The True Account Read Free

vast fund of classical stories and poems, he knew a thousand tales of witches, ghouls, and ghosties, in the telling of which he terrified no one so much as himself. He was deathly afraid of large dogs, small serpents, lightning—he had been struck eight times since the installation of his copper crown, and it was said in the village that, like a tall ash tree in a Vermont hedgerow, he “drew electricity"—and of nearly all women, though he had the greatest respect for and confidence in my mother, as did my father and I.
    One of my uncle’s most curious inventions was a wooden, Dutch-style shelf dock, about a foot and a half tall, without any works or innards but with a very passable painting he had done on it of his hero Quixote, that Knight of the Woeful Countenance, doing combat with a windmill. The painted hands of this clock were set forever at twenty minutes past twelve, which hour had a triple significance to my uncle. First, he was utterly certain that this was perpetually the correct time at Greenwich, England, so that by knowing the hour where he was, and the altitude of the sun, he could always calculate his correct longitude and divine where he was in the universe. And it distressed him not in the least that no matter how many times he made these calculations, his position never came out the same twice but varied wildly, from the longitude of Calcutta to that of Venice.
    The second point of significance concerned a saying in our family, which was that whenever a lull fell over the conversation, it must be twenty after the hour. Admittedly, between my uncle the ex-schoolmaster and my father the editor, one or both of whom seemed always to be discoursing from dawn straight through until midnight, there were not many such lapses of silence in our household. But when by chance no one happened to be talking, my uncle would leap up and dash out to his Library at Alexandria to check the time on the Dutch clock and confirm that it was indeed twenty past the hour, which was a great relief to him. And though the clock was less reliable as a timepiece than was entirely convenient to one wishing to know the
actual
hour, it was so reliable as a conversation piece that it never failed to set the talk in motion again.
    Third, and finally, it was inside the hollow case of this remarkable clock that my uncle stored his hemp tobacco.
    Â 
    From what I have retailed to you thus far, you might well suppose that mine was a very odd and somber boyhood. Odd, I will grant you. But somber? Never in this world. For my uncle was ever a second father to me. In fact, it might be said that between my true father and my uncle True, the pair of brothers made one complete and perfect father. Or so I thought, at least. And no boy could
ever
have had a more complete education than I. When my interest first in sketching, then painting, birds and wildlife began to emerge, my uncle even took me on a tour of the great museums of England, France, Italy, and the Lowlands. By which I mean that we canoed across the “Atlantic Ocean”—our pond, that is—and on the far side he described the great paintings of the world so exactly that I all but saw them. Say what the village might, then, it was a splendid way to grow up. And to anyone who thought differently, Private True Teague Kinneson doffed his belled cap, bowed low, and said, “Why, bless you, too, sir. With a tooleree and a toolera and a tooleroo!”

4
    O F ALL MY UNCLE’S many schemes and projections, the one nearest his heart was no more and no less than to discover the Northwest Passage. From my earliest visits to the Library at Alexandria, I remember him poring over the old histories of his mostly ill-fated fellow expeditionaries and visionaries who for more than three centuries had sailed in quest of that elusive route to the riches of Cathay. On a wall map of North America behind his writing desk, the blank territory to the north and west of the