ROOTS OF THE WILD ARTICHOKE
This text was created under human supervision, using the first sentences of a known work as its starting point.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He has a little hoe in his hand, and he is not used to it, for he grasps it with his fingers spread wide. But he is scratching at the earth like a wild thing, and he regards neither you nor me. He is pulling some roots out of the ground; but I don’t know what they are. I think they are roots of the wild artichoke.
“Do you think he’s crazy?” asked the Under-sheriff.
“No,” said the Sheriff. “I think he’s just a boy who has found something that he likes better than playing ball or doing lessons. I don’t see anything very horrible about it.”
“But those ghastly roots!” exclaimed the Under-sheriff. “They look like dead hands trying to get out of the ground.”
“They do,” said the Sheriff, “but I’m not certain that they are roots of the artichoke. They may be taro.”
“What's taro?” asked the Under-sheriff.
“I don’t know,” replied his superior, “but it isn’t the artichoke.”
The boy was scratching furiously at the soil with his hoe.
“Now,” said the Sheriff, “you see how fervent he is in this work; and when you have been here for a while you will see him digging even when there aren't any roots to dig up. It would be easy to imagine him crazy if you didn’t know him personally.”
“Perhaps they’re not always artichoke roots,” suggested the Under-sheriff, casting an alarmed glance at the boy’s bare feet.
“Perhaps not,” replied the Sheriff, “but we must leave him free in his choice of occupations; they are probably harmless enough.”
“How long has this been going on?” asked his subordinate.
“That’s hard to say,” said the Sheriff.
They stood watching for some time in silence. Finally they walked away and left him digging alone in the corner of the garden. He did not bother himself about their presence, and showed no fear of them whatever. He worked with a quiet, steady persistence until they were out of sight.
But they heard from others that the boy had gone on with his digging for weeks. He never failed to come home before dark, and his mother did not worry about him because she knew that he never deviated from this practice, no matter what might happen to interrupt his digging operations; he came home every night with his spade over his shoulder and handed her whatever roots he had dug up during the day without saying a word about them or telling her what use he intended to put them to. She did not trouble herself about their quality because she knew that if any were rejects she could use them herself. Sometimes they were so abundant that he would fill buckets with them and carry them into the kitchen; but he didn’t explain what he was after or let her ask questions. He would take a bucket into his room and lock himself in while he was making mysterious preparations.
What was odd about this boy was that although he lived only a few minutes’ walk from all sorts of schools, and had had plenty of opportunity to attend one if he chose, it was discovered that he had never been to school in his life nor studied anything except gardening, cooking, and some elementary arithmetic which he had learned at home from books written for children by a lady who lived in another part of town. The boy had studied these books by himself in which there were charming color plates of plants and flowers and birds; but it was one thing to study these books by himself and quite another thing to attend school or be taught by a teacher in a schoolroom; yet the boy had never learned anything about schoolrooms nor what is taught in them nor how being taught differs from learning things on one’s own initiative as this boy did by himself every day when he went into his room and locked himself in while he studied things that interested him under his mother’s roof on Sunnyside Road. He was free to study these things without any teacher present to say “No!” or “This will never do!” or “You don’t know what you’re doing!” like some teachers are inclined to do at times when children experiment with transforming themselves into artists or musicians — or detectives — or whatever their souls may yearn towards in order to become themselves more fully than they can be otherwise, especially if pupils are admitted to school at such tender ages as four or five years old when self-consciousness is impossible because one does not yet know how one looks or behaves because one is too young to observe one’s own mannerisms or too innocent ever to suspect that there are any such things as mannerisms at all — being still so close to God who made us all and knows us through and through.
When Dr. Burke opened the door of the waiting room at his office on the morning of October fifth, he found the Under-sheriff waiting for him. It was about nine o’clock. Dr. Burke was surprised to see him, for he had not thought that by this time the police would have any kind of definite proof that the boy had been killed or that they would have found either the body or other indications of murder on Sunnyside Road.
“Well?” said Dr. Burke, looking at the Under-sheriff, who was at first unable to speak because he saw a rifle hanging in front of the doctor’s coat — the very rifle with which someone had tried to kill the boy on September fifteenth but had only hit his hat off his head.
“Well?” repeated Dr. Burke, because the Under-sheriff was still unable to say anything, although he made an effort to do so. He had been too eager to break into speech when he entered the office that morning and had told himself that he must be cool and not say anything which at a moment's notice would betray him. He had dreamed all night about that rifle — the one in front of his eyes. He had dreamed that the boy was wearing the hat that had been shot off his head; and this hat was a suit of armor in his dream, as if nothing could hurt him as long as he wore it. This was a dream in which he could find no rest nor think of anything else except running down Route 12 after dark with a revolver in each pocket; but when he woke up in the morning all this seemed pure nonsense to him.
“I’ve come out to see you,” said the Under-sheriff, “because you and I have a little business to discuss.”
“And this business is what?” asked the doctor.
“Corollaries to the matter with which we have been dealing in town,” said the Under-sheriff.
“Are you still hunting for the body?” asked Dr. Burke.
“When you see it you won’t think it looks like a body,” replied the Under-sheriff.
The doctor did not answer this when he heard it; but he remembered something that he had read in a detective story about a body which was thought to be a body but was but a doll — a marionette — which had all its joints concealed magnetically and which could be made to roll and jump and even scream, or just stand still and merely shiver. He thought about the word ‘corollaries’, which always had a pleasant sound to him just because he liked so much to hear and say the other word ‘corolla’ — which he associated with flowers, and roses especially, whose petals he used to count in the summer when he was a boy.
“I have brought you a sample,” said the Under-sheriff, producing a box of roots. Dr. Burke counted them: there were five roots in the box. He knew right away what they were.
“What do you say to these?” said the Under-sheriff.
Dr. Burke answered at once that he could not recognize their species since he had never been taught the subject.
“These are roots of the wild artichoke,” said the Under-sheriff, watching him.
The doctor was still silent, looking at the box.
“You know something about them, I think,” said the Under-sheriff.
Dr. Burke, who had given up smoking at the age of fifty, because he had read in a medical journal that smoking was injurious to sex glands, bit one of the outer skins of a root.
“I had a dream about you last night,” said the doctor.
“I had one too,” said the Under-sheriff. “I dreamed that I was chasing after some bad men, and that I caught one of them, but he told me that he was just a scarecrow, and that he couldn’t feel a thing.”
“Go on,” said the doctor, still gnawing at a root.
“Are you aware of what you are doing?” asked the Under-sheriff.
Dr. Burke went on eating, his head bent over the opened box. When he had finished one root, he bit into another.
“You can see that I am going to eat all of them,” he said, looking at the Under-sheriff with huge eyes, and opening his mouth to show the teeth that were left to him.
“Are you trying,” said the Under-sheriff, “to show me that you are so mad that you can walk with the devil and get away with it?”
“The devil?” laughed the doctor. “These are sweet. They won’t hurt me. I shall die long after you are dead.”
“What you have done to me in the past,” said the Under-sheriff, without changing the tone of his voice, “and what you have done to somebody who had no one to protect him, and who was, therefore, my friend, is a matter that will be duly investigated, and all its circumstances, no matter how shameful and immoral, will come to light.”
“Night has many things that the day does not know,” said the doctor.
“Aren’t you afraid of God?” asked the Under-sheriff.
Dr. Burke laughed with his eyes closed. “I am afraid of nothing,” he said. “Nothing can hurt me, since of all the ills that men can suffer, I have known each and every one. Tell God to go on painting his great frescoes. I am coming to see him at the end of the world.”
At these words, the Under-sheriff took a revolver out of one of his pockets, pointed it at Dr. Burke, and fired. Dr. Burke’s eyes showed no change; but the bullet hit him below the left shoulder. When the Under-sheriff saw that the doctor had not even moved, he thought that his shot had missed, but he soon realized that he had fearfully miscalculated everything.
The Under-sheriff, a man who had come into these parts to raise chickens, whispered a few words that sounded more blasphemous when uttered than any others ever spoken.
“You have overdone the part,” said the doctor, laughing.
The Under-sheriff could not say another word.
Dr. Burke had eaten all the roots, as he had said he would.