The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (23 page)

In the dirt and pebbles and fallen leaves all around them, he knew, were the kilned clay pellets that had been fired from those same cannons two months ago – and he wondered now if they had quivered with newborn alertness, in the moment between their landing and his rejection of Parnassus’s offered gift.

Another cannon shot boomed away between the ridges of the gorge.

For a moment as the echoes faded he was sure he caught, faintly, the high female voices he had heard singing on the night four months ago when he had tried to take Tersitza and himself away from the mountain – but they were very faint now, and he was bleakly sure that they no longer sang to him.

He thought of Odysseus, the real Odysseus of Homer, tied to the mast and intolerably hearing the song of the sirens fading away astern.

And in a vision that he knew was only for himself, he saw the great stone spirit of the mountain rise beyond the trees to his right; its vast sunlit shoulders eclipsed the southern ridges, and its dazzling face, though it was an expanse of featureless gleaming rock, somehow expressed immortal grief.

And I do love thee,
it had said to him on that night.
Therefore stay with me.

As he shifted his head the thing stayed in the center of his vision as if it were a lingering spot of sun-glare, or else his gaze helplessly followed it as it moved with voluntary power, and he found that he had painfully hitched around in the saddle to keep it in sight, until it overlapped and merged with the giant that was Mount Parnassus, receding away forever behind him.

Trelawny was certainly a liar who eventually came to believe his own melodramatic fabulations – though his last words were, “Lies, lies, lies” – but his adventures on Mount Parnassus did happen. He really was the barbaric right-hand man of the mountain warlord Odysseus Androutses, really did marry the thirteen-year-old Tersitza, and he really was shot by William Whitcombe in the high Parnassus cave, and with no medical aid simply waited out his recovery. His injuries were exactly as I describe them, and he really did spit out, along with several teeth, half of one of the two balls Whitcombe’s rifle was loaded with.

He survived, and in later years asked Mary Shelley to marry him (she declined the offer), swam the Niagara River just above the falls, and in his old age was lionized in Victorian London society as the piratical friend of the legendary Byron and Shelley – and even of Keats, though in spite of the many colorful stories he would tell about his acquaintance with that poet, Trelawny had never actually met him. Trelawny died in 1881, at the age of eighty-eight, and the romantic autobiography he had constructed for himself, partly extravagant truth and partly extravagant lies, endured whole for a good eighty years after his death.

–T. P.