Roquot knew that his new-found chum, Bierce, favored small pets—lizards, turtles, and such—so when Roquot was dispatched in chains to Marin County, Bierce agreed to care for his pet parrot, Jum. Roquot had been obsessed with Jum, feared for its fate, and was desperate to find it a home.
    This is when I now come clean and explain how I came to live with Ambrose Bierce.
   His first published work appeared in the Californian, a poem called “The Basilica,” which originally read:

   With aimless feet, along the verge
   Of ocean, where the rocks emerge,
   I strolled, and watched the driving surge.

   It might have been better, which was my fault. I should have devoted more attention to it. But the fact that it would be published at all encouraged him to continue—and for me to make that happen.
   I told him, “I dislike your using the word ‘driving’ to describe the surge.”
   “What’s wrong with it?”
   “It’s common. Utilize a more poetic expression, such as ‘baffled.’”
  “I’m a purest when it comes to language. A surge is literally water in action. Only animals and humans can be baffled, as in perplexed—not waves.”
  “But poetry applies metaphor and simile, such as, ‘an angry sea.’ If you prefer to be literal, write a tract on oceanography instead of the poetic arts.”
   “What the hell do you know, Jum? You’re only a parrot. Just because you can talk...”
    Which was true then just as much as it is now.

Jum

   At first, Bierce refused to take me seriously, believing that I, even as an African gray, possessed the mere rudiments of intelligence and was purely imitative, despite my inordinate ability to communicate verbally in ways he never expected. That I preferred to eat seeds, nuts, and fruit, and never spiritous liquors as did he, was not in my favor, nor was my tendency to shit when and wherever was convenient, which I considered a fringe benefit. I also excelled at calculus and similarly my ability in English grammar, as well as French, German, Spanish, and Belarussian, although the latter with a noticeable dialect. My brain, despite its compact size, was a veritable repository of data—if not always wisdom.
    His austere room was not far from the Mint, and when I first saw it I was devastated. It contained only a narrow bed, rickety chair, an overturned box for a desk, and a few books. Quite a letdown from Tinley Roquot’s well-appointed rooms. Of course, Roquot was a crook. Bierce’s only artifact seemed to be his childhood collection of arrowheads.
    “This place is a dump,” I told him.
    “It’s all I can afford.”
    “It doesn’t even have a commode.”
    “It’s down the hall. Besides, why would you need a commode?”
    “How can you make me live in such squalor?”
    “Oh, stop your squawking, Jum. It’s temporary until I can earn enough to improve my surroundings. Anyway, I won’t be taking guff from some bird. And how is it that you speak so fluently?”
    “A simple explanation,” I replied.“My syrinx, which is at the base of the trachea, consists of two lateral tympaniform membranes controlling sound frequency. This allows for directed air to flow into my interclavicular air sacs, the pressure of which permits me to control my vocal range.”
    “I knew that.”
    Highly doubtful, but Bierce was unlikely to express weakness, either in knowledge or character.
   He said, “You’re not even a particularly attractive parrot. Not a single feather with color except for a little red fringe on your ass.”
    “Fine feathers make not the bird, my friend.”
   As a much younger man, our now incarcerated acquaintance, Tinley Roquot, had won me in a drunken, marathon game of fan-tan in Chinatown’s Hang Wah Alley, and was immediately impressed by my ability to articulate far better than the troubled family in Placerville he had abandoned.

Fan-tan, Chinatown—Roquot in brimmed hat at edge of table

    Initially, I hated my confinement. At fleeting times I craved escape, but eventually adjusted to captivity, cognizant that the world outside was chaotic and dangerous. For example, the entire bird population was keenly aware of what was happening to the passenger pigeon. I was also conscious of the fact that I was small and vulnerable, impossible for me to compete on a physical level, a juicy target for owls, vultures, and humans with rifles. So I focused on study, knowledge, stratagem, and tactics, my major regret being that I would never be the chess player I wanted to be.
    Tinley Roquot trained me, and for that I give him credit. He read aloud to me at every waking hour from the plethora of books he had excessively and illegally acquired. He even engaged an astute neighboring urchin to read to me in those periods when he was at the Mint or out burgling. In time, it was clear that my ability to absorb raw information far surpassed my owner’s, at which point it became uncertain as to who owned whom.
    Now, with Tinley Roquot behind bars, I was the companion of Ambrose Bierce, which would prove to be a more suitable match—although often volatile, acerbic, and hostile.
    Still, he read to me from all of the current journals and newspapers, so I was able to keep abreast of the times. When he launched a regular column in the various journals he wrote for over the years, I was able to dictate to him his copy, which he published verbatim knowing that my command of both fact and language far exceeded his own.
    “How did you become so smart, Jum?” he asked in a moment of familiarity borne of Martell VSOP.
    “It wasn’t always that way. In my younger days I had to wing it.”
    “And how much more do you need to know before you can rule the world?”
    He made the question sound like a joke, but I suspect deep in his intellect he believed it.
    “I know enough now, Ambrose. But, as you say, I’m only a parrot. And, admittedly, my hygiene isn’t always what it might be.”
    “I’ve always viewed slang as the grunt of a human hog with an audible memory. In other words, the speech of one who utters with his tongue what he thinks with his ear, and feels pride in accomplishing the feat of a parrot. Although it your case, Jum, I’ve changed my mind about parrots.”
    I maintained an unassuming distance after his marriage to Mollie Day, but joined them when they sailed to England. In London, I guided his regular column “The Passing Show,” and wrote his first three books, which he published under the pseudonym of Dod Grile.
    When he and Mollie returned to America, I helped Bierce launch a new column,“Prattle,” in the Argonaut. Taking leave to go to the Black Hills to supervise an ill-fated gold mining operation, he took me with him, and I became an expert on hydraulic drilling.
    Back in California, he resumed his column, this time in The Wasp, which led to a stint on the San Francisco Examiner and his ambivalent relationship with William Randolph Hearst. When I noticed that Bizet’s Carmen was being performed at Maguire’s Opera House on Washington Street, I begged Bierce to take me.
    “I’m not taking a parrot to the opera.”
    “I insist.”
   “Parrots aren’t allowed at Maguire’s. There’s a sign on the front door.”
  “That’s a falsehood, and you know it. The sign reads ’No Chinese.’ I must see a performance of Carmen. I demand it.”
   “Stop ruffling your feathers. Why do you want to go to that opera anyway?”
   “I liked the book.”

McGuire’s Opera House

   Due to me, Bierce and I were highly productive during this period and produced some of the best-known material attributed to him, including what may be my finest effort, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
    I told him, “Ambrose, I don’t care for the way you adjusted the ending in this story. It’s not the way I wanted it.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with my ending. I know this period. I saw firsthand what was done to traitors and spies in the war.”
    “But you merely have the escaped spy, Payton Farquhar, arriving safely at home to his wife and children after successfully eluding his Yankee executioners.”
    “So what? It’s the way it happened. I know. I was in that place while you were still in a cage somewhere, defecating.”
    “But you’ve cobbled a trite ending to an otherwise decent story, potentially our most significant.”
    “How should I end it?”
   “By having Payton Farquhar believing in his freedom even as the executioners’ rope snaps his neck.”
    A pause.
   “I’ll think about it.”
  And I created all of the definitions in The Devil’s Dictionary, including my favorite:

Fraud, n. The life of commerce, the soul of religion, the bait of courtship, and the basis of political power.

Ambrose