James Kendley

The Man Who Murdered Poetry

from The Mooncalf and Other Stories

 

 

My great-great grandfather, Jonas Alexander Boyles, murdered poetry and betrayed everything for which he claimed to stand.

 

I’ve been told that I favor him.

 

Two of my great-great grandfathers are wholly unknown to us. One was a Cherokee who embraced Christianity to escape the Trail of Tears, but it didn’t buy him much time; he was shot dead in Atlanta two years later. Two of my great-great grandfathers fought for the Confederacy and two for the Union, and one half-wild Kentuckian seems to have fought for either as the mood struck him. My surname comes down from Jonas Alexander Boyles, who sometimes claimed to be a colonel in the U.S. Army but in fact had no military record at all.

 

A tintype of Boyles from the late 1880s shows him bearded and balding, with the high, narrow forehead and sharp nose still prevalent in our family. I’ve seldom thought it easy to read character from a photographic portrait, but you can see the stubbornness that had helped this fierce, wiry little man become rich in a wide-open town like San Francisco.

 

The oil portrait of his wife, Greta, hangs beside him in an absurdly rococo gilt frame. She looks to be in her early 60s, a heavy woman with a broad peasant face and iron-gray hair pulled straight back. When I was a child, she looked like a stern, bloated saint in a darkened cell, a saint whose eyes followed me to any but the most acute angles possible in my grandparents’ long, narrow dining room.

 

Family lore says she was a barmaid Boyles picked up in a Colorado silver town on his way west. His grandchildren, my paternal grandfather and grand uncles, never met Boyles, and they passed down no stories of the relationship except that Boyles remarked after Sunday dinners that he married Greta because she was the only woman who could make him clean his plate. They remembered her as a kind, indulgent grandmother, but they had heard of only her most outrageous acts in relation to the outside world: bodily tossing a maid into the street and then throwing the girl’s clothing from a window; assaulting one of San Francisco society’s lesser lights for paying too much attention to Boyles at some social function; and publicly referring to a newspaper publisher as “that wormy, half-witted little bastard.” This last was apparently in response to the newspaper’s obliquely linking Boyles to the Black Dragon Tong. Boyles had made his best contacts in the silk, spice, and jade markets by delivering coolies to transcontinental railway work gangs, his only proven relationship with San Francisco’s nascent Chinese power structure.

 

Greta remained vehement in denials of her husband’s public misdeeds, and in her dotage, she demanded that my great-aunt Hecuba draft incoherent letters to politicians long since dead and newspapers long since shut down, letters quietly destroyed when Greta drifted off again. She was senile and helpless by Black Tuesday, but she lived until 1940 at my great uncle’s home in Fresno. Records of her birth were destroyed in the bombing of Frankfurt, but if we are to believe the age she gave on her marriage certificate, she was 105 years old when her heart finally gave out. I see no reason to doubt her; she admitted to being a full decade older than Boyles.

 

Boyles and Greta were a large fact of life in my childhood. I felt as if I knew them, partly because his only printed work, Coolie Tales, was the first book I ever loved. After my mother went off a pier in a gentleman friend’s rental car, I read Coolie Tales again and again, leaf by brittle leaf. After the desiccated spine split and fell away, pages started to pull free from the binding. I kept the pages together in a wooden cigar box.

 

Coolie Tales was a world unto itself, a consistent, unchanging realm filled with demons, ghosts, and enchanted beings. They really had nothing to do with the long rows of gray coats and little red books on the television screen, and they had much less to do with the hypothetical Chinese who could line up four abreast and march around the Earth forever. The Chinese Boyles wrote of were magical beings who lived outside history and outside the edges of maps on classroom walls. As such, they lived only within the context of Coolie Tales, so his attempts to degrade the Chinese on one hand and to invoke the power and mystery of Chinese tradition didn’t puzzle me at all. As I read the book over and over, phrases like “yellow heathen” settled in comfortably with “sons of the T’ang and Ming.” There is no reference in the foreword to his own involvement as a flesh-peddler save his translation of “coo-lee” as “bitter labor.”

 

His poems, true to the title, seemed based on folk stories from Chinese workers, although two poems were glosses of classical Chinese works and one, “The Thrice-Damned Monk,” was a melodramatic adaptation of a story from a 1776 collection of mysterious tales from Japan.

 

The title poem begins:

 

When spikes and hammers clatter down

And picks are laid to rest,

When skinners lead the mules to feed

And Sol sinks in the West,

 

Then all the coolies gather ’roun’

To clamour for “chow-chow.”

The shades who kneel in Chæron’s keel

Could not make such a row!

 

The coolie bangs his tin with sticks

While leaping through the air.

In depths of greed he’ll howl and plead

And pull his coal-black hair

 

Or deal the others bites and kicks

And blows from either hand,

Then try to steal his neighbor’s meal —

Or spill it in the sand.

 

But when “chow-chow” is stowed away,

They sit around the flames.

The coolie hears the lays of years

As old ones tell the names

 

Of emperors returned to clay

And warriors strong and brash.

Their strange tales fill the night until

The embers turn to ash.

 

It went on for another eleven verses, and that’s about as good as it got. Ten of those verses were synopses of poems in the collection.

 

Coolie Tales warped my poetic sensibilities, but Boyles was a great storyteller. In “Lee Po’s Washbucket Bride,” a doggerel ballad of a boy with unnatural desires for inanimate objects, Boyles was wry and restrained; the poem was oddly touching and funny as hell. In “The Goose-Necked Ghost,” a chilling tale of a murdered wife’s vengeance, he gradually piled horror upon horror in stilted hexameters and specious imitations of Chinese honorific speech, building up to a bloody climax and a vague, haunting denouement. In the last poem, “Shanghai Mornings,” he described dawn breaking over the harbor and the first stirrings in the bustling city. It was wildly romanticized, and his topography was so far off that it was clear he had never been there, but the poem betrayed his sense of wonder, a yearning for the unknown.

 

Boyles dedicated Coolie Tales to his wife:

 

FOR MY BELOVED WIFE, GRETA,

 

My Muse and Mentor,

without whom these tales of wonder

never would have seen the light of day.

 

Despite that and three sons, he disappeared one summer morning three years later. He disappeared completely, as if he had dropped into a crack in the earth somewhere between the front steps of his house and the back door of his warehouse. My great grandmother was called upon to view corpses from wharves and beaches, and she was called upon to visit hospitals and insane asylums, but Boyles never showed himself again. Greta sold his house and business for what she could, paid his debts, and turned to raising her three boys.

 

She knew the whole time. She didn’t discourage wild talk of Boyles being murdered by men he’d helped Shanghai, or finally getting crimped himself, or finally running afoul of the Tong, because she knew what had happened. Boyles had been careful about his money, and the $40,000 he’d taken with him was all in gold, gold that didn’t appear on any ledgers. He had taken his horn-handled Bowie knife and his old railroad watch, leaving behind the engraved sterling pocket watch with her likeness inside.

 

She knew.

 

I imagine his employees knew, and half of San Francisco must have guessed, but his picture was still on the wall in 1993 because Greta had kept her mouth shut in front of the boys until long after World War I, long enough for Boyles to become a family legend.

 

For as far back as anyone can tell, half the men in my family were scoundrels and the other half stayed home and wished they’d had the balls. By the time I figured out which I was, it was already too late. During reunions, the men in my family invariably drifted to the tintype and the portrait in an unacknowledged rite of homage or catharsis or both. When I was old enough to join them, small and brown in their rough semicircle of Sans-a-Belt slacks and over-salted Margaritas, Greta had begun to look serene and triumphant. I noticed for the first time that the light patch that outlined her head had faint striations like those in painted halos and bad examples of Kirlian photography.

 

Boyles, on the other hand, looked hard and ascetic, seeking some truth forty-five degrees to his left. As a child, I wondered if the photographer’s studio had faced the wharf, the bank, or the bordello.

 

When I graduated college, I considered vacations to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei to search for some trace of Boyles. By the time I left Japan in fall of 1993, I didn’t even want to know. I suspected that the poor bastard had never found what he was looking for, and I just hoped I wouldn’t stumble over his bones on my own merry way to Hell.

 

 

 

Former DM Senior Editor, Archivist, and blog-monkey James Kendley is the author of The Drowning God and The Devouring God, available from HarperCollins Publishers. He is also director of education services for Cricket Media. He is father of two, husband of one, and he lives in northern Virginia.

 

The Mooncalf and Other Tales is now available from Hammer & Anvil Books.