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Brill Among the Ruins

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The Nile splits at Cairo, Egypt. The Damietta branch goes east, and the Rosetta west.

On this west branch, near a city then called Rosetta (pop. 32,800, and now renamed), was found in 1799 the famous black basalt stone inscribed in three alphabets which taught European scholars of the nineteenth century A.D. to read the language of Egyptian scribes ([ILLUSTRATION OMITTED])s and courtiers ([ILLUSTRATION OMITTED])s of the nineteeth century B.C.

The three alphabets were hiergolyphic, demotic, and Greek.

Hier-means sacred, a glyph is a symbolic figure. Hieroglyphic was a pretty slow way to write.

So in addition to their language of sacred pictures, the [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]s had a kind of cursive they could scratch along in called hieratic. Demotic, the second alphabet on the stone, was a simplified, thus popular, form of hieratic.

Greek was, and is, whatever it is to each of us, but those educated nineteenth-century Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans could read it like we read Dick and Jane, when they weren't busy shooting cannon at one another under Wellington, Bonaparte, and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.

Today in the gazetteers Rosetta is called Rashid. This seems to be the preference of contemporary Egyptians, in their gray suits and red fezzes, their Hamitic hearts still brooding over the ancient, Pharaohnic error of letting Moses' people go, 2,300 years ago, whatever the plagues and provocations.

Before it was called Rosetta, Rashid was called Bolbitine, a place name which no longer appears on any maps, even in parentheses. If it hadn't been for the stone, we might surmise, the place name Rosetta could have disappeared as well by now. As it is, it survives, if not on Egyptian maps, then, like many other Asiatic and European place names, on maps of the United States of America.

But does it? And is it the good old scholar's key to ancient times which is commemorated? Research will tell.

The atlas locates a Rosetta, population 350, in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. It is in the southwestern corner of the state, about thirty miles from Natchez, on the Homochitto River.

But an inquiry, addressed to The Mayor, Rosetta, Mississippi, mailed January 30, 1969, was returned unopened from a nearby town called Crosby.

There is only one other Rosetta listed. It is in Johnson County, Arkansas, in the mountainous northwest part of the state, about sixty miles from Fort Smith on the western border.

A similar inquiry to its mayor, mailed on the same date, written in typewriter, the script of American scribes and courtiers of the twentieth century A.D., received the following reply in demotic, postmarked from a town which must be nearby but whose postmark cannot be read. It looks like this:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The letter reads:

Rosetta is a community, it was at one time able to support a school, P.O. & a store. Now it has neither. Only three families live in a 3 mile radius. When the P.O. was established the first Postmaster was Mrs. Rosetta Allen. They named the Post Office after her. I do not know the date it was established. It has been discontinued about 35 years.

Thank you, unsigned Sir or Madam. There's nothing like a little research to smudge a point, but if there are no Rosettas left, we are free enough to invent one for ourselves.

We'll put it in southwest Illinois, on the Mississippi River, and number ourselves, like the present population of Rashid, 32,800. We'll put ourselves twenty-one miles east of University City, where we sometimes go for culture, across and a little upstream from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where we sometimes go for candlelight and wine.

This puts us an hour north of Cairo, Illinois, where we sometimes go, in a businesslike way, to shoot Canada geese.

Mid-American businesslike. Easterners don't understand. They think we socialize in order to do business, but really we do a little business in order to socialize. Of course we take it off the tax, but to ask a truthful question, what the hell other friends do we have or occasions to spend time with them? Cairo.

Bob Brill, the lawyer, who can shoot a Browning magnum 12 at a high goose better than anyone else in town, doesn't go there any more. Cairo is hardly north at all of Memphis, Tennessee, which has four different Holiday Inns, for Christ's sake.

Though University City is larger, Rosetta is the county seat of Alexandria County. College kid needs a wedding license or to spend a night in jail, he comes over here for it. Cattle are traded here; farmers served in two ways. Honest and dishonest. There is light, smelly manufacturing. There are marginal oil wells nearby, and even a marginal oil millionaire, renamed Robert E. Lee Trump. That's right, he was born Cesar Trumpanek, his dad was a miner; putting the name change through court was one of Robert Brill's first jobs. Not that the information is especially crucial to Brill's story; it's just that we've been playing with names. Which is how life starts.

2,

Now: Midnight Friday. Brill awake in his cups, beside a perfumed lady sleeping. Brill imagining himself seventeen years old, in conversation with a cousin named Felix, then nineteen, who was dead before he reached twenty.

What is life? Well, that's something they've got for people who don't watch television. Be serious, Felix; what about art? Sheeyit. What about history? All right: only never was ever is.

You can take a flaming frig at the moon, Cousin Felix.

Felix does. Astronauts complain. Brill sleeps.

3,

Through the quiet, cool, and dark of four A.M. in mid-October, Robert Brill, six foot three, sandy-haired and warmly dressed, sculled a low, peculiar boat, moving it softly away from, and then turning parallel to, the bank of a minor oxbow of the Mississippi River, on his way to hunt ducks.

He carried with him a Winchester 28-gauge side-by-side double, a yellow dog, and a hangover so mild as to be almost pleasant.

He'd have brought a large, common-sense, and much less graceful gun had another human been along, to avoid technical debate and the possibility of appearing to show off.

The dog, which he called Unk, would have been left behind as well, a second reason why it made Brill happy to be going out alone. He'd have had no trouble finding five or ten more.

He sang, "Oh, the man bone's connected to the dog bone," and said: "Isn't it, Unk?"

Unk was using all the space forward in the boat designed for two more men. Each would have been on his back, nearly lying down, head and shoulders braced against a slanted thwart board and feet sticking into the bow under a spray shield. The shield had slits in it for peepholes. Concealed in this way, with a third man lying behind, shoulders against the transom and sculling, gunners could move in among ducks on the water, the birds seeming to take the craft as no more menacing than a drifting log. Once within range, all three would sit up at the same moment and fire in three directions as the birds flew off.

In Brill's cabin on the small bluff, below which he had untied the scull boat, three people were sleeping whom Brill had been careful not to wake: they were his friend Martin Habib, a movie-theater owner of Lebanese parentage and Nicaraguan upbringing; a lady they called B.S.L.; and an airline stewardess whom Martin had met returning from a business trip and brought from St. Louis for the hunting weekend. Her name was Edith.

Martin Habib didn't hunt but last night Edith had said to Brill: "You get me up to shoot those ducks, you old Bobby, you hear?"

Now, moving through the black water, him old Bobby said to Unk: "Airline stewardesses used to be tense, smart, slim girls, didn't they? With upper middle airs. They're calmer now and plumper. More like waitresses than mistresses."

When in doubt sit; Unk sat.

This morning, going into the bedroom in the cabin to wake Edith, Brill had found the room warm, a lamp on, and the man and woman stretched out asleep, naked and reversed, Martin's head on the girl's soft stomach, Edith's left arm still under Martin's thighs. The scene was not without a certain sweetness, in Brill's view, except for the evidence that the girl had not taken time to wash off her makeup before it got underway. Because of this detail it seemed most tactful to turn out the light and leave, stocking-footed, affectionate, and a little horny.

The third person in the cabin, whom he and Martin called B.S.L., which stood for Big Shy Louise, was a nice, somewhat arch woman who worked as a sorority housemother in University City, twenty-one miles away.

Big Shy Louise liked time in the morning to get herself together, and would have been painfully confused at being waked before four, hurried into her clothes and into a duck boat. Big Shy Louise had been unusually passionate and enduring the previous night, and while Brill had felt obliged to oblige, she'd left him with what he thought of as a crick in his pecker this morning.

He shifted his position, to put the crick out of friction with his hunting underwear, and smiled, and sang, and talked to the dog—all very quietly—as he came out of the oxbow onto the big river.

4,

It was still night, more than an hour until sunrise.

At thirty minutes before sunrise he might load the gun, for it would then be legal to shoot.

The river water was still black, and the stumps in the shallow part through which he was sculling hardly separable from it, so that now and again he bumped one gently.

Good enough reason not to use a motor, if you needed some reason other than liking the quiet.

The stars, bright through holes in the clouds when Brill started, were disappearing now, and the clouds moving in a wind which must be strong up there, though it hardly rippled the river yet. He looked back east and there was a promise of light, lying as a margin between land and sky.

Breeze started, just enough to rock the boat a little.

Something was moving above him, shadows of birds against the clouds. He guessed cormorants, but couldn't see well enough to know. He nudged another stump, and, in a parody of cause and effect, there was a splash out somewhere on the water, a big carp, probably, or a muskrat.

A lost cow, bawling on shore, sounded ambiguously like a bullfrog, but it was too late and cool for frogs.

The water was grading from black to gray as Brill came out of the area of stumps, into the edge of the Mississippi current. He turned to scull upriver, to get above his decoys, and a small flight of wood ducks went over him in the dawning sky, coming out of the oxbow, turning overhead, and cutting back toward the bank.

They were going, he judged, to Captain's Slough, a mile back from the river, where oaks dropped acorns into shallow water; and a long time since Brill had been there.

The wood ducks he recognized not by their appearance, for he could barely see them, but by the soft, hooting call-note of the males as they passed.

5,

Ask anyone in Rosetta about sculling ducks, and the majority will ask you back, "Doing what to them?" Still, there's quite a few of us will nod and tell you that the men who do it any more are damn fools, with the low duck limits we get these days: two mallards, one redhead or can.

You've got to have fifteen dozen decoys just to start, which is three hundred bucks right now, unless you're like Bob Brill the lawyer that inherited a barnful of them. Even those have to spend two good weeks in the fall, painting them up, and a couple more days rigging them and setting them out. And every time the wind changes, those decoys ought to be moved around. The old rivermen used to put their diver decoys on heavy chains, at intervals, so they could pick up one end at the buoy and move the whole set that way.

Pick up a couple of hundred feet of chain with your left hand and scull with your right? The old rivermen: long, funny, chunky forearms, coupled short to round shoulders and deep chests, just about the way bears are built, knew how to do it.

It's not just the work and expense, it's uncomfortable and risky. If there's weather enough to make a day fit to hunt, you're going to be taking spray and shipping water. There's been lots of men drown out of scull boats. Remember Armistice Day, 1957? For a couple of mallards.

Pete Canaday, who's a hot-shot hunter, shoots from pits and blinds, he was runner-up in the duck-calling contest at Stuttgart one year.

Pete once said: "Sculling is like standing in a cold shower with your clothes on, tearing up twenty-dollar bills."

Later Canaday admitted that he got that one from a girl he knew when he was on the West Coast, that he went sailing with, and said it about sailboat-racing.

Bertrand Russell once said: "... there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge ... there probably will be countless ages without knowledge in the future."

We don't know where Russell got that one.

6,

There were 207 decoys in Brill's spread, two thirds of them divers, anchored in a raft in open water. The puddle-duck decoys—mallards, pintails, and widgeons—were set off at the shallow end near a sandy island. He watched the set as he sculled past, keeping the boat close enough to the riverbank so that birds sitting among the blocks wouuldn't see him go by.

Each of his was anchored individually, but he was thinking, as he regularly did at this point in the trip, about the old men and their long chains. He must get one of those chains and learn to manage it, or that way of setting out might be lost for good from local use.

"How about that for a grave responsibility, Unk?" Brill said, sculling. "That cognac, dog. Still working here this morning. Make a big-time epistemologist out of you."

Tried to remember the eighty-six-proof profundities of the night before, as he'd lain awake beside Louise, and couldn't, though he did recall that Felix, the long-dead cousin after whom he'd tagged, growing up, had been in his mind when he finally went to sleep. At least he hadn't got up, as sometimes happened, to write fierce, thoughtful, barely legible notes, uninhibited by rationality, bottle beside him on the kitchen table, about the state of his household, his profession, and the nation.

A couple of hundred yards above the decoys was another shallow area with stumps in it. Brill stopped sculling there, dropped a hitch over one of the stumps to hold steady, and looked at his watch.

Five minutes more till legal shooting time.

More birds were going overhead, cormorants for sure this time. He watched the big, black, gooselike bodies, wondering at the way a dozen birds could fly like dancers, all wings stopping together to glide, all starting in again to stroke on the same beat.

He remarked to himself, and also told the dog, that he had not shot a wild goose yet this year, and that his family expected one for Christmas dinner. Cooked by three serious specialists—Brill, his fifteen-year-old daughter Trinket, his college-age son Cal—last year's goose had sure spattered grease all over hell.

The children's mother, Brill's wife Pat, was still pretty good around the kitchen mornings, but by midafternoon most days, last Christmas no exception, she'd drunk enough California sherry to go to bed for what was called her nap.

"My wife isn't just any drunk," Brill thought, too loyal to say it aloud to the dog. "She's a genuine wino."

The thought was not without tenderness and not without regret.

Shooting time had come, but Brill didn't load. The level of light was high enough so that he could make out individual decoys down below on the river, and now ducks went over him: divers. Bluebills, probably, at considerable but not impossible range, perhaps sixty yards, a flight of thirty. Short, rapid wing strokes, chunky bodies, they were such busy, urgent fliers you almost imagined them buzzing as they went.

Unk saw them and whined.

"Wrong ducks, boy," Brill said.

He watched the flight go over and past his decoys without pausing, which pleased him since bluebills were not what he wanted. He watched them go on down the river, low, and was pleased again because no shots were fired down the line. So far he had the river to himself this morning.

There were a half dozen other men in the area who put out decoys and used scull boats, but they didn't hunt much after opening weekend, some because they liked only the appearance of being hunters, not the reality of hunting, and others because they were old.

At ten minutes before sunrise, Brill had still not loaded his gun. He might, by now, have dropped a wood duck, and a second flight of bluebills had gone overhead, landing this time among his decoys. They'd be swimming around there now.

At the shallow end a duck rose on its tail in the water, shook its wings, and settled back, and he felt quite certain it was a mallard and that there would be other mallards with it near the sand island.

But he was enjoying the freshness of the morning, lazy if you like, and thinking about it, thinking that regardless of how polluted the water was, and the air, a night's sleep seemed to do the earth good, producing at least an illusion that all was clean and sane again.

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Excerpted from Brill Among the Ruins by Vance Bourjaily. Copyright © 1970 Vance Bourjaily. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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