Mostly Murder

by Fredric Brown

  “They didn’t marry, though?”

  “No. There was almost a year to wait before she’d be twenty-one, and they’d definitely decided to wait till then. He had come back to America—partly, I gather, because he didn’t trust himself near her and he was young and foolish; he didn’t want to touch her until they were married.”

  “Was that foolish?” I asked.

  “Yes. Very. He had a year to wait, and he turned to another love for solace. His love of adventure. He bought himself a beautiful little one-man sailboat in Boston and started out to sail around the Horn.”

  “The Horn?”

  “Cape Horn, the tip of South America. His destination was San Francisco, the long way around, but he never got there. He was shipwrecked on a little island off Chile, a week after he had rounded the Horn. It was an uninhabited island not much bigger than a city block, and he was on it nine years.”

  “Nine years?” I said, “and he stayed sane?”

  “No. He went quite off his rocker toward the last; he’s in an asylum now, if he’s still alive…“

  I got the picture as he talked. First, of course, the shipwreck at night in a storm. Running before that storm into pitch darkness, Carl Marney’s little yacht had taken the rocky south coast of the little island he hadn’t known was there head-on, and it had taken the bottom out of his boat. The impact of it had thrown him out of the cockpit and into the shallow water; it was a sand beach with rocks sticking up out of the sand, and his boat was hung up on one of those rocks.

  Fighting the night and the storm, knowing that his boat would probably break up before the storm was over, he salvaged what he could off the boat—provisions, water (it turned out later that didn’t matter; there was a spring on the island), his radio set, log and papers—and carried them to higher ground. And then there was nothing more to do but to sit beside them, shivering in the stormy dark until morning.

  And when dawn came, his boat was gone and he could see where he was. That is, he could see that he was on a tiny island. By roughest reckoning he knew it was a hundred miles at least, possibly two hundred, off the coast of Chile.

  And it wasn’t in a steamer lane; he wasn’t sure of that at first, but he became sure as the months went by, as the years went by. When a steamer did come, it was too late. Nine years on an almost barren postage stamp of an island, alone, is too long. But he survived.

  Oh, survival wasn’t hard, at first. He had the supplies he’d taken off the boat, enough to eat for a month or so. His first major worry was shelter. There weren’t any trees on the island, so he couldn’t build himself a shack. He tried to weave something out of bushes, but he didn’t have the knack. He finally dug himself a shallow cave in the little hummock—you couldn’t call it a hill—in the middle of the island. It wasn’t much shelter, but it was something.

  Food—after his supplies ran out—meant fish, when he could catch some. Fish for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Can a man live nine years on fish? Carl Marney did. When he could catch them, he ate fish; when he couldn’t he went hungry. For the first six or seven years he cooked them and then ate them. The last two or three years he just ate them. It wasn’t too bad for a while. For the first few months he had things to keep him busy. And he had hope. He kept a beacon fire going at night on top of the hummock as a signal to ships. But then he realized that there wasn’t going to be enough brush on the tiny island to keep that fire going, and he had to stop. Besides, there weren’t any ships. He didn’t see one for nine years. Whatever ships rounded the Horn went well inside or outside of that island.

  There were storms, frequent rains. There was baking heat from the sun and there was intense cold. He had little in the way of creature comfort.

  But—the poem. He had a keen mind and a marvelous education. When he’d been on the island a few months—long enough to realize that it might be a long time before he was rescued—it came to him that he must do something to keep from going mad—at least to keep from going dull and stale and animal-like.

  He had writing materials from the boat, and he set about writing a poem. Not poems, he decided, but one great poem, one that would epitomize—well, the love of life that he felt so strongly, that he felt even more strongly in his temporary isolation and deprivation. It was to be something along the lines of the Rubaiyat, but without the gentle melancholy and bitter undertone of that hedonistic masterwork. It was to be rhymed and metrical, in quatrains.

  You must remember, you must keep in mind, that he had time. Even the few things—mostly fishing—that he could find to do did not occupy his mind while they occupied his body. He had the mind, the ability, the background, the sensitivity, everything that a poet needs to write a great poem, and he had time, all the time there was. He could spend a day, a week, a month if necessary, polishing a single quatrain. He could find the right word, then a better one, then the perfect one—the one that combined perfection of sound with perfection of imagery.

  He worked on that poem almost nine years, and he finished it.

  But meanwhile, so that you can understand the development and evolution of that poem, you must understand some other things that were happening.

  He had the radio—a receiving set only; the boat had been too small a one for the two-way sets that existed in the nineteen twenties—and it still worked after he had rigged it up in the cave. He had a considerable knowledge of chemistry and was able to find certain mineral substances that enabled him to keep his batteries charged, after a fashion. He couldn’t, of course, have repaired a tube had one blown out or worn out, so he limited himself to half an hour’s use of the radio out of every twenty-four. And then only late at night in clear weather when the hearing was good.

  He couldn’t waste the precious life of those tubes on entertainment; he concentrated his listening on the news programs that kept him abreast of what was going on in the world. He learned of his own disappearance at sea and the brief search that was conducted for him—with planes flying along the coast line of Cape Horn and a bit each side of it, hundreds of miles away.

  A year and a half later he learned that his fiancee—the daughter of the earl, had married a prominent American career diplomat. At least, he reflected bitterly, she’d been true to America.

  That news had thrown him into a bit of a tailspin; he’d torn up most of the twenty-odd quatrains he’d written of the poem, and, salvaging a line here and there, had written them over again. There was a touch of cynicism in them. The touch was more than a touch; it was growing into bitterness by the time—late in 1929—when he learned of the stock market crash. He knew then that he wasn’t rich anymore—if he ever got back. When he learned, a few months later, that the man who had had charge of the Marney estate in his absence had joined the procession of brokers who were walking on air out of skyscraper windows, he knew that he wasn’t even solvent any more. Literally, he wouldn’t have a penny.

  That was when he’d been there three years. The prospect of poverty, though, didn’t bother him. as much as the loss of his sweetheart had. Either was bad enough, but he knew he was equipped to earn a living—even in the deep depression the radio told him about—and he knew that, even as a penniless young wage earner, he might find another woman whom he might love and who might love him. All wasn’t lost.

  He managed to keep that note of hope shining through the changing form of the poem, through the bitterness that had become its dominating motif. It wasn’t the same poem at all, now after three years, that it had started out to be, but it was still a great poem, maybe a greater one because it was a truer one, a more realistic reflection. It had changed in form to free verse; the artificiality of rhyme and meter had palled upon him. He concentrated on cadence, working, polishing, perfecting—while the days and nights fell upon him like the drip of drops in the water torture.

  He’d given up hope, now after four years, of ever being rescued. If no ship came this way in four years, probably none would come in forty.

  His radio finally died a natur
al death, and he lost all touch with the outer world.

  But he still kept working on the poem, the great poem. Not now, because he hoped to gain fame or recognition from it. It had become an end in itself, a thing that kept him going, that gave meaning to the cold and hunger and loneliness, gave expression to them.

  His health and strength were going now. You wouldn’t have recognized him from one of the newspaper pictures that had appeared so often five years before. He was emaciated and he suffered terribly from scurvy as a result of his all-fish (and not too much of that) diet. He tried eating leaves of the bushes on the island, seaweed, but everything he tried had poisoned him a little. He suffered wracking pain from dysentery almost constantly. After five years on the island, he was twenty-eight, and looked nearer fifty.

  But he survived.

  The poem, the great thing that he was doing—if only for himself—kept him going and kept him alive. He’d decided on a shorter form, a strictly limited length and was trying to pack into that everything that he felt. Concentration. The bitter couplet. Yes, he’d gone back to rhyme and meter for a while. A poem—he had it finished almost to his satisfaction—of forty-eight lines, twenty-four cruel couplets that tried to wring out the last drop of venom from a poisonous world.

  It was six years then. Maybe by then he was going a little mad—except about the poem; he remained sane to the end about that.

  He kept working on it, improving it rather than lengthening it. His supply of paper was running low now, so he did his work on sand with a stick until he was satisfied—temporarily—and then and only then would he transfer the written word to one of his remaining sheets of paper. Always, when he revised, he destroyed what he had written before; he didn’t want the ghosts of former versions to haunt him; he wanted only the shining perfection of the best he had done to date.

  It was seven or eight years—he’d rather lost track of time by then—when it came to him that he no longer wanted a boat to come. Never, now, would he want to go back and face again people he once knew. Partly because of the tropical diseases, you see. He was thirty or thirty-one then, and he was an old man, a slightly cracked old man, and a hideous one. He’d lost his teeth and his bald skull was cracked like pottery from the sun and his body was almost a skeleton, a naked skeleton. All his clothing had long since worn out. His skin was like rotting leather. He weighed about eighty pounds—and he was a tall man.

  He’d lost his hair, his teeth—other things—but his mind went last. It went after his strength and his love of life and his hope. It concentrated on the poem and kept itself alive.

  Distillation. It had come down to that now. He cut and pruned to combine two couplets into one; then to put the very essence of everything into a single quatrain, a master quatrain that would be the key to all expression. Slowly starving, dying, going mad, he survived by trying it in a hundred forms, none of them quite perfect.

  A couplet, perhaps. He tried that, worked on it, and tore up the quatrains when he had almost what he wanted. Distilling, always, down to the drop of essence.

  Yes, the ship finally came, but he had finished his poem first. He had finally discarded the couplet form, Rupert Gardin told me, as he refilled my glass with iced tea, just a short while before the ship came and rescued him.

  He’d distilled it at last to the final drop, the ultimate essence, the single syllable. He had it! Perfect at last, the expression of all that had happened to him. He shouted it in a high, cracked voice at the sailors in the dinghy as they neared the shore. He shouted it often, thereafter, but never any other word. Only the great poem that he and nine horrible years had made.

  And Rupert Gardin, the dean of American critics, leaned close to me ha his hotel room and recited the poem, the untitled poem, a single unprintable word of four letters.

  I still remember, after these years, the thrill I got when I went back to the office, wrote the story, and turned it in. I still remember waiting to see it in print, knowing for sure it would get me my first by-line, and I remember the disappointment and the anger when I came across the story the next day, just the story of the interview buried on page eight and without a by-line. There wasn’t any mention of Carl Marney.

  I headed for the office of the city editor, stood fuming at his desk, and when he looked up I told him I’d quit.

  He grinned a little. He said, “Go out and have a beer and then come back and I’ll hire you again, maybe. While you’re there figure out how Rupert Gardin knew what happened on the island if Marney never said anything after he came off except his poem. Gardin took you for a ride, kid.”

  I said all I had to say without even opening my mouth, and the city ed chuckled. He said, “Get the hell out of here and have that beer,” and I did.

  Over the beer, while the redness went out of my face, I repeated Carl Marney’s poem softly to myself, and suddenly I laughed out loud and the bartender turned and looked at me. And I think that with that laugh I quit being a cub and became a reporter, because I’ve never believed anything since—except the fundamental validity of Carl Marney’s poem.

  Little Apple Hard to Peel

  THE APPEL FAMILY moved to our part of the country when John Appel was ten or eleven years old. He was the only kid.

  New kids didn’t move in very often and, naturally, some of us took considerable interest in finding out whether we— could lick him. He liked to fight, we found, and he was good at it.

  His name being John Appel, Jonathan Apple was the nickname we picked at first. For some reason, it made him mad, and there wasn’t any trouble getting him to fight. He fought with a cold calmness that was unusual for a boy. He never seemed to see red, like the rest of us.

  He was small for his age, but tough and muscular. He could lick, we soon learned, any kid his own size. And he could lick most kids who were bigger. He licked me twice, and Les Willis three or four times.

  Les Willis, my best pal, was a little slow on the up-take. It took him that many lickings to find out that the Appel kid was too much for him.

  It was one of the bigger kids, a few grades above us in school, that first called him “Little Apple Hard to Peel.” Appel liked that nickname. He used to brag about it, in fact. Of course nobody called him that much, because it was too long.

  The first incident occurred when he’d been around only a week. He knocked a chip off Nick Burton’s shoulder. Nick was only a few months older than Appel, but Nick was big for his age. Appel fought like a devil but he just couldn’t handle Nick. After the fight was over, he got up and we dusted him off and he wanted to shake hands with Nick. That shaking hands after a fight was new to us; usually we kids stayed mad a few hours and tapered off, sort of.

  It was the next day at school that Nick sat on the nail and had to go home. He was in bed three days, and limped quite a while. Somebody’d driven a long, thin nail up through the bottom of his seat, so it stuck out almost two inches.

  We kids had often played tricks like that with thumb tacks, but this was something else again. It wasn’t any joke. It was obviously meant to hurt badly, and it succeeded. There was quite an inquisition about it, but no one ever found out who had put it there. Somebody, though, had made a secret trip to the schoolhouse at night. Nick sat on it first thing in the morning after the bell rang.

  Those of us who knew about the fight Nick had had with Appel wondered a little, but that was all. It didn’t seem possible a kid would do something as cruel as that.

  Then there was that dirty drawing on the blackboard. Not the usual comic caricature of a teacher that kids draw, but something pretty smutty. There wasn’t any name signed to it, but it was done in yellow chalk, and Les Willis was the only one in the class who had any yellow chalk. The teacher believed Les’ denial, finally, or at least she said she did.

  But Les failed that year in school and it put him a year behind the rest of us. He’d been sort of on the borderline of keeping up before; he might have made it, if it hadn’t been for that. The drawing on the board happe
ned a couple days after Les beat Appel in the tryouts for pitcher for our class team. Appel played second base. But next term he pitched, because Les was still back in the same grade and the rest of us had moved on.

  There was another thing. Appel never liked dogs, and dogs didn’t take to him at all. There was the time Bud Sperry’s little fox terrier, Sport, bit Appel in the leg. Two weeks later Sport died. He died in one of the most painful ways a dog can die. Someone had fed him, not poison, but a sponge pressed tight and coated with meat grease to make a dog gobble it quick. Then that sponge swells up inside the dog. Bud Sperry’s uncle was a vet, and when Sport’s agony started, Bud took him to his uncle. His uncle chloroformed the dog, and then cut him open—on a hunch—and found the sponge.

  Bud Sperry would have killed whoever gave Sport that ‘sponge, if he’d known for sure. But there wasn’t ever any proof.. Not then, or later.

  I think it would have been a good thing if Bud Sperry had killed Appel then, proof or no proof. That’s a hell of a thing for a sheriff to say. But other things happened, after that, and not always to dogs.

  Appel was a good-looking kid about the time we graduated from high school. He was still small, but he was stocky. Despite his size, he’d made a good football player, and he had curly hair, and the girls were crazy about him.

  Les Willis had quit high school in his second year and was helping his folks on their farm, just outside of town. The Appel place was just down the road. John Appel wasn’t doing anything then, just living with his folks and “looking around.” You got the idea, from the way he put it, that there wasn’t anything in town good enough for him to do, but that he was looking anyway.