Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Текущая страница: 41 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

…a fatal letter wings its way

Across the sea, like a bird of prey…

Lo! The young Baron of St. Castine,

Swift as the wind is, and as wild,

Has married a dusky Tarratine,

Has married Madocawando’s child!

et cetera.)

On October 24, 1861, when the first transcontinental telegraph message links sea to shining sea and replaces the Pony Express, Henrietta Burlingame, 49, gives birth to my grandfather, Andrew Burlingame Cook V. The father is unknown: it is not necessarily Henrietta’s brother. The perfectly ambiguous facts are that just nine months earlier the twins had either quarreled or pretended to quarrel seriously for the first time in their lives – not, ostensibly, over some transgression of the former limits of their intimacy or the election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the Southern states, but over the merits of Karl Marx’s thesis (in his essay The 18th Brumaire and the Court of Louis Napoleon) that great events and personages in history tend to occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce – and separated. Henry (who agreed with the second proposition but not the first, given the multiple repetitions in their own genealogy) moved to Washington; Henrietta (who believed that the recurrences were as often tragic as the originals, e.g., Tecumseh’s reenactment of Pontiac’s conspiracy) to the Eastern Shore, where in April – as Baltimoreans reenacted in 1861 their bloody riots of 1812—she found herself unambiguously three months pregnant, and remained in seclusion until her child was born.

Once the separation is effected, their letters become entirely fond, insofar as one can decipher their private coinages and allusions and sort out reciprocal ironies. In addition to the literary reminiscences already mentioned, they chaffingly criticize each other’s positions vis-à-vis the war so long ago predicted in Joel Barlow’s Columbiad; also vis-à-vis their father’s prenatal letters to them. Neither twin has anything to do with the fighting. Henry declares or pretends to declare for the Union, Henrietta for the Confederacy. Henry’s reading of their father’s letters is that they were disingenuous: that Andrew IV exhorted them not to rebel against him exactly in order to provoke their rebellion – i.e., to lead them to work against the sort of stalemate he “pretended to hope for in the 1812 War” and for “the Manifest Destiny he actually believed in.” Henrietta in her turn maintains that their father’s exhortation was perfectly sincere.

Of course it is quite possible that the twins were secretly in league. They are together in New York City at the time of the great draft riots of July 1863, in which 100 people are killed; they are together in Ford’s Theater in April 1865, when Lincoln is assassinated by the erratic son of their old friends the Booths of Baltimore. The Union is preserved, however sorely; the slaves are emancipated, if not exactly free. The Dominion of Canada is about to be established; the first U.S. postcard will soon be issued. Where are Henry and Henrietta?

Why, they are once more in their true womb, Castines Hundred. There the new baron and baroness have been killed in an unfortunate carriage accident, leaving a baby son named Henri Castine IV (they have their own Pattern, of no concern to us here). The twins sell their Baltimore property and die to the world; not even literature much engages them now. They raise the young cousins with benign indifference. Andrew V displays a precocious interest in the family history; they neither foster nor discourage it. He is shown the “1812 letters” of his grandsire and namesake, the other documents of the family, his great-grandfather’s pocketwatch; but his insistent questions – especially concerning his parents’ own activities (he does not shy from referring to the twins thus) – are answered with a smile, a shrug, an equivocation.

The boy decides, for example, that their obscure movements during the war were a cover for certain exploits in the Great Lakes region: the establishment (and/or exposure) of the Cleveland-Cincinnati relay of the Confederacy’s Copperhead espionage system; the institution (and/or disruption) of a white Underground Railroad to Canada for Confederate agents and escapees from Union prison camps. Whose scheme was it, if not theirs, to ship bales of Canadian wool contaminated with yellow-fever bacilli to all U.S. Great Lakes ports, by way of avenging the bacteriological warfare waged against Pontiac’s Indians a century before? And who masterminded the Fenian invasion of Fort Erie by New York Irish “bog trotters” in 1866, he wanted to know, just a year after the Burlingames’ official return to Castines Hundred? The Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood’s objective might have been to seize and hold the Welland Canal until Britain granted independence to Ireland; but was it not the twins’ idea to provoke another U.S.-Canadian war (which of course the British and the ruined Confederacy would welcome) while the wounds of the Civil War were still open? Or contrariwise (what actually happened) to bind the reluctant Canadian provinces, as disinclined to confederation as were Tecumseh’s Indians, into a Dominion of Canada united against U.S. aggression?

“You are more Burlingame than we are,” his parents contentedly reply. They live into their eighties, the first Cooks or Burlingames to achieve longevity. By the time of their death in 1898, the son of their middle age will be nearing the classical midpoint of his own life (well past its actual midpoint in his case); he will have married an educated Tuscarora Indian from Buffalo, sired children of his own – first among them my father, Henry Burlingame VI – and already cut his revolutionary teeth in the Canadian Northwest Rebellion of ’85, the Chicago Haymarket Riot, and the Carnegie and Pullman labor-union battles.

Unlike his parents, Andrew V is overtly and intensely political, by his own declaration first a socialist and then (when the analogy between strikebreaking robber barons and imperialist industrial nation-states persuades him that a “rearrangement of markets” by cataclysmic war is in the offing) an anarchist, the first in the family since his grandfather’s French-Revolutionary youth. He decides that the whole family tree, Cooks and Burlingames alike, has been as it were attending to the wrong dog’s bark: it is not this or that government that is the enemy, except to this or that other government: it is government—on any scale larger than tribal, with any powers or functions beyond the most modest defensive and regulatory. More regressive than Henry and Henrietta together, he takes as his heroes Julian the Apostate, Philip II, the Luddite loom-breakers – all those who would undo the weave of history. Especially he admires Tecumseh and Pontiac, driven to confederate in the cause of anticonfederation. He applauds the Cuban revolutions against Spain, the war of the Boer republics against Britain, the Philippine insurgency, the Russian, Mexican, and Chinese revolutions, the Boxer Rebellion – anything that either resists enlargement or divides what is by his lights too large already; redistributes more equitably, decentralizes, or promises to do so.

Of his 20th-century activities – other than quarreling with Eugene Debs and defending Leon Czolgosz (the assassin of President McKinley in Buffalo) – little is known until the “rearrangement of markets” occurred in 1914-18. He seems to have been involved in the fast-growing electrical communications industry and to have had little interest in literature: “Marconi’s transmission of the letter S across the Atlantic by wireless today,” he told his wife on December 12, 1901, “is more important than Henry James’s publication of The Sacred Fount.” (My grandmother agreed; she preferred H.J.‘s short stories.) He was a friend of Alexander Bell from nearby Brantford (named after the Mohawk Joseph Brant), and though he agreed with Mark Twain that the telephone is an instrument of Satan, he explored the possibilities of its misuse, along with the wireless’s, in “the coming war.”

Uncharacteristically for our line, he was no great traveler: to my knowledge he never visited Maryland, much less Europe; indeed, after the birth of my father during the Spanish-American War, Andrew V seems to have left Ontario only once, for Vera Cruz in the spring of 1914, in the mistaken hope that enough false messages might connect Pancho Villa’s and Zapata’s resistance in Mexico with Sun Yat-sen’s revolution against the Manchu dynasty and the wars in the Balkan States, and bring about general political chaos in time for the Second International scheduled for Brussels in July. The mission failed; the general wish, of course and alas, was realized, just a month or two late.

Of his posture vis-à-vis the family, on the other hand, we know more, and of his end, if we accept provisionally my father’s account. Distressing to report, Andrew V exercised his “liberation” from the Pattern by regressing, almost absolutely, to the vain ancestral dialectic! Like the Andrews and Henrys prior to 1812, the more he considers the family archives – especially the Letters of 1812 and those exchanged between the twins during the Civil War – the more he comes to believe that his parents were after all deplorably successful secret agents for the Union, pretending to be Copperheads. It is not only the ignorant of history, it seems, who are doomed to reenact it!

Indeed, the quick end to my grandfather’s story, shortly thereafter, is itself a reenactment. Back at Castines Hundred in 1917 (when the U.S. and Canada become allies for the first time in their stormy history, though the old Yankee-Loyalist enmity is not dead, only sleeping, even today), he notes the anger of Ontario’s Fenians at the execution of Patrick Pearse and Sir Roger Casement after the abortive Irish rising of the year before; he is thereby reminded of the I.R.B.‘s attempt on the Welland Canal in 1866. Like the Fenians, but for different reasons, he declares himself indifferent to the World War, which has in his opinion nothing to do with ideology; he is much more interested in the revolution against the czar, and, in the (somewhat self-contradictory) name of International Anarchy, he associates himself with a Bolshevik plot to blow up the Welland Canal. It is the only ship channel around Niagara Falls, and is thus indispensable to the movement of materiél and manufactures from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic; its obstruction will gravely hamper the supply of the American and Canadian Expeditionary Forces in Europe. But lest the blame be placed on (or credit claimed by) German saboteurs, as was the case in the Black Tom explosion in Jersey City, he will broadcast by wireless from the ruined locks his solidarity with the bombers of the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade on July 22, 1916, and call for a Second Revolution in North America, against economic royalism.

There, the phrase is uttered: a Second American Revolution, quite a different matter from the “Second War of Independence” in 1812. Uttering it was to be my grandfather’s chief accomplishment. His associates were fellow anarchists and Bolsheviks from both Canada and the U.S., together with assorted Fenians, Quebec Librists, and sympathetic Germans from Wisconsin and western Ontario: two dozen in all, plus – significantly for that date – a precocious young Iroquois nationalist from the Tuscarora reservation on Grand Island, Andrew’s wife Kyuhaha’s militant brother (Kyuhaha is approximate Iroquoian for “unfinished business”). This fellow’s name was Gadfly Junior; he claimed to the son of a Tuscarora chief named Gadfly Bray and the brother-in-law of Charles Joseph Bonaparte (Betsy Patterson’s grandson and, briefly, Teddy Roosevelt’s Indian commissioner). Like many of his Mohawk brothers, this Gadfly Junior was a specialist in high steelwork; on the strength of this experience (and a stint in the Wyoming Valley anthracite mines, and a general feistiness), he appointed himself chief of demolition.

The old canal had 25 lift locks: the plan was to dynamite them in quick succession with wireless detonators fashioned by my grandfather. Twenty-five bundles of dynamite were assembled, each fitted with a small wireless receiver tuned to ignite a blasting cap upon receipt of the international Morse code signal for a particular letter of the alphabet; an alternative signal, common to all, could be used to detonate them simultaneously if time was short. No ideological slogan known to the conspirators was alphabetically various enough to do the job; their programmes were anyhow too heterogeneous for agreement: they settled on the standard typewriter-testing sentence, stripped of its redundant characters – THE QUICK BROWN FX JMPD V LAZY G – and reserved as the common signal the only letter missing there from, the one hallowed by Marconi seventeen years before and by James Joyce as the first in the scandalous novel he’d just begun serializing in The Little Review. On the night of September 26 (American Indian Day, Gadfly Junior would have been gratified to know, though it’s also the anniversary of General McArthur’s recapture of Detroit from Tecumseh’s warriors in 1813) the saboteurs in two trucks and a car rendezvoused at the little town of Port Robinson, the midpoint of the canal, and spread out along the 25 miles of its length from Port Colborne on Lake Erie to St. Catherines on Lake Ontario, each to his assigned lock with his charge of explosives. All were to be in place by sunrise, when – just as the British army was breaking the Hindenburg line in the final offensive of the war – my grandfather would transmit on his wireless key the fateful sentence.

I believe that I have neglected to mention that I myself had been born that year, out of wedlock, to my precocious parents: my father, 19, had “supped ere the priest said grace” with the current flower of the Castines, his cousine Andrée III. In this return nearly to the center of the family gene-pool – which A.C. V had commendably eschewed for the health of the line, given the particular consanguinity of his own parents – Henry Cook Burlingame VI betrays (I had better say affirms; he made no secret of it) his affinity for his namesakes Henry and Henrietta. He does not despise his father (who, we remember, apparently put by all revolutionary activities between 1898 and 1918 to raise him, except for the Vera Cruz expedition of 1914); indeed he admires him… as a cunning double agent dedicated to subverting the cause he officially espouses!

In short, we are back to the Pattern, with a vengeance, and the more distressingly in that my father was not a student of the family archives (it was Andrée, rather more of a scholar, who taught him how to overcome the genital shortfall of the Burlingames; I was conceived in their virgin seminar on that subject in 1916). Altogether unaware that he is reviving the classical interpretation of Cooks by Burlingames, Burlingames by Cooks, my father maintains – at the time to my mother, later to me – that Andrew Cook V was all along a closet patriot, an operative of the Canadian Secret Service who infiltrated the saboteurs in order to thwart their designs on the Welland Canal, and succeeded at the expense of both his brother-in-law’s life (Gadfly’s) and his own.

“Your grandfather was an expert in wireless telegraphy,” Dad once explained to me (I was 13; it was during our stint in the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge here in Dorchester County, where “Ranger Burlingame’s” current cover was supervising CCC work during the depression): “It’s suspicious enough that he altered the test sentence”—in which, as everyone knows, THE QUICK BROWN FX JMPS V LAZY DG, touching all 26 alphabetical bases in the process—“and it’s unthinkable that he would reserve as the common detonator the first letter of the international wireless marine distress signal, especially to blow up a ship canal, and choose for its transmission the frequency of 125 kilocycles – the only frequency shared by both naval and merchant vessels at that time.”

My father’s Uncle Gadfly Junior had been his hero and closest friend; at the time of the canal plot Henry was old enough to be included in it, and had begged to share with Gadfly the riskiest assignment: mining the entrance locks at either end of the canal, where security was heaviest. Gadfly had the G at St. Catherines; my father wanted the Port Colborne T. But my grandfather forbade him, as a brand-new father himself, to place any of the explosives, and only reluctantly permitted him to stand watch over the transmitter at Port Robinson while he himself mined Lock N nearby, at the center of the canal.

Andrew’s target being closest at hand, he thought to reach it, plant his charge, and rejoin his son within an hour to await the dawn at the transmitter while the others were still being dropped off at one-mile intervals in both directions. Thirty minutes after their parting salute—“To the Second Revolution!” which meant different things to the several bombers – and before even my grandfather had slipped past the watchman and lockmaster at Port Robinson, all 25 charges went off together.

That is to say, there were three explosions: a tremendous one on the back road south from Port Robinson, where the truck carrying THE QUICK BROW group toward Port Colborne was about to discharge its first passenger (Comrade W) near Welland; a similarly tremendous one on the road north from Port Robinson, where the truck carrying FX JMPD V LAZY G toward St. Catherines was about to drop off Comrade F near Allanburg; and a third, only one-twelfth as great but sufficient nonetheless to distribute Andrew Cook V over a considerable radius, within sight of the locks at Port Robinson itself.

And there are at least three explanations, (a) The detonation was an accident, caused by the coincidental transmission at 125 kc. of either an SOS from some distressed vessel in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, or any other message containing either an S or letters from each of the three groups (i.e., THEQUICKBROW, N, and FXJMPDVLAZYG). But there is no record of ships in distress in the canal area on that pleasant Thursday night or Friday morning. Coincidental transmission remains a possibility: a wireless operator just coming on watch, say, aboard any vessel near or in the canal, waking up his fingers with THE QUICK etc. My Tuscarora grandmother preferred this explanation.

(b) The saboteurs were sabotaged, suicidally, by one of their number. This was my father’s theory: that by a fatal patriotic rebroadcast of Marconi’s first transatlantic message, say, or some sufficient three-letter combination, A.B.C. V martyred himself to the Allied war effort, whether because his anarchism recoiled at the mounting totalitarianism of the Bolsheviks (the Romanovs had been murdered just two months earlier), or because his anarchism had all along been a cover for infiltrating subversive groups. To the objection that suicide was unnecessary to foil the plot (one letter from each of the truck-borne groups – a T and a G, say – would have done the trick), my father would reply either that not to have blown himself up would have blown my grandfather’s cover, or, more seriously, that inasmuch as it had been necessary to sacrifice his wife’s brother Gadfly, Andrew V had felt morally constrained to sacrifice himself as well. In support of his argument he adduced the fact that his father had handed him, at the last moment, “for safekeeping” while he mined the lock, the old Breguet pocketwatch passed on to him by his mother Henrietta.

But contemporary accounts of the event (I have read them all, especially since 1953, the “midpoint” of my own life, by when, alas, my father was eight years dead and unable to defend his theory against my new objections) maintain that the three explosions were separate not only in space but, slightly, in time, and while opinion on their exact sequence is less than unanimous, most auditors agree that the two big blasts preceded the smaller one by a little interval—boom boom, bang – and that the southerly boom was the earlier of the two. An ex-artillery officer at Port Robinson reported feeling “bracketed” by the booms and hit directly by the bang.

I have thought about this, and conclude that we may rule out the SOS theory, coincidental or otherwise, except possibly as the third signal. Likewise the theory of self-sabotage by any member of the group except, I reluctantly admit, my grandfather. Not impossibly he did destroy his comrades and thus himself: the quickest signal would have been a simple dot (E) to wipe out the southbound twelve, followed by a dot-dash (A) to detonate the northbounders, and either the N (dash-dot) or the S (dot-dot-dot) to do for himself. Or he could have tapped out any of at least seven English words: BAN, CAN, HAS, RAN, TAN, WAN, WAS, etc.

But I am struck by the reminiscence of an old Port Robinson telegrapher whom I interviewed on the subject some ten years ago. A religious man, he had been awakened by those blasts from dreams of a telegram from God, whose sender he recognized by the thunderous subscription of His initial. Awake, he forgot the text of the heavenly message (he was to spend the rest of his life vainly endeavoring to recover it, as I have tried in vain to recover the signal that blew my grandfather and his company to kingdom come), but he understood in immediate retrospect that the coded initial had been the blasts themselves. Boom boom bang: dash dash dot.

In my late adolescence and early manhood, when I too underwent the filial rebellion our line is doomed to, I did not agree with what I took to be my father’s politics. Of this, more in a later letter, my last, which I shall write on the eve of the 51st anniversary of this catastrophe and the dawn of our Second 7-Year Plan for the Second Revolution. I am less certain now than I was in those brash days that both of the foregoing theories or classes of theories about the Port Robinson explosions were wrong: that the truth was (c) that my father, a U.S. Secret Service undercover agent, either sabotaged the whole Welland Canal plot himself from his station at the master transmitter (the only one known to be both tuned to the proper frequency and positioned unequivocally within range) or – as my son Henry Burlingame VII firmly believes and gently suggests – that when H.B. VI heard the first two explosions and realized or imagined that A.C. V had blown up both truckloads of bombers, including his beloved Uncle Gadfly Junior, in outraged grief he sent the parricidal letter.

In whichever case, alone or between them, my father and grandfather monogrammed the Niagara Frontier visually with the apocalyptic Morse-code S: an aerial photograph would have shown the two large craters and the central smaller one as three dots, or suspension points… And acoustically they shook the heavens with the initial echoed down to me 35 years later by the Ontarian telegrapher’s recollection: the big G, not for God Almighty (with whom no Cook or Burlingame, whatever his other illusions, has ever troubled his head), but for the man who was to my father what Tecumseh and Pontiac were to my remoter ancestors: well-named Tuscarora, boom boom bang, Great-uncle Gadfly!

We approach the end of the line, lengthy as our letters. The Tuscaroras were “originally” a North Carolinian tribe so preyed upon by the white settlers (who stole and enslaved their children) that after losing a war with them in 1711-13 the survivors fled north to Iroquois territory, and the Five Nations became Six. The Tuscarora War coincided with the great slave revolt of 1712 in New York, mentioned in Andrew Cook IV’s third letter and by him attributed to the instigation of Henry Burlingame III, the Bloodsworth Island conspirator. Many white colonials feared a general rising of confederated Indians and Negroes, who might at that juncture still have driven them back into the sea. This ancient dream or nightmare, which so haunts our Sot-Weed Factor, was my Great-uncle Gadfly Junior’s obsession (His Christian name was Gerald Bray; he was early given his father’s nickname after his agitations, in the remnants of Iroquois longhouse culture, for the cause of Indian nationalism generally and Iroquoian in particular; he later took the name officially and passed it on to his own son). A better student of history than my father, he argued for example that the Joseph Brant who signed away the ancient Mohawk territory in the Treaty of 1798 was either an impostor or a traitor, and that thus the treaty was as invalid as the one signed by Tecumseh’s rivals with William Henry Harrison at Vincennes, and countless others. The Mohawks should reclaim their valleys; the Oneidas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas their respective lands, from the Catskills and Adirondacks through the Finger Lakes to Erie and Ontario. Bridges, highways, and railroads should be obstructed. The moves in Congress to confer U.S. citizenship on reservation Indians should be resisted as co-option. Common cause should be made with W. E. B. Du Bois’s NAACP (conceived at Niagara Falls, Canada), with the Quebec separatists, with American anarchists, Bolsheviks, et cetera, to the end of establishing a sovereign free state for the oppressed and disaffected in white capitalist industrialist economic-royalist America.

My grandfather admired and distrusted him; thought him a bit cracked, I believe, but valued him all the same both as Kyuhaha’s brother and thus his own, and as rallier of the apathetic Indians: his relation to Gadfly Junior was like Pontiac’s to the Delaware Prophet, or Tecumseh’s to his brother Tenskwatawa. What made Andrew most uneasy was exactly what most impressed my father as a youth: Gadfly’s extreme, even mystical totemism, or animal fetishism. In 1910, for example – the same year that the NAACP and the Boy Scouts of America were incorporated – Gadfly claimed to have conceived a child upon a wild Appaloosa mare in Cattaraugas Indian territory around Lake Cassadaga, near your Chautauqua. The following year he brought to the Grand Island Reservation a strange piebald infant whom he called his son by that union (a disturbed, unearthly boy, more like a bird or bat or bumblebee than a centaur colt, this “Gadfly III” was the queer older companion of my early youth when, after his orphaning, my parents took him in. His own child – whom they also briefly raised – was queerer yet.)

My parents! With those fond, ineffectual, endearing intrigants I end this letter. My ancestors since the 17th Century have burdened their children with the confusion of alternate surnames from generation to generation: I was the first to be given two at once. Henry Cook Burlingame VI and Andrée Castine III, though utterly faithful and devoted to each other till the former’s death in July 1945, never got around to marriage: my father duly named me Andrew Burlingame Cook VI; my mother, as nonchalant about the famous Pattern as about other conventions, blithely christened me (in the French Catholic chapel at Castines Hundred) André Castine, and maintained that inasmuch as she was the sole surviving member of that branch of the family, I was the 5th baron of that name. I grew up bilingual as well as binomian, and peripatetic. Now we were in Germany, protesting with the Spartacus partisans the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; now in Massachusetts demonstrating on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti; now in England for the great general strike of May 1926; now in Maryland’s Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, “communizing” the CCC (the only pastoral interval in my youth: I was awakening to sex, literature, and history together, and to this day associate all three with marsh grass, wild geese, tidewater, the hum of mosquitoes); now hiding out back at Castines Hundred. They were not poor: the Cooks and Burlingames were never men of business, but the placid Barons Castine had invested prudently over the years in firms like Du Pont de Nemours; there was money for our traveling, for my educating – and for their organizing Communist party cells in the Canadian and U.S. heartland during the depression; for infiltrating the Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA Writers Project; for supporting the Lincoln Brigade and other Loyalist organizations during the Spanish Civil War…

At least for ostensibly so organizing, infiltrating, supporting. For while it is clear that they played the Game of Governments, however ineffectively, to the top of their bent, it is less clear which side they were on. By the time I learned – at least decided, in 1953, after Mother’s death – that they had in fact been sly counterrevolutionaries all along, the revelation made no real difference to me, for I had also come to understand that the Second American Revolution was to be a matter, not of vulgar armed overthrow – by Minutemen, Sansculottes, Bolsheviki, or whatever – but of something quite different, more subtle, less melodramatic, more… revolutionary.

But that, of course, is for another letter, which I will happily indite once I have provided you, in weeks to come, with the bones of my Marylandiad: the further adventures of Andrew Cook IV in and after the War of 1812. Till when, I have, sir, the honor of regarding myself as

Your eager collaborator,

A. B. Cook VI

(dictated but not reread)

P.S.: As to the orthographical proximity of your Chautauqua and my Chautaugua: The Algonkin language was spoken in its sundry dialects by Indians from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi and as far south as Tennessee and Cape Hatteras, and like all the Indian languages it was very approximately spelled by our forefathers. The word in question is said to mean “bag (or pack) tied in the middle.” Chautauqua Lake was so named obviously from its division into upper and lower moieties at the narrows now traversed by the Bemus Point – Stow Ferry, which I hope it will be your good fortune never to see replaced by a bridge. Chautaugua Road, where this will be typed for immediate posting to you at Chautauqua Lake, is near the similar narrows of Chesapeake Bay (now regrettably spanned at the old ferry-crossing, as you know, and about to be second-spanned, alas), which divides this noble water into an Upper and a Lower Chesapeake. The scale is larger, but the geographical state of affairs is similar enough for the metaphor-loving Algonquins, wouldn’t you say?