The girl bent over the bucket and, after observing its contents for what seemed like a small eternity, at last drew out the knife.
“Good! Good!” It was hard to contain my enthusiasm. “Now if you could take that knife and sever these binds…” I wiggled my fists against the tree trunk and nodded back over my shoulder to the ropes. “…I would be forever grateful.”
She held up the knife and studied it.
“Yes. It is sharp and should do the job quite nicely.” I wiggled some more and indicated the ropes wrapped around the tree at my back. “Just cut right through them. It should be fun to do.”
At that point the church music grew momentarily louder, and I saw that the door had opened, and the Polynesian lady came back outside. She was accompanied by the half dozen other native men and women – all those who had recently been play-acting at joining up with the Shining Redemption. The last lady came out and closed the door behind her. Then they all ran laughing toward the beach, peeling off their civilized clothes and dropping them on the ground as they went. Soon they were all naked.
The little girl stood before me with the knife.
“I’d sure like to go with you,” I pleaded. “If you would only cut me loose.”
She stepped forward.
I started to cry. “Please.”
The girl reached over and touched the tears on my cheek, and then she licked her fingers.
“Ooh-ee-la-e-o-ay,” she said.
“I am sorry.” I sniffled. “I do not speak your tongue.”
“Ah-ee-o-no-ly.”
Her voice was lovely and small as a sparrow’s, but the language she uttered was so deeply immersed in the primordial regions of my inner being that I was at a loss to understand.
I shrugged helplessly as I sensed an opportunity slipping away.
The woman from the canoe called to the girl and waved for her to come.
The girl smiled, said something else I did not understand, and dropped the knife back in the bucket. She took the wreath of red blossoms from her neck and looped it around mine.
“Thank you,” I said. “Merci.”
The flowers’ perfume wafted all about my head as I watched the little girl scamper back to the boats. The lady helped her on board, and then, after pushing off from the beach, the whole parade paddled away, beyond the reef, and on and on, until their song faded, and they disappeared at the horizon.
I WAS ALL PLAYED out.
Done for and doomed.
My emotions had been jerked back and forth between hope and despair so many times these last couple of days that I felt wrung out and most already done with this world. I half wondered what it would be like – Death – but had given up caring.
The heady attar of the flowers around my neck intoxicated me. From my resigned and droopy state, I felt a deep tremor issuing forth from the earth beneath me. I did not know if this was truly happening, or if it was merely my weary imagination. Perhaps, I distantly decided, some demon is opening the creaky gates of hell in preparation for my much-anticipated arrival.
I closed my eye and hung my head.
“It is finished,” I mumbled scripturally.
The Edenites droned on and on with their merciless music. Was there no end to their horrible hymns? The only other sounds were the sea and birds and palms waving on the torpid breeze.
But then, from the depths of my indifference, I realized – no, at some point unbeknownst, those other sounds had altogether ceased.
The church songs sounded distorted now, like they were coming from the bottom of an empty rain barrel.
I opened my eye and peeked out, just curious enough from within my stupor to investigate what was making this aberration I sensed descending over the island.
All the elements were there – the sand and trees and water – but nothing was as it should be. The birds had stopped their chatter. The ever-restless air had grown still. The whole world felt to be holding its breath. But what was most strange was what I saw at the beach.
The sea had receded.
The area that should have been underwater was uncovered, littered with seaweed and scurrying crabs. The reef was high and dry, adorned with corals shining like pink and orange antlers in the sunshine. The tide had drawn back well below its usual mark.
I observed this, and then observed it some more, struggling to know what it meant.
That is what I was doing when I felt footsteps coming toward me from behind. I turned my head but could not see who it was. The steps stopped.
“Who is there?” I croaked.
No answer came forthwith.
“Sister Beulah?”
No answer, just another step my direction.
I shuddered.
“Marguerite?”
And then I felt hot breath on my neck, followed by the unmistakable sensation of a sticky wet tongue.
A shiver rankled under my skin. Had Death’s dark angel come to see what was holding up the show?
I cranked my head round as far as it would twist, struggling to see, when the goat’s face leapt to my vision.
“Huh!”
“Blaa-ah!”
She stepped round before me.
“Angeline!”
“Bla-ah-ah.”
I could not quite believe it. Perhaps I was only suffering a vivid goat-breathed hallucination. But then she leaned forward and nibble-kissed me on the mouth.
“Mrrmph! Well, darling,” I chuckled. “Aren’t you a sight for my sore eye?”
She commenced to munching on the flowers hanging down my chest. She chewed and smiled, blue and yellow petal fragments tumbling from her rubbery lips. I watched the reflection of my sorry beat-up figure bulging in the nanny’s sandy brown eyeballs.
“I am truly pleased to have you come in my hour of need,” I told her. “It is good to have a friend in one’s last moments on earth.”
This idea made me feel both wistful and glad. Although I had pretty much wept myself dry, I tapped yet another reservoir of tears. I sobbed. It was an unexpected relief not to be dying alone, surrounded and devoured by none but my enemies.
“Friend,” I whimpered. “Oh, friend.”
I snuffled and blubbered a bit to the goat about thankfulness and friendship and various other nonsensicalities.
“Blah-ah.”
Angeline nuzzled my shoulder and then stepped back behind the tree.
“Please do not leave.”
The goat remained out of sight.
I felt momentarily desperate to have her back and close to me, but then when it occurred to me what was happening, I had what felt to be the most beautiful epiphany of my whole sorry life.
My binds were made of hemp!
Angeline started in chewing around my wrists.
My tears of sadness transformed to tears of joy as I realized I was possibly going to be saved after all.
“Hoo-yah!”
Angeline gnawed at the ropes.
I nervously waited for her to finish, watching out at the ocean and planning my subsequent action.
That is when I saw it.
“Oh.”
It occurred to me that the natives must have known it was coming.
“Oh.”
That is why they had loaded up their canoes and left.
I squinted over the sparkling water. Far out on the horizon, a disturbance had formed on the otherwise placid Pacific.
A wrinkle.
A ripple.
A wave!
It rolled toward the island.
“Say, Angeline, you might want to chew more quickly.”
As the wave drew nearer, it grew, and I began to comprehend its magnitude.
“Zut.”
It grew yet larger.
The goat chewed and champed. I felt her whiskers on my wrists and her slobber dripping over my knuckles.
The wave came closer and closer.
Silent and immense.
Sparkling green and blue in the sunshine.
At last, I felt the l
ast threads of rope were severed and fell away.
I clambered to my feet.
The towering wave had reached the reef and was moving with a slow and awful sort of swiftness. It came like a beast, making a slucking noise as it swept up the slope of the seabed.
I turned and sped toward the Ark.
“Help!” I hollered. “Get out! Get away!”
But the music just kept playing.
“Save yourselves!”
I ran.
“Prudence!” I screamed.
My feet churned in the sand.
The wave raised up behind me, cold and immense.
It blocked out the sun.
It lingered.
Hovered.
And then it came down and down on the people of the Shining Redemption as they celebrated the long-awaited day of their prophecy’s final fulfillment.
THE AFTERWORDS
FOR I ONLY AM escaped alone to tell thee.
Well, that is to say, I and Angeline – my shaggy redeemer.
As that deluge crashed over Eden and swept me up, the she-goat stayed close at my side, tumbling right along with me amidst all the detritus. Boards and crates and chickens and trees churned inside that great rise up collapsement of oceanic power and island-scrubbing purgation.
From within those violently breaking waters, I caught a glimpse of the Ark. It was launched like a vessel cut loose from its dry-dock. But whereas a ship might then bobble and right itself to enjoy a long life at sea, the Ark proved unseaworthy, less like a boat than a large white coffin. It rose up briefly on that liquid green surge, only to promptly plunge, taking all those Shiners down with it. The whole denomination was delivered in one fell swoop to a fathomless grave at the heart of the atoll.
It could be argued that I was the lucky one. For who would not, when given their druthers, prefer one more day of this earthly existence – plagued though it is with suffering and gloom and general discomfort – to the dubious promise of heaven?
And yet, I cannot help but wonder at my friends down in that dank hole. Who is to say they are any less fortunate? Who can say for a certainty that Prudence and Adamiah were not granted the greatest of all God-given gifts? What better way to leave this earthly struggle than freshly married and filled up to the brim with newlywed joy? What better end than dying with the anticipation of throwing off one’s innocence, and yet not having to go through the messy and disappointing process of having that naive dream crushed by reality’s grim truth?
But I wax cynical.
I cannot postulate with any authority.
At any rate, there I found myself – once an ill-starred scapegrace, now an apparently chosen survivor.
The island had been wracked by the flood, but it served well enough for our garden home. The trees had all been busted off and the buildings all scoured away. The only relics of humanity’s stain were a few bones and shards of rainbow glass scattered over the ground. As the wave receded, a thousand fish were left flopping like fallen angels on the sand, but the gulls cleaned them up before they ever got to stinking.
The natives never returned. But the daily rains started up again. We tipped our faces to the heavens and caught the big delicious drops on our outstretched tongues.
Time passed.
Days and nights.
I took to writing poems in the wet sand with my finger. It seemed that old yearning could not be squelched after all, and it felt good to write after so long a hiatus. I would compose my simple lines near the water’s edge, chuckling at my own clever verbalisms, only to have the rising tide wash the poems away. Something about this cycle seemed fitting and obliquely divine. It reassured me to know that my verse would be short-lived and would never pester anyone’s imagination but my own.
Angeline possessed the miraculous ability of turning seaweed and twigs into robust ruminant health. I parasitically benefited from her talent as she turned her diet into milk. This served to maintain me.
At night we watched the stars.
We watched the moon.
And then each dawn, I knelt beneath the goat and took suck.
In those first days, I inevitably thought of my mother – of her gentle songs and caresses – but eventually those memories began to sink away to somewhere deep inside of me.
A new sort of paradise was at hand.
Godless.
Without stain.
And arguably improved.
I sat naked on the beach and wiped the dribble from my chin, producing a milky little blurp as I so did.
Angeline often snuggled beside me after the nursing, and I would put my arm around her neck, stroking her whiskers and admiring the view.
The ocean was lovely to gaze upon, often glassy and calm in the light of the rising sun.
We saw dolphins playing in the distance.
Or sometimes whales.
“Blah,” said Angeline. “Blah.”
I laughed and peered out at the sea.
“I could not agree with you more, my dear.”
Amen
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OTHER TITLES BY BRIAN KINDALL:
DELIVERING VIRTUE, adult fiction: Book One of The Epic of Didier Rain
Didier Rain is broke, lovesick, and just off a three-day whiskey binge. And yet, The Church of the Restructured Truth has been told in a vision that he’s the man to fulfill their Holy Prophecy. He must deliver Virtue – a blue-eyed infant – 1,000 miles along the western pioneer trail to their prophet’s stronghold as his child bride to be. Savages, zealots, and wildfire all stand in Rain’s way, not to mention a list of Thou-shalt-nots designed to thwart any man’s most basic comforts. But there’s something holy about the job – something, Rain suspects, that might just turn his sorry life toward a better path.
In Delivering Virtue – Book One of The Epic of Didier Rain – Brian Kindall takes the classic novel of the West and turns it on its head. Grandiloquent humor, pathos, and a cast of absurd and depraved characters all come together in an American Frontier world inspired by myth and legend, creating a surreal and disarmingly poignant adventure reviewers are calling a triumph of American Magical Realism.
BLUE SKY, middle grade novel:
Blue Sky can climb like an ibex. She was raised in the highest peaks of the Alps by the herd and named for the color of her eyes. They say her father was a fallen alpinist and her mother his beautiful dying dream… and so, as you may guess, she’s somewhat magical – strong and sure-footed on the peaks, and natural as an ibex in this harsh environment of wind, rock, and ice. Until the day she rescues a young alpinist from a stormy peak. The boy looks like her, and he tells her of the mysterious world beyond the crags. Sky longs to follow him. Can a girl raised by ibex in the mountains ever join the world of humans? Blue Sky must first fulfill her destiny with the ibex and find the courage to leave everything she’s ever known.
A tale of self-reliance about a girl who finds strength in being who she really is and the courage to follow her dreams.
PEARL, middle grade novel:
Pearl can’t move. She’s never wanted to, until now. Life above the waves beckons to her as she watches the boats moving along the surface of the water above her. Pearl is a statue carved of milk-white stone that has stood on the floor of an ancient sea for a thousand years, but she’s waking up, and she wants more. As desire builds within her, it propels her on a journey that takes her to an exotic island grotto, into the midst of a bloody revolution, underground into a rat-infested tomb, and, at last, to a magical mountain paradise. Crazed rebels, wise philosophers, greedy grave robbers, and a few other friendly people and fish accompany her along the way, as she asks the question, “Is desire enough?” She'll h
ave to have faith in the stars. She'll have to muster more courage than she's ever imagined. But perhaps by journey's end, Pearl will believe in herself, experience a miracle, and realize her greatest desire of all.
Fortuna and the Scapegrace Page 30