dikathapon

From Jack Main, a work in progress

The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

—William Shakespeare

part III

I’m sitting here with an I-give-up grin on my face, shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head. It might look a little odd to the fly on the wall, since I’m otherwise alone, but I can’t help it. It’s what happens every time I think about this, how the subject of Dikathapon turned out to be the main order of business the last time I saw the old man. Construction on the Long Valley Dam was fairly far along at that point in time, so I’d returned to Hop Springs for a short stretch in order to help my mother get ready for her move. Word was he’d become “forgetful,” as she charitably put it, and there was some talk of his moving—or being moved—out of the cabin on Tools Creek to a room in town. The Spring House, where he’d often stayed in winter, was going to remain open till the last minute—they were doing a land-office business with the construction people—so the thought was maybe he’d agree to that. My only thought was I’d better get out to the cabin if I wanted to see him in his element one last time. So, on a spectacular Indian Summer afternoon, out I went. I found him, door ajar, sitting in his chair, chewing on an unlit cigar. “Hey, Jack,” he said, offhandedly, by way of greeting. It was as if I’d been there only yesterday. “Do you remember Dikathapon?” “Do I remember Dikathapon?” I responded. There are certain things you never forget. “He was the only blue person I ever met!” “You remember our going out to visit with him then?” “Of course.” I had been standing at the threshold, leaning in, my hand still on the doorknob. I took the liberty now of coming all the way in and standing, arms folded, in front of the stove. A small all-purpose table, pushed flush against the rear-window sill, stood between us. “I was just thinking about it.” He went into a reverie briefly, came back out. “His being on bended knee as we departed.” Pause. “He looked like Al Jolson in a way. The tears streaming down his face.” Another pause. “Except blue instead of black.” “Alathapon Jolson,” I said. The association never would have occurred to me. “Ha!” he said. “Yes.” I could see he was still thinking. I waited. “Memories, Jack,” he said, finally. “Keep the funny ones”—he was looking around for his spit can—“chuck the rest.” Okay, fine, I was thinking, but now that you’ve brought it up, what I remember is, you were firing over my head that day. I stooped, retrieved the can, which he kept under the stove, and handed it to him across the table. “What was all that business about the white mare, do you remember? Otto Schwenzer’s horse.” “What’s that now?” He spit in the can and set it on the floor beside his chair. “That’s just it, I don’t know. You never would tell me. You sure got old Dikathapon going with it, though. Something about Schwenzer’s horse kicking over the fence and running away all the time. You seemed to be hinting that Dikathapon had something to do with it.” The old man sat with the cigar clenched in his jaws and pondered. Then, slowly, a grin spread across his face. He looked at me hard. “How old would you say you are now, Jack?” “Old enough to know better.” “You? Impossible. Heck, I ain’t that old yet.” He rolled the cigar between his fingers, staring at it, seemed to wander off somewhere for a moment, then snapped back. “You want one of these?” I shook my head. “Well, I do.” He gestured with his chin. “Give me a light, will you?” The matches were on a shelf over the stove. I grabbed the box and tossed it on the table, then recalling the pleasure he derived from small courtesies, giving and receiving, picked it back up, took out a match, and struck one for him. He leaned forward, smiling, and I detected that he was quivering slightly, more or less all over. You have to puff pretty hard to get a wet cigar going, but he managed it, then sat back, satisfied. “You have to understand, there are certain duties and privileges that attach to royalty, certain obligatory obligations, certain hortatory subjunctives.” He took a couple more puffs in quick succession, creating an excess of smoke. I tried to breathe shallowly. “But I’ll give it to you straight, Jack … how long have we known each other?” He squinted at me through the smoke. “Thirty years?” “We haven’t either … thirty?!” He eyed me up and down, exaggeratedly. “Why, I remember when your father—” I must have winced, if so from habit, the scar from that wound having faded away to nothing with the years. Maybe the tender spot, if he had hit one, was for the old man himself, a man I’d loved the way other boys love their fathers, so I’d always thought, or anyway, their grandfathers. The trouble was, he’d always been old from my point of view, but now, after thirty years, he really was. And I was not resigned to it. Regardless, he read the headwind and tacked. “Well, so, where was I?” “Dikathapon,” I said, prompting him, “the white mare?” “Oh yes.” He took a long draw on the cigar, then exhaled in a controlled gentlemanly fashion. “You see, Jack, it all goes back to the old country. I may not be Irish, but you are, time you knew. Dikathapon was a Connell, God bless him—Dick Connell—good, royal, Irish stock. And do you know what the King of the Connells—of Clan Connell—do you know what King Connell had to do to become king?” “I do not,” I said, affecting a light brogue now, in the spirit of the thing. “Well, your mother brought you up good, so of course you don’t. But I’ll tell you. Forget Robert Frost, forget the Marine Band, forget Mamie Eisenhower or what have you, inauguration day up Derry way came down to one thing and one thing only.” He paused, drew on the cigar, blew the smoke out slowly, waiting for me to press him. “And what was that?” I asked, indulging him. “Hmm?” he said, pretending to lose the thread now, a little cat and mouse. “Unless I’m somehow mistaken, I believe the question on the table is how were the Connell kings inaugurated?” “Oh, that. That.” He gazed out the window, a thoughtful expression on his face. “It’s just what you’d expect, of course.” I waited. “Public copulation with a horse.” I’d been leaning against the stove, now I bolted upright. “What!” “That’s right, Jack.” He took several quick puffs on his cigar then waved it around in the smoke exaggeratedly, as if he were intent on clearing the air around this subject. “And not just any horse, Jack, not just any horse.” He was looking me in the eye to see how this piece of ancient Celtic lore was registering. “But a white mare.” I didn’t know what to say. Was he suggesting that Dikathapon …? “Kay-O, that was her name,” he said, interrupting my train of thought. “As handsome a specimen of horse flesh as ever there was, she was. From muzzle to mane, withers to dock, she was every inch a sailor, through and through. And white … as … milk. I’m sure you can see how a man like Dikathapon might have taken a fancy?” “You can’t be serious.” “Well … a simple man, living alone like that. And a blue man, besides, don’t forget, blue from head to two.” “Who could forget?” “And a Connell, Jack. A Connell!” He leaned forward in his chair and, trembling quite perceptibly now, pointed his cigar at me. “Droit du seigneur,” he said, shaking the cigar till the ash fell onto the floor, “divine right of kings, for goddsakes.” He clamped the cigar in his mouth, and sat back, point proved. “You tell me, Jack,” he said, quietly, out of the unoccupied corner of his mouth, “you tell me.” I leaned back against the edge of the stove, let my gaze wander around the cabin as I pondered this. It was an ordered world. Dishes neatly racked, bed tightly made, books shelved, floor swept (excepting the cigar ash), fishing rods by the door, and stack after stack of Scientific Americans piled waist-high against one wall. The late-autumn light, streaming in through the window, animated the cigar smoke which had fallen into a kind of order of its own, spiraling lazily upward from its source to merge into a sagging stratus cloud that drifted across the ceiling then dissolved. I could not imagine the old man anywhere in the universe but here, in this cabin, on Tools Creek. “Well, she was a fine-looking animal, I will give you that,” I said finally. Somewhere, in the distance, a grouse began to drum. “Ha, Jack!” The old man beamed. “I knew you’d understand.” “Whoa!” I said. I sensed a trap. “I don’t know about that.” “Whoa, indeed,” he said, lightly rubbing his hairless dome with his cigar hand and grinning, eyebrows raised, from ear to ear. “Whoa, indeed.” And that, make of it what you will, was by and large it, as I say, the main thing we talked about on the occasion in question, the last time I saw the old man.

Thomas Shane is a contributing editor for Arcadia. His story “Channel Surfing” can be found online at Per Contra, “The Catbird’s Cry” at Mount Hope. Other publication credits include Aethlon, American Way, Elysian Fields, Light, Other Voices, River Oak Review, Slippery Elm and Trajectory, and the anthologies Fresh Water and When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50. He has also been runner-up or finalist in a number of writing contests, including the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the International Imitation Hemingway Competition, and the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest.

For more work by Thomas Shane, visit his page at our Online Sundries site.

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