Subject: (urth) PEACE: tryst, diary, gold

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 18:05:16 +0000

Roy quoted me and wrote:
>>That is not the verbatim of the diary text.  If you prefer, it is the image
>>of the "story behind the veiled text" that Weer imagines as Kate reads it,
>>but I think it is too close in style to the intrusions of Ghost Kate
>>interacting with Hannah at the end of the banshee tale (where Hannah speaks
>>in italics) to be anything else but a ghostly "story behind the veiled
>>text."
>
>Kate never read from the diary; Lois did.

Right, I meant "Lois."  (Or are you just giving me a hard time?) <g>

>Kate *couldn't* have read from the
>diary for some very good reasons, chief of which is the fact that *the diary
>didn't exist until Lou Gold wrote it* in the 1950s. Secondly, Kate never
>kept a diary. She couldn't have, because she couldn't read or write. As Weer
>told Lois, the old Kate was "illiterate, or nearly so". (167)

Right, the diary is a forgery by Lou Gold.

Roy quoted me and wrote:
>>The Boston detail is a difference, especially when Weer is so certain.
>>OTOH, when teenager Hannah Mills presumably returned with mother and sister
>>to the farm and discovered that bandits had been there, had locked up her
>>dad and the hired man and maybe done something unspeakable to beloved Kate,
>>well that would understandably put a dampener on the whole trip, perhaps
>>even to the point where the trip would not be mentioned by Hannah.
>
>This all presupposes the contents of the forged diary were true.

No, not at all: it presupposes that the tryst (that is, the non-verbatim
version of the story in/behind the diary entry that we get from an
omniscient/third-person point of view) is true.  As true as Hannah talking
to Ghost Kate about Den and the mysterious other: which is to say,
absolutely true.

As you keep pointing out, the tryst material is hardly "the content" of the
forged diary: there is the stuff on how she got the diary, and so on, and
so forth.  The tryst material is a tiny fraction of the whole.

Aside: If the tryst (section 4) is true, and if Kate had Q's child (we know
she had offspring), then the appearance of Dan French (as Q's biological
heir) in section 5 is parallel to the appearance of Charlie Turner in
section 4 (having been a minor character in Tilly's "tall tale" of section
3).

Roy wrote:
>Or are you suggesting that the fictional account Lou Gold authored in the
>1950s somehow *changed the course of history in the 1860s*? That just
>because Gold wrote it that way in his forgery, that Hannah, who died before
>Gold ever even heard of her, who had never in her life "been a hundred miles
>off from that little house" she was born in (10), had the facts of her life
>changed, posthumously, so that she *did* go to Boston and Quantrill *did*
>come to the Mill farm?

No, you are avoiding what I wrote (I quote myself):
>Furthermore, this means that Lou Gold, even while "forging" the diary, was
>in some sense channeling Kate.  Seems outrageous, I know, but then the fact
>that his forged Necronomicon somehow "works" is a pointer; as well as the
>fact that, as I've written above, Ghost Kate is already established in the
>text.

That is to say: Gold is a necromancer (however accidentally it might be).
He did manage to get it right with regard to the tryst because Ghost Kate
influenced him.

Both Roy and Stone Ox take me to task for the fact that Hannah claims to
have never been 100 miles away from the house.  I stand by my point: a
teenage girl returning to her family farm to find such horrible things had
happened in her absence would very likely feel conflicting relief (that she
had not been there), guilt (that she had not been there), horror (what the
bandits would have done to her, her sister, and her mother if they had been
there), shame, and compassion (tend to those who suffered).  To put it into
modern terms, suppose the mother and daughters had gone to DisneyWorld and
come back to find their farm had been raided and their nanny had been
raped: how likely is the teenage girl to blather on and on to the nanny (in
a rural area with no neighbors, no telephones, etc.) about what a great
time she had experienced at DisneyWorld?  She will say nothing about it,
and the whole family will try to put it =all= behind them: DisneyWorld and
the raid, two events linked together because they were contemporaneous.

=My Position=
Diary: forged
Tryst: real (Ghost Kate)
Boston trip: real
Q's Gold: not there
Lois: not murdered

=mantis=

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 21:11:24 +0000

>He did manage to get it right with regard to the tryst because Ghost Kate
[snip]

>Lois: not murdered

I take it that we agree that Kate never kept a diary?

Let me see if I understand you correctly. I don't understand your emphasis
on the importance of the tryst, but we agree, I think, that it *was* a
consensual sexual encounter, not rape. Whiskey loosened the tongues of the
seven men and Kate overheard them talking about what they had been doing
down by Sugar Creek to get their boots muddy. Later, when one of the men (I
think Quantrill himself to have been the least likely of the seven)
encountered her alone, she took "him to the haymow, and bribed him with such
talk as she knew how to make, and kisses and more. She was not that ugly a
woman by moonlight." She used sexual bribery in an attempt to pump him for
more detailed information than she had overheard earlier about what they had
buried in the creek. Am I right so far?

What was it that so peaked her interest that she was willing to trade sex
for information about it, if it wasn't treasure? If it was treasure, then
why is your position (above) "Q's Gold: not there"? Wasn't that the whole
point of the tryst? Wasn't it to stash his gold that Quantrill ever came
near the Mill place in the first place?

I'm not trying to be difficult; I just don't understand.

-Roy

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