R. A. Lafferty - Melchisedek 01 - Tales of Chicago

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MORE THAN MELCHISEDECH
VOLUME ONE:
TALES OF CHICAGO
Book One:
Early Boyhood of a Magus
We know the sign athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchisedech
Is Dead and never dies.
G. K. Chesterton
Ballad of the White Horse
CHAPTER I
Well, what do you think is maintaining the world on even its wobbly
ways if it is not the extraordinary work of a few prodigious and special
people in it? These people are known as magicians or sorcerers or magi: and
this is the daily life of one of them.
He was Melchisedech Duffey. Like every magus, he arrived with many
mantles of magic. Like every magus, he would lose most of them during his
life. And such payments as he would receive for his losses would seem
trivial or incomprehensible.
"d do not understand the value of these trifles d receive for the
splendid things that d give up," another magus had complained once.
"df you are a true magus, you will understand it," one in higher
authority said.
"And d go all my life in fear of assassination or even more mortal
things," the magus complained.
"df you a true magus, you will not let these small things bother
you," the Higher Authority said.
The True Magus Melchisedech Duffey had the golden touch. He could
bang his hands together and produce graven gold or bar gold or coin gold. He
was an invader of minds, moving in and out of the people with whom he was in
accord as well as some with whom he was in clashing discord. To a limited
extent, he was a Lord of Time, moving back and forth in the streams of it
almost at will. And he commanded invisible giants.
By talismanic device, he was able to manufacture persons, or at
least to put his own fabricator's mark on unfinished human clay. This was
his most powerful gift.
"Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither
beginning of days nor end of life --" -- these specifications seemed
improbale for a mortal person like Duffey; and there was confusion about
each of the items as applied to himself.
Duffey remembered three different childhoods in the present or
twentieth century. dt was hard to reconcile them because they occupied the
same years. Duffey also remembered a much older and continuing life that was
always with his like a backdrop. This older backdrop contained camel's hair
tents flapping in the wind in a rocky country that was green with grass and
golden with sunlight. And there was a background sound that fit in
imperfectly with the semi-desert atmosphere. dt was the hooting of a
particular ship's horn, a strong, golden and pleasant sound that could be
produced by one ship only. Other people could not hear this ship's horn
however loud it sounded.
dn all other ways, Duffey was a pretty normal person. He had sorrel
hair and fire-blue eyes. He would be a solid but not overly large man. He
had a month that might start to grin before his eyes did. And he was
constantly banging his hands together and shouting "Yes, yes, my creature,
we will do this thing right away." He might be shouting this to a clay
chicken he had made with his hands, and to no one else at all.
For a very brief moment here, we dip into the latter-middle life of
Duffey just before that life breaks up and moves in several directions, but
mostly back in time from that latter diy. For this one brief moment that we
watch now, he is in his own 'Duffey's Walk-in Art Bijou' in New Orlcins. He
is eating and drinking with a frend there, and he is contemplating an urn
full of ashes that is on his cluttered table.
The urn is old and ornate and it had once belonged to a King of
Spain. There is nothing odd about keeping an urnful of ashes on one's table,
perhaps, but this case was a little different, The ashes were Duffey's own.
"The people whom you make, Duffey," said Mr. X who was the friend
Duffey was eating and drinking with, "you haven't any real control over
them, have you?"
"Over them? It's over you, X. You're one of the people I made. No, I
haven't much control over the bunch of you. You're a 'how sharper than a
serpent's tooth' crew."
"And someday you'll have to settle on one of your three childhoods
to be the real one, Duffey," X said.
"Yes, but I won't settle on it yet. I'll keep my options open. What
kind of man I can bee today or tomorrow will always depend on what kind of
boy I was yesterday. I really wish that I had more than three childhoods to
choose from. But beyond these three I come on only fragments.
CHAPTER II
Melchisedech Duffey, for one of his most likely childhoods, appeared
in either Harrison or Shelby or Pottawattamie County in lowa. The seven
cities that disputed the honor of being his birthplace were Minden,
Underwood, Beebee Town, Neola, Crescent, Avoca, and Union Township which was
not properly a city at all.
Melchisedech used to say that he arrived on the night of the turn of
the century, a night that also was claimed by the Papadiaboloi and Mr. X and
other potentous persons. Duffey may have lied about this: he may have been
several years younger than the century. And X may have lied about his own
case. Likely he was several years younger than Duffey even.
A fact given by all older relitive or pretended relative is that
Melchisedech's mother had died when he was five years old and that
thereafter he had lived with cousins until finally he came to live alone.
When Duffey was twelve years old, he began to go to boarding schools, and
that was the beginning of his living alone.
Duffey, between the ages of five and twelve, lived with cousins in
little towns and on big farms in Iowa, and he lived with kindred in a number
of cities: Dubuque, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Omaha, Kansas City, St.
Louis, Chicago, and Boston. The older relative also said that Duffey, far
from being without kindred, had many relatives: the Duffeys themselves, the
Kellys, Byrnes, McGuires, Crooks, Bagbys, Haleys, Healeys, Haydens, Kanes,
Whites, Hughes, Kennedys, Thompsons, Clancys. This older relative also said
that Duffey's original name was Michael and not Melchisedech.
"She is probably remembering my twin and not myself," Melchisedech
said when told about it. "Those supposed kindred that she mentions are good
people, and I know some of them. But they are not my kindred, and I have no
genealogy through them. I was born without father and without mother, and I
was five years old when I was born."
Here is a scene when Duffey was in Council Bluffs when five years
old ("The year when I was born," said Duffey). It was in a park on Lake
Manawa. People there were indulging in that weirdest of all total-body
masquerades, 'going swimming'. There was a high diving board over one part
of the lake and people were diving off of that board and disappearing into
the water. Duffey believed that the words 'diving' and 'dying' indicated the
same thing, as he had not observed either of them before.
"So thit is the way they do it," said Duffey, and he whacked his
hands together. "I always thought that people died in the house, but how
would you get rid of them if they died there? This is right, that the people
disappear into Lake Manawa when they die."
Other people were appearing from under the water, and this was a
more frightening thing. The new people were coming up out of the lake.
Duffey began to count the people who disappeared and those who appeared, and
he found that their numbers were almost the same. A strong man with
black moustache and black hair and with a blue bathing suit dived into the
water. After a very little while, a different strong man with black
moustache and hair came up out of the water. This second man had an evil
look, and he had flowing or blurred features. But he looked something like
the first man, like a caricature or deformity of the first man. It was
apparent now that the people who came up out of the water were evil people.
They would have to be watched.
It went on. Those who dived in were bright and pleasant looking.
Those who came out were mean, bad, twisted, with their faces half washed
away or only half formed, just not shaped right. The good persons on the
like shore made uneasy way for these evil persons who came up out of the
water.
One of the most evil of them all climbed up the ladder to the high
diving board. It was as if he himself intended to dive into the lake as the
good people were doing. Did they not notice that he was one of the bad ones
who had come up out of the lake and had then sneaked into the line with the
good ones? It made the flesh crawl.
That 'thing' that was going out now to dive off the board was the
evil strong man who had come out of the water after the first strong man had
gone in. What could such an evil creature change into a second time? Why was
nobody strong enough to prevent him doing it?
Then Duffey knew that he himself was strong enough to prevent it.
Should the monster come up out of the water after he had dived in, Duffey
would enforce the condition that he should come out of it dead. There was
spirit-wrenching on Duffey's part to come to this decision to intervene.
The monster dived into the witer. Duffey prevented him from coming
out of it again. There was a death struggle going on, inside the mind of the
monster and inside the mind of Duffey, inside that water that was Lake
Manawa and inside the water that is the oceanic matrix of everybody. Duffey
kept the monster in his watery prison. He kept him there till he knew that
he was dead. Then Duffey let go. "I just don't care any more," he said.
He couldn't see just what did happen afterwards. People gathered on
the lake shore and in the waters of the lake itself. They were taking a
great interest in a darkish form that they pulled out. People said that a
man had drowned and that he looked absolutely dreadful, that he was
strangled and horrifying.
Of course he was horrifying. But imagine how much more horrifying he
woould have been if he was alive when he came out of that water. That was
the first time that Duffey ever killed.
In that park in Council Bluffs the squirrels are coal black. It is
the only place in the world that has coal black squirrels.
There is another early scene. It's in Boston at about the same time.
It is almost the only Boston scene in the Iowa-based childhood, though in
later years, Duffey often passed himself off coming from Boston.
It was in a narrow park surrounded with buildings, and with a blue
sky over it. White clouds were sliding into the blue of that sky.
Melchisedech Duffey was with an older person, an uncle or cousin who called
him Mikey.
"You can mke clouds disappear by pointing at them, Mikey," the older
person said. "Pick out one, the smallest one you can see till you learn how
to do it. Now hate it with your whole mind, and you will make it dissapear."
Melchisedech did point his finger at a little split-off fringe of
cloud. He did concentrate on it in the spirit of hatred and extermination.
And he did make it disappear. He was startled by his new-found power. This
was the first real thing that he had ever made to disappear. Give a power
like this room to operate and there was no limit to what it could do.
Melchisedech picked out a larger cloud fragment and made it
disappear. And then he picked a still larger one. He could do it every time,
and he felt the power standing up in him. If he picked out too large a
cloud, it would leave the scene and slide behind buildings before he could
finish with it. But every cloud that escaped his power was greatly
diminished when it escaped.
"Is it working, Mikey?" the older person asked.
"Oh sure. Every time. Can all people do it?"
"All very smart people can do it. And some dogs can. Pointer dogs
can do it best. They get rid of a lot of clouds. When you're wanting rain,
then you always have to shut up the pointers in a shed where they can't see
the clouds. There wouldn't be a cloud left in the sky otherwise."
Melchisedech diminished or completely destroyed about forty clouds
that day. And the next day, he came back to the park again and destroyed
about half that many. He had thought it would be easier the second day, but
it was more difficult. The clouds were thicker and tougher that second day,
and small pieces of cloud were hard to find.
The third day in the park was disaster for Duffey. The clouds
covered almost the entire sky. It was hard to find small clouds to
exterminate. All were rolling around and joining themselves to bigger
clouds. Then Melchisedech found one and fastened onto it with pointing
finger and pointing mind. He commanded it to melt and disappear. It refused.
Duffey then used a word that compels obedience. He obliterated that
cloud. Then he pushed all the clouds back from the center of the sky and
left a sunny interval.
"Don't do that!" came a warning from somewhere. It was the voice of
a demiurge.
"I will do it!" Melchisedech Duffey insisted. But it took more and
more strength to hold the clouds apart. Then a lightning eye appeared right
in the middle. Lightning came out of that eye and slashed open a tree in the
park and buckled the pavement on the edge of the park, this not twenty feet
from Duffey.
"Oh, if you're going to do that," Duffey said, "do it to these."
Duffey held up a handful of sticks that he had taken from his pocket. Then,
to horrified observers, it seemed that the lightning came down and struck
the little boy's hand with blinding bolts, again and again, twelve times at
least.
"Now they will have some fire and juice in them," Melchisedech said.
"dIwondered how I was going to get it into them."
People came and got Duffey and pulled him out of that little park
and to the shelter of a nearby building. He yowled in fury at being drigged
away. He wasn't beaten. He could have continued to hold the clouds apart, to
push them even further apart, to destroy them all. He had just eased up on
it for a moment to get the lightning to animate his sticks.
There's a sort of explanation to this. When damp and traveling air
moves over dry and standing air, there will be masses and scatterings of
white clouds produced. But these clouds will all melt back into the dry,
standing air within minutes. You can watch the clouds fade on such a day.
You can predict, when you learn the trick of it, just how rapidly they will
melt. So it is no great trick, when conditions are right, to pick out a thin
cloud and point a finger at it, and make it fade. Every cloud will be fading
away into the air, and new clouds will be formingg and moving in, to fade in
their turn.
But, on the following day, the dry standing air will have become
less dry because of the clouds it has absorbed. Clouds may still fade away,
but it will be a much slower process. Then (and it is usually in the night
when the changeover comes) there is a dividing line after which the clouds
will be growing instead of shriveling. They will grow and grow. They will
swell up with lightning and noise. Then they'll break open in rain.
That is a neat explanation of the thing. It is even true, to a
limited extent. And yet there were and would always be times when
Melchisedech could command the winds and clouds and rains. He could do it
all. But sometimes he was afraid of it, and he held back.
But an important thing had been done in that early encounter. The
talisman sticks had been imbued with lightning.
On Duffey's first day in school (his first day in any school) he
always found that the class was very unorganized. So he would bang his hands
together and say: "It just seems that we are wasting our time here unless we
introduce a little bit of system. I have some good ideas on the subject.
We'll use them now."
"Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, don't let there be a smart kid again
this year!" Sister Mary Sabina prayed to herself out loud. This was Duffey's
first day in school ever, and he was a little bit direct about things. "Why
does there have to be a smart one every year?" Sister asked her heavenly
friends.
"We can break the class up into mixed groups of fours," Melchisedech
said, "with a responsible leader for each group. And we can --" This was
insufferable from a five year old boy who shouldn't have been allowed into
school for another year.
"Go ahead and organize it then," Sister said. "You will anyhow.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, remember, when I come to my last agony, that I bore
these things cheerfully."
So Duffey orginized his first class. He did a pretty good job of it
too.
CHAPTER III
Now here's a bit about the three slant-faced persons. Duffey saw
them the first time when he was about six years old.
They were three boys who were two years older and two years bigger
than himself. They had slack mouths and slant faces, and they slouched along
with their hands in their pockets and with knives in their hands. This was
in the big town house where Duffey was living with some of his pretended
kindred. It was the second largest house in town, and was on the top of the
second highest hill.
Duffey was looking out of the Prisoner John Window when he first saw
those three persons. That was a little, peaked, fourth-floor or attic window
that was off of the high room where Melchisedech had his domain. It was not
in the main attic room as were the other three high windows that looked out
in three directions. The Prisoner John Window was in a little closet or cell
off the main attic room. Duffey heard the three slant-faced boys in the road
down below though they thought that they moved in silence. He came to the
window to watch them. He saw them come to the door, and he heard his
aunt-of-that-season open the door to talk to them. "That little boy in
this house, can he come out and play?" one of the slant-faces asked. And the
other two slant-faces formed silent words "We want to kill him". But Duffey
could read mouth.
"Oh yes, yes," said the aunt, And she came back into the house
calling "Melky, Melky!" But Melchiscdech Duffey was out of the opposite
attic window and he swung by his vine-covered rope to a corner downspout,
and then down it to the ground like a hot-footed squirrel. He was out
through the squash rows and the corn rows of the garden, and off into
Mayfield's Meadow. And he stayed there for a couple of hours.
"There were three nice little boys here while you were gone. They
wanted you to play with them but I couldn't find you," the aunt said when he
returned.
"Oh nice little boys you nanny goat! " Melchisedech howled. "They're
mean ones. They came to kill me."
"Oh Melky, what all imagination you have," the aunt exclaimed.
It was about two months later that Melchisedech saw the same
slant-faced boys again. He had been for a morning walk, and he came back to
the house. He looked up, and there were the three of them, inside the house,
looking out of the Prisoner John Window. It was called the Prisoner John
Window by Duffey if by no one else, because Prisoner John had once been held
captive for twenty years in that little closet. He used to look out of that
window all day. That was back in the Civil War days.
But now these three boys were inside the house itself, looking out
of that high window and waiting for Duffey to come so that they might kill
him. "He sees us," one of the boys said.
"No. The sun's in his eyes. He can't see us," the second one said.
"We'll wait for him here, and we'll kill him when he comes up," the
third boy mouthed. Melchisedech was still some distance off, but he could
read mouth. In fear and trembling he came up to the house. They'd kill him
of course, but it was better to be killed than to let any of the big people
know that you were afraid of anything.
"Melky, where were you?" the aunt asked suddenly from somewhere.
"Your trunk is already in the buggy. You didn't forget that you were going
to the country this morning, did you? It's time to get in the buggy now."
"I forgot it for just a little while," Melchisedech said.
"Is there anything you wint to get from the attic before you leave?"
"No, there sure isn't anything I want to go up there for," he said.
He got in the buggy to go and spend three months in the country, and he was
chortling inside. He laughed at those boys spending all day and all night
there for three months waiting for him to come back so they could kill him.
It was two months later that they heard in the country that the
house in town had burned down. Everybody had gotten out of it all right, and
nobody knew what had caused the fire.
"They knocked over the old wobbly lamp up there, that's what caused
the fire," Melchisedech said, "and I hope that they didn't get out all
right. If they rake the ashes good, they ought to find three strings of
bones in them." But he was wrong.
Melchisedech hoped that he was rid of his three slant-faced enemies.
And he thought that he was -- for five years.
When Melchiscdech was eight yeirs old, he was living one winter in a
middle-sized Iowa town with people who pretended to be his relations. He was
one of the boys who served 6:30 mass every morning. The pretended relations
lived right across the road from the church, so Melchisedech was able to get
there no matter how deep the snow might be or how severe the storm.
The church had an old rope-operated bell. When pulled with
sufficient force or weight, the rope would rock the bell into movement to
send its heavy booming voice out over the whole town. This would be heard
with a wakening delight by all persons except some of the Protestants.
But if the rope was pulled with insufficient force, there was no way
that the bell could be set into motion. It would not stir or move at all to
a light pull. It followed a quantum law. Too little was nothing at all to
it. So the institution of the 'fat altar boy' had come about. One of the
four young boys who served every morning had to be heavy enough to set the
bell into motion when he swung on the rope.
But there came a day when the fat altar boy was sick with pneumonia,
and there was consternation among the other three of them. None of them was
heavy enough to set the bell into motion when he swung on the rope. The
other two cowards pointed at Melchisedech. So he had to be the 'fat altar
boy' and he weighed only sixty-three pounds. The genuine fat altar boy had
weighed a hundred and twenty pounds before he got the pneumonia.
Melchisedch said silent prayers. Then he made a mighty leap and
caught the end of the rope. He danlgled there and was unable to budge the
mighty bell an inch. He dangled there, and he was impassioned with a golden
fury. Was he a magician for nothing?
"I am the golden boy! I am the boy king!" he roared. He roared it
not in sound but in some other medium. "It is mine to order. It is mine to
command. I command that the hand of an invisible giant come down and help me
to pull the rope."
It happened. The giant hand came down and seized the rope. The bell
was rocked three times, higher ind deeper each time, and then it broke into
its beautifil and roaring sound. The people all over town woke with the
secure feeling that it was a giant hand on the rope, and that it was the
hand of a sanctioned giant. The giant was invisible, but the hand was
visible. It was seen clearly by the other three boys.
"Who does the hand belong to?" they asked Duffey. "How could a hand
be that big?"
"It belongs to one of my giants," Duffey told them. "They have to do
anything I command them, but I'm always reasonable."
"How many of them are there?" the boys asked.
"There's about a dozen that I've used. I think there will always be
as many as I need."
Well, Melchisedech was a boy magician and a boy-king, and he proved
it several times. Many who saw his proofs have since died, or have forgotten
about them. But several still remember.
Melchisedech was shunted from place to plice quite a bit. Did he
really have three separate and discrete childhoods at the same time, one of
them mostly in Iowa, one of them in St. Louis, and one of them in Boston?
This does not seem possible, but doubting it or denying it is not a real
impediment to its having happened.
There is one explanation: that Melchisedech did have (in some
context or other) a brother one year younger than himself and a sister or
step-sister two years older than himself. These were living, in those years,
with other kindred in other places. And the children were taken a great
distance to visit each other almost every vear. Some of the pretended
kindred worked for railroads, and they and their families could travel free
on all the lines so that there was no great expense involved on the trips.
Now the fact was that Melchisedech was an invader and ransacker and
pirate of minds. He would visit with brother or sister for a week, and he
could appropriate and keep every experience that brother or sister
(step-sister) had had for a whole year, every touch and seeing and feeling
and smell and notion and daydream. Or at least one of the three young
persons could do such things, could be such a pirate as to steal all the
experiences of the other two. And this one of them, whichever he was, bore
the group name of Melchisedech.
This may explain some of the anomalies about the St. Louis
childhood. This is the most intricate of all of them and it is wrapped in
baffling symbolism and allegories. This was mainly the childhood of the
sister-person, which doesn't prevent it being the authentic childhood.
Everything seems to have a second meaning here: it is one rich tangle. When,
in later yeers, Melchisedech had himself analyzed, this particular rich
tangle became a prime target for the analyst. There was concatenated
strangeness in it. There were motifs of high artistry running all through
it. There was sublimity of concept, and something new in transference and
understanding. Yes, and there was a slightly bovine element in it that was
not in Melchisedech Prime. Then, under the forceful pursuit of the analyst,
the tangle quacked once, laid an addled egg, and expired.
"I do not know how it came about," the analyst said, "but at one
period of your life, for half a dozen of the early years, you were a girl. I
mean it. You were a girl physically and mentally and psychically. Can you
fill me in on that?"
"Nah," Duffey had said. He had asked for his bill, paid it, left the
analyst without another word. But he laughed a lot about it privately.
But it was true that Melchisedech was an invader and ransacker and
pirate of minds. There could be forty Melchisedech-aged children in a small
town, and Melchisedech would have entered the minds of all of them and
appropriated the contents. He would know every detail of the insides of
every one of their families, and in great fullness and feeling. He knew so
much about people and places that both people and places came to fear him.
Oh how he had the details!
There was a shingle-block that served as a back step for one house.
There was a wooden 'crossing' on a street that he did not use (the
'Crossings' bridged the mud gutters from dirt paths to dirt roads) that was
of wood a little different from its fellows, ind Melchisedech would remember
details of grain and color of that crossing for more than fifty years. There
was a notched ear on one of the big coach horses in the livery stable; there
was box-elder wood in the wood box of one of the houses, and elm wood in the
wood box of the next house. Some of these things were known by acute
observation and memory, and some of them were robbed from other minds. But
it was all one realm to Melchisedech.
There were sacks of hazel nuts on the back porches of some houses,
and sacks of walnuts on the back porches of others. But in St. Louis,
sometimes, they had gunny sacks full of pecans. There were red squirrels in
Iowa and gray sqirrels in St. Louis. But in Boston they didn't even know
what a squirrel was.
And there were the iron words of household things, many of the words
stolen out of minds. There were pump handles with the iron words 'Acme Pump
Company' on them, and pump handles with the words 'Rock Island Pump
Company". There were other iron letters on other handles and bodies:
'Binghampton' or 'Wisconsin' or 'Burn' or 'Cheese Factory' on covers of milk
cans, 'Peerless' or 'Sears' on the handles of cream separators, 'Sturgis' or
'Curtis Improved' or 'Star Barrel' on churns, 'Armstrong's' on cheese
presses, 'S.R. & Co.' or 'Peter Wright' on anvils, 'Schofleids' or 'Auto
Ball Bearing' on grindstones, 'Rdd Ridge' or 'Hubbard's' or 'Jamestown' on
axe heads. Melchiscdech loved stolen iron words that really belonged to
other households than his own. He loved everything that was noticed by
anyone else, and he appropriated it to himself. In McGuire's house, they had
a potty that came all the way from Philadelphia. Melchisedech could see it
plainly, with the scrolled porcelain words on it. And he had never been in
McGuire's house. But enough of that.
Behind all these flimsy things in the temporal world, there was a
more genuine childhood in which Melchisedech was the Boy King, in which he
had been the Boy King for thousands of years. This was the solid base behind
all the lives. The other and later things are the shadows of it. The Boy
King with the golden hands was real. His dromedary hide tents were real. His
flocks and his green pastures and his silver rivers were genuine. His groves
of figs and dates and olives and apricots and pomegranates were more real
than were the apple trees of Iowa or the plum and peach trees of Missouri.
His fields of sesame and millet were more real than the wheat and corn
fields of Iowa and Nebraska. His tobacco bushes and incense bushes and
coffee bushes were living reality. His grape vines were authentic, and his
silk worms were valid. His silk from camel and ass and ewe and gazelle and
cow and India buffalo was milk in actuality. He had meat from all these
animals, and from all harts and stags, from the swift pigs of Persia, and
from a hundred sorts of fowl. He was the Boy King with the golden hands. He
set out bread and wine for all visitors, sometimes more than a million of
them a day, and he performed miracles without seeming to do so.
Mostly he called up giants, both visible and invisible, to effect
his miracles. They could break up rocks and boulders and permit springs and
rivers to flow. They also could bring about the 'Slaughter of the Kings', of
rival kings. For cures of blindness and lameness, Melchisedech would place
his own golden hands on the ailing parts, and the physician could then
effect cures. Melchisedech could turn stories into birds and set them to
flying. The world would long since have run out of birds if it had not been
for this.
Mostly Melchisedech kept his powers hidden. He was always there in
his full powers, but one of his powers was invisibility. Melchisedech kept
his person as the Boy King invisible most of the time. The body he wore was
known as the 'urchin disguise'.
And Melchiscdech had talismans: nobody knows how many of them. Every
time he gave one away, he somehow received or made another one to take its
place. He had given the first one away when he was no more than three years
old, to an Italian man who was selling little cakes out of a hokey-pokey
pushcart. And this was to bring about or create the first of the persons who
would make up the Duffey Nation. These talismans, which represented special
gifts or blessings or graces or formations, especially to one not yet born,
cannot be easily described.
"He got the first of them out of a box of crackerjacks," said Aunt
Mary Ellen Hart (one of the pretended kindred), "but it's much bigger now
than it was when he got it out of the box, and I just don't know how that
came about. I don't know what he made all the others out of, but he made
them to look quite a bit like the first one. And he keeps other things,
Charles. He keeps jars full of blood and such things."
"I used to do that too," said Charles Hart, one of the pretended
uncles. "There's no harm in having jars of blood. You can catch weasels if
you have blood around. They'll come to it. There's no harm at all in that
boy." Melchisedech gave these talismans to various persons, mostly on
sudden impulse to persons he had never seen before. They were always to
powerful effect, working their way on unborn kindred of these people. This
was part of the process by which Duffey actually manufactured people.
Here is a bit when Duffey was about eleven years old. For several
weeks he had been visiting kindred on a farm where he had never been before.
It was early summer and early morning. Melchisedech had gone out through
orchards to a field of timothy hay. He lay down there, just about a rod from
a fence corner and within the hay. The timothy was tall, and Melchisedcch
was completely hidden.
He heard several sounds. Two sounds were from the bush-grown
fence-rows. One was from the extent of timothy hay toward the center of the
field. These three sounds were intended to be muffled.
Then there was another sound so soft that it needed no muffling at
all. It was followed by a little yelping bark that was rusty from disuse. It
was a fox bark. Melchisedech knew foxes, but this one he knew in a different
wiy from the regular foxes of the field. The yelping bark came again, more
insistently.
Melchisedech sat up. Then he lcpt to his feet and was running. A
person maty live all his life in kit-fox country and see none or maybe one
of these smallest foxes. And he would have to live ten lives in kit-fox
country before he heard the rusty yap of one of them. But Melchisedech saw
and heard the kit-fox now. He knew what it was, for it was his totem animal.
And he knew that it had come to warn him.
The kit-fox was as sorrel of hair as was Duffey. He was as grinning
of month and as apprehensive of eye as Duffey was. "But for size, we look
about the same," Duffey took time to think as he ran and as he weighed other
things with his own apprehensive eyes. Two of the slack-mouthed,
slanted-faced boys were coming over the two corner jags of the fence.
Another of them was coming out of the deep timothy ahead of Duffey, and
Duffey was surrounded. Melchlscdech Duffey had grown since he had seen these
boys before, but they had grown faster. They were still quite a bit older
and quite a bit bigger than he was. They intended to kill him, and they had
caught him cold. Which way to go? Duffey was already going. He was going the
way the kit-fox went.
The kit-fox, which avoids humans more than does any other of North
America, made for one of the boys who was clearing the fence. So Duffey made
for him too. Any way that Duffey should veer off, the boys would have the
interceptors' angle on him, and they would hivc his back or flank undefended
to their knives.
The kit-fox took the slant-faced boy low to make him suitable, and
Duffey took him high to bowl him over. Then Duffey cleared the fence with a
leap as high is his own head, and he had all three of the boys behind him.
They'd not catch him now if he could outrun his own blood loss. What blood
loss? Duffey was startled to find how badly he was bleeding.
That slant-faced boy had knifed Duffey deeply, and he knew how to
use a knife. He'd have killed Duffey if the kit-fox hadn't slashed him as
sharply is to make him stumble and to give Duffey the edge to bowl him over.
Duffey very nearly bled to death from that one, but his fortune
held. He was staunched and saved, and in ten days he was well. It had been a
providential kit-fox thatt Duffey had seen, of course. No other kind is ever
seen. CHAPTER IV
But childhoods, even gold or sorrel-colored childhoods, are quickly
lived through. (This doesn't apply to the basic childhood which goes on for
thousands of years.) There are simply not very many years to a regular
childhood. When he was twelve years old, Melchiscdech Duffey was sent away
to the first of his boarding schools. So, by his own count at least, his
young manhood had begun.
Other things being equal, it is only the difficult child-people who
are sent away to boarding schools for their early high school years. And
when the difficult child-people go, there is always an odd sound behind
them, the sound of hands being washed. The hands are being washed, by
parents, by guardians, by kindred, by (in a special case here) well-meaning
pretended kindred.
The more difficult children, of course, are those who are sent away
even before they reach the high school years, so Melchisedech had not been
one of the outrageously difficult ones. He had never given people trouble.
He had only given them unease, as being something out of the cuckoo's nest
and not out of their own.
But Duffey's three new friends, with whom he now formed a conspiracy
and consensus, would fall into the outrageously difficult class by this
test. It had an advantage. They knew their way around boarding schools. Yet
they seemed to be the three brightest and most intelligent and most pleasant
persons ever. Well, Charley Murray was sleepy a lot of the time, and yet he
was bright.
This Chirley Murray was from St. Louis. Charley and Melchisedech
discovered that they knew many of the same people there. That Melchisedech
knew them only out of the mind of his sister or stepsister and not from his
own encounters was something that he did not tell Murray. Murray did magic
tricks. He had a dozen magic sets and a score of magic trick books. When he
摘要：

MORETHANMELCHISEDECHVOLUMEONE:TALESOFCHICAGOBookOne:EarlyBoyhoodofaMagusWeknowthesignathwartthewreckThesignthathangsaboutyourneck,WhereOnemorethanMelchisedechIsDeadandneverdies.G.K.ChestertonBalladoftheWhiteHorseCHAPTERIWell,whatdoyouthinkismaintainingtheworldonevenitswobblywaysifitisnottheextraordi...

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