Mawz Engersol would be remembered for a night he couldn’t undo, and Brisket Whiskerhooven would be remembered for an intimacy too urgent to keep quiet, but what would Luddy Upland be remembered for, if anyone’s to remember him at all?
Luddy Upland and Mawz Engersol might be remembered as friends like Carnival and Hunko might be remembered as friends, or like Kennesaw and True might be remembered as friends, or like True and Jubilee might be remembered as friends. They might even be remembered as better friends than Zebeliah and Frainey might be remembered as friends (even though no one can remember if Zebeliah was a Hackensack or a Whiskerhooven), or better than Frainey and Chippewa might be remembered as friends, and possibly likely in the end remembered as better friends than True and Threesie might ever be remembered as friends if indeed they ever were truly friends at all, for as everyone remembers befriending Threesie Lope was as reckless a pastime as cleaning a gun in the dark.
Luddy’s friendship with Brisket Whiskerhooven (whom everyone remembers was indeed a Whiskerhooven if for that one good reathon) was a friendship that might have grown and adapted itself through the ages like a river settling into its own smooth groove through a valley, had Brisket not been swept up young in that second wave of the big fever, and it was the friendship that Luddy should be remembered for, but time has done its darndest to obliterate that friendship from memory. To recall Brisket at all is to recall him at Grunths Pond and to recall hith lithping grunt-outh of “Knotsthy!” on a nightly bathith. What has passed from common lore is the lisp’s Luddy-link, for it was Luddy Upland whose suggestion it was that Brisket repeat the name Knotsy over and over in order to break him of his articulatory encumbrance.
Night after night on the shores of Grunts Pond, Luddy would whisper encouragement into Brisket’s ear to put all of his urgent business into getting the correct pronunciation of Knotsy’s name into his mouth while in his hands his urgency went to work. It was an enterprising attempt at solving a problem that had plagued the lad since his first uttered words, which were, according to his mother, the two favored words out of his father’s mouth, which were, as all who recall can attest, two words often spoken as one, which were the word “horth” followed by the word “thit,” which is, as some folk might agree, the very definition of a legend. But, alas, practical as Luddy’s remedy was, repeating Knotsy’s name over and over was not the problem-solver it was hoped. In fact, it only led to further complications no one could have anticipated. For able as Brisket proved to be at his urgent business, he never did succeed at getting his tongue out of Knotsy’s S.
And that’s all the story anyone remembers, if anyone remembers any of that story at all.
The friendship people are more inclined to remember if they remember any friendship is the friendship between Luddy and Mawz Engersol. You could say that Luddy and Mawz would be remembered as close friends. What you could also say is that while they would be remembered as close friends, proof of their close friendship wasn’t something anybody remembered ever knowing. Luddy and Mawz, while close friends, were not friends as close as Mawz’s papa, Bull, had been friends with his good friend, Remedial Bliss. Luddy, unlike Remedial, was an able fellow who could roll his own rocks and till his own rows and seed his own beds and didn’t need Mawz to step in and muck things up like Mawz’s father had done and look where that got Mawz, no thanks.
Luddy was someone who was always around when a day came and when a day went. The lands his father, Pernicious, had scraped raw with an instinct for farming that would have better served him had he been a locust, Luddy spent the better part of his life reinvigorating with God spit and cowshit, and at their finest, it could be said that his lands yielded chervil and lovage like nobody’s business. Chervil and lovage were not a crop business that served his toils well; you could say he was better at doing a thing than he was at thinking about why he was doing it, but the man had to be commended simply for doing his old man one better, which was to get his lands to grow something—anything—edible. It was a truism that he could boil chervil in water flavored with lovage, lay chervil raw and dirty on a platter and sprinkle it with lovage he dried and crinkled to bits between his rake-like fingers, gnaw on one of the umbels that grew hat-rack like from the umbelliferous chervil stalk and masticate it to swamp mud and just before swallowing, chomp a bit of lovage to season the mash of it and make it go down double-icky; all of that was true, all of that he did, but none of that mattered a burp because no one wanted to eat it, for to everyone else, rutabagas and sorrel are a tastier twosome than chervil and lovage, yet muck up Luddy’s thinking with a truism like that his good friend Mawz Engersol wouldn’t dare, having learned from his own father what putting yourself into someone else’s business can lead to, no thanks.
What few recall is that it was Luddy who knew about the business with Cozy and Bull and how that stepped on the toes of Mawz’s dance date with True; that Luddy also was the first to hear from Mawz about Bull Engersol’s unfortunate tumble from his spooked horse and his head’s unfortunate encounter with a rock; about Mawz’s burying his father and burying him beneath the spooked horse that threw him (Mawz never said how he dealt with the horse, one just assumes it was an unfortunate encounter between the horse’s head and a bullet); and it was Luddy years later who found Mawz on the mound that marked the spot where his father and the horse were hell-bound, and who decided to leave the bird-pecked remnants of his friend’s body exactly as he found them—heart gone, eyes gone, skin flayed rare, and True’s pink velvet ribbon clutched in his maggoty hand.
So a story is lived, so a story lives on. Etched on the living as acutely as those cold chiseled onto stone markers like the ones all atilt in Nedewen Field. Had the sight of Mawz on the ground there been its own self-wielding cold chisel, it could not have imprinted itself on Luddy any deeper or more permanently than the vision itself did without benefit of tool or intent. For years, Luddy carried that final sight of Mawz with him into every room and every planted row. It entered his house, it walked his fields with him, it settled down beside him on the two-seater privy, and no amount of lye could make it decompose. It was in every forkful of chervil, every crinkle of lovage, to the point where he, too, grew to hate their taste. It wasn’t so much the eyes gone plucked, or the bones of Mawz’s ribcage gnawed raw. What haunted Luddy was that half-blackened, half-maggoty hand clutching that pink ribbon. A desire so close to its intent, as insistent as a full moon crowding through the curtains, but foiled at the very end by the very heart it sought. And how he had left the decomposing body there as if it were an animal corpse he’d come upon and not his friend who not so long ago had wanted so to live. To have left that body there for the elements to have their way with was unfinished business that rattled in Luddy’s mind like a door on loose pins and he could not stop its noise. Had he done in Mawz himself, his regret would not have been any louder.
Yet, stories etched on the living as on stone, with the wear-away of time come to fade, and as on the worn-away markers all atilt in Nedewen Field, in time leave to those looking on only indecipherable indentations suggestive of a something, but not a specific someone; a what, but not a definable when; a was, but not a particular how. Such was the way the memory of finding Mawz lost its outward definitions on Luddy’s person; in time his flinching at the smell of cooking flesh subsided, and he was able to contain his stomach when seeing others eat meat down to the bone, and he developed a numb kind of patience whenever the subject of Mawz and True was being opinionated on for the umpteenth time. Without stating his disgust for their insensitivity, he’d offer up an alternative for folks to chew on, one he knew would turn their stomachs as they were turning his: a wagonful of his chervil and lovage and he dared them to refuse. Up until that afternoon on the ridge Luddy was as happy as any to offer his two Indian heads on whatever grist was churning in the daily mill. But from that vision on, he taciturned inward, and rarely would he speak unless he was yelled out of his numbness. You could say that the Luddy Upland who once-was was left to rot in that same sun as his close friend, Mawz Engersol, or at least he wished he had been.
Bearing Mawz’s testimony to life’s cruel turns, keeping it as hidden in his own conscience as Mawz kept himself hidden behind trees from True’s eyes all those years, then keeping hidden the final sad bits of Mawz’s sad end deep in his heart as if his heart were deep as a six-deep hole—Luddy carried all that business through his life faithfully, honorably and guardedly, until the sharp details of it in time wore smooth and indecipherable, and the indented facts of it pitted and turned to powder, and Luddy was left with not so much the story itself as he was with its heavy and very particular sadness, much like the smell of flesh in the air after the rotting of it is done.
Folks who did not fully understand his friendship with Mawz or know the history that Luddy took great care to conceal, looked on Luddy as a man simply grown sad with time, for time will do that to a man who doesn’t have much of his own story to live. You cannot blame people for not seeing what they cannot see, even when what they cannot see is so present before them. In Luddy, what they could not see, though it was as evident as air in the lung, was that his sadness for Mawz, having taken up such prominent a place in his heart, became the story of his own life.
Think of Luddy Upland and you think of labor and patience and steadfastness and chervil and lovage. His name is one of those names like Zebeliah Was-She-a-Hackensack-or-Was-She-a-Whiskerhooven (it no longer even matters that no one can remember which) or Elementary Hurlbutt that always comes up in the back stories to memories, not because of any deeds that can be attributed to him, though we do know there were at least three (urging Brisket’s “Knotsthy” and leaving Mawz all maggoty and growing crops everyone considered icky). More likely Luddy figures in the river of New Eden’s narrative simply because he was one of any number of stones the waters rolled over on their way to somewhere more eventful; a life who, for all his life, breathed in and breathed out on a steady daily schedule during the moments when something special was happening to somebody else.
Think of Luddy Upland and the virtues of labor and patience and steadfastness—all serviceable virtues, nice to think about, but not a one of them strikes a representative image in the mind that you’d care to place on a pedestal or admire when painted on the blade of a saw. Virtue on its own, with no blocky shape to its head, or lanky carriage of its body, no hump that sets it apart or a third hand coming out of a hip, will not get you effigized in bronze and set down in the middle of town where it’s an honor for eyes to ogle you and birds to cover your head and shoulders in feces. No one builds bonfires on a Saturday night to the patiently sturdy and silent. No walking stick is whittled to celebrate the slow-building, day-to-day steadfastness of nice and unassuming. And surely never was a sonnet composed that praised the heavens above-age for chervil and lovage. When you’re in command of your own life but not commanding, and even though you are the first to think of others, you are not the sort whom others think of first. And everyone would have told you that about Luddy, if they’d remembered to.
Had Luddy Upland been someone with a light in him he’d have dug a hole and given his friend his proper due. But all his life he felt the lack of something essential inside of himself, a specialness, a spark, an impulse that would lift him up from merely living to feeling himself alive. And whatever it was that was missing in him, he was convinced others could see.
He felt himself to be the woods at dusk, illuminated from beyond his edges by the pale glow that spilled off others and lit his underbranches in bits of afterglow. The flame he saw others burn with he could not for himself in himself spark with flint, and he so wished he had it in him to do. If I only had a light in me, he thought, nothing blinding, nothing that would give the sun a run for its money or make the full moon feel inferior, a modest light would do, he reasoned, a pale star behind a star behind a star, a faraway dot that could light my own tiny orbit like a half-lit firefly, the tiniest sparkle that years from now might remind you, or you, or you, of me—that’s all he wanted in himself, but finding nothing in himself, he settled for the borrowed light of others by becoming the match that fused their way. He had urged Brisket to repeat a name while handy-Andying his urgent business and Brisket’s not-so-silky recitation of that repetition forever became that lad’s legacy. He’d stood steady-Luddy for Mawz to confide in, and carried his friend’s secrets for him and took on his friend’s sadnesses as deeply as any of his own he might have sunk under himself had he thought enough of himself to do so first, but in the end it did not make of him the lasting memory his labor and patience and steadfastness made of them. Tell Mawz’s story without Luddy and the story has strength all its own; put Luddy in and he adds to it by not detracting from it. Brisket, though he will fade from memory like all the rest, a ghost’s ghost in a ghost’s story, doesn’t need Luddy to hit the mark any more than Knotsy needed Brisket to wet her dreams. You don’t remember the match that lights the fuse; you remember the bang.
Who chose the acres of land where the end lasts forever? Luddy always wondered this about Nedewen Field. Was it a founding father who first toed a spade in the ground beneath the grasses to assess the ease of digging holes here? Or was it, perhaps, in an earlier time, from the time before the discovery of the already discovered, was it a tribal elder out seeking his own peace one day who came upon this place where the wind speaks in hushed tones and thought the spirits would find eternal ascendance here? Or was it a soul less advanced in a time more primitive who one day no more remarkable than any other in his still-forming world on this very spot stumbled onto his own loneliness under the wide open skies above here? Luddy liked to think it was this latter man, an earlier incarnation of his own unlit self. In Luddy’s imagination he was a muted, though thoughtful spear-wielder, cousin perhaps to dweller or nephew or great-great-grandson, out exploring this very patch of land for whatever might be found here, when he came upon the carcass of a fellow spear-wielder so like himself, fallen and rotting in the afternoon sun, his spear still gripped in his maggoty hand. There was no other spear-wielder around, no beasts, the landscape had bubbled up only knee-high here so no ground nearby could provide any hiding; all there was was the unblinking sun in the sky above to know what felled this carcass and the sun wasn’t saying.
This curious soul sniffed and poked and kicked that naked form so like himself for any signs of life in its limbs or any glint of light in its black-socket eyes, but found only lifelessness there in that form so like a rock now. Spear-wielder hadn’t traveled to this spot with any companion, nor did he miss the company a companion might have provided. But coming upon this fallen form he felt for the first time a longing to not be alone. Warm as the sun was on his fur and skin he started to tremble at what he could not fully picture to be the state of his own next form; that the next form of himself might be that form on the ground, lifeless and rock-like and rotting. With this odd new dread of his own future state settled on his skin and fur as snug as any odor, he felt as never before his own nakedness to the unblinking eye of that afternoon sun, and for the first time ever in his tramp life reasoned that perhaps that eye knew something he did not. In his evolving understanding, he looked around his still-bubbling, still-hissing world, and it dawned on him that there might be in the vastness over his head a presence in that eye that he could not sniff nor poke nor kick, and to that presence spear-wielder attributed all that he did not understand. That presence would stare down upon him no matter what and see him for what he was, and it was that presence that would give him back license to be who he might have it in him to be. Spear-wielder looked at the fallen form and at his own not-so-fresh flesh, scanned the landscape for answers he knew he wouldn’t find anywhere out there, then raised his eyes as much as he could to the sky, and then lowered them lower than the ground beneath his feet where a strange new sensitivity greeted them.
The rotting body was cold to the touch, but the ground was as warm as the sky. And only by covering that lifeless form with the earth below him would spear-wielder cover his own nakedness to that eye in the sky above.
So unnamed spear-wielder, this faceless early man, this Luddy of the dawn, not really understanding what he was doing, he dug a hole by hand and he rolled the carcass into it, and the carcass landed with the spear still it its hand and most of its face face up, and the afternoon sun illuminated the black-socket eyes with a final twink of borrowed light and in those eyes unnamed spear-wielder, faceless early man, Luddy of the dawn, saw himself. Spear-wielder stood above the hole staring down at the carcass with unfinished thoughts about his own next form, and as he did, the sun began to settle behind his back, and the twink of borrowed light in the sockets of the carcass’s eyes went back to their lender forever. And spear-wielder, he stood there a little longer feeling empty and not knowing why, then he knelt to the ground and scooped back into the hole the earth he had hollowed it of. The light had gone out of the form he found, and only by covering it from the light of day could he see his own way to this next form of himself.
In time, more holes followed more carcasses, and more pairs of hands than his own made ritual work of scooping and hollowing and rolling, of drying and wrapping, of dressing and boxing. From one observer grew small clusters standing shoulder to shoulder around the lifeless holes. In time the odd new sense of dread that made spear-wielder feel so alone that lone day swelled communal, and the small growing clusters who stood shoulder to shoulder around the lifeless holes felt their dread bind them heart to heart, united by a sense of something they could not sniff nor poke nor kick. They were naked as fur and skin to the vastness over their heads, and, in time, under their bonnets and boots, too, just as naked to that unblinking eye in the sky above. But united in their nakedness to that eye, they felt inexplicably warmed, or so they told themselves to keep the cold from returning.
Brush away the moss on any of the broken teeth markers in Nedewen Field and lay over the pocked stone surface a sheet of clean paper, then take a charcoal stick and rub it across the paper to reveal the faint etchings of names and dates underneath, and you’ll find emerging from the pits and pocks many an Upland who came and went and left nothing of themselves more lasting than a weathered old stone in an overgrown field, naked and alone under that vast sky above, and Luddy is just one more among them. Hunko Minton found Luddy on the path side of the Upton side of Nedewen Field only a day or two after he must have fallen and failed, and Hunko thought it the right thing to do to drag Luddy’s corpse inside the walls of Nedewen Field and dig a hole for his friend. There’d be no box; there was no point. It was a hot spring day and the sun was rushing the world to start anew, and he could already see on the lump in the grasses a picnic squirming. That sun in the sky wasn’t doing his decomposing friend any favors.