Read Online An Embarrassment of Riches by James Howard Kunstler - Free Book Online Page B

“Sweet dreams.”
    He climbed downstairs, taking the candle with him. Soon the house was dark, save the flickering glow of the hearth. Despite my bindings, sleep quickly overwhelmed me. I don’t know how much later it was that I awoke to the sensation of hands creeping across my breast, opening my shirt buttons, then foraging in my breeches.
    â€œO, no!” I cried before the monster stuffed a rag in my mouth. I next felt her soft, warm, feminine flesh bear its weight upon me, while her mouth issued the telltale whistling exhalations.
    But her face was not visible to me in that near-total darkness, and I would be less than candid to aver that I was not seized by a most shameful and uncontrollable priapism, the climax of which was a taste of the life everlasting that makes us all links in the Great Chain of Being.

3
    I awoke to the screams of quarreling blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) and the scratching of squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) as they scurried over the roof. I realized at once, and to my horror, where I was. Bessie snuggled beside me. She stirred, lifted her frightful visage, and tenderly whistled words that, after lengthy cogitation, I made out to be “good morning, sweetheart.” My heart swam amongst my liver and lights.
    â€œBe kind, my pet, and untie these bonds,” said I cajolingly. She stuffed the rag back in my mouth and had her wicked way with me again, under the steamy bearskin robe. The human mind is a curious engine, for in her repeated, furious assaults I began to imagine that I was at the mercy of a gigantic rabbit. The delusion was, I regret to confess, not wholly unpleasant, for, as rabbits go, she would have made an handsome one. Far into age, the mere sight of Lepus americanus browsing on a greensward has prompted in me a shameful excitation.
    Soon voices were audible below and the cottage filled with the aroma of boiled coffee. Bessie loosed my bonds, put on one of her tattered dresses, and departed down the ladder. I waited what I hoped would seem a decent interval, and went down myself. Bilbo was fussing at the fireside. The doors and windows were flung open. Outside it was a beautiful spring day, the woods ringing with birdsong. Uncle sat grumpily at the dining table.
    Bilbo, for his part, had awakened in spirits exceedingly buoyant. With a breakfast of venison chops and biscuits drenched in molasses, he pored over the map President Jefferson had given us.
    â€œHmmmmm. Ahhhhh. Ummmmm.”
    He decided at length, on the basis of my prevarications, that we should embark down the Ohio thirty leagues, turn north up the Dismal River, now called the Scioto, into the country of the Shannoah, and there search around the vicinity of that wilderness footpath known as Zane’s Trace for the fountain of youth. I assured him that I would recognize the spot when we arrived nearby.
    It was midmorning when we had reloaded our keelboat with many of the supplies lately pillaged by our business partner. It was Bilbo’s idea to drain the cask of Monongahela into our specimen jars.
    â€œWe shall be needing both whiskey and jars,” he reasoned, “and by the time we have drained all these vessels of whiskey, we shall have reached our grail of fortune, so to speak, and the bottles will be ready to receive that stronger liquor that shall be the wonder and benefactor of all mankind.”
    By noon, we were ready to go. Bilbo stood on the silty beach facing his stolid little cottage in the verdure. He called to those two oddities of nature who constituted his kith and kin, put one prehensile arm around his daughter’s shoulder, placed his other hands [O3]upon the dwarf’s black-curled head, and bid adieu to that little island haven that had been his home in the wilderness lo these many years. Uncle and I stood mutely aside whilst the trio had their little ceremony, Bilbo himself weeping great drafts of parting tears. It was a very affecting scene—until one