nights when kings in golden mail ride their elephants over the mountains
Everyone has been coming around trying to sell me a decadal system even after I said that I don’t want one. I store my old years in a metal filing cabinet or in the back of my very nice petit rosewood sideboard and I don’t worry about putting them in order, the cat will only pull them out again. But here, in honor of the persistent decade-salesmen, is a story that IS from the 2010s, I am all but completely sure. I’ve told it before, but not recently, and you can learn from it.
Couple of years ago I took a real vacation, the kind where you get on a train and go somewhere: to Harpers Ferry, a town derided by West Virginia snobs as not the “real” West Virginia, but it was real enough for me, I nearly died there.
My problem was I couldn’t be satisfied with just having a wonderful time breathing the cool mountain breezes, paying my respects to the John Brown wax museum and wondering at the John Denver-themed restaurant. I thought I ought to put my feet on the Appalachian Trail a little bit; walk up and down, to and fro, you know, to say I’d done it. I didn’t want to do this, I wanted to drink wine on the balcony of the inn and look out at the beautiful blue mountains far in front of me and look down at the beautiful innkeeper’s cat on the porch far below. I had done this for some hours already, and I knew I liked to do it. but ambition had caught me.
In the morning before I set out, the innkeeper said to me: If you go into the olde-timey candy store in the Lower Town, the woman who runs it will ask you if you have been there before. SAY YES, YOU HAVE. This is very important. If you say no, she will start explaining the olde times to you and she won’t stop, and you will never be able to leave.
She warned me this the way Marya Morevna in The Death of Koschei the Deathless warns Prince Ivan not to open a certain dungeon door in her castle, and if he does, not to do anything asked of him by a man he might find chained up inside. He disobeys her in the story and all sorts of bad things happen, the story is a lesson to always listen to your wife. The innkeeper was not my wife but she seemed like she knew things.
and sure enough, when I got to a certain point on the High Street in the Lower Town on my way to stride through the wilderness, there on the banks of the Shenandoah was the shop of old-fangled candy creations: where you can buy a big bottle of corn syrup just like they drank back in revolutionary times, or some tree bark to gnaw on if you want to be old-timey to the maximum degree.
now, I had brought along a bottle of water for my athletic adventure because I know about preparedness, I’ve read books. But I still needed a pack of candy cigarettes, in case I got lost off the Trail and had to live on the land like in Julie of the Wolves, bartering the trinkets of civilization with the mountain lynxes for their help building a lean-to and starting a fire. Everyone knows you do need them. They’re calorie-dense and, unlike their bubble-gum-cigarette cousins, they make you look sophisticated. So I said to myself, Don't get confused and buy a package of horehound lozenges instead just because you read about them in Little House on the Prairie, horehound is disgusting. Don't buy a package of hickory bark or mastic gum, you are not an idiot. Just get the candy cigarettes and get out. Then I obeyed the mysterious compulsion on me and went inside.
A woman was there in the shop with her back to me, and just as I entered she swung round like a wax figure on a swivel platform and said
Have you been here before?
just like I was told she would.
& I remembered the warning I had been given and said Oh yes, thank you, I have, which was a lie and I’m sure she knew it. Some invisible power in my answer held her behind the cash register, & there she stayed silently, thwarted rage glowing out of her as I browsed along the blocks of 18th century maple sugar and hemp-encrusted filberts just like George Washington used to gnaw on with his wooden teeth. and because I admitted nothing and asked no questions, she let me pay for my precious sugar-paper cigarettes (the hiker’s essential) without a word and let me go.
so to say I narrowly escaped death in West Virginia is a strong statement, but it’s pretty obvious that if I had said No, I am a stranger here and have never been in your shop before, she would have changed me into a tiny jar of rose petal confit and I would have been imprisoned on her shop shelf forever, because nobody is ever going to buy a jar of rose petal confit, why would they.
This must have happened to so many other tourists who stayed at inferior Beds and Breakfasts without wise innkeepers or who got their own warnings but disregarded them, and are now transformed into pine-cone pastilles. A living death, just like in The Marvelous Land of Oz when the King of Ev and all his family are changed into objects by the Nome King and have to be disenchanted by Dorothy, using her intuition to know them as people when the evidence of the senses is no use: only in the case of this shop, no Dorothy and no rescue would come.
(This is how they show it in Return to Oz, which is pretty accurate. you see how hard it is to tell which Object is a person under a spell:
—this is also what the shop looked like, more or less. in your mind’s eye just switch confectionary for antiques, low ceilings for high ones, me for Fairuza Balk.)
So it is possible that a piece of old-timey candy I bought in Harpers Ferry was once a tourist and if that is so, I apologize. I do not know how to disenchant things so I just ate them.
* * *
Before the clock turns over and the world starts to run backwards I should tell you that this morning three deer leaped across the road in front of me, to a white house with a blue door and a broad pasture-yard behind it. They must have been on their way home even as I was on my way to work. Deer keep strange hours.
Where I live there are trains above the ground as well as below, and deer on the tracks sometimes. I saw one running past as I stood on the Fort Totten platform, early in one of the past ten Novembers, and it was terrible to see, breathing hard and bounding slowly because it was tired, looking all wrong that way; they aren’t made for long jogs. The train operator knew it was there and was only inching along, trying to let it pass on ahead and get away; and we outside the drama, on the platform watching, also knew there was no risk of a horrible collision; out of all of us it was only the deer who didn’t know it wasn’t in danger and didn’t need to run for its life. But there was nowhere else to go. There was the high platform on its left and a metal fence on its right so it couldn’t get out of the way that was set for it, only forward down the track. That station was the terminus at the time due to track work in the Beyond — you could see into the Beyond from the platform, we all wanted the deer to make it there — and so that train wasn’t chasing anyone, it couldn’t; it had to reverse and go back the way it came. The deer was freer than the train was. But the deer was not to know that, and only ran and ran.
* * *
In conclusion, the most impressive thing I learned this year was that John Cheever and John Updike weren’t each the same guy as the other one was, and I am excited to tell all any of you who didn’t know it already that Cheever’s the good one. Well: the better one of the two. He says in an introduction to something,
"Coming out of the maid's room in another rented house I shouted to my wife: "This is a night when kings in golden mail ride their elephants over the mountains!"
me, I am not expecting to have a night like that, not tonight. but good luck to all of you.