23. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, pp. 733-773

Three: Last Transit, 75-78

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Mason writes Dixon to tell him, "I am coming North a Mountain of suitable Gravity to seek, whose presum'd Influence might deflect a Plumb-line clearly enough to be measur'd without Ambiguity," adding a little dig about Maskelyne's "difficult History with Plumb-lines." He asks Dixon to recommend an inn, but Dixon insists that Mason stay with him.

"Mason finds Dixon still gloomy about the death of his Mother back in January," but they begin to reminisce. Mason tells him about how Maskelyne kept him on in Ulster longer than necessary and then brought him home on "a meat-ship" -- a vessel loaded with sheep carcasses. Eventually there comes a moment of unaccustomed tenderness between the old companions:

"Gave thee a rough time, didn't I, Friend." Reaching to rest his hand for a moment upon Dixon's Shoulder, before removing it again.
"Oh," Dixon nodding away at an Angle from any direct view of his Partner's Face, "as rough times go, ... the French were worse ...? The five Years of Mosquitoes, of course ..." The old Astronomers sit for a while in what might be called an Embrace, but that they forbear to touch. 

Dixon launches into an account of his stay at the North Cape of Norway, where he caught only glimpses of the transit. And then proceeds into a tall tale about his travels even further north, but to the inside of the world, where one of the inhabitants observes that people on the outside of the globe, "wherever you may stand, given the Convextity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice. Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else, -- ev'rybody's axes converge, -- forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another, -- an entirely different set of rules for how to behave." Mason has his usual bemused reaction to Dixon's fabulations.

As they part, Mason asks, "If they don't kill and eat me up there, shall we do this again." Dixon replies, "We must count upon becoming old Geezers together." "They are looking directly at each other for the first time since either can remember."

In Scotland, in August 1773, Mason meets up with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, who are "upon their famous Trip to the Hebrides," or so Cherrycoke claims, though Ives doubts that they passed within a hundred miles of each other. "'I had my Boswell, once,' Mason tells Boswell, 'Dixon and I. We had a joint Boswell. Preacher nam'd Cherrycoke. Scribbling ev'rything down, just like you, Sir.'" On his expedition, Mason locates the mountain called Schiehallion, but he declines to return to the mountain to make the measurements needed, so Maskelyne gets the credit for determining the mass of the Earth.

When Mason and Dixon meet again, Dixon is crippled by gout and Mason has rediscovered his old melancholy. They spend their time together fishing. Mason meets Dixon's mistress, Margaret Bland, whom he has always planned to marry "just before we go to America." They have two daughters, but "America now would never be more real than his Remembrance, which he must now take possession of, in whatever broken incompleteness, or lose forever." Mason tells Dixon that he has remarried and they have had a child, Charles Jr., and are expecting another.

While they are fishing one night, they're approached by a dog, a Norfolk terrier, who looks like the Learnèd Dog, though that was many years ago and this dog is "scarcely a year old." The dog follows them home, but never speaks. Margaret Bland asks what his name is. "'Fang,' says Mason. 'Learnèd,' says Dixon." Then one night, both of them have the same dream: The dog whispers to them, "I am a British Dog, and belong to no one, if not to the two of you. The next time you are together, so shall I be, with you." They take it as a sign that they'll see the dog when they get together next year.

But it is Mason, not Dixon, who emigrates to America, where Benjamin Franklin visits him on his deathbed. "His illness at the end was never stipulated. Yet 'tis possible, after all, down here, to die of Melancholy." Though he had five more boys and a girl, "he never put Rebekah to Earth." And he never really reconciled with his father, who claimed that Mason's son Doctor Isaac "was named after the Doctor who lost" Rebekah. Willy Mason tells his brother, "You are nam'd for Newton, whom Dad admires greatly," but Doctor Isaac remains unsure.

"When news reach'd Mason that Dixon had died, he went about for the rest of the Day as if himself stricken." He tells his sons stories about Dixon, and when he mentions Dixon's two daughters, Willy and Doc suspect him of matchmaking: "'Two Sons.... Two Daughters. And a Father wishing, as Fathers do, to be a Grand-Father." With Doc, Mason visits Dixon's grave, where "Mason beseech'd what dismally little he knew of God, to help Dixon through." When he is suddenly overcome, "'It's your Mate,' Doctor Isaac assur'd him, 'It's what happens when your Mate dies.'"

On his deathbed, Mason says to Franklin, "Sir, you have encounter'd Deists before, and know that our Bible is Nature, wherein the Pentateuch, is the Sky. I have found there, written ev'ry Night, in Astral Gematria, Messages of Great Urgency to ourTime, and to your Continent, Sir."

After Mason's death, "Mary would return to England with the younger Children, -- William and Dr. Isaac, Rebekah's Sons, would stay, and be Americans."

7. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, pp. 183-214

One: Latitudes and Departures; 18-21

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Mason and Dixon return to London, where "They address the Council of the Royal Society, and find they have nothing but good to say of all they have met at St. Helena and the Cape." Dixon makes his way home, as does Mason, though more reluctantly: He wants to see his sons, but "he dreads the Re-Union." His son William is five, and Doctor Isaac (apparently his real name) is three. They are shy when he arrives, bringing them toy ships that he picked up at the last minute.

James Bradley, the royal astronomer to whom he was assistant, dies on the thirteenth of July, and Mason decides to go to his funeral, remembering how close -- perhaps too close? -- he and Rebekah were to Bradley and Susannah. But Bradley's family -- Susannah's brother Sam Peach and seventeen-year-old Miss Bradley -- "advise him, as gently as they've ever known how, that Bradley wish'd only the Family near." Mason feels like "a Warrior who has just lost his Lord."

Bradley married Susannah Peach in the year of a comet, 1744, and she died in 1757, "another Comet-year." Mason reflects that two years separated her death from Rebekah's and that those years "were rul'd by the Approaching Comet of Dr. Halley." Bradley's death leaves his valuable "Volume of Observations Lunar, Planetary, and Astral" in the hands of the Peach family, and Mason wonders if Susannah had been "but a means of getting those Obs into the Peach family, and the eager Mittens of Sam Peach, Sr." He wonders if, because of his contributions to them, he should put in his own claim, but decides that he had really given them to Bradley "for nothing more than, 'Thank you, Mr. Mason, and well done.'"

He goes to a bar, where he finds a heated topic, related to Bradley's death, is the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in Britain, which took place in 1752 and necessitated skipping eleven days -- so that Wednesday,  Sept. 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday, Sept. 14, 1752. "Mason pretends to examine his shoe-buckle, trying not to sigh too heavily. Of the many Classics of Idiocy, this Idiocy of the Eleven Days has join'd the select handful that may never be escap'd." Mason's own father had argued with him about whether losing eleven days made one younger or older. In the pub, a Mr. Swivett is complaining, "Not only did they insult the God-given structure of the Year, they also put us on Catholic Time. French Time." For the audience in the pub, Mason crafts a fiction that the time was not lost; it was given to a race of beings with a different approach to time than ours. They continue to inhabit the lost eleven days, "and wherever they are, temporally, eleven days to the Tick behind us. 'Tis all an Eden there, Lads, and only they inhabit it, they and their Generations." And he buys everyone another round.

Mason's sons "live with their Aunt Hester, Mason's sister, and her husband, Elroy." Returning there, he is set upon by Delicia Quall, who "suffers from that uncontroll'd Need to be a Bride, known to Physicians as Nymphomania, in whose cheerful Frenzy nuances vanish, and ev'ry unattach'd man is a potential Husband." He tells them all that "there's something else up" and that he "may be off again, and fairly soon." His sister Anne, just "turn'd seventeen and eager to be out of the House, where she is an unpaid 'round-the-clock Menial" asks where he's going, and Mason says, "America." He explains, "They want Boundary-Lines, hundreds of Miles long, as perfect as they can get 'em. For that, someone must take Latitudes and Longitudes, by the Stars." Hester informs him that if he's away when the boys come of age, they'll be apprenticed to his father at the mill.

So Mason goes to see his father, who says that he told Elroy that since he's been paying for their upkeep he feels entitled to "their services, when they're old enough to work." But Mason can't tell whether his father is joking or not. Mason's father also says that when he heard of Bradley's death, he knew that Mason would be going to America. He had warned Mason that Sam Peach was not a friend of his.

"In fact, far from the Ogre or Troll his son makes him out to be, Charles Sr. is a wistful and spiritual person. He believes that bread is alive." This creeps out his son a bit:

The baker's trade terrified the young man. He learn'd as much of it as would keep him going, -- but when he began to see into it, the smells, the unaccountable swelling of the dough, the over door like a door before a Sacrament, -- the daily repetitions of smell and ferment and some hidden Drama, as in the Mass, -- was he fleeing to the repetitions of the Sky, believing them safer, not as saturated in life and death? If Christ's Body could enter Bread, then what else might? -- might it not be as easily haunted by ghosts less welcome? Alone in the early empty mornings even for a few seconds with the mute white rows, he was overwhelmed by the ghostliness of Bread. 

Mason had wooed Rebekah with his own fantasies of escape from this provincial life, planning to take her with him when he went to view the transit of Venus. But he also knew that even astronomy was subject to the whims of politics. And now he meets with Maskelyne about the proposed survey in America.