A brilliantly original voice-driven debut about defying expectations, set in the Georgia Gold Rush.
1
AN IMPONDERABLE SPECIMEN
MY NAME IS YIP TOLROY & I am a mute. I have made not a sound since the day of my birth, October 2nd, 1815. I will say that my life has been something of a trial but such is God’s wish & so I must tell my story here on the page.
Indeed I should thank Him for these 3 fingers left me, they might still hold a quill & feel the ink flow free beneath them. I did leave them other 2 where they lay & I have dreams still of the rains feeding them like greentip shoots where in that spot now stands a Hand, the wrist a smooth-
Barked bole & a Hundred Fingers wagging like branches in the breeze.
Answers have not ever come easy to me. By all accounts they is like teeth – you can try to pull them clean out but even then they will likely Splinter & Crack & there will be nothing but a palmful of dust at the end of it. Here is a lesson worth attending to – no One or Thing comes into this world whole & it is in the search of what is gone missing that our lives do find their meaning. That is the truth of it. At one time a great many beardy doctors did apply their crude instruments to me though none was able to declare a reason behind my queer afflictions. I ought to make it plain I am not cut from the common cloth. Aside from my lacking a voice I stand at 4 feet & 8 inches tall & there is inexplicably not a single hair on my person.
Some have been willing to look upon my differences as mere eccentricities, though the majority have not been so generous with their opinions. I never did quarrel with them who chose to insult me & I did not simper up to them who chose to treat me with civility. It is not my business to decide how others wish to comport theirselves. Only know that I have growed to look upon my own reflection in kind, for there is no hatred more pernicious than that which is turned upon the self.
It is true enough though that most people are affronted in one way or another at the sight of me. I have had many strangers & even them I considered friends claim I should be caged & preserved for the general public to enjoy as Entertainment. I did not figure this a likely chapter of my days but much to my dismay their wishes was to come true & I did in fact spend a short spell under the dubious protectorship of Mr. Jim Coyne & his Traveling Show. Of this I will tell you more later.
As for them doctors I come to understand they are a breed what do not much relish a mystery. On meeting me they would work theirselves into a great lather of excitement & then after an hour of poking & prodding, looking down my throat & into my earholes, their faces would grow dark & irritable. More than once was I referred to as an Imponderable Specimen. I could not claim to have the understanding of such a remark back then but I had sense enough to glean it did not portend nothing good.
It is just my humble opinion that there is many stories writ beneath the skin what will not give up their meaning to no Earthly Eye. This I know troubles a doctor greatly. He will not confess to it but part of his studyment of all them long yrs was in the hope that he will somehow keep on breathing long past the rest of us have quit.
Well I am still here & still breathing. No one has figured me out yet. I have led a life filled with wonder & misery both. That is the way God intended it. If you do not suffer pain then you will not know what it is to Live & Love. I have to hope there is not so much pain from now on to the end though, I do not think any soul could claim me a liar when I say I have had my fill.
“My skin was like the finest vellum, it did not look fit to suffer a spring rain & my head was a frail & venous globe straddling my shoulders as an egg might the final stalks of a plundered nest.”
2
A CRUEL & UNUSUAL BEGINNING
IT IS AN UGLY TRUTH the day of my birth is fettered to an event for which there is no cause to celebrate.
Who knows how many others have arrived on the current of such cruel & unusual beginnings but I imagine us to be a Sad & Lonesome band, them who entered this Life & left the door ajar for their begetter to take their leave. Should I ever come across one such soul I would know them by their dark & cowled eyes, for like me they too must carry the weight of all that could have been.
My poor daddy did not get to hold me. He did not even get to take one look into my eyes. And I will not lie it has put a bitter twist on my lips to have wrestled with my portion of the blame. O yes that guilt is a Sour-Seeded Fruit what hangs from a man’s heart, there is no dose of time what will bring him peace. Not until he is returned to the dark of the earth will he reconcile himself to all what come to pass in the light of his days.
It does seal my heart in Eternal Sorrow that to this day I do not know where his poor bones lie or whether they was not simply left for the wind to scatter or to sate the whiskered maw of some rooting hog. It does me no good to dwell on it but still I must tell you of how he met his end, for it was no accident or natural flaw what brung his heart to silence.
My birth it will not surprise your eyes to read was no simple matter. Death was busy that day trying to claim all he could. My own life-cord was snaked about my neck, a blue & slippery noose as if already I considered myself a weary veteran of life’s many bewilderments. My Mama groaned & wept & bled. She arched her back & after a day of fret & toil expelled me on a blood-warm surf what ferried me to the Direful Shores of that day.
Pale & silent I lay atop the freckled slabs of her arms, only my hands what opened & closed in faltering bloom did attest to the putter of my troubled heart. My skin was like the finest vellum, it did not look fit to suffer a spring rain & my head was a frail & venous globe straddling my shoulders as an egg might the final stalks of a plundered nest.
It was no surprise then that Dr. Whit Parrick, our town’s only practitioner at that time, should steer my daddy toward the cool shadows of the parlor & there inquire after the integrity of our spade, warning it would likely be put to use by nightfall. Dr. Parrick, he was not one to waste his words but spoke of my demise as plainly as of some turn in the weather.
But where an older man might have appreciated Parrick’s candor & boldness of expression, my daddy – still young, still artless in the face of Death – could bear it no more. His eyes, so blue, so very piercing, assumed the dull & empty sheen of 2 buttons sewn into the head of a straw doll. Without a word he turned on his heel & begun to run.
“She told me my daddy was a poltroon, her beliefs was stubborn as limpets, she would never say no word otherwise.”
3
COLD KNOWLEDGE
I WILL WASTE NO TIME in telling you that my daddy run right out that door & he did never come back.
No he did not return & night fell & my Mama was laid by lanternlight in bloodslick sheets while Dr. Whit Parrick soaped his hands & watched wide-eyed as she raged & cursed my daddy for a Weak & Gutless man. Dr. Parrick did think at first it was his own character come under siege until he realized it was her departed husband she so damned, O she did spare none of her characteristic rancor in her explication of him. She convinced herself that very night he was a coward of the Highest Order, I imagine now it did give her broke heart some comfort to think so little of him.
As for Dr. Parrick that dour man did surely tell every soul he come across in Peeper’s tavern of my Mama’s curses, for soon it was become common knowledge the lily-livered John Tolroy had lit off in favor of a childless life beneath the gaze of some distant spread of stars.
Of course you understand I had never knowed my daddy, he was gone before I got the chance. Some folk have told me over the years that you cannot miss what you never knowed, I never in all my days heard such Rot, it is a lie big enough to sink a ship. I do miss my daddy every day & through whatever mysteries in the blood is passed down from father to son, in all them yrs of my growing up I could not shake the notion that he had harbored no intentions of disappearing at all. Indeed I thought I knowed it for a fact he had not meant to be gone long, all he wanted was some air in his lungs, a moment to clear the clouds from his poor head after seeing his struggling boy. It did not sit true that he just upped & gone, I found I did have ideas of my own come to colorful bloom behind my eyes.
As I growed up like many boys I heard stories of men what wore masks made of sugar sacks & wagon canvas across their faces, holes poked in them for the convenience of eyes & mouths. They held up burning pine knots & went blazing through the black of night, roaming across Cherokee & White soil alike, not caring a bit for who they stole from or what brand of blood they let spill.
I heard them thundering hoofs & seen them ugly masks lit up near every night in my dreams & each time they was surrounding a man, their voices hollering out, their horses restless in the dust & their guns angled down from their saddles. Their mouths was always covered but somehow I always knowed they was smiling cruelly down at that man who was alone, frighted & cowering, turning every way only to find another mask looking down at him, another gun levelled at his heart. I never seen this man’s face but them dreams did always end the same way, I woke with the echo of a gunshot in my ears & the Cold Knowledge that the cowering man had been my daddy.
I never told no one of them dreams, for when he never come back my Mama did her best to forget him. As is natural for any fatherless boy I would in time come to ask about him, though she was always well prepared. She was not the type to parry an answer with clever wordings or kindly distractions, as a fancy-dressed romancer might wear his heart upon his sleeve my Mama did wear her bitterness upon hers. She told me my daddy was a poltroon, her beliefs was stubborn as limpets, she would never say no word otherwise.
We do so like to think we is the writers of stories but they so often come to us fully growed, it is only for us to choose how they might be read. So it was the folk of Heron’s Creek was happy to have their story as it was – John Tolroy had absconded his fatherly duties without a trace & that is the way it would be until someone did go digging for the Truth.”
Extracted from My Name is Yip by Paddy Crewe out now.
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