he wins, this time.”

  “Hoot Gibson,” Tom said. “Is he the one who runs up to the back of the horse and jumps on?”

  “That’s him,” Al said. “Papa used to jump onto a horse just like that. So he says. In the old country, before the war.”

  Orvis laughed. “Not much call for trick riding on a beer wagon, is there, Alphonse?”

  Al flushed, and I took the paper out of Orvis’s hands. “Don’t listen to him, Al,” I said. “Here. You go, and you have a good time.”

  Al shook his head. “You all missed the interesting part. Take another look, Mr. Eddie. Look at the small print.”

  I looked, and read aloud.

  “REAL INDIANS needed for PAYING WORK associated with this premiere. BONUSES paid for authentic clothing, weapons, etc. Contact N. Birnbaum, Colony Theater box office.”

  “Real Indians,” Orvis said. “I’ll be damned. What are they gonna do, stage a massacre at intermission?”

  Tom looked around at the girders, the forge, the lunch buckets, the skeleton of the Chrysler Building down the way. “Thanks for telling us, Al, but when they say, ‘Real Indians,’ I don’t think they mean us.”

  Joe Diabo looked thoughtful, but didn’t say anything.

  I returned Al’s paper, and he went on his way, and we went back to work.

  “My turn to rivet,” Tom said, reaching for the gun.

  Joe Diabo sounded startled. “No, no, not yet. Let me. I’m good till lunchtime.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Just getting warmed up.”

  Orvis was trying to look unconcerned, but I knew this was just fine with him. He never wanted to rivet; he’d be the sticker-in all day, if he could. But Tom was more ambitious. Tom looked to me for help, and I disappointed him by saying, “We did have a great rhythm going there.”

  “Sure we did,” Joe Diabo said. “Let’s get to it, boys.”

  “OK,” Tom said, and that was it. No big deal. Sometimes we rotated jobs after a break, sometimes we didn’t. And in the high steel, what Joe Diabo wanted, Joe Diabo got. So that was that. I keep telling myself.

  I said earlier that being the heater gave me the best vantage point. That was because neither Tom nor Orvis could see anything but the top of Joe Diabo’s head on the other side of the beam. And their attention was fixed on the rivet anyway. But me, I could see both sides of the beam equally well, with nothing to do but wait for the time to toss the next rivet. Usually I watched Joe Diabo, who was a master, as I said. I watched him flatten the next rivet, and the next, and the next. Then I watched him lift the gun, wipe his forehead, say, “That one ain’t—” and step backward off the planks, into the air.

  Why? Who knows why? When I was a kid, I heard an old, old man, one of the nail-keg crowd at Montour’s store, tell about his son, also a riveter, who fell from the Soo Bridge in 1890. “Who knows why he fell?” the old man said. “It happens. Sometimes you just get in the way of yourself.” That old man is gone now, but his successors sit around Montour’s to this day, talking about Joe Diabo.

  Some of them say he did it on purpose. I guess any sort of notion is interesting to think about, when you have nothing to do but sit on the side of the highway watching the tourists speed past you toward Montreal and hoping your old buddy on the bench next to you hasn’t noticed tha
t you’ve peed your pants again. But I was there. I watched his expression as he realized what he had done, Joe Diabo, who had walked the beams and the planks for thirty years. It was the same expression that Orvis, for Christ’s sake, Orvis got every Saturday night, when the latest in a long line of bruisers got tired of his lip and proceeded to knock the shit out of him, and Orvis just standing there, watching it come, marveling at his own folly. That’s what I saw in Joe Diabo’s face, and worse yet, he saw that I saw it. As he stepped back, he looked at me, still openmouthed from the “ain’t,” and without thinking I looked away, looked down, into my pan of hot coals. But not quickly enough. He saw my face, all right. What did he see there, to carry down with him? One of the coals tumbled sideways and flared red as Joe Diabo screamed.

  Don’t ask me what he said. Oh, sure, those of us in the steel that day were mostly Mohawk, and we recognized Mohawk when we heard it. And make no mistake, everyone heard it. In the steel, a scream like that, you halfway listen for it all day, and when it comes, you’re ready. But not one of us, it turned out, followed the old ways. We grew up speaking French or English, with some Mohawk thrown in as needed. If you wanted your mother to make you some kanatarok, for example, you had to say it in Mohawk; there was no English word, because English folks didn’t boil their bread, they baked it. Those everyday Mohawk words, I knew. But whatever Joe Diabo screamed at the end, it was not an everyday word.

  Some people want to make a joke of it, say maybe it was an old Mohawk curse word. Horseshit to that.

  But Joe Diabo wasn’t talking to us, anyway.

  We came down, of course. No more work that day. The construction companies are good about that. Also, they think falls might be catching. White people are superstitious that way. Tom and Orvis went ahead, carrying their lunch buckets with the sandwiches that never tasted as good on the ground, but I had to dampen the coals, fasten the cover and the flue for the night, and so on, and I was always more painstaking at these tasks than the others. I mean, Orvis? Forget it. Plus I was slower than usual, on account of not crying. Mohawk men don’t cry, but not crying is hard work sometimes. It takes all your concentration. So I thought I was the last one on our level—the tail end of the goat, my grandmother would say, though she would have said it in Mohawk. But as I set foot on the ladder, I saw a figure sitting alone, way on the other side of what would be the thirtieth floor, but was now mostly air.