Grail Excerpt: Asphodel, New Jersey

[At the wheel of his gigantic Oldsmobile, one Pierce de Borron approaches a small town. The year is 1992.]

Asphodel, New Jersey, current population four thousand one hundred fifty-seven, had felt the first white man’s boots upon its surface nearly three hundred years before Pierce’s tires.

Having been led by a willing Delaware Indian guide to the little spit of land formed by the confluence of the Delaware River on the right and a narrow creek on the left, the captain of the English party pointed to the creek.

“What call ye that?” said the captain.

To the Delaware guide, the pale stranger with the surfeit of clothing and the bizarre headgear seemed to be pointing not to the creek itself but to the island jutting up from its mouth, just off the tip of the mainland.

The guide checked with his comrades before answering; yes, they said: that was their observation as well.

The Delaware turned back to the captain. How to put this…?

“You want to walk to the island?” he asked finally in his native Algonquian, giving up all effort at tact but setting his voice (so he thought) to be unambiguously incredulous.

Nodding, the captain duly directed that the waterway’s name be so recorded.

The party’s scribe’s ears were ringing at the moment. He didn’t know what the problem with them was but suspected it had something to do with the weeds these savages had given him to smoke last night, and of course he knew even less of the Delaware’s language than his captain. As a result the unfamiliar words were corrupted, as such things generally are, and the creek has been known since that time as the Asphomenatic (“Walk-to-Island”).

And what of the anonymous island out there?

****

Separated by a narrow channel of dirty water from the mainland of what in a hundred years would be known as Asphodel Township, it had never been settled by the Indians. Sandy and dry, with a random but limited variety of trees and grasses dotting its surface here and there, it seemed to be an anomaly, a loose end, a geologic expression of divine listlessness; except for occasional romantic appointments, it never experienced intentional human footfall. Birds nested there, and squirrels chittered from the trees, and the rabbit population seemed to have reached an uneasy truce with Malthusian arithmetic. It was said that the spirits of lost departed Delaware roamed the hills on the island (that they were there at all being perhaps the best evidence that they were lost), and so for the most part it was ignored right up through the Colonial years.

But the distant and then nearer guns of revolution changed that, at least for a while.

****

A bit to the north, on the Pennsylvania side of the river, there dwelt a journeyman cooper named Josiah Turning. Josiah was a bachelor, married to his trade in the daytime and his ale at night. Aye, his ale. The ale, that is, Josiah’s consumption of which was increasingly spoiled by the fractious temperaments of his neighbors at the publick house, by voices of discord pro- and anti-King. Competing toasts resounded from the walls, drowning one another out: “To liberty!” “No, to the Crown!”

It was a source of considerable and growing disgust for good Josiah Turning; why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone and be done with it? Everything had been fine until all this feather-brained talk of independence. Spoiled, they were. Not that he had any great love for monarchy but after all what were a few pennies’ more in tax, eh?

But the voices grew louder and shriller, dissolved at last into gunfire, and that was when Josiah Turning, cooper, betook his hoops and his staves and his mallets and other tools of his trade and most especially his curmudgeonly self across the Delaware, to the city of Burlington.

But Burlington was even worse; here in the colony of New Jersey it seemed that men lacked even the modest restraint of Quakerdom — or mayhap all the Quakers had relocated elsewhere. In any event, the patrons of the first Burlington publick house into which Josiah introduced his thirst seemed ready to throw into the stocks the first unfortunate devil to introduce the name “George” into conversation.

Josiah did not even bother to unload his skiff but set out again, though the night was already approaching, floating south and west with the tide and the bends in the river, looking for solitude, blissful solitude as it might reveal itself in the absence of all lights and fires over here to his left, solitude far from strife and politics and the unnatural inflammation of tempers.

Looking for solitude, perhaps, such as he might find on this dark form now rising up out of the river to his left.

He poled the skiff into the narrow, muddy channel. “Halloo!” he called. “Halloo!”

Having received no reply, he thought for a second, then cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “I claim this island in the name of George the King!”

Silence.

“I mean, in the name of liberty!”

A wonderful absence of sound answered him, save for the plick, plick, plick of water lapping up against the side of his boat. A water bird called somewhere nearby, espousing no impassioned principles of royalty or mob; a breeze rattled the leaves of the half-dozen nearby trees, oaks and maples and elms.

Aye. This would be his home.

That was 1774. He rode out the Revolution, Josiah Turning did, muttering to himself, listening at nights to the sharp but distant cracks of musket fire as his nearest neighbors played at warfare, systematically (he supposed) annihilating one another.

Once, and once only, he ventured back into Burlington for a mug of brew and the latest gossip. The news was all bad: the Revolution was here to stay. No one needed barrels.

Fine; Josiah Turning needed no one. He returned then to his home for good, shooting rabbits and woodcocks, scratching out griping entries in a journal, eking from the island’s dunes and thickets a semblance of an existence.

In the spring of 1794, almost twenty years to the day after he’d moved to the island, his body was found by a young couple “in search of…  of a homestead, yes a homestead,” said the man as the woman blushed prettily and smoothed her wrinkled skirts.

As best as the authorities could tell in those days, Josiah Turning had been dead for several months, huddled there apparently against the winter cold in his rickety hut fabricated of barrel staves, alongside his desiccated corpse the desultory journal of his time spent on the island, the testament to his time spent living out his curse of apolitical blood.

The island was known ever after as Turning Island — even after a WPA project in the 1930s dredged out a deep gouge in the Delaware and dumped the silt into the channel, filling it in, converting the erstwhile island into a peninsula.

Turning Island: never settled (the young couple who had found Josiah’s remains never having gotten around to establishing residence there), Asphodel’s housing coming right up to the edge of what used to be the channel and stopping there, abruptly, like the jungle wall bordering the Sahara.

Indeed it was like a desert here, “out on the Island” as the folks of Asphodel called it, sandy mountains having been transferred from the river bottom, littered now with broken bottles and used condoms and tires from vehicles that had not been manufactured for decades, visited in daylight only by grade-school science classes engaged in fantastic fossil-hunting expeditions, visited at night only by those same old Delaware spirits and later generations of trysting couples, roamed now also by the restless misanthropic shade of Josiah Turning….