by Paul Binding
And he heaved his bottle to his lips through which he proceeded to let fall a few drops of its dark-golden liquid. He smelt powerfully of this stuff; he must have been swigging away for some time. He’d perched himself on the edge of the bench as though he didn’t intend to stay in the shelter any longer than he could help, it being a mark of weakness to be there in the first place.
His remark didn’t seem to admit of a reply. Besides I, Martin Bridges, product of the nineteenth century and employee of The Advertiser, felt physically, nervously jolted by this latest clap from the heavens, and, if I spoke, might well betray this reaction. I still had some pride.
“I was talking to you, young man!” said my fellow refugee. “And when I choose to speak, why, shucks, I expect other people to listen. If I wanted to talk to myself, I’d have done so, and if I wanted to talk just to him”—again the tilt of the chin, which, I could see in the dim light, sprouted only a short beard, of what color I couldn’t discern—“then I’d have done so aloud without bothering to say anything in your damned direction. And I still might do, you know, ’specially if we hear his voice again. Because I respect him, you see, I’m not frightened of him, though he is frightening, for he is mighty and there’s none able to challenge him.”
Even without “shucks” and that adverb “mighty” I had decided from the rhythm of his sentences and his burred r’s (and also, I might add, his spitting to punctuate certain phrases) that the sharer of my shelter was an American—of some variety or other, for he didn’t much speak like the other few (very few) Americans I’d met, nor even like the many imitations of them I’d heard.
“Quite a storm!” I said in that jaunty way I had with intrusive strangers. “Still I suppose it had to come, didn’t it? And of course, it’s made everything cooler.”
The relief of this was something I hadn’t fully done justice to, what with the overhead tumult and my own equally tumultuous feelings. Perhaps I should have been more inwardly grateful—to him perhaps?
“‘Made it cooler,’” growled the man, “made it a darned sight cooler, I’d say! But . . . well, if that isn’t England for you! Always so practical, always thinking of itself and its damned comforts, and blind—blind and deaf both—to what this world really means. Shucks!” As if to illustrate his contempt for the country where he now was, he tilted the brandy to his mouth with vicious jerks of elbow and forearm, as if he were already engaged in some sort of fight. “Did you hear what I said to you, young fool who’s said in his heart there ain’t a God? I’ve told you, clear enough, I’d have thought: ‘That is his only way of speaking to us meaningfully. He has just the one language for expressing what he thinks . . .’”
I reverted, I knew it, to my Thomas Middleton School self, one in truth I’d never left for long: “I heard you the first time,” I replied.
Then, as if to complement this American’s repetition there came another boom of thunder, though perhaps slightly less loud, and perhaps a fraction (to be welcomed) less directly overhead.
“So you did, did you? Now I know—as I could have done just by looking at you—that you’re some very cheeky as well as some very stupid English kid,” the man spat the insulting adjectives out at me. “No wonder Ukko utters what he utters when the land beneath him is crawling with idiots like yourself, godless little wretches all of you.”
Surely he was—well, did I really need to say it, even to myself, stinking high to heaven as he was?—pretty half-seas over. Then—Ukko, I wondered, whoever is Ukko and what can it be that he’s uttering?
“Ukko?” I asked, half in protest that he could expect me to understand such an outlandish name. But I’d heard it before, had I not? A Kvennish name, if my memory served me right.
“Ukko,” another spit, right into the spreading puddle at his feet. “Ukko, Old Man—Ylijumala as my ancestors and kin would call him, the over-God, the Captain of the Heavenly Crew. Thunder came into the world because Ukko mated with Akka, yes Ukko actually fucked Akka, and every one of us, Yankee, Britisher, or Kven should remember that truth—or else . . .” And here he gave another upward jerk of his arm, the bottle still in his hand, and pointed this time not at his own mouth but in my direction, as if in a hostile toast, or as though to see me off with an obscene gesture from his phallus. “Yes, those who know no better call thunderstorms ‘natural disasters.’ Goddam fools!”
Heavens, I didn’t care for this man at all, noxious and obnoxious, with his incomprehensible drunken talk, and but for the remorseless swoosh-swoosh of the rain, and the likelihood of further lightning I would have moved away from him at once. But the continuing bad weather beyond the shelter held me captive beside him. Not as he talked on, it was me he was really addressing: “Gee, when in March he made himself heard and seen, in such an awesome way as even a traveler like myself had never seen before, then I told him square, said to him straight out: ‘Ukko, Old Man, Ukko, it is not just your right, but the nature of your being, that you manifest yourself like this, and don’t think I don’t know it! I would never be so foolish as to make lamentations, not like the poor-witted creatures all around me, with their complaints and their silly prayers and their crying out loud like goddam babies. I shall go down if that is what you want. I shall make for your arms and if you stretch out your hammer I’ll be ready to take it. Always ready, always!’”
This strange little speech was every bit as alarming to me as anything in the outer world (which had after all inspired it). Oddly the man didn’t slur or even trip over his last words as you might have expected in one who’d consumed as much brandy as the state of his bottle indicated. But there was something alien about his delivery all the same, almost as if he were not employing the language he was most deeply intimate with. Ylijumala, “my ancestors and kin” . . . for all that he’d used the exclamations “shucks” and “gee,” maybe he was not an American at all.
I glanced at him as full-eyedly as I thought wise. He was dressed—like myself—for a summer’s day, with loose blue trousers of that strong twill cotton known as “jeans,” and a short-sleeved shirt, also blue, of some towelling material or other. The arm nearest me was pretty thoroughly tattooed; I could just, before turning my eyes back to the view of the Esplanade pavement immediately in front of me, catch a mermaid and an anchor. A nautical man, therefore. A nautical man who was and was not an American. Who talked of Ukko and Akka and had actually used the word Kven . . .
The stab of fear I experienced as his identity broke in on me was violent enough to make me jump and cry out. And though I did not precisely do these things, I am pretty sure some noise not quite normal, and by civilized standards not natural, emerged from my throat and that I made an involuntary movement which rocked the wooden bench.
At any rate he turned around, and I could see a look of aggressive challenge in his dark, almost black eyes.
“Something wrong?” he growled. “Some goddam thing you want to say?”
And this time he didn’t sound like a Yankee at all.
One thing I was absolutely certain of. The man—the sheer reek of him was confirmation enough—was not dead. No revenant. Only too alive, and possibly dangerous to boot.
“I was just thinking,” I spluttered, hoping to hear some footsteps coming along the promenade through the wet evening, but no such luck, not yet. “That the rain’s let up a bit at last. And we haven’t heard any thunderclaps for—”
“Get yourself out in the storm then!” As if he had the authority in this shelter when it was me who had entered it first. “Doesn’t show you’re brave if you do so, if that’s what you’re thinking. The man who respects Ukko—who wants to find out what he’s trying to tell us in his power—doesn’t desert him and go rushing through rain like some spoilt brat.”
And truly, whatever the degree in its intensity compared with before, the rain was still splashing heavily down, and wasn’t that—further off, admittedly—another sky-sent rumble?
“When he rages for day after day, then that’s another matter, pal, and
when that happens, you may well think the time has come to submit to his will.”
Well, I would take a risk. I could not do otherwise, however far from brave I was.
“As you did in March?” I ventured, my pulse quickening as soon as I’d spoken, and the saliva forsaking my mouth. I was feeling less steady even than at the Gateway, and yet—wasn’t I, in an important sense, back at the Gateway a second time?
“In March, Ukko was hard even for me to understand. Such vengeance he took then, who the hell, I thought, was I to be spared his wrath. But”—and just as I felt I was getting somewhere, even if it were somewhere he (and I with him) dreaded, he swung his head to meet me, his action making the brandy shake in the bottle—“hell, what’s an English boy like you doing knowing about Ukko? I thought the English had turned their back on gods of every kind.”
This was something I hadn’t heard before, though, recalling my own antipathy to church-going and scripture lessons, maybe he had a point. But any defense of myself as representative Englishman that I might have liked to make was wiped out by the shock of confirmation I now received. I saw that the man was red-haired.
In my head I could hear Hans Lyngstrand saying, He was cleanshaven. Well, that was no longer true, though his beard, I could see was of recent growth. And a redhead. A darkish sort of red. And then there were his eyes. Black but their blackness changed—and I wasn’t the only chap on board to notice this—with the weather. Clear when the skies were clear, clouded when the skies were overcast.
Certainly in each eye pupil and iris were one—as black as coal. And the weather, which this union of color denoted, could scarcely be more inclement.
Again Hans’s voice echoed internally: But Alfred Johnston talked about things that didn’t belong to natural history or any branch of science we’d ever been taught.
I said his name aloud. This seemed to amuse him.
“Say it again, English boy!” he ordered, and when he did, gave a deep laugh of such phlegm-ridden wheeziness it scarcely deserved so innocent a name. “Yes, I’ve called myself Johnston. On more than one ship. Friman’s another favorite of mine. But neither is my real name, any more than the others I took on simply for the sake of being a respectable member of a crew. My real name I shan’t divulge to anybody. Certainly not to a shivering little English boy who talks about the ancient gods without understanding them . . . But how come you know about them at all?”
For the time being, I decided, I shall not speak Hans’s name aloud. I felt afraid to do so, and largely because everything about this bo’sun come back from the missing seemed fearful, and dislocated from any life where there were persons and things to depend on.
“Friends have told me. One friend in particular. Who once served with you.”
“Well, a darned many have done that.”
“On Dronning Margrete.”
Alfred Johnston sighed, “Oh, that was a bad business that truly was. A beautiful ship, but Ukko knew that he had to treat her with savagery. He dashed her to pieces in the very Channel to the back of us and showed little mercy. But he favored me, did Ukko, because I am his loyal servant, and know his power. Can’t remember everything that happened, though. When the mast split, I was able to get into some kind of dinghy . . .” Just as in Hans’s case in our early conversations, the dreadful experience the man was trying to recapture in words was suddenly so vivid it banished the speaker’s actual surroundings. “Yes, and then—then I had the fortune to be picked up by a Belgian boat. She took me to Antwerp and safety, and there they put me in some sort of seamen’s hostel. They were all good enough to me, doctors, nurses, fellow-sailors, probably couldn’t have survived without ’em, but it was like—like being a dog, a proper dog, German shepherd or an elkhound, shut up in a damned human kennel. Then they went and found for me—would you believe it?—another position as bo’sun, on an Antwerp boat ship going to Santander. We put in to Dengate to pick up some cargo, but then”—he grimaced, but his narrative—probably for the most part true—had steadied him a little, his speech was more coherent, his face a little more composed—“but then Ukko showed his temper yet again, and so the Captain wisely decided not to put out to sea again till the morning. So I decided to hit this town. I hadn’t had much fun this year, and bad weather brings back bad memories, and those have to be dealt with. But I didn’t get so very far from our berth in this port.”
“But far enough”—I knew it was now or never; my suspicious reluctance to pronounce my friend’s name in his company must be resisted—“for you to encounter somebody who knew Hans Lyngstrand from Dronning Margrete.”
“Knew who?”
“Hans Lyngstrand.”
The man edged nearer to me, and I thought: If he doesn’t strike me unconscious with his fists, then he will through the sheer dirt and stink and ill temper of him.
“Alive?”
“Yes. But he was in the cold sea a long time and got a severe pulmonary infection. He . . . he recuperated here in Dengate awhile, and now is back in Norway.”
“And you’re a friend of his, you say?” The words were not spoken in the least nicely, in fact were spat out, with foul-smelling spittle at my face.
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, be so good as to tell him when you next see him—in England, Norway, or at the bottom of the sea—that in my view, and in Ukko’s, too, of that I have no doubt—that he, the good little Hans Lyngstrand, was the true cause of the storms we suffered—that sent the beautiful Dronning under—not the low depression or whatever else learned Norwegian First Mates like to talk so grandly about. Disgusting piece of shit! That’s what he was! Offering his bum to all and sundry, by day and by night, sucking the cocks of any one who asked—and Ukko knows there were a damned sight too many sailors who did just that—and all the time the sweetest innocent smile on his face, the most obliging offer to be helpful to everybody in just whatever way he could. As though butter couldn’t melt.” His voice assumed a strange high tone here, presumably in mimicry of Hans’s effete desire to be helpful. “‘I’m Hans and I hope you like me!’ And you—you probably fell for him, too. You look the kind of fool who would! I’m a man with a man’s rule. When I love a woman—as I did her up in Molde in Norway—I expect from her faithfulness, obedience unto death—and way beyond even that. That is how a true Kven, a true server of Ukko thinks. He doesn’t like stupid girls, silly women who run off with other men just because it appeals to them to do so. He thinks they’re filthy tarts, and wants them to pay. And even less he likes boys who do women’s work with their bodies, and then pretend that it’s natural. Damn them all to hell, I say. Ukko won’t be sending the likes of little Hans to the great peace of beyond with his flying spray, I can tell you that much. No! He’ll gladly let them sink to the far depths of the sea from which he’ll cast them for ever into the fires of the underworld . . .”
These appalling last words were the last I heard from the bo’sun. In my revulsion, two sentences earlier, I had hauled myself up off the bench, left the shelter and was now running—for dear life, even if that literally meant death—back in the direction of Castelaniene. Better to face Will and Beatrice than to hear one syllable more from this Kven’s violent, evil mouth.
By the time I gained St. Ethelberga’s Road, with my mind so stunned it could surely receive no further impressions, and with my body painfully pierced by stitches such was the desperate ferocity of my speed, the storm had virtually passed over our particular Channel port and was making for the next one.
I remembered what old Doris had told me when I was a small boy: “Always cast off wet clothing the moment you get inside, and then give every inch of yourself a thorough rub-down till your skin tingles.” (My poor mother was too engrossed in the sorrow that was her married life, and my father too little interested in anybody’s welfare, his own included, to worry about such things.) So now, many years after my home life had come to an end—and, if truth were to be told, scarcely happier than then—I entered Castelanie
ne with the intention of doing precisely this. All corners of all my garments, all inches of my body beneath them, had been attacked or invaded by the vicious summer rain. But before I could even begin to attend to these necessary and restorative attentions to my person, I saw Mrs. Fuller coming through the hall toward me with vigorous, agitated, dramatic strides. She clearly didn’t expect the person to be entering Castelaniene to be myself.
“You’re not Will!” she said, in a tone of reproachful accusation. “I thought you might be Will coming back—I didn’t see how he’d make the London train he wanted to get—but perhaps, after all, he did! Anyway, you’re not him. And he’s taken his door-key with him!”
“Will went out—in all this?” I said, shaking the sopping hairs of my head. “Why ever . . .? What about the nice dinner you’d got for him?”
“Never eaten,” said Mrs. Fuller, “on account of things you were pleased to tell him about me, Mr. Bridges.”
“The things weren’t about you,” I said, never imagining my long overdue confrontation with Mrs. Fuller would take this particular impromptu shape (and I could still hear rain beating on the porch behind me). “They were facts of your situation which I thought”—though what exactly had I thought as I imparted my incomplete knowledge to Will—and hadn’t it been a matter of feeling rather than of thinking?—“that he ought to know in light of the . . .” But what was it? “The growing friendship between you!” was what I decided on.
“You told him about George and Horace,” Mrs. Fuller spoke the words quite flatly, and sounded more injured than angry, and more sorrowful than either.
“I told him what I’d worked out, quite carefully, for myself. Together with things I’d gathered from other people.” I shook my saturated head again, like a retriever dog. “But my knowledge wasn’t very complete. I’m sure it could be a lot completer. But you had after all given me to understand that your husband was dead, as indeed you had made the whole town think, considering you organized a public funeral for him. Not true, I am pretty certain. As for Horace you never mentioned him until I stumbled on you in the Mercy Room.”