Master Snickup's Cloak

by Alexander Theroux

One morning it was ...

The Middle Ages.

The sun shone down on the foundling home at the end of Duck's-foot lane in the quiet little dorp of Sleutel in the Netherlands. The year was 1307 (by Pope Hilarius's corrected calendar, of course). Master Snickup, a tiny ward there - wearing the black and red uniform of the home - gleefully played punchball against the cobbled wall beneath a yew tree near the town weigh-house. It was a feast day: the Pardon of St. They. Cattle were blessed. Children processed. You heard litanies.

"Wat is Uw naam?" asked a new little orphan girl who suddenly appeared at his side, smiling, plum-cheeked, and wearing a chaste wimple. Her beauty put to shame the roses of Paestrum. Superfecta - for this was the name of the flax-haired froikin - immediately stole Master Snickup's heart away.

The two children, thereafter, spent day after day playing games of noughts-and-crosses, stickjaw, stitch away tailor, egg-in-cap, ducking mummy, backy-o, all the winkles. And skip-rope, when they frisked and jumped to the jingle,

"Do you love me,

Or do you not?

You told me once,

But I forgot."

Happily, Master Snickup even did her chores for her, cups, dipping tallow, and decoaling the squinches; he did the wash pots, as well. She played the dulcimer.

A decade passed, just like that.

Superfecta, who'd bloomed into indescribable loveliness, now drew smiles from each and all. There is no potential for permenance, Master Snickup told his heart, without fear of threat.

And so they were betrothed one day at the shrine of St. Puttock of Erpingham and swapped gifts; he gave her two white pigeons and received at her hands a wonderful blue cloak.

Now there lived on the verge of the village, at that time, one of the richest burghers in all Gelderland - the ill-living Mijnheer van Cats, an unctuous cheesegobbling fat pants who smoked a clay pipe and wanted sons. He owned the black windmill.

But who'd be his wife? A purse of 2,000 gulden was put up. In vain did the merchants of the guild offer their daughters, a group of off-sorts who had pointed noses and pointed caps. "Knapweed!" "Hake!" "Twisses!" screeched van Cats and hurled other unprintable names at them. Modest pious folk covered their eyes.

One winter dusk, it so turned out, the orphans were all given special dispensation to go to the Haymarket to watch the "illuminations". Mijnheer can Cats, in attendance, sat up on the balustrade of the guildhall, whereupon his gaze fell - fatefully - upon Superfecta. That little boompjes, thought he, will soon be mine. An ouch of heavy gold was hers the day following; his was a sealed envelope - which he slit open with his pipestem. What could be the decision? "Yaw, yaw" guffawed the fat Dutchman.

A record of the wedding can be found to this day as a small entry in the old chronicle of Nuewenburgensis. You will do, as the diverb has it, what you are.

Master Snickup - disedged with grief - took up scrip and staff and, wearing only his blue cloak, set out to pick his way across nearer Europe. He sought the antipodes. Hither was yon, yon hither.

Mountains were climbed, mazes thrid. He crossed a sea that had no motion on the ship, What is Pseudonymry, and came to a desert where he said penances and fed on caper buds, dormice, lentils. Still he pilgrimaged, reading the footprints of geese in the air.

To reach eventually the Black Sea where, living alone on a shale island, he chastised himself with thongs and subsisted only on air and dew. Rain fell on his blue cloak, which he sucked, supplying himself with vitamin B12. Swallows sang upon his wrists.

"Sero te amavi," whispered Master Snickup, and he prayed constantly with perfectly folded hands, a shape best fitted for that motion. Small furious devils hated that and visited him in a variety of shapes and torments:

Six-fingered Anaks freexes, ansicernous beetles, chain-shaking kobolds, Sauba ants, red-eyed swads, sorcerers who could disconnect their legs and flap about like bats and pin-headed Hippopodes with reversed feet, who leapt instead of walking. Master Snickup fell ill. But who could help? For ships in sight there were none.

The town of Sleutel, meanwhile, rang with news. Superfecta van Cats was delivered of a son. "A witty child? Can it swear? The father's dearling! Give it two plums!" boasted its sire, butterballing it with his gouty feet.

But hear of more. Mijnheer van Cats, now fattened on perfidy itself, had turned syphilitic and even more hateful than before. He sang curses against his wife in the taproom and, roiling and hissing, streeled home. He locked her nights in the black windmill. He chased her through town slashing her with wet timothies. Sadism and farce are always inexplicably linked.

The orphanage, in the meantime, closed down - without so much as two coppers snapped together to prevent it, despite the bulging wallets of all the soap-boilers, razor makers, brewers, and guilder gobbling rentiers that lived nearby. O events! God could not believe man could be so cruel.

Winter settled hard over the Black Sea. The soul of Master Snickup now grew pure - a hagiographical commonplace - as his body grew diseased. He never washed his bed save with tears. The tattered blue cloak had become infested with worms and rotifers, which also battened on his holy flesh.

It snew. And on that desolate shale island, since fabled, Master Snickup one day actually looked into the heart of silence, rose, and - with a tweak-and-shake of finger and thumb toward the sky - died. Rats performed the exequies. The moon, suddenly, was o'ercast blood-red in an eclipse. Thunder rumbled. Boding? - Ill.

A rat flea, black in wing and hackle, flittered out of the shred of blue cloak and flew inland - as if carried along by destiny - toward the Crimean trading port of Kaffa. The infamous date was 1346.

Stinks were soon smelt - in malt, barrels of sprats, chimney flues. Physicians lost patients in spates. Plague! Plague! bellowed the chief magistrate running swiftly in circles, his fauces black, streaks of jet vivid along his nose and wicks - and dropped dead as a stone. Fires were lighted. The harbour was sealed.

But it was too late. Ships, laden with produce, had already set sail in the pestiferous winds and headed out along the trades to Constantinople, to Cyprus, to Sardinia, to Avignon, and pints beyond - Sleutel, among them: a town that, recently, had expanded and grown to the clink of gold in the guilds, the crackle of flames in the tile-kilns, and the mercantile sermons in the new protestant kerks.

There was even entertainment. The town brothel - formerly the orphanage - represented the major holding of a certain Mijnheer van Cats who lived alone with his son, the dissolute half-wit seen once a year moping into town to paint its shutters and touch up the wooden sign out front that read: De Valk Gravin.

It became famous. Merchant sailors, visiting in droves, always wept with laughter at the idle boast of its madam, that she had once been the village beauty. Or was Time, indeed, the archsatirist? For the place was run by an ooidal-shaped sow, with chin hairs, a venomous breath, and grit-colored hair, who always carried a ladle and trounced her girls. They called her "Mother Spatula".

The legacies passed on by the sailors were worse than the legacies they received. It began with "the sweats". The town of Sleutel was soon aflame with flews, black spots, boils, pink eye, and the stinking wind that broadcast one to another. Lost souls screamed aloud to be crimped with knives like codfish. A whole Arabian pharmacy could do no good. Nothing could stop the contagion, neither chanters nor flagellants.

The townsfolk spun into dancing fits, cat-concerts, and fell to biting each other and frying Jews. Men castrated themselves and flung their severed genitals into the hopeless sky to placate an angry God. "The Black Death" struck, and struck, and struck. Bodies fell like the leaves of Vallombrosa. It beggared rhetoric: recorded only by historians as the worst disaster that had ever visited the world.

Mijnheer van Cats, having stared upon his son's flapping black tongue and drooling insanity, waddled up high into the black windmill, took off his clogs, and - pinching his nose - stepped past the revolving vanes and cowardly made his quietus.

They went to their accounts impenitent.

Mother Spatula ran into her dank room, made mouths in a glass, and shrieked! Horrified at the tell-tale nosebleed, her drazels held to her lips a little statue of St. Roch the Plague Saint; but she went deaf as a beetle to their pleas, curled up into a fork and died, notwithstanding the fact that, to her black feet - in order to draw the vapors from her head - they had applied two dead pigeons.

She didn't seem to attach a good of importance to them before she went.

The End