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By Root 525 0

their hints of last October’s ruddy-spot leaves (O great trees of the Versailles castle of our souls! O clouds that sail our Immortalities!— that tear us to the Voom, beyond the ledge and massive widow, O fresh paint and marbles in a Dream!)—the gentle, graceful grass, the weaving waving in the drowsy afternoon, the kingly slump and slope of the earth of Snake Hill, and then sensationally out of the corner of the eye a whole wing and corner and facade of the Castle–wild, noble, baronial home of the soul. This was an afternoon of such bliss that the earth moved–actually moved, I knew why soon enough–satan was beneath the rock and loam hungry to devour me, hungry to sleek me up through his portal teeth to Hell–I lay back and innocently in my boyhood barefoot sang “I got a nose, you got a nose—” Nobody passing in the road beyond the wall asked what I was doing there little boy–no paint trucks, no women with children —I was relaxed in my day in the yard of the homely old Castle of my play.

Late that afternoon, almost dusk, very cold, I made my way down Snake Hill via the little cart road through the jackpines in the sand not far from the sooty old coal shute of the Centralville Bee Coal Co.

4

AFTER SUPPER I WANDERED up to the sandbank and stood on top till dark,—looked at the coal shack below, the sand, Riverside Street where the sand road crossed, the rickety Voyer grocery store, the old cemetery on the hill (homerun centerfield in old games against Rosemont Tigers on their own grounds), the backyard viney and autumn-like of the Greek brothers Arastropoulos (faintly related to G.J. thru relatives working a lunchcart on Eighth Avenue New York)— The vast fields towards Dracut Tigers, distant pines, stonewalls– The trees of Rosemont, the great river beyond–far off, across Rosemont and over the river, Centralville and its darkening Snake Hill. I stood on sandbank top like a meditative king.

The lights turned on.

Suddenly I turned. Doctor Sax was standing there.

“What do you want Doctor Sax?” I said immediately– didn’t want the shade to overcome me and I pass out.

He stood, tall and high and dark in the bushes of the night. The feeble Lowell night lights, and the early stars of 8 o’clock evening, sent up and down a gray luminescent aura to illuminate the long green face beneath the shroud slouch down hat— “Staring with mute sun eyes were you at the drop of day in your billygoat town–think old men ain’t traveled and seen other shepherds and other gray goat pies in the meadow by the wall– You didn’t read a book today, did you, about the power of drawing a circle in the earth at night–you just stood here at nightfall with your mouth hanging open and fisting your entrail piece—”

“Not all the time!”

“Ah,” said Doctor Sax rubbing his cane against his jowl, his shroudy cane popped up from black pedestal bases in his stomach dark–he leered—”now you’re pro-testing—” (turning away to do a sudden smirking grin with himself in the palm of his black glove)—”Look, I know you also saw the little children of that Farmier family running up and down the log at the river’s flooded edge and complimented yourself for the keenness of your eyes and thought of mowing them down with a distance scythe didn’t you!”

“Yes sir!” I snapped.

‘That’s better-” And he pulled out a mask of W.C. Fields with David Copperfield Mr. Swiggins hat and put it over the black part where his face was under the slouch hat. I gaped,— When I’d first heard the rustle of the bushes I thought it was The Shadow.

5

AT THAT MOMENT I KNEW that Doctor Sax was my friend.

“When I first saw you on the Sandbank I was scared– the night Gene Plouffe was playing the Moon Man—”

“Gene Plouffe,” said Doctor Sax, “was a great man–we must pay him a visit. I’ve been watching Gene for years, he was always one of my favorites. As a phantom of the night I get to know and see a lot of people. I once wrote a story about one of my madder adventures which I’ve since lost.”

Neither one of us at that time knew Amadeus Baroque or that he had found that ghostly manuscript.

‘The Flood,