by Ferenc Máté
Father Murphy edged his way slowly through the crowd, clasping the Bible. He paused near the cask of rum, murmured some words no one could understand then stepped to the graveside.
The four sailors were on their knees, lowering in Testard.
The priest bent down, took a handful of sand, and, murmuring, “Ashes to ashes,” sprinkled it into the hole. The captain stepped forward, said a few words about duty and service, then fell silent and there was only the murmur of the sea. He too picked up some sand and let it run through his fingers into the grave.
One by one the soldiers of the garrison did the same, then drifted back into the shadows. The others stood saluting. The sailor with the squeezebox began a mournful Marseillaise. Someone sang. Others followed.
The blast of a cannon tore apart the night.
The sound of the cannon echoed around the bay. It had burst with a tongue of flame from the frigate and bounced up from the water, and then from the face of the dark mountain. The shell whistled overhead, a distant, silly sound, and slammed into the mountain somewhere high above. Some trees broke, some rocks fell, then the world returned to silence. The squeeze-box began to play. The villagers didn’t move.
Then the cannon fired again.
This time, the shell whistled louder. More menacing. Lower. Closer. Then it hit. It slammed into the darkness just beyond the fire. By the light of the flames, they saw a shack rise off its pilings and explode into pieces. There was the violent sound of breaking, a woman screamed, and a stout man cried out, as the remnants of their house spread across the sky. Bits of poles, fronds, and mats fluttered to the ground. Some sailors stopped saluting. The captain turned away. The boy who saluted with his cup lowered his arm.
The man whose house it had been stood there as shards and shreds rained down over him.
The third shell came in quickly: the gunner had his range.
Chapter 53
When the fifth blast from the cannon came at the village, the boy who had saluted with his cup gave an anguished cry and flung the cup toward the shell whistling through the dark.
The shell hit Nataro’s house, the largest of the huts. As it blew apart, a kerosene lamp burst and fiery pieces rained down, setting the nearby roofs ablaze. Nataro watched bits of his house smolder in the sky. He watched a corner post of ironwood tumble down, the one he had cut with his son on a three-day journey into the canyon of the ponds, the one they’d had a fine time searching for, cutting, and cleaning. They had brought the trunk of the ironwood out together, notched it and set it in place—the first post of the house—and Nataro’s brother carved their figures into the pole, and so many times they had looked at it and remembered those days, that good time.
The post hit the ground. Around it fell planks every man in the village had helped hew, and the roof that for two weeks the village had braided—hard on the hands because it was pandanus, but worth the trouble because it lasted seven years instead of three, like palm fronds. Last to fall was the flaming mat Nataro’s wife had woven with her sisters, singing all the while by the pond of the waterfall.
The village burned.
The admiral, his task eased by the blaze, shelled the village house by house like cleaning a cob of corn. Women shrieked and men waved empty rifles. The captain turned to them and apologized with all his heart, but there was chaos now and some children cried while others laughed, and the sailors backed away toward the lifeboats except for the boy who had thrown his cup. He now took a loaded rifle from the boat and aimed it at the frigate, but the captain gently pushed the rifle barrel down and said, “Forget it, son. It’s not worth your life.”
The captain ordered the sailors into the lifeboats, then he waded into the sea and pushed the first boat off into the dark. The second boat was overloaded and two sailors scrambled out to float it, then scrambled in again. Only the captain remained, thigh-deep in the sea. When the engineer put his hand out to help him aboard, he just stood there and watched the lifeboat drift away. The engineer called out, “Sir?”
And he still didn’t move, didn’t want to move, just wanted them all to go away, disappear, and never come to this beautiful place again. “It’s your ship, sir,” the engineer said quietly. The next shell hit, another house exploded. The captain gritted his teeth and waded deeper into the sea.
“UP SAILS,” a big Kanaka barked, and Dugger stalled for time but hoisted the main. Two big Kanakas hauled in the anchor chain. The cries and shouts from shore and the cannon’s roars drowned out its grinding.
Dugger hauled the halyard tight, sheeted it, and the ketch took off in the stiff breeze. He went to raise the jib. A Kanaka steered the ketch and the jib luffed hard and Dugger worked frantically, nearly blind with anger. When both the sails were set, he took the wheel and the ketch heeled hard to port with the cannon weighing it down, and headed at speed, straight toward the frigate.
The Kanakas gathered around the cannon. “You get one shot, you understand?” Dugger hissed. “Then I’m sailing out of here. They can’t turn the ship without steam, and their boiler’s out, but once they start it up again, we’re all dead, so you get one shot and then we run.”
“Me good shot,” a young man said.
“Glad to hear it,” Dugger said.
He steered the ketch over the rolling seas. Near the frigate, he fell off, aimed past its stern, and came about, finished resetting the sails, then sailed beam-on to the frigate less than thirty yards away. The young man was on his knees beside the cannon, sighting. He had the aft deck in his sights, then he sighted the main house, then the tilted stack, then the wheelhouse, then the kerosene barrels beside it, and now in his sight, he saw the base of the big cannon.
A swell jostled the ketch. He fired.
An enormous thunder shook the air. A column of fire from the frigate split the sky. Sooty flames roared on the frigate’s deck as the burst kerosene drums caught fire and lit the remnants of the wheelhouse, now all blown to splinters, with only the wheel left standing in the open air. But the big cannon stood intact, with the admiral behind it, scorched, staring in astonishment at the wreckage at his feet.
“Dumb Kanaka bastards!” Dugger roared, and fiercely turned the wheel. He fell away from the frigate and let out sail, and had the ketch reaching, running out to sea. The Kanakas stood in stunned silence. Kate burst out of the hatch and blinked into the night.
“Brainless morons!” Dugger yelled, and slammed the sheets to the deck. “How could you miss from this close?” The ketch flew downwind, straight out of the bay. Then, with his jaw clenched, Dugger turned the wheel. He hauled the sheets ferociously and turned the ketch back, heading toward the frigate. He ordered the boy to the wheel, then ran to the foredeck, pushed the Kanaka away from the cannon, reset the wedges, braced the cannon tight, swearing all time, checked the sight, then threw open the breech to let fall the empty shell.
“Don’t think I’m doing this for you!” he hissed. “That frigate is barely scratched and once they get up steam, they’ll blow my ass to hell!” With a violent swing of his leg, he kicked the smoking shell into the sea.
They were coming up on the frigate as before. “Give me another shell!” he ordered. No one moved. “Come on, dammit, give me another shell!”
The boy stepped forward but stopped. “No more,” he said.
Dugger stared. “No more what?” he said hoarsely. “No more what?”
“No more shell.” the boy shrugged.
“No more shell?” Dugger repeated. “No more shell?” Then, for lack of anything else, he grabbed the boy by the neck. “No more fuckin’ shell? You came to start a goddamn war with one goddamn shell! Is this a fuckin joke? Well, that’s great! That’s just jolly dandy! The war is started!” He pushed the boy violently away. “Now what? You gonna yell at them? Stick out your tongue? What?”
ON THE FRIGATE, the admiral, his hair and eyebrows singed and uniform stained with soot, feverishly cranked the handle on the cannon’s wheel, swinging the barrel around toward the
ketch. The lifeboats came with chaotic churnings of their oars.
Without time to ease the sheets, Dugger rushed back to turn the wheel and the ketch fell away, but with the sheets still tight and the sails full, she heeled and buried the rail, plowing white foam furrows in the fire-colored sea. The admiral cranked the cannon to its farthest starboard range, flipped the lever, and fired. The shell flew and the sails shook, but it missed the mizzen. “You limp Frog!” Dugger grinned, his heart thumping in his throat.
The admiral stood helpless as the ketch sailed beyond the aim of the cannon and off into darkness.
The pirogue changed course to meet it in the pass.
THE LIFEBOATS REACHED THE FRIGATE and the sailors climbed aboard. As the admiral shouted orders to chase the ketch, some swung bits of canvas to suffocate the blaze. Others hoisted the anchor, still others the lifeboats, and the engineer headed below to fire up the boiler, but at the companionway the captain stopped him with his elbow. “Doucement, Henri,” the captain said. “Doucement.” The engineer looked at his captain’s tired eyes, then back to the shore, where the village was a row of leaping flames. He turned and went below and, without hurry, began looking for his shovel.
“GET OFF MY BOAT,” Dugger roared. “And take your goddam cannon!”
One by one, they slipped down into their pirogues and, with swishes of the paddles, vanished in the night. Dugger lifted the base of the cannon and rolled it overboard. He flashed a nervous smile toward Kate. “Alone at last,” he said.
“And Nello?” Kate asked.
Dugger looked over his shoulder and said, “I don’t know.”
They sailed between the two dark points out of the bay. The swells grew long, and they sailed up moonlit slopes and down into dark valleys. The moon was clear and bright and on the sea was a dark pirogue heading for their bow.
Dugger tied off the wheel and went below for his pistol. When he came back the pirogue was so near he could make out two figures paddling with all their might. He untied the wheel and rested the pistol calmly on his arm. When they were just a boat-length off, he fired over their heads.
“Thank you, Cappy!” came a shout from the pirogue. “It’s nice to be welcomed home.”
Lil’bit held the gunwale of the ketch while Nello climbed aboard. When he turned, she was still there, saying nothing, standing in the dark. Nello leaned down and grabbed her wrist to pull her onto the ketch, but he felt her resist gently, clutching the ketch’s rail.
“I wish I could stay,” he said.
“Me too,” she replied. Then she let go of the ketch. It sailed off, leaving her and the pirogue behind.
Behind them the frigate’s smokestack belched its first dark plume.
THEY SAILED WITH SAILS HAULED TIGHT but couldn’t clear the point, so they tacked and beat across the wide mouth of the bay.
Sparks flew from the frigate’s funnel. Halfway across the bay they tacked again. The bow was pointed barely past the point and Nello went to the high rail and stared ahead. The ketch strained, the blocks groaned, and the sea washed over the rail. Then he heard something slam hard into the hull. On the low side of the aft deck a figure clambered aboard.
Nello pulled out his knife and, leaping over the taut sheets, struggled aft. The figure, crouching, crawled toward the cockpit. Nello threw himself at it to push it over the side but held back in midflight.
“Madonna,” he hissed in surprise. “You’re coming?”
“A lil’bit,” she said.
Chapter 54
With the wind whispering in the dark boughs above her, Darina climbed. She had left the village behind long ago, deserted, its fires down, with only a dog standing near a bucket looking down the path the villagers had descended. She climbed above the jungle into steeper open ground and could see up ahead the slope flatten to a saddle. The grip of Guillaume’s pistol had grown familiar in her hand, its metal warm and sweaty, and she caught herself nervously fingering the trigger, not unlike what she had done so often at the Magdalenes’ laundry, nervously fingering the beads of her rosary.
Throughout the climb, grisly thoughts of her brother and the child raced through her mind. To push them away, she rattled aloud the Apostles’ Creed, skipped the Our Fathers because they reminded her of Joya’s dead eyes, and raced into Hail Mary’s with a feverish devotion, saying each word strong and clear to clutter up her mind. Breathless, sweating, but cold from fear, she reached the rim of the plateau. It stretched peacefully below her, aglow with tufts of mist in the gleaming moonlight. The point of land, like a silver spur, jutted out to sea, and the altar stones and platforms loomed, enormous and dark.
At the center of the plateau, something moved. A woman rose, straightened slowly with the caution of old age, and walked inland, leaving behind a corpse laid out in white, surrounded by mounds of fruit and flowers. She went to a creek where a nanny goat was feeding her wobbly-legged kid. Darina saw the old woman push the kid away and reach toward the nanny’s sagging udder. Then, in the great stillness, she heard the sound of milk squirting into a tin cup. On the way back the woman drank from the cup, then she set it down beside a mound of flowers.
The plateau was still again. Nothing moved in the moonlight but the mist.
DARINA SAT UNDER AN OVERHANGING ROCK, leaned against the still-warm stone, and waited. Her eyelids drooped. No matter how she tried, her eyes wouldn’t stay open. She heard her own breath deepen, heard a purring snore. She dreamed long and unstoppably about Mr. Connally and her brother with the lambs. Her eyes opened only when she heard a baby cry.
She awoke with such a jolt she banged her head on the rock. Below her the plateau swam in hazy light. It was dawn. The old woman sat by the corpse with the wobbly kid now beside her. Darina’s heart was still racing from the dream, and she reached for her rosary to calm herself but found only the gun. She clutched it under her breast, half to hide it, half to cling to it. Across the plateau, where the great stone platform rose and the banyan threw its capacious shadow, she saw movement. But when she looked, it stopped. Some terns dove and soared along the cliff’s edge as if drawing pictures across the morning sky.
The movement came again. It was tiny at first, a small dark ball behind the platform in the shadow, but then it cleared the platform and stood clear against the sky, a dark, half-naked man, walking along the edge. She recognized the gait, the cautious way he held his head, and how he carried a small bundle in his arms.
Darina closed her eyes and hoped to God she was asleep. By the time she opened them again, he’d walked halfway to the spur. He was keeping to the edge of the cliff, heading toward that point of land that stuck so starkly out into the sea. “Michael,” she whispered. “Michael.”
She clasped her hands over the gun, laid them across her knees, and murmured, “Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
She got up.
THEY HAD SAILED WEST ALL NIGHT, running from the moonlight. At the first hint of dawn they had dropped all sails and packed them tight so they wouldn’t reflect the sun when it rose. Dugger braced himself against the mizzen with the binoculars at his eyes, and looked in an arc straight aft of the ketch at the curve of the horizon. “Not a sign of them,” he said, and, barely able to hide a grin, he handed the binoculars to Nello.
Lil’bit stood at the helm and watched the long swells pass under the ketch. During the night the wind had come up strong, with the swells growing higher every hour, and the ketch had run hard ahead of them and across them. Dugger managed now and then to catch a wave, and have the ketch raise her bow and surf on the hissing crest, feeling as if some giant had given her a violent shove. Lil’bit stood near him and, when she felt the ketch surge hard, made little sounds of joy. She let go of the rigging and bent her knees as if riding her board.
After a while Dugger pulled her into the cockpit. “Steer for those two stars,” he said. “You surf better than me.”
With sparkling eyes, she held the wheel. It took her a while to get the feel—she luffed the genn
y twice—but then she had the wind just right, and felt the press of each wave trough in her feet, through her thighs. She caught one and the ketch surfed well beyond her hull speed, and the rudder fluttered below when Lil’bit finally lost the wave and the seas rushed by. All night she steered. And all night long she surfed. And each time she caught a wave she let out a squeal; like a child. Her arms tired by dawn and she asked Dugger to take over. She went and sat on the starboard rail, dangled her legs overboard, clutched the shrouds, and closed her eyes. She leaned against the shrouds and slept with a smile lingering on her face.
NELLO WORKED THE BINOCULARS a long time. He swept the dawn-lit north horizon from east to west in an ever-widening arc, back-tracking over the same piece of sea, then did it one more time.
On the cockpit seat beside him, Kate stirred. She had slept soundly all night and now rolled gently over and sat up. Her color had returned and she moved with aches but seemed fine. When she saw Nello looking incessantly aft, she turned questioningly to Dugger.
“We lost them.” Dugger grinned.
Nello lowered the binoculars and handed them back without a word.
The horizon grew bright. The first arc of the sun burned a flat hole in the sky.
“What’s eating you?” Dugger asked, looking up at Nello.
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“You’re not thinking; you’re worrying. Well, there’s nothing to worry about. You saw for yourself; we lost them. Now we can go anywhere we like.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“They saw us heading north. They must have thought Hawaii. So that’s where they went.”
“Except that frigate is twice as fast as us. We only had an hour’s lead. After two hours they must have known they were wrong. They would have changed course. So they should be at least this side of the north horizon.”
“But they’re not.”
“No. So where the hell are they?”