Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (2 page)

It’s a letter that has suffered loss, thinning our language as we went about minding our p’s while forgetting our q’s; if Shakespeare possessed those lost words, why can’t we? Here’s a quorum of such quatches ripe for revival, ready for your quaintance: quaddle (grumble), quizzity (oddity), querken (stifle), quiddle (dawdle), querimony (complaint), queme (pleasant), quetch (go), queeve (twist in a road). And there’s the handy
quisquilious:
in one sense it refers to something composed — like a life, a book — of odds and ends, and in another import it means rubbish.

I can see now the letter one of you will write me:

Dear Mister Fancy Author,

I’d like to querken your quiddles on the quizzities of the letter Q because they aren’t queme and leave me quaddling and full of querimony. Stick to the queeves and get quetching on your way to your quisquilious Quoz.

Querulously yours,
Ace Reeder

So that brings us to
quoz:
a noun, both singular and plural, referring to anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious. It rhymes with
Oz.
To a traveler, it’s often the highest quaesitum. For me, everything — whether object, person, or event — when seen clearly in the depths of its existence, in its quiddity, is quoz, and every road, every alley, the hall to your parlor, the course of a creek, the track of a comet, all are a route to quoz for any traveler, any querist willing to question, to go in quest, to ask the cosmic question of medieval church drama:
Quem quaeritis?
Whom do you seek, O pilgrim?

Forgive me, quick-witted reader, if this quodlibet to
Q
has made you querimonious; I’ll leave the letter and return to Q, the woman, after I tax you with one more notion. The vocabulary of our language is an abundant — and often untapped — storehouse of concepts neatly embodied in a few squiggles of ink or in a column of air vibrated by vocal cords. To fail to embrace and thereby honor a rich vocabulary is a sacrilege advocated by those who would reduce the expanse of our lexicon to fit their own limited expression; these are often novices and drudges and certain book reviewers who ought to be confined to the exposition of instructions for installing a water heater. A genuine road-book should open unknown realms in its words as it does in its miles. If you leave a journey exactly who you were before you departed, the trip has been much wasted, even if it’s just to the Quickee-Mart.

During that restaurant-supper, I admitted to Q — call it a quid pro quo — that since my boyhood, when my favorite number was five (I could handle it mathematically easier than, say, seven or nine), I’ve longed to be not William but five-lettered Quint. Its Roman version, Quintus, helped lead me in high school to enroll in Miss Nell Adams’s Latin I and II. How different my life might have turned out with Spanish or French, I don’t know, other than to say that somewhere among the ancient declensions of Rome and the Etruscan
qu-
words, I was becharmed by a girl seated in front of me, and for the next five years I discovered all that goes with infatuation. So you see, the letter
Q
has shaped me in ways beyond my comprehending, even now as I write these words.

While this recital of our pasts came forth, I think Q and I began to recognize a fellow traveler sitting across the table. There we were, our imagined names revealing more about us than could ever those strapped onto us by others. For me she was Quintana, only later becoming simply Q.

But I’ve become neither Quint nor Quintus. Because we met through a forgotten manuscript of William Clark — the William of the great 1804 to 1806 western expedition, he who is buried not far from where Q grew up along the Missouri River, he whom she was then writing a book about (the very undertaking that introduced us), he whom I am named after — Q has not been willing to yield up my William, and so to her, Will I am and remain.

She is a historian who left the practice of law not long after she discovered Clark’s logbook of his 1798 trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, a voyage — virtually unknown and totally unexamined until her research — he made six years before his ascent with Meriwether Lewis up the Missouri River and on to the Pacific. It was a journey I had made and written a book about just before I met Q. Over the course of the travels we were about to undertake, she would tell me from time to time of her surprising discoveries about William Clark descending the Mississippi into Spanish territory. So, along with my stories triggered by our passing a place I’d visited before, we began traveling miles overlaid with several dimensions of time. During these travels, Q was a quinquagenarian, and it was sheer chance we began them in the old lands of the Quapaw, and not far from the ancient Tunica “town” Quizquiz [Kees-Kees].

Because she’s important to these roads to quoz, I’ll try to set her before you now and then, but not by physical description except to say she is slender, with straw-colored corkscrew hair that can draw from men long glances that amuse me. No husband should undertake to describe his wife in detail, especially a wife who practices law and knows something of libel, invasion of privacy, and, when pressed, can even explain the Rule Against Perpetuities. It’s unwise to monkey — in print, at least — with such professional counsel. I think she will emerge from her own words and doings which I hope will catch her quintessence and maybe even a touch of her mystery emanating from her quietness.

For now, let one incident reveal something of Q, an event in her eleventh year. Walking home from her parochial school with her friend Deborah, the pretty girls in their perky uniforms — white blouse, navy-blue pleated skirt, matching kneesocks — Q saw two lads from the public school approaching. As the children passed, one of the impious Protestant boys said, “You girls are sluts.” Never breaking slide, Q gave him a raspberry. Deborah whispered, “What’s a slut?” Young Q had no idea, but it sounded intriguing, so the girls went to the town library only a block away and opened the fat dictionary on a pedestal under the tapestry of George Washington. There, in the greatest single volume of American lexicography — 
Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language,
2nd edition — they found the word. Narrowing the definitions meant looking up several other terms, but it was the illustrative citations from esteemed sources that shed light:

•   “Sluts are good enough to make a sloven’s porridge” (old proverb).

•   “Such wicked sluts cannot be too severely punished” (Fielding).

•   “Our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut” (Pepys).

Q said to her friend, “I have a feeling those twerps didn’t mean this last definition.”

Her capability to listen so intently to one of my stories may cause her to ask, well after the story is finished, “Did you say somebody tried to shoot you down like a dirty dog?” This happens because, while I’m getting a tale down its road, she takes a turn bending off in a promising way but not on the route of my narrative. I’ve learned to watch her face for indications her mind is heading for Texas when the story is on its way to Tennessee.

I’ll mention now, in all of our miles over neglected and strange routes, she never once has complained of even the most twisted of intimidating roads. If she gets uneasy at one of my route decisions, she expresses it only with silence and a certain slant to her lower lip. But her nether lip can also betoken an odd idea or a different track coming on, sometimes resulting in a new route, including her idea of going to Arkansas to follow the Ouachita River.

In 1849, J. Quinn Thornton published a guide to westward emigration called
Oregon and California in 1848.
He said of the people setting out for the Far West that “some were activated by a mere love of change; more by a spirit of enterprise and adventure; and a few, I believe, knew not exactly why they were thus upon the road.” If you will grant the writing of books as an enterprise, then of the other reasons J. Quinn enumerates, I could be convicted on all counts. But for me it is that last reason which underlies all the others, for to go out not quite knowing why is the very reason for going out at all, and to discover the
why
is the most promising and potentially fulfilling of outcomes. I’m speaking about a quest for quoz, of which I’ll say more as we go along, but until then, you might want to see Quoz as a realm filled with itself as a cosmos is with all that’s there, not just suns and planets and comets but dust and gas, darkness and light, and all we don’t know, and only a fraction of what we can imagine.

I’ve spent so many years rambling alone and not knowing exactly the reason, I now believe the answer to why we “were thus upon the road” lies in both the
why
and the
how
I became a writer in the first place: to break those long silent miles, I must stop and hunt stories and only later set down my gatherings in order to release them one day to wander on their own. A few years ago, a friend traveling in Nepal was lying on a pallet in a dormitory; atop a small shelf he saw a book dust-jacket and my face watching him. He said to me later, “You’ve traveled where you’ve never been.” To write is to have a reason for hoboing through one’s life and sometimes through those of others, whether or not you’ve met them. It’s for this reason you will find me now and again addressing you, the good reader. What the deuce, I might see you someday at that bookshop in Oshkosh or maybe we’ve already met at that lunch counter in Yazoo City.

These days, when Q and I take off down some two-lane where I begin to wander into a tale about that very road in another time, my recital is not just to pass uneventful miles; even more it’s my try at recollecting and reclaiming what once occurred. After all, for each of us, at our finale — if we’re lucky — we end up with only memory. As long as it lasts, memory — upon which love is utterly dependent — is the lone, truly portable outcome of our days. It’s a snare for the transitory happenings that have been our life. Everything you will remember in your last days probably will come from encounters on your own roads to quoz. When one’s past can no longer be summoned forth (even if elided and distorted as it must be through our frailties in perfect recall), that’s the day we become a former person, a cypher with the rim rubbed out.

My first book ends with this fragment from a Navajo wind chant: “Remember what you have seen, because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds.” Through those ancient words, and the others preceding them, Q first knew me and thereby set in motion our path to that supper conversation about the seventeenth letter of the alphabet.

As best I can figure it, my job is to go out and get stories and to pass them along as far as they can carry themselves. You can see what I’m saying: A search for quoz gives me a reason to get out of bed and step into the shower and wake up and once again take up a quest. That some particular quoz I find might one day later find you is not a requisite to my travels, but it surely is nice.

So then, quizzical reader, you who are yourself an infinity of quoz bound temporarily as one, it is now
you whom I seek
in hopes you’re ready for the quest and ready with a second question:
Quo vadis?

2

Mrs. Weatherford’s Story

O
N THE SECOND DAY
of spring 2004, Q and I headed for the Ouachita Mountains, she at the wheel. I told her this story soon after we crossed the border of northern Arkansas not far from a road that triggered my recollection. I spoke of Mrs. Weatherford — as I’ll call her here — and a tale she passed on to me some years earlier.

Traveling alone, I met her aboard the steamboat
Delta Queen
on a voyage down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. By chance I got seated next to her at the supper table the first evening. Despite her age — barely shy of eighty — she was attractive, slender, and quick, and she was a widow. Although she had little formal education, Mrs. Weatherford was a reader and articulate and happy to let her two companions — rich ladies, as was she now — do most of the talking, yakking really. In their fifties, her friends were overweight, mirthful women from Houston whose husbands gladly set them up in expensive sun-deck cabins for long boat-trips. The two companions talked often about money but not in dollars. Rather, their terms were the chattel of a well-heeled suburban life: “Why, the ring he gave that girl!” or “That man has never known a mortgage!” or “The First Lady said my gown was to die for!” And so on. The pair fell silent only when Mrs. Weatherford told a story from a time none of us had seen; although she never spoke of money or the life attached to it, despite being wealthier than her shipmates.

After each supper, I would follow Mrs. Weatherford and her friends to a quiet deck near their cabins where they would pour a nightcap. Then was the time she would pull up a story. My dedicated attention must have been encouragement because she kept telling things the other two had never heard. Mrs. Weatherford’s clear recollections made me wish her a relative or a neighbor, someone I could drop in on just to listen to what were really prose georgics from an era seemingly more distant than her years would allow. When she had finished a story, told in her soft Ozark cadence, I’d ask questions — the first night just to keep the others silent for a while longer but afterward to learn more details. She was pleased when I wrote some of them into my shirt-pocket memo book.

One evening we were sitting topside with our various nightcaps — mine was two fingers of a Kentucky straight Bourbon distilled not far to the east of where the boat was just then. We were watching a kind of alpenglow on the horizon behind a dark mass of big cottonwoods having the silhouette of low mountains. I said the sunset must be radiating all across Arkansas, and Mrs. Weatherford straightened in her chair as she did when something stirred her memory.

The version I set down now is from my notes:

“None of you know I grew up in north Arkansas,” she said. “The western side, in the hills. It was mostly rocks, soil no thicker than worn-out muslin. Everything, except our chickens, we had to get out of a creek-bottom field so small Poppa could plow it with a mule in a day. The hills were good for firewood and some walnuts and a squirrel or two. We didn’t eat coon. Usually, dessert was a half-dozen verses from the Bible. King James Version.”