What were we talking about again?

The other side speaks!

Excerpt from a response from General D. McArthur to G. Thomas Magnum, on the event in question...

Disaster? Yes, my boy, but to truly live, one must devour the broken custard.

This is some fetching nonsense, I will admit that. You have the conviction of a wailing woman--heard above the crowd--and I suppose your standard pedestrian would consider this admirable. You and I are familiars, however, and we both know I am not an apt correspondent on this issue, as it's a rare morning I stir to the sound of complaint and/or other pussified bullshit. You shouldn't have expected a quick response. I told you seven years ago to go to law school and swallow the consequences in your middle age, like all sensible men do. I will ask again: What, precisely, were you anticipating? That you would skim the raw and practical waters of adulthood--lofted on your own wind like some oblivious duck-winged imbecile--and come softly to rest somewhere in coastal New England? Was some dentist to make an honest housewife of you? Explain, please.

Fortunately for you, I've room in mind for your pointless cargo. Your father might have beaten this nonsense out of you at an early age, had he not been occupied with his occupation, which seems to have been the support and maintenance of a capering little jackass. But sit there, and I shall tell you a story. Let me set the scene. You are sitting, undoubtedly, on the deck of your rented apartment, smoking a $200-a-box cigar, and the whole of your attention turns on not ashing the thing on your $300 shoes. I will not ask the pointed questions--the ones you certainly know the answers to--questions like 'What do you feel you've done to deserve such things?' and 'What do these things do for you, in the end?' I simply ask that you continue reading, and that you compose for me, your own friend and correspondent, the message I intend.

Don't laugh, but once, long ago, in a forest where only the ancient hemlock kept the time, there lived a great chief, Wyandanch, master of the Abenaki peoples. This chief had a daughter, White Fawn, who was more beautiful than all the lands. Her voice was the sun on summer breezes; and her eyes all the birds in all the trees in her lovely Indian world.

Now, in Wyandanch's tribe there were many great warriors, strong men with arms like woven oak, and all of these warriors loved White Fawn. But there was also a disinterested brave, whose name is unrecorded--but let us name him Bartleby the Spoiled Yankee, for the sake of the narrative--and this disinterested brave loved White Fawn with a love far stronger than the strongest warrior, primarily because he didn't have a clue what he was letting himself in for. Do you see where I'm going with this? I doubt that you do. Probably you think this will be a Romance...

Though White Fawn was largely ignorant of our Bartleby, she was familiar enough with him to be startled by his appearance at the door of her father's longhouse. What store of courage buoyed this unlikely suitor, she wondered lazily to her pretty self, as the young and disinterested brave entered the granite regard of his Chief. What does he believe he will gain, and why does he believe he deserves it, having never fed so much as himself, and nevermind a family?

As you are likely realizing, my dear G. Thomas, these were the days of Tribal Wisdom, so we can assume that Bartleby knew these questions as well--knew them better than even White Fawn--and carried them so close to his heart that it was sometimes difficult for him to distinguish his own desires from their pressing insistence.

Things grow murkier from here. The Great Chief Wyandanch was impressed with this normally disinterested brave's courage, and immediately his thoughts ran to a grandson, to a potential heir. Afterall, Bartleby had entered his presence with little more than the conviction that this was certainly what the other fellows would do, if they hadn't already, and the Chief knew this. So, once the question was asked, Wyandanch drew himself up from his fire, and stretched his mighty right hand, strong like woven oak, and said 'You may have my daughter's hand, Bartleby, if you catch for me a certain fish, from a certain stream, which will appear only as the sun sets. But Bartleby, the stream where this fish will swim is in a haunted briar, and the ghosts of fallen warriors wail in its shadows, hunting the living.'

Prior to that day, Bartleby would certainly have declined, but on that day he found his love for White Fawn so strong that he was unable to conceive an alternate path, and so he accepted his Chief's challenge, and agreed to bring him this prize. And so he went to this certain stream the Chief had mentioned, and built a wicker weir from birch saplings, in order to snare the fish as it went past. And indeed the briar was dark, and indeed there was a strangeness to its shadows--an indeterminacy, say, although it is highly unlikely Bartleby would agree with our term.

Bartleby sat by this stream and waited. But as he sat, he noticed the shadows in the thorn bushes by the water, and he could not keep his eyes from the shadows in the thorns. His wicker weir was damaged, but he could not keep his eyes from the shadows in the thorns. The fish swam through the holes in the weir, but he could not keep his eyes from the shadows in the thorns, and when the sun set, and the moon rose full in the sky like a broad white face, the shadows extended out to meet him, and tore him to pieces.

You're thinking you know the point of this story, which only proves you haven't been listening these last few years...

All night Bartleby's blood flowed down that certain stream, until in the morning it came to a light-dappled pool, to where White Fawn, the Chief's beautiful daughter, had come to bathe her irrelevantly lovely body. In distinctly folkloric manner, White Fawn became pregnant with the child of a young brave she knew only in a somewhat tangential way, and when she died in childbirth, the Chief took the child--a boy--and raised him as the son and heir he had always been guilty of wanting.

G. Thomas, I forget what the point of my story is. It was a long time ago it was told to me, and it is now beyond my abilities to outline the thing, or to say THIS is the hero, THIS is the villain, THIS individual was wronged in some elemental way. But when I find myself in a hole, G. Thomas, I generally just keep digging, knowing by experience that the world isn't that deep. In this spirit was most of America built, afterall.

Now you and I are very much alike already, G. Thomas, but then I ask you, is it always a good idea to help the Chief?