Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

— She bout to go, Jack Frost said, and shook his rattler the faster.

— Tell her, Anne said, snake been told, coon been told, jay been told.

— She going! Jack said with his eyes closed.

— Tell her, Anne said, Rabbit dance tonight. Tell her we dream.

Tommy looked up, Silk Deer looked up. The rattler ceased.

— We kick the door, Dovey! Anne cried. We kick the door!

— She gone, Jack Frost said.

ARCHYTAS FELL on his knees and looked at something under one of the kettles, signaling with a waving arm to Damos on the other side. There was a whomp and hiss in the air, and Pappas lifted me up so that I could see the dove leaking winter breaths of steam slide up the ramp, unfold its wings, and shoot upward. It whistled up like an arrow from a bow, fluttered with the stagger of a bat, and banking into a long high wheel, soared over the chronometer tower, the fane of Asklepios, the armory, the hills. We all cried with delight.

John Charles Tapner

A LANTERN held to his face showed which of the exiles in the weave of the waves was the one who had insulted the Queen. Their longboat had touched into the shingle and they jumped from her prow, wet to the hips, to hand out women and boxes and trunks with hummocked tops. They’d come across from Jersey in a fog, calling on a tin trumpet that had the one flat ugly note breaking into the music of the gannets and gulls, the bells of the buoys, and the ruckus of windwash rolling the ocean at half dawn.

It was a grand thing to see them all remove their hats and bow from the waist as the old one came from the boat. I had their names on a list from the constable: Bachelet, Dessaignes, Fruchard, Thomas, under proscription the lot, exiles living from pillar to post.

Well over thirty years ago the first Napoleon died, in a rage they say, on some island no bigger than this half the world around, and the dust he raised will not settle in our time. But then the French love a drum and adore a scarlet sash. Give them a snail to eat, a tall bottle, a book with things ungodly and wild in it, and they will follow a general with a moustache from shoulder to shoulder and a brass band into heathendom and beyond, heel-deep in their own gore.

He came across the brown sand, enlarged by the mist that had bedeviled the island for days, a hank of vraic around one boot, he never minding the hamp of it, his grizzard beard runched out from the lappets of his redingote. The bonnet and frogged cape behind him was his wife, fashed and tottering, flapping like a sea mew. And yet another fluster of ruffles, wet and squealing gaily, was his daughter.

— A very Beethoven of a wind! he cried into my ear.

Holding the lantern aloft, I bade him welcome to the Bailiwick of Guernsey. I did not ask for papers. The peelers would remark upon that later.

His cunning eyes looked out of silken wrinkles, the eyes of a man easy with books and talk, restless and attentive, no rat’s jinking from a hole more awake.

The daughter had a beauty which was, at that hour and mauger the blore, wearying toward length in the tooth and a sharpness of nose. She would later run away to the new world after a red sash of her own, but that’s another story. From under her drenched cape she took two great oblong books. Shakespeare.

— Monsieur Martin, he said, pronouncing it French.

He took my hand in both of his and looked into the backrooms of my soul, my God what eyes! A knitch more on the fire and we stood in puddles before a blaze, swapping politenesses in a desperate sort of way, until madame said she would scream if she did not have a chair, a posset, and camphor on her temples.

— And what did I say? my goodwife Polly hissed as I fetched the rum.

— It is the way grandfolk act, I said. Consider the honor.

We put them up, we and the neighbors, for that hectic day, and that was that, for the nonce. They took the fine house in Hauteville Street, November 20, that belongs to Domaille, renting it for the year, even though the Alien Bill might shoot him out onto the sea again if all his grand talk had no effect on the high collars in London.

He had come here from Jersey, and he had come to Jersey from Belgium, where a number of exiles had fled, Doctor Raspail who wrote the home medical book, and the heretic Edgar Quinet. Louis Napoleon had scattered them all. Islanders study the newspaper carefuller than most.

We saw them every day or so moving about the rainy streets under umbrellas, and you could always, if you wanted, find the old one on a rock orating to the waves. He liked the young men who came from England and France to find him there, standing as if about to step higher, his cloak lifted out by the wind, saying things in Latin to the rack, to the silly puffins.

The man who made the daguerreotype of Tapner at the last came and took his likeness posed there on the rock.

Half the mail coming to and leaving the island was his. His little dog with a spot over his eye followed him everywhere. Senate was his name.

Two weeks after his arrival he turned up one morning and warmed his hands at our fire. Polly gave him the hint of a curtsy and pleaded that she had to go wring the neck of a hen.

Which reminded him, he said, of our curious taxes, each of us owing a chicken to the Queen by way of taxes. The droit de poulet, they call it in law.

— This paradise of fuchsias, he said. The green! Do