We studied all that first rainy afternoon and into the early evening, until our brains fairly ached with theological effort.
“Well,” I said at last. “Perhaps that is enough for now.”
Adamiah yawned and rubbed his eyes.
“You seem to have shaken your queasy demeanor.”
“I’m feeling better.”
“Good. Good. Shall we take up our lessons again in the morning?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Certainly.” I stood, preparing to leave.
“Thank you, Hoper.” He stepped close and appeared suddenly bashful. “Before you go… I know we have only just met, but I was wondering… Well, you see, I have no one else, and, so… Can I call you a friend?”
“Of course you may, Adamiah. Absolutely.”
“Well then, when I am in New Eden… that is, when we finally arrive, and I am joined with my love, would you consider standing by my side as the best man at our wedding?”
I was truly touched.
“Adamiah,” I said, and offered him my hand. “I would consider it one of my life’s greatest honors.”
He took hold of my hand and shook it vigorously. “Thank you, Hoper. Thank you so much for all you’re doing for me.”
“One thing though, Adamiah.”
“What’s that?”
“Since telling me your story, you have only referred to your betrothed as the neighbor girl. Surely she comes with a name more elegant than that.”
“Oh, yes!” He reached inside the neck of his gown and drew forth the locket hanging from the chain around his neck. “She sent me this to remember her by.” He held it up, unfastened the latch, and opened the little door, leaning so I could see.
In that exact instant, as if to confirm the divine elements involved in our endeavor, the setting sun raked under the clouds from the horizon and beamed through the window onto the locket held up like a holy icon in Adamiah’s hand.
The rains ceased.
One almost believed one could hear a chorus of angels.
I regarded the suddenly illuminated image.
The lady was truly lovely.
The effect of her tiny blue eyes gazing from out of that locket and into my own caused a jealous ache in my being. I know it was inapposite of me, but I felt an irrepressible pang surge forth in my visceral regions, a stirring of a sort both forbidden and splendid.
“Very pretty,” I said, and swallowed hard. “You are a lucky man, Adamiah.”
“I can’t wait to be at her side.”
“Yes. I look forward to meeting her myself.” I nodded and smiled. “And her name?”
“Prudence,” he said proudly. “Prudence Merriwether.”
THAT NIGHT I HAD a troubling dream.
I was not proud of it, but neither was I sorry.
It was too pleasing, too welcome, too…
A person is granted few enough sublimities in life.
Besides, surely a man cannot be held responsible for the midnight fondlings of his lonesome and somnolent mind. That is the underconscious workplace of the gods, after all, or in some cases, one must allow, imps.
It is hard to know which one for sure.
In said dream, I found myself standing expectantly on Adamiah’s beach. The sun was glaring down, and the ocean before me was just as he had described it – like a mirror held to the sky. The horizon line was but a thin demarcation of blue meeting blue.
I held my hand to shade my eyes. I could just barely discern a disturbance at the farthest reach of my vision.
A whale’s spume?
A ship’s fluttering sail?
A floundering soul?
I could not say.
But in the next moment, I was distracted by a figure rising before me from out of the sea’s placidity.
Prudence!
It was as if I had – like some divinatory Pygmalion – conjured the lady in her entirety from my brief encounter with the face I had seen peering from Adamiah’s locket.
She was all dark hair long-flowing over clean white shoulders.
She was coy-smiling mouth and knowing blue eyes.
Of course, as the image from which I had summoned her was but a miniature portrait, I could not know for sure what she would truly look like in her bodily manifestation. We had never met before. So how could I ever know that her nipples were like the tightened pale buds of roses? How could I comprehend with such meticulousness the daintiness of her knees?
And yet I did.
She strolled from out the water and stood close before me, dripping sea foam.
She gazed at me in an otherworldly manner.
I could feel her breath on my skin. I could smell her salt and wet flower fragrance.
“Petit poisson de la mer,” she whispered, “Est-ce que tu es mon ami?”
I trembled all over.
I swooned.
“Absolument!” I replied. “I am your little friend from the sea. Most definitely and yes.”
She licked the water from her lips.
She grinned like a fish.
And then she pulled me into her bosom.
THE NEXT DAWN BROKE clear, complete with a sail-bulging breeze. At long last, we had outdistanced the rain. The world turned from dismal and dank to radiant and kind.
The skies were warm and blue.
The only cloud to be seen in any direction was the seafaring one beneath our feet. Lighthearted sailors hopped along its decks and swung like monkeys in its rigging. With Bosco at the lead, they all sang chanteys.
Oh, how many a gal do a saily boy know?
One in each port, and they’re all so comely.
And how many a lad do a porty gal blow?
A dozen or so, and they all grin dumbly.
Even the surly, green-horned dunderheads looked to be caught up in the overriding good cheer of the ship. I saw a Jones tapping his knee to the rhythm of Bosco’s ditty. I spied Scarface gazing up into the full-blown sails with an almost endearing, if marred, expression of youthful glee.
Captain Nilsson was at the helm, bantering jocundly with his crew.
Friendly waves slapped at Cloud’s hull while snow-white terns circled like seraphs about the tippy-top spikes of the masts.
Only First Mate Starkey appeared subdued. All business, he positioned himself at the rail with a clear view of the sun. Something there was of foreboding in his all-knowing manner. Something at odds with the ship’s overall good humor. Something, one could not help but notice, listing toward dread. He squinted through his telescopes and sextants, worrying over his charts and protractors, pinpointing, one supposed, just where in this watery wide world we were.
*****
Adamiah and I began our day with a draft of goat milk and a plate of biscuits. He was markedly improved from his previous bout of sickness, and full of enthusiasm to get on with our studies. He had exchanged his rumpled sleeping gown for white linen trousers and a clean shirt. His cabin was tidy and fresh.
At first, I found it hard to look at him directly, as my nocturnal tryst with his Prudence was still fresh in my mind and causing me the faintest feelings of what one supposed to be guilt. But then I reminded myself that it had only been a dream (although a quite vivid one), and that Adamiah was surely more in violation of sacred protocol and its punctilios than myself because he was so brazenly endeavoring in his own deception while fully awake. After all, had he not told a bald-faced lie to his affianced and her father? Was he not brazenly posing as someone he most certainly was not?
Yes, true, it could be argued that I was working as an aid to his fraudulence, but my role was so pitifully small that it could hardly be counted as a complicit act of deception. To the contrary! I was supplying Adamiah with important lessons in the Bible, footnoted with my invaluable insights, the likes of which could possibly guide his long-wayward soul to a righteous life and its ensuing salvation.
And so on and etcetera, I reasoned, until I became fully convinced of my utter innocence
.
*****
I launched into my canonical inculcations with the Garden of Eden, the cunning Serpent, and how Adam and Eve – like naughty children – had so egregiously eaten of the forbidden fruit, irking God to the extent that he felt inclined to evict them from Paradise for their brashful trespass against his favorite tree.
“Some folks – men mostly – blame womankind as a whole for this misstep of our primordial progenitors, even holding a grudge against our softer counterparts unto this modern enlightened age, citing their inherent feminine mystique as proof enough they are in league with sinister forces and so not to be trusted. But I have always felt this to be unfair. Our boy Adam was surely just as guilty as his rib-derived mate. As they say in this big barn dance of life – it takes two to do-si-do. Either way you choose to see it, we are still to this day living with the ramifications of those original lovebirds’ indulgence of their succulent indiscretion, and we are forever struggling to find our way back to some semblance of that paradise lost.”
We moved on to Abraham and Sarah and their precious son Isaac. And then I elaborated on the lesser-sung, but more intriguing, part of that story involving Abraham’s dark concubine, Hagar.
“I never really understood what Abraham saw in his dowdy old wife anyways,” I said. “Hagar always struck me as prettier and more intriguing.” (In my mind, she had always looked like my own mother.) “One could hardly blame the virile patriarch for his dalliance with a desert flower so svelte and enchanting as Hagar.”
We skipped to the story of Noah, his ark, and the flood that washed over the world’s every inch.
“The Almighty was largely perturbed by humanity’s wickedness, and so he decided to wipe out his whole terrestrial creation, and then maybe start over with a freshly washed globe, possibly populating it this time round with a different breed of pet – one that was not so unruly and inclined to mischief and overall stupidity.”
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
“Now this Grace is an important commodity,” I told Adamiah. “If you can get yourself ahold of some of that, you are in surest cahoots with Heaven’s top man himself. It is what saved Noah. Time and again you will find that people lucky enough to be chosen for the Grace of God are allowed to live fortunate lives, and even get away with missteps that those who have otherwise escaped its benefits cannot.”
Adamiah tipped his head, no doubt wondering if he himself would prove to be God-graced or otherwise.
After that came the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and how the Good Lord destroyed the people in those cities for their overall turpitude and venereal experimentalism.
“Then, as a self-amusing prank, God turned Lot’s wife into a statue of salt. Ha!”
Following the thread of our prevailing themes of sin, wrath, and annihilation, I next explained how God had found it so upsetting that the people of Babel were building a tower to his heavenly front doorstep that he punished their ingenuity by causing them all to speak in a confusion of tongues.
“So, they could never accomplish anything that would rival his own handiworks.”
“At least he didn’t kill them off this time.”
“No, but he surely did set us up for some ugly misinterpretations over the years, many of which, no doubt, have led us to destroying ourselves in various self-annihilating battles, both as large as wars and as small as lovers’ spats.”
After some hours of study, I noted that Adamiah had begun to droop in his chair. His earlier enthusiasm had been replaced with a visible mix of anxiety and boredom.
I was about to jump ahead to a rousing lecture on the Ten Commandments when I intuitively decided that in light of the infidelity, murder, mayhem, and overall tomfoolery of mankind thus far dealt with, as it was, by way of the punishing Hand of God, that our lesson had become disheartening. Truth be told, I was getting rather depressed myself and needed a lift.
“Say,” I impulsively suggested, “maybe we should take a break from our studies and talk about Prudence.”
(For I had felt her there all morning swimming just beneath the surface of my thoughts.)
“Prudence?”
His posture changed, and the clouds forming over him blew away in a whiff. He was so betwittered by the mere mention of her name that it did not even for an instant occur to him that my intentions were, if not strictly impure, at least marginally errant.
“Yes,” I said. “I know she is always on your mind, and so I thought perhaps, as a way to remind yourself of why you are doing all this hard work, that it might help you to talk about her.” I shrugged. “You know, as a stimulator to your vision.”
Adamiah thought this a peachy idea.
“Maybe you would like to show me her picture again,” I suggested apathetically, “so I can better study her face and therefore imagine the two of you together.”
My gullible friend unloosed the chain from around his neck and proudly offered the locket for me to examine. I opened it up and peered inside.
A hot wind blew over me.
There she was, just like in my dream. Her hair was now up and held with combs, but one could just as easily imagine it wet and hanging down. One could imagine those full red lips beaded with seawater.
My heart thrummed in my neck.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” asked Adamiah.
I nodded, suffering so severely from my own mesmerization that I could not form an appropriate response with words.
Adamiah turned and squatted at his bed, drawing a footlocker from the shadows underneath. “Here,” he said, and, opening the locker, brought out a bundle of papers bound with a lace ribbon. “Let me read you her letters.”
I made myself comfortable on Adamiah’s bed with the locket, while he sat at the table with his epistolary trove.
“‘Dearest Adamiah,’” he began. “‘When I stop to think that Providence will soon reunite us after all these years, I have to pinch the soft flesh under my bodice to know that I’m not in a dream. Can it be true? Will we soon be coupled as husband and wife just like we imagined as children back in Ohio? I am filled with such lightheaded exhilaration at the very idea.’”
As Adamiah read, I peered into Prudence’s blue eyes.
I knew that feminine voice whispering beneath Adamiah’s; surely I did.
Petit poisson, I recalled. Mon ami.
*****
Now I understand that an onlooker privy to my secret thoughts might have considered me to be at odds with the handshake agreement I had so recently made with one Almighty God. There was, admittedly, something about my wayward woolgathering that felt vaguely uncomfortable and in violation of the changeover I had hoped to make in myself as a man. But the trifling of shame I suffered in the basement of my conscience was so small, so enormously minute, that I was able to disregard it in the same way one might ignore a gas bubble forming in one’s deepest bowels. In hindsight – which always proves itself so embarrassingly clear – I can see now that I would have been best advised to squeeze out my self-indulgent fantasies, let them dissipate unto the ether, and put all my energies into indulging Adamiah’s own hopes and dreams regarding Prudence before the damning winds of change were allowed to build to such a full-blown macrocosmic force.
But I failed to do that.
And so I can only guess that this failure on my part was catalyst for the God-driven misadventures that would, in the near future, overcome both my friend Adamiah, and, closer to home, myself.
Anyway, after our initial foray into Prudencetopia, that is how it went each day. We would fill the morning with lessons of Biblicality, and then in the afternoon we would move eagerly into Adamiah’s Prudence-esque musings.
I was keeper of the locket during those times, and I would gaze upon its contents in the way that one hungrily gazes upon an amenable inamorata, or sugar bun.
Adamiah rambled on and on, filling my head with the encyclopedic details of his wife-to-be, which I would then selectively use to color my own secret, quixotic
fictions. At that point in our journey, Brother Linklater was but a shadowy cuckold to my adulterous envisionings. But in my fanciful mind, blessed as it was with an increasingly vivid realization of Prudence Merriwether, the line between what was real and what was not had become as thin as the horizon line separating the fathomless blue-eyed heavens from their own reflection on the placidified surface of the deep blue sea.
CLOUD CROSSED SOUTHWARD OVER the equator with a bit of hoopla and mishap.
Someone shot off a Chinese rocket. It whizzed up through the sails trailing red smoke into the blue sky until it fizzled – hung like a dying bird – and then exploded with a loud Boom! – raining a shower of glittering sparks over the indifferent waves.
“Hooray!” cheered the crew.
Someone fired off a pistol.
And then a party started up.
It seems there are few enough diversions on a long sea voyage, and so the day of transitioning from one hemisphere into another gets unduly elevated.
“A ration of grog for each man!” proclaimed the good Captain Nilsson.
More cheers.
The homuncular purser divvied out the brew to the crewmen. He took his job as ship’s barmaid quite seriously, marking a check on a list after each man received his single portion.
“One per wag,” he warned. “Only one slosh per wag.”
As exemplary teetotaling clerics, Adamiah and I passed on our helping of the groggy delight, opting, instead, to sip from our standard daily pints. Honestly, I was growing somewhat weary of goat milk, but the last alcohol I had indulged in had been the opiate-laced brandy so deceitfully offered me by the soothsayer, and its lingering humiliation and sickness were still vivid enough for me to willingly abstain from any immediate temptation of liquefied spirits.
Fortuna and the Scapegrace Page 10