A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport (ebook reader .txt) 📕

and so I named you Hitch, by your leave, taking silence for assent. How have you fared since then?

There was a flicker of leaves, a deepening of the wood's silence.

—You are not afraid, are you, of my walking stick leaning here against the log? It is just a length of wood with a silver knob which gentlemen in Copenhagen carry about with them. It goes with my hat here, and my gloves. They make a set of things to indicate to the world that we have money and that we pretend to morals approved of by the police and the clergy. Come out into the open.

In a shared fish, said Demokritos, there are no bones.

—So let me tell you a story that may shed light on our predicament. There was once a highwayman in England who disguised himself with a great bagwig, such as the noted Samuel Johnson was the last to wear in polite society. When a wayfarer came along the road he worked, so to speak, he emerged from behind a bush, giving the wayfarer the choice of giving up his money or his life. The frightened wayfarer quailed at his pistol, and probably at his wig, and turned over to him his horse and purse.

The highwayman, riding away, threw the wig by the side of the road, where a pedestrian later found it, and put it on as windfall finery.

Meanwhile, the wayfarer who had been robbed came to a town where the pedestrian with his newfound wig had also just arrived. The wayfarer, seeing him, called out for the bailiff and had him charged before the magistrate with highway robbery. He would, he testified, know that wig anywhere.

The magistrate sentenced the pedestrian to be hanged.

Now this was a small town, and the assizes drew a large crowd, among whom was the highwayman.

—Fool! he cried out to the magistrate. You are sending an innocent man to the gallows. Look, give me the wig, and I will put it on and say, Your money or your life, and this false accuser will see his mistake. Yes, yes! the accuser said. That is the voice I heard from under the great wig.

The magistrate, however, ruled that the first identification was made under oath, before God, and that the sentence, pronounced through the majesty of the law, had been passed. And must stand.

Surely there was a shifting of shadows over there, between the Norway pine and the larch, upward and sideways, where the troll must be.

It would be charming if the troll looked like a Danish child, if it upended itself and stood on its head, pedalling its feet in the air and turning pink in the face. Or stand on its right leg with its left foot hooked around its neck, like the Gypsy acrobats on market day.

—The law, you see, is unbending. We made the law after the manner of the god, so it has nothing human in it. Let me tell you about the god. When he brought his people out of bondage in Aegypt, he led them to Kanaan, but for forty years they wandered in the desert, where the god fed them with a white fluffy bread, manna it was called, of which they became tired. So they asked for something different, something savory. Like quails, quails roasted brown on a spit over a fire, basted in their own juice, salted and rubbed with sage. So the god, who was in a proper snit about their ingratitude and greed, with their placing the sensuality of taste before a just appreciation of his grandeur and might, said:

—Ye shall eat until it comes out of your nose!

And a hail of dead quail fell from the sky, and his people dressed and cooked them, and (here I quote Scripture) even as the meat was yet in their teeth, the god caused a deadly plague to kill them who had eaten of the quail.

—What do you think of that? It was a prayer he was answering.

The troll's eyes were those of a happy child and therefore unreadable, for a child's happiness is something we have all had to forget. It is a happiness that comes from wrenching the hands off the clock, of pitching Grandpa's false teeth in the fire, of stealing, of lying, of pulling the cat's tail, of shattering the china vase, of hiding from one's parents to make them sick with worry, of hitting one's best friend's toes with the hammer. Of a child with beautiful hair, as if of spun and curled gold, and with big blue eyes, culture says behold an angel! and nature says here is your own personal devil.

A bird in those branches, or the troll?

—Listen! he said. You see me here in my great coat of German cut (in which I have heard Schelling lecture, for German auditoria are as cold as Greenland), gloves, stovepipe trews, cane, and handkerchief up my sleeve, but you cannot see from any of this, from my large nose or the fact that my brother Peter is a bishop, that I live in a city of merchants who imagine themselves to be Christians. You might as well say that a banjo player from Louisiana is Mozart.

You cannot guess from any of this that my father once shook his fist at the god on a hill in Jylland, and cursed him to his face.

The troll, the troll! But no: a hare or fox whose home this wood is.

Trolls belonged, Mr. Churchyard imagined, to the genera of toadstools, in the same way that trees were kin to angels. Mr. Churchyard's century was looking into nature, and the Germans were scrutinizing Scripture. Why have the god, after all, when they have Hegel?

Were not there passages in Scripture where the scribes wrote the opposite of what mercy and fear suggested that they suppress? Abraham most certainly sacrificed Isaac.

His father had cursed the god and moved to Copenhagen and prospered as a merchant, money begetting money in his coffers. He died in the arms of angels bearing him to heaven.

The corollary, is it not, is that if we pray we are answered with death while the meat of the quail is yet in our teeth. But the world is here, and to despair is sin. Even in their churches the tall light, the ungiving