Fortuna and the Scapegrace

by Brian Kindall

Stepping into his berth was not dissimilar from entering into a tubercular lung. The compartment was cramped and stale, the gray air fouled with the redolence of a man shut up in a closet with a long-neglected chamber pot. A porthole window was available, but it appeared the parson had felt uninspired to crack it open for the sake of ventilation. He wore only light slippers and a flouncy nightshirt and was generally disheveled. His suit of white clothes lay in a crumpled pile, as if the body wearing them had suddenly turned to vapor, letting them collapse to the floor. The dank room held a small table and a chair near an unlit brazier with a bundle of alder faggots jutting from its inglenook. The holy man’s Bible was open on the table, along with a plate of partially eaten biscuits, and some papers with a pen and pot of ink. However, the man did not appear as if he had been hard at his monkish studies, but rather lollygagging in his rumpled bed.

  “I beg your pardon. I did not mean to disturb your nap.”

  “Oh.” He cast his eyes to the floor. “Not at all. It’s only… The ship’s up and down. It never stops. Night or day. I suppose I’ve been feeling under the weather.”

  “Well, perhaps a bit of tepid goat milk will do you good.”

  He forced a doubtful smile, and then sat slumpedly on his bed. His complexion was green and morbid, with a wispy fog of breath escaping from betwixt his narrowed lips. He held a locket on a long chain and looped it over his head before tucking it into his collar so that it hung against his chest.

  I pushed the Bible to the side and placed the mug on the table. It was a challenge to accurately pour the milk, as the ship’s rolling made the receptacle a moving target. With concentration, I was able to perform the feat without spillage. I blew a sigh and raised my gaze to the wall before me, only to find myself confronted by an image that I took to be an off-colored daguerreotype of either Lazarus, or, more likely, the pastor himself.

  My leading thought upon regarding this picture was that it was uncharacteristically vain for a clergyman to keep a self-reflective idol so close at hand, as such practice was not at all in keeping with my understanding of the precepts of humility so typically held by the Good Savior’s disciples. But then the eyes in the picture blinked, causing me to start at its ghoulery, until I realized that the image was not a printed portrait of the preacher, but a reflection in an isinglass mirror.

  The image, that is to say, was my very own.

  But for vaguely defined glimpses caught in muddy San Francisco street puddles, or the occasional Me-shaped shadow passing before a rain-streaked window, I had not seen myself for quite some time. And certainly not so clearly as this.

  It was, to say the least, disconcerting.

  The face I viewed before me was that of a man who had been dragged around in life, shat upon, and considerably kicked. The cheeks were drawn and stubbled. One earlobe was tattered and bent. And an air of devaluation emanated from the sorry soul’s general demeanor. I would like to say that impressive marks of integrity and wisdom augmented his face as well, but, arguably, those were only wrinkles.

  Still, something there was twinkling from behind that lassitudinal mask. It brought to my mind a star obscured by clouds. Perhaps it was Hope once again, making its subtle presence felt. Or perhaps this was merely a lunatic’s hallucination. (One needed to allow for that as well, I supposed.) Doubtless this was not the face that had so charmed the ladies in my more dashing years. A dandy I was no longer. And still, some trace of that old debonairity yet endured. It needed only to be given a bit of upkeep and affection. Just a touch of polish and a purpose. I needed just one more God-given chance to redeem my former value, and regain my rightful, if jaded, vigor.

  Yes indeed, I thought, and shot the mirror a wink.

  Then I turned and handed the pastor his milk.

  “Thank you.” He stood and gestured to the pail. “Won’t you join me?”

  I shrugged and held the half-filled vessel in both hands. “As you like.”

  “Well,” he said with diffidence. “God bless.”

  And then we both quaffed our beverage.

  The milk was lukewarm and lumpy and not at all to my idea of a flavorsome treat. But in keeping with my plan of cahootsing with a possible redeemer, it seemed important for me to establish a bond with the pastor, and so I held my breath and gulped down the warmish mucoid extract, suppressing the gag I felt bumping like a frog in the back of my throat.

  We lowered our tankards, and then gazed at one another like a pair of muskrats coming up for air.

  We neither one spoke.

  His top lip glistened with a white foam mustache, and I felt that mine did too. Neither of us moved to wipe it away. I cannot say if he was reeling with the same transfixation as myself right then, but of a sudden it occurred to me that we were nearly duplicated shadows, each one of the other. Although his earlobes both appeared relatively unscathed, the rest of his face looked to be etched with the same variety of wear as my own. This likeness, I determined, was the cause for the strangeness I had felt upon our first meeting. Even his body appeared to be malnourished in the same way as mine, as if he too had been sculpted by hardship and lonesome hunger. Not exactly, perhaps, but add to that the general similarities in our hair coloration and facial under-boning, as well as our equivalent heights, and it all added up to something close enough for us to be mistaken for brothers.

  At last he broke my trance by clearing his throat, wiping his mustache, and pointing at the table behind me. He asked, “Would you care for a biscuit?”

  I took up the plate and held it to him, so that we both might serve ourselves, and then we munched the stale rusks and sipped our milk in a crunching, lip-smacking form of makeshift communion.

  I suppose it was in that moment, on that rainy day, while traversing the wide breast of the Pacific, that the foundation of our friendship began to form. I felt it building beneath the moment as we chatted and sipped and chewed.

  There was something endearing about Linklater.

  I liked this queasy fellow.

  *****

  His skin tone remained cadaverous, and he slouched in the attitude of a sea-sickened mendicant.

  “May I call you Adamiah?” I asked.

  “Please. If I may call you Hoper.”

  “Of course you may.” (Although to have myself hailed thusly felt most disquieting indeed.) “Well now, Adamiah, if you will pardon my saying so, it seems you are in need of some tender care. Why don’t you crawl under your blankets and let me make these quarters more comfortable for a man who is feeling poorly? One cannot help but note the telltale signs, strewn asunder as they are, which indicate a man suffering self-neglect.”

  This made him chuckle. “You don’t need to trouble yourself.”

  “It would be no trouble, but a privilege.”

  I moved to his bed, ruffled the pillow, and drew back the covers so that he could burrow into the wombish cocoon. “I insist.”

  He was too feeble to put up a fight, and so he did as I bade him.

  I picked up his white linen suit, shook out the wrinkles, and hung it on a hook.

  “First off,” I said, “a man cannot help but feel puny when rebreathing the same fusty air.” I opened the window a smidgeon, letting a fresh breeze waft into the room along with the monotonous dirge of the sea.

  Adamiah sank deeper into his bed.

  “Do not fear,” I assured him. “I will not let you freeze.”

  I crouched before the lifeless stove and stuffed it with sticks, lighting a fire to offset the chill now blowing through the porthole. The flames snapped and crackled, their warmth supplanting the room’s tombish drear with a whiff of smoke and a burgeoning cheer.

  “Good?” I asked.

  The preacher smiled and nodded. He looked for all the world like a contented – albeit, bilious – youngster who had just been tucked in for the night. All that was needed now was a bedtime story.

  Inspired by this idea, I took up the Bible. “Would you like me to read to you?”

  “If
you want.”

  I sat in the chair and, making myself comfortable, began on the already opened page.

  “And Judah said unto Onan, Go unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother… and it came to pass, when he went unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it onto the ground…”

  I regretted not previewing the passage before diving in. The masturbatory mishap of which I read made me feel unexpectedly awkward. I believe it provoked Adamiah in like manner, as he appeared to have gained a sudden bit of color to his pallid complexion, which was, no doubt, nothing more than a gush of bashful mortification. We both sat there, a pair of flush-faced bachelors, while the embarrassing words I had uttered flapped around in the room like a flock of trapped pigeons.

  “Say,” I said, “this particular episode strikes me as random and not very interesting by way of a story. Why don’t I visit one of your favorite tales in the Bible so that you might find yourself comforted as well as entertained?”

  He agreed to this.

  “Where shall I turn?”

  “Umm.”

  I waited for him to choose.

  And then waited longer.

  “Surely you have some story you would like to hear, or perhaps a bit of soothing verse from the poetical books?”

  He fixed his gaze on where his knees made bumps beneath the covers. “Well,” he said quietly. “Why don’t you pick something?”

  This struck me as odd conduct for a preacher. In my experience, men of the cloth always had favorite parts of the Bible. Was Linklater just too shy to tell me his? That seemed unlikely. I was slightly baffled. I glanced at the paper on the table and, searching for clues to the man’s spiritual interests, read the single word scribbled thereon – Genesis.

  “Well,” I said, “perhaps I could better choose if I knew the objective in your current course of study.”

  He nodded at his knees. “I’m reading the whole thing through,” he said, “from beginning to end, during the length of our voyage. Only I’ve been too sick to make much headway.”

  “The whole Bible?”

  He nodded.

  This, too, confounded me. “Well, it is surely worthwhile to plow through the entire fat lump in one’s seminary years,” I agreed. “But although the Lord’s book is no doubt brimming with certain intrigues on every page, I would dare bet that most veteran clergymen go through life without ever revisiting those long sections, the reading of which, to risk sacrilege, is about as exhilarating as rinsing out socks.”

  “And what are those sections?”

  I found this a most curious question for a preacher to ask. “You cannot say yourself?”

  He shook his head. “To be honest,” he confided, “I’ve never read them.”

  “You mean the boring parts?”

  “No.” He raised up out of his blankets and sat with his back against the headboard. He peered at me with shame-shaded eyes that were imploring. He lingered, assessing me, I was soon to realize, for one who could be trusted with his uncomfortable secret.

  “I mean,” he confided at last, “I only just started reading the Bible when we left San Francisco.”

  “But you have surely read it before.”

  “No, I haven’t,” he said, and shook his head. “Not one single word.”

  *****

  I regarded the sickly fellow before me, my mouth dropping open in flabbergastment. “But…” I scratched my chin. “The Shining Redemption is a Christian church, is it not?”

  “Um, yes?”

  “So, well, do you not find it marginally challenging to deliver a sermon based on a book you have never read?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose?”

  The distress twisting his face in that moment could only be matched in its intensity by my own expression of incomprehension. What on earth could he ever mean?

  “Hoper,” he said. “I’ve never actually delivered a sermon before.”

  “But I understood you to be a preacher?”

  “I am. That is, I hope to be. You see, I am new to the trade.” He tried to smile. “I have a lot to learn.”

  “And quickly, I should say. If you will recall, Captain Nilsson is quite proud of his ship’s swiftness. Cloud will arrive at your destination shortly.” I lifted the Bible. “Many are the pages, and few are the days to learn them.”

  He nodded dolefully.

  “Are the Nouveau Edenites expecting the arrival of a well-versed pastor?”

  More doleful nodding.

  “Well,” I said. “Huh.”

  I regarded the King James Bible that I was holding, judging its weight in my palms, as if its mass were somehow correlative to the task of absorbing its many nuanced stories and teachings. Good Lord! The devout spend a lifetime poring over those parchmented wisdoms, and then still die basically ignorant of their manifold interpretations. What made this affable lunk think he could pass himself off as scripturally erudite to a lot such as that?

  “Pardon me, Adamiah. If I might ask – what in heaven’s name is the motivation for this subterfuge in which you are so ruefully engaged?”

  The man moved his hand over his nightshirt to that place where one generally expects to feel the reassuring thud of a heart muscle. A tranquil smile replaced his contortion of discomfiture. Right before my eyes, Adamiah Linklater transformed from a wretched and woozied invalid into a man instantaneously aglow with a vibrant robustitude.

  “Love,” was all he said. “True love.”

  *****

  Of course!

  I should have recognized its symptoms from the get-go.

  This boy was not suffering so much from the pitching of Cloud as he was from the instabilitating effects of life’s most venerated virus.

  Amour.

  Eros.

  Cupid’s dumbfounding dart.

  Call it what you will. No power on earth has a more dubious and celebrated reputation for its ability to drive an otherwise sane man to such twitter-brained maneuvers against God and good sense.

  Pathetic!

  And yet… yes, admittedly, one could not help but feel oneself growing slightly green-eyed jealous, too. Surely every man has suffered – or longs to suffer – a comparable silliness of emotion. That such a sentiment might be reciprocated by an ardent and tender counterpart is, doubtless, the most sublime hope fulfillment available to a man on his earthly walk.

  Would that it were not so elusive!

  And slippery as a fish.

  Still, I found myself inspired just to be near someone so severely smitten and filled up with that wobble-headed ecstasy so celebrated in the annals of legend and epicated poesy.

  “The Shining Redemption, I take it, has something to do with this love of which you speak?”

  Adamiah nodded heartily but did not immediately offer more.

  I speculated, putting together as best I could the few pieces of information I had been granted, but was not instantaneously able to imagine a scenario in which preaching could lead to romantic love.

  “Well, friend,” I pried, “do you care to talk more about it?”

  Adamiah fairly squirmed in his bed. His gesticulations were unmistakable for a man wrestling with his self.

  “I’ve never told anyone before.”

  But knowing what I knew of people and their secrets, I was confident that he would not pass up a chance to air his confession to my sympathetic ear. Such catharsis is generally irresistible, especially to someone who has been simmering for some time in secret silence, and, sure enough –

  “Do you promise never to tell another soul?”

  I felt myself to be back in the schoolyard again, swearing oaths with a chum. I placed my hand over my heart, in that way one does in such situations, and forced myself to appear sincere.

  “On my honor,” I solemnly vowed. “Never ever.”

  AS CERTAIN FRIENDSHIP-DISSOLVING calamities have since invalidated my aforementioned promise a
nd, excusably, freed me from its strictures, I will now recount, as best I can in his own words and way of speaking, Adamiah Linklater’s astonishing story of his spiritual journey as he poured it out to me that day in his dingy cabin –

  *****

  I was brought up in Ohio, he told me, by nonbelieving parents.

  Freethinkers, they called themselves. And Hedonists besides.

  They neither one took stock in God or the Devil or angels, or anything to do with religions of any sort. They both thought everything that happened – the stars and the world and all its creatures – was just a big, complicated coincidence. My father always told me my only job was to live as fully as I could, according to something he called my own compass, and that following all those other rules laid out by institutions and men was just a waste of an opportunity granted me by Chance. Pleasure was mankind’s foremost goal – the satisfaction of one’s desires. Guilt was a waste of time. Or even bothering with what most folks called morals. A mistake wasn’t really a mistake and something to feel sorry for, so much as a chance to learn. And furthermore, it was a person’s self-serving obligation to deliberately make those mistakes so as to shape one’s destiny.

  Hell didn’t exist as a consequence.

  Or Heaven as a reward for a so-called virtuous life.

  We never read fairytales in our house.

  Once you died it was all over for you, so the best you could do was make the most of what little time you had to enjoy yourself.

  But I was a reluctant learner to their view of life. I just wasn’t like my ma and pa. They had come to their ideas when they were grown adults, but I was just a fresh-faced kid. Whereas they went about their days smug and godless, seeking pleasure at every turn, I always secretly felt something else might be a truer way to live. The inner compass my father had told me about was directing me to another course.

  *****

  As irony would have it, a family of religious zealots moved into the house next door to ours. They were a man and his wife, two sons, and a pretty little girl, younger than her brothers. The father was a founding clergyman in a church that was just starting up, and he spent his time trying to establish his religion according to a variation on the tenets of an older church, tenets he and his people felt were not being followed exactly as God would have it.