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  “Papa knew all there was to know about printing,” she said. “He went broke on thirteen different magazines. We had to skip out of that many towns when I was a kid. Lots of times we didn't have anything to eat. Papa knew all there was to know about the business.”

  “He must have learned from his mistakes,” Duffey said.

  “Mistakes? He never made any mistakes. He played every deal just right.”

  “Was he unlucky then?”

  “No, he was pretty lucky. A lot more than most. Mama didn't die till we were half-grown. She never knew how hard we had it later. Mama used to worry about money and things like that.”

  “Why didn't your father get out of the business if you all had it so hard?”

  “Get out of it? How could he get out of it? That's the way he made his living.”

  Friday morning a letter came. It had a large bill in it, as much as a working man made in three months. And it had a verse.

  Scratch a Turk,

  And find a Jew.

  I don't think it'll work,

  Do You?

   — S

  2.

  And Saturday morning, Finnegan woke about five o’clock, for the light was on and he thought he had turned it off when he went to bed. And the typewriter was clicking, and he was sure that he had stopped typing when he retired. An owl-faced large young man with horn-rim glasses and a cigar was typing. And on the desk in front of him was a placard ‘Absalom Stein, Publisher.’ He grinned at Finnegan. “Giovanni, your troubles are over,” he said.

  “I never had any,” Finnegan said, still not believing what he saw.

  “Absalom has been persuaded to take charge,” Absalom said. “A touch of genius is all this thing needed. Luckily I thought of myself.”

  “You may be, Stein, I'm not sure. But if you're in, I'm out.”

  Actually Finnegan was scared. He was scared cold. It wasn't Stein he was scared of. For a long time now he'd had to force himself not to like Stein. He was scared because he realized that he didn't belong with this. He still didn't belong anywhere.

  Vincent knew what he would do. Hans had always known. Henry knew now, Casey still did not know; but there would come a time when he would. But would there ever come such a time for Finnegan?

  In later times Finnegan said that if Stein had not joined, things might have been different. But Finnegan said this about many things besides Stein. Likely things would never have been different with Finnegan.

  He set the coffee on and started to pack his things.

  Stein understood Finn better than Finn understood him. If anything could have been done for Finn, Stein would have done it. He belonged to the club of those who would have helped Finn if only —

  “Where are you going, Giovanni?” he asked. “I do not want to drive you out.”

  “I am going to Chicago to see Casey and ask him nine or ten questions. I didn't know the questions to ask him last week. If these do not resolve thing, I will begin my Odyssey till I find the answer. I do not believe that you are the answer.”

  “No. I surely am not. But you won't find the answers by wandering. There aren't any answers in the way you mean. Someday you will have to withdraw the questions.”

  Duffey got up and seemed to have been expecting Stein. They were at once talking of setting up a board of directors.

  “Will you be one, Finnegan?” Duffey asked him.

  “Who will they be?”

  “Henry. Me. Dotty. Stein. Hans. Gabrielovitch (you don't know him). And you. Seven.”

  “I will be one only to keep further incompetents off the list. What do we call our little sister magazine?”

  “Dotty wants to call it the Pelican. The Pelican has liturgical significance. It was believed to feed its young with its own blood and is thus symbolic of the blood of Christ. It is also the symbol of our adopted State of Louisiana. Stein wants to call it the Neo-Centrist Review of Evolvate Socio-Geopolitical Motifs in a Disintegrating World, to be subtitled Thesis and Antithesis. Several of us think that this title is too long. I lean to the Pig-Sticker, which is direct and all-inclusive of our aims. Henry wants to call it the Bark, in the meaning of a little boat, from a dream he had which started him on all this.”

  “Then it will be the Bark. Two is a plurality when nobody can agree. I will draw the masthead before I leave.”

  Finnegan drew the Bark in charcoal, the wave-rocked, water-shipping boat with the shattered masts, the boat about to go down in terrible disaster; he drew it just as Henry had dreamed it. For Finnegan was Clairvoyant, and knew what Henry had dreamed from the first. And under the drawing he listed:

  The Seven Pillars of Righteousness:

  Henry — The Merry Monk.

  Duffey — Thou art Forever.

  Stein — Absalom to Omega. Oh, the big O.

  Dotty — The Beautiful Barmaid.

  Hans — Aquinas in a T-Shirt.

  Gabrielovitch — Don't Know It in Croat.

  Giovanni — In Absentia, O Absentia!

  He drew them all wonderfully and truly, including himself, and Gabrielovitch whom he had never seen. It is the same masthead that the Bark uses today.

  “I go now,” Finnegan said. “This isn't a real world. It's a thin crust, and it crumbles. I know another world or two that are realer than this.”

  “Oh, we know it isn't real, Finn,” Dotty said sadly. “But He told us to remain here until He comes. He may be angry with you when He finds that you have not waited in the world that He assigned to you.”

  She cried when he was gone.

  3.

  This one is about Henry, so what are all these other people doing in it? Well, Henry was a solitary, but he could only be happy when people were around. Besides, you know Henry from the people he influenced. You can't know him of himself. Henry Francis Salvatore was born on December 8, 1920 in Morgan City, Louisiana. His father was Lawrence Salvatore and his mother was Mary Genevieve Herbert. His brothers were Christopher, Eustace, Hilaire, Joseph, Louis, Mark, and Simeon; his sisters Angela, Lucy, and Rita. This was not a large family by regional standards, but neither was it small enough to be ashamed of. With a group of near-living cousins it made a respectable showing.

  The closest of the uncles were Alphonse, Charles, Fulgence, George, and Matthew Salvatore; and Anthony, Edward, Gregory, Julien and Nicole Hebert. Of aunts in the neighborhood there were only Emily and Marietta.

  This made in all, with the family of Lawrence, thirteen families of cousins. Their march was a complex of rivers, bays, and marshes, a world of water, fresh, brackish and salt, and of water-logged land.

  Henry was the fat one and the mean one. His cousins followed him in everything, Basil and Sebastian, Fabian and Adrian who were older, and Peter who was younger than he. Henry ruled in town and country, but in school he had trouble. It wasn't that he was dumb. They had a lot of dumb boys there, but Henry wasn't. It was that he was too bull-headed smart. He maintained the point that after you have learned a thing there is no sense harping on it. In French or English or Latin he never met a word or sentence that gave him pause, but he saw no reason to sit in school and copy out squibs from one tongue into another.

  “When you've extracted one square root you've extracted them all,” he said, “and a quadratic equation solved once is solved forever.”

  Papa Lawrence became tired of quibbling with the authorities over the boy. Accordingly, he sat Henry down one evening and carefully examined him. He discovered that Henry was already educated. This surprised him, for he had considered Henry the dullest of his boys.

  From that day, early in his thirteenth year, Henry had perfect freedom. He waxed fat, and traveled. But his character was not formed then; it was formed before he was born. He was a Cajun; think about that a while and you will get the picture.

  The Cajuns are not recognized as a separate entity by the anthropologists. They are put into a sub-class of sub-class instead of being treated as a people apart. They are Ca
ucasian, and then they are Alpine or possibly Mediterranean. They have either long heads or round heads, and their blood has ‘O’ or ‘A’ types. In point of fact, many of them have tidewater instead of blood, and no heads at all. There is a pretended history of them, and a claim that their language is somehow related to French because it uses the same words. But the carefully arrived-at facts are that they were talking Cajun, driving buggies, raising rice, going to Mass, trapping muskrats, drinking inferior wine and impossible beer, and generally lousing around in the whole country South of the Red River before Rome was even built.

  It is bad luck to speak lightly of them though. You had better like them, or stay out of their country. Those boys will whip you as quick as they will bait a hook. And Henry was mean, even for a Cajun.

  He would spend weeks on Baratarria Bay muskrat trapping. He grew larger, and he seemed much older than he was. He was a bar-room brawler when he was fifteen. He went with the shrimp-boats, he went up and down the Mississippi with barge trains. He signed out from New Orleans and Port Arthur and Galveston on cotton boats and cattle boats and tankers and sulphur boats. He became a rake, and dabbled in vices from Copenhagen to Aruba. His fat was an illusion. He was strong as a cape buffalo, and had never been whipped. The Fat Frenchman was known as a mean and ugly customer.

  It was said that he was black-balled in the entire merchant marine. Men from half-a-dozen crews had told him that they'd kill him if he ever smelled salt water again. There had been some trouble, and seamen were a clannish bunch. Henry was stubborn, but he wasn't that stubborn. They made him see the light in this.

  He left the sea and drove trucks for several years. Among others, he drove for the Red Dog Motor Freight Line which was owned by the Schaeffer; it was at this time that he met Mary Virginia Schaeffer. This girl he would have married, had it not been for an odd dream that he had overseas.

  Henry had joined the army on his twenty-first birthday. He was a member of the High Order of the Dirty Five. Now he was out again and had affairs to settle.

  4.

  Henry collected, transferred, and handled a lot of money that week. He went around the state and saw a bishop and an archbishop. One obstacle could not be removed. He would have to go at least one year to minor seminary before entering the seminary in New Orleans. His father Lawrence was surprised at his haste. “Is it really such a rush, Henry? Are you trying to do this too fast?”

  “Yet. I try to do it too fast. The Church may go down.”

  “In Mohammed's time, it was thought the world would be lost.”

  “Half was lost.”

  “And at the time of the Great Schism?”

  “Half was lost then.”

  “And at the Reformation?”

  “Half again lost.”

  “So many halves? At the Revolution, it was thought France would be lost.”

  “France was lost.”

  “Do you know to whom the next half will be lost, Henry?”

  “Yes, to those of the Secular-Liberal Religion, working from inside the Church, but with no Catholic element in their make-up. Within twenty years, one-half the priests, nine-tenths of the priest editors, and one-quarter of the laity of America will be advocates of this dirtiest thing ever to rise against the Church. To the number of one priest I will counteract it.”

  “I wasn't sure you understood. But what do you offer? A cure for poverty?”

  “It isn't necessary that the pure be deprived of their poverty. It is only necessary that the Gospel be preached to them. But there will come mouths that are unable even to speak the name ‘Holy Poverty’.”

  “Why comes this to you, my oddest son. But you cannot bring back the thirteenth century, only the sixteenth. You will have to take one road or the other, and what if both roads are wrong?”

  “We do not have to take any road. We are there. We are the Centrists. We stand in the middle and build the world around us.”

  “The world is a very thin bubble, Henry. It is only a slight detail in the dream. Do not lose the wonder, or ever regard the world as a main thing. And I believe that you place too much emphasis on the Communist thing. It is only one of the many shells that the old Antagonist manipulates the pea under. You do not even know whether it is the shell that the pea is under now. It may be a diversion.”

  “There are a hundred holes in the boat and the ocean is coming in through all of them,” Henry said. “But it is presently one of the most gaping holes.”

  “How will you get all these folks to work for you while you are still learning your trade?”

  “They will do it. God gave us each other.”

  “One thing bothers me. You never rebuilt the world, before, Henry. It may be that you do not know how.”

  “It may be that I do not.”

  But Henry was not too busy to go fishing one day that week, as it had been four years since he had fished in his own land.

  5.

  Henry was shocked that Finnegan had left. Had he been there, Finnegan would not have left, for Henry had much the stronger will. Still, if Finn was destined to skip, he would have skipped sometime. Duffey and Dotty and Stein had now set Henry into immediate action. They took an immense warehouse and loft next to the print shop. Here were the beginnings of the library and institute and auditorium. Here too were all the living quarters, including the flop-house of Duffey's insistence.

  Gabby (Gabrielovitch) who soon joined them was still a young man and did not adopt the Spartan life of the rest. He liked to have quite a bit of money. As the Bark did not pay, he did much money work elsewhere. He made the bars from three in the morning till dawn and was known for his capacity. His companions on these jaunts were Berny Cacciatore of the Sporting News Sheet, and Bulo Belonki of the Jazz Sheet. Much of the work on those two papers was done then. It was Berny who told them that Finnegan had fought in the ring under his own name of Solli before the war, and that he was good. Even Dotty hadn't known that.

  The rest of them went out on the town only about once a month, Dotty, and Henry when he was there, Duffey and Mrs. Duffey, Mary Schaeffer when she was there; and Stein. They cared more for the company of the vinters than for the stuff they sold.

  This Gabby was, like Finnegan, of the People of the Nose. His was of the trans-Adriatic variety, craggy as the mountains of that east coast, and contoured as the crosier of a Montenegran shepherd. Gabby had clipped a paragraph to the effect that persons with big noses were passionate and he tacked it on the bulletin board under the heading ‘Noted with Interest’.

  And Stein was interested in noses. “The appearance of the nose in the goyim is a hopeful tendency,” he said. “A weak and deceitful generation cannot grow noble noses. The Archangels had noble noses. The conventional iconography goes back only to Michaelangelo whose own nose was flattened in youth and who de-emphasized the nose. But in the beginning it was not so.”

  Stein would have liked a more imposing nose for himself, but taking thought did not add one thumb's length to it. “There is only one thing to do,” Dotty told him. “Leave your nose alone and shrink the rest of your head. It would help.”

  It was Gabby though who strangely added a philological sidelight to their own legend.

  “The Argosy is really the Ragosy,” he said. “It was a fleet out of Ragusa in Illyria, and Ragusa was the original city of Iolcus.”

  “Rosemary Riorden implied the same thing,” said Stein, “that we sailed from Illyria.”

  “You could not have known that,” said Mr. X (you don't know him yet) with a touch of anger. “You were not that sergeant. You were not there. You could never have heard the name of this Rosemary.”

  “Could I not? Then how have I spoken it?” Stein asked stubbornly. “To some extent I was that sergeant. Do not tell me what I am not. We were all of that old company, even myself, and you, and Duffey, and many others besides the Five. And we all partake of each other. But amnesia seals it off.”

  6.

  The Bark had drawn first blood, and by
its very launching. A bright bitter trickle of deep red flowed from the Crock in Chicago, and in the unmistakable hand of Casey. The conflict was more important than it would seem. The Crock had shot at the same twenty-five thousand people whom the Bark now shot at, that group of minds not so very superior but to situated as to control the thought of the country. This piece has to be given at length, for Casey always wrote at length. It is an authentic example of the style of Casey, and you cannot know him without it. And it is in the manner of the peculiar people who now possessed him:

  ‘From Pelican Land and off the Pelican Press comes a new magazine which is certainly a beak-full. It is also a belly-full. This is a bird we never loved. Now we know why.

  ‘The Bark, or Barque (they use both spellings), erroneously depicted on the Mast-Head as a square rigged ship (it should be composite rigged) will hardly survive the first squall. It is not Seaworthy.

  ‘Of the background of the co-captains (who are all Chiefs and no Indians) we happen to know more than can be decently printed. Though calling itself a neo-Centrist (does that hyphenate have any meaning?) Catholic Publication of the anti-Communist (has that?) persuasion, it does not have ecclesiastical sanction. Henry the Merry Monk is neither merry nor a monk. Though I love him like a brother, I must report that he is a dour fat Frenchman of no experience. He has now been made the tool of an unsavory band of opportunists who have caused him to mortgage the family farms to promote this dubious venture.

  ‘Hans, the Aquinas in a T-shirt, was wearing a dinner jacket and a highball the last time I saw him. Though listed as an editor, he is actually in the contracting business in St. Louis: and it is reported that he has put some of his own money and more of other peoples’ (unbeknownst to them) into the project. In charity it is hoped that he does not know what direction it is taking.