Fortuna and the Scapegrace

by Brian Kindall

  I slammed into a stub wall.

  Burning swatches of sail flapped across the sky like bright, demonic birds.

  Of a sudden, the foremast broke off at its base, falling slow and dreamlike over the bow. Lines snapped, and a general shattering of wood briefly overpowered the bellowing of the wind.

  Shrouds ripped from their stays with splintery explosions. Broken boards flew in all directions as the tall pole crashed through the rails. The burning sails draped over Cloud’s bow, sending up a swirl of orange sparks.

  Hopelessness pervaded the scene.

  And yet, as the ship regained its tenuous verticality, I felt inspired to act. It was a moot gesture, to be sure, but I urged myself to find Adamiah. What I hoped that might accomplish – what I thought I could do to change his luck – I could not rightly say. Admittedly, I was unnerved. Rational thought was not readily available. But I had some notion that if Adamiah should perish, so would I.

  “He must be saved!” I declared. “And I must be his savior!”

  But it was not meant to be.

  In the next instant a colossal wave slammed into the ship’s flank, bursting over the decks. The great vessel shivered and began to roll onto its side. The masts swept through the sky with a whoosh. The deck tipped into a rapidly steepening slant. Crewmen and flotsam toppled into the sea. I hugged tight to a post.

  The masts smacked down hard against the water.

  I held on, bracing myself for the jolt of the ship righting itself. But instead, another wave bashed into the great ship’s underside and forced her on over.

  I flipped from the deck and flew through the air.

  I felt to be falling forever.

  Until I splashed into the sea.

  *****

  The noise changed to a hollow roar.

  I plunged down into the murk.

  Everything moved with a rapid sort of lethargy. The burning ship illuminated the underwater scene with pulsating bursts of radiance.

  Sailors writhed all around me, their arms and legs thrashing in slowful motion as they fought to gain the surface through the tangle of ropes and debris.

  Cloud continued to roll. The ship’s masts raked down through the water, their burning crossbeams aglow and breaking apart, until, at last, they were pointing straight down into the depths. It was a hallucinatory image to behold, and awesome – an image, I vaguely surmised, which spelled a certain doom for all involved.

  I sank down, an inert weight.

  A pressure squeezed my head.

  Now I will die, I decided. For there seemed no way around my fate. It was almost a relief to know it – the soothing acceptance of a long-awaited escape from a life that had offered few enough pleasures to counterbalance its solitude and pain.

  I sank down and down.

  The water was dank as dead tears.

  The surface, with all its turmoil and worry, gave way to a peaceful frigidity.

  Death, I pondered, why dost thou so tauntingly tarry?

  Bubbles leaked from my nostrils and rose like tossed silver coins toward the light. It was beautiful to see.

  My lungs began to burn for their want of air. Simply breathe the water, I encouraged. Simply let it fill you up and have done with it.

  But my lips remained clamped. The small hope clutching in my soul would not let go its hold. And that is when I was seized with a startling desire.

  Do not go gently! something in me screamed. Live!

  I could not help myself; I began to beat my arms; I frantically kicked my legs.

  Still, the surface receded.

  An ache began pressing in my skull. My vision narrowed, as if I were peering down a length of pipe.

  A woman’s face was there at the other end, beckoning.

  She smiled.

  Maman? I whimpered.

  The sea rushed inside of me.

  The pipe closed off.

  And then I felt myself sucked into the pitch-black maw of a monster.

  ENTR’ACTE

  WHEN I WAS A boy, my mother would send me to fetch a loaf of bread from the neighborhood boulangerie. I enjoyed this task immensely. The cobbled streets of Cherbourg were often washed with rain and the wind would blow in off the ocean and it was pleasant to walk through the chill and then finally step into the shop made so cozy and warm from the heat of the ovens.

  The air inside was perfumed with burnt sugar and butter and cinnamon.

  An old man and his wife ran the establishment, and they were so wholly at one with their métier that they looked themselves to be made of bread. She was plump as a biscuit, with sagging arms that jiggled out of her sleeves as she vigorously kneaded her lumps of dough. Her husband, contrarily, was thin as an onion baguette. The pair, like everything else in the shop, always bore a white patina. This gave them a ghastly and spectral appearance that was quickly offset by their overall cheeriness and smiling faces.

  “Bonjour! Bonjour!” They greeted me heartily when I entered their shop. “Que voulez-vous, petit monsieur?”

  “Du pain.”

  “Le poisson, ou l’ordinaire?”

  “Le poisson, s’il vous plaît.”

  The fun-loving baker liked to form some of his stock in the shape of fish, and I always chose one of these loaves over the more traditional sort since, as a youngster, it struck me as amusing to have something that could pass for two foods at once. As the man went to his shelves for the bread, I dragged my fingertip through the flour dust on the counter, drawing a boat or a face or a word.

  “Voila!”

  We exchanged money for bread, chatted of this and that, and then he gave me my change.

  “Merci, petit monsieur.”

  “Adieu.”

  Afterward, fortified by the fresh bread’s aroma, and the happy exchange with the old twosome, I ventured back out into the cold.

  I often hummed a favorite melody as I strolled along, hugging the warm fish loaf to my chest in both arms.

  *****

  One day, as I rounded a corner, I was surprised to be met by a somber procession; it stopped me short in my tracks.

  A priest was leading a donkey through the streets, followed by a young man and woman. The man had his arm around the woman’s shoulders, and the woman was walking bent over and weeping into her kerchief. The couple was dressed all in dark clothes, and a pint-sized coffin was tethered to a rick on the donkey’s back. Inside the coffin, one gathered, was the couple’s deceased child.

  It was with no small degree of awe that I stood by and watched this sorrowful cavalcade. Death was a great mystery to me and anytime it came close a morbid curiosity was sure to be roused in my young imagination. Other pedestrians had stopped as well, the men holding their hats, the ladies all hugging their shawls close around them and casting pitiable looks at the grief-stricken parents.

  That sad parade passed slowly.

  With little steps.

  As if mired in a tangible gloom.

  The woeful couple did not so much want the moment to last, I supposed, as they did not want it to end. For once they had delivered their child unto the ground, what would they have left but a grave marker and their few tragic memories?

  The procession clopped by; we onlookers regarded them with wonder and pity.

  In those days, Cherbourg suffered from a feral dog problem, and a pack of these curs had been prowling in a nearby alleyway when they spied the show and decided to cause some mischief. In a blur of fur and teeth, they swarmed past the crowd and began nipping at the donkey’s heels.

  The startled creature kicked and brayed.

  The equally startled priest whirled about, a wild fear in his eyes, clutching with both hands at the rope tied to his heaving animal.

  “Mon dieu!” he whimpered. “Mon dieu!”

  The dogs were having a fine time, darting in and out, snapping their jaws, yapping happily as they did the Devil’s dirty work.

  The whole raucous spectacle lasted only a moment. The dogs were adept enough to know th
ey needed to act quickly and flee. But as an inspired finale, one dog – a dirt-colored mutt wearing a snaggled grin – rushed in for a last chomp at the donkey’s tender hock.

  The donkey kicked his back legs up high and the force of this motion tore the coffin from its binds, sending the wooden casket end over end through the air until it crashed down onto the curb, popping its lid, and spilling its contents at my feet.

  A shiver shot up my spine bones.

  There on the cobbles, as if just wakened from a nap, lay a pretty little girl.

  She stared up at me with her barely blue eyes. She wore a faint smile. Her hair was pearly white, and her skin. She was dressed in a white smock, her feet bare, her pale toes like dainty bone buttons. She looked to be carved of a moonbeam. The child did not seem so much dead as detached from this plane, drained of color and separated from where I was in that moment by nothing more than a thin window of air.

  I know you, Didier Rain, she whispered to me then, because I know all things.

  I swallowed but could make no reply outside of vaguely bobbing my head.

  The girl’s parents were now in anguish. As the priest worked to calm his donkey, the father knelt at his dead child’s side while his wife hunched beside him, offering up lamentations.

  The man gently slid his hands under the stiffened shell of his little girl. He lifted her up and placed her back in the cradle-sized box. He positioned her head so that it rested on a small lace pillow, and he forced her rigid arms so that her hands were folded palms-down on her chest. The man then reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. After closing one of the girl’s eyes with his fingertip, he laid the coin on its eyelid to weight it shut. He patted his pockets. He dug into his jacket. I do not know why it mattered to him so much, but he became desperate when he could not find another coin to close the other eye. He knelt there, thinking what to do. Then he turned to me.

  “Avez-vous une pièce?”

  I looked into his face. His eyes were red and swollen with weeping.

  Oh, his grief!

  I did have a coin. The baker had given it to me as my change. I could sense its trifling weight in the darkest depths of my pocket. It was a vivid sensation, a small and poignant point of ice seeping through the cloth against the skin of my thigh. I imagined that coin on the dead girl’s eye for all eternity. I imagined it down in the cold, black mystery of the grave. I imagined what it might feel like to have one’s eyes covered up with coins forevermore, and then I said, “Non.” I shook my head. “Je suis désolé, mais je n’en ai pas.”

  The man nodded, distractedly scratching at his throat, and then, apparently deciding that it was no longer important, he placed the lid back on the box. Taking up a stone from the street, he then pounded the tacks along the lid’s edge to keep it in place.

  After that, he cuddled the casket into his arms and stood. Then, with his wife at his side, he walked away. The priest followed with his animal, and they all shambled on down the street, around the corner, and to the graveyard at the church.

  The bystanders disbanded, returning to their quotidian pursuits.

  Life, after all, is for the living.

  But I stood there for a moment longer, watching in the distance to where the luckless family had disappeared. It occurred to me that it was raining. I had not noticed when it began. I peered up into the space between the tall buildings. A flock of pigeons flapped across the leaden sky. Raindrops splattered my face. I remembered the bread.

  “Oh!”

  I had been so distracted by the drama that I had not realized what I was doing. I had squeezed the loaf so forcefully against my chest that it was broken and smashed and crumbling onto the wet cobblestones and my shoes.

  “Zut!”

  That is when I heard the dead girl laugh; that is when I felt her pale eye watching me from the nether regions of my very own soul.

  PART TWO

  REVELATIONS

  I RETURNED TO LIFE gradually.

  Methodically.

  One impression at a time.

  First, out of an otherwise sensationless void, I tasted salt. A lump of the stuff had seemingly replaced my tongue. It encrusted my lips and throat.

  I swallowed, but it was a parched and spitless act, entirely free of any lubricatorial satisfaction.

  Then I heard birds – gulls or terns – far away, then close by, their bristly shrieks eventually transmuting into the singsong prattlings of children.

  “That poor man don’t look none too good to me,” said a girl.

  A boy asked, “Is he dead?”

  It was, I sensed, a reasonable question. If not for the growing awareness of a life-affirming pain in the area of my splintered rib bones, I might have answered yes.

  I heard lapping water.

  I realized I was all over wet.

  I felt sunshine on one side of my face, damp grit pressing against the other.

  “Here come the elders!”

  With a herculean effort, I parted my eyelids. Even from my stuporous state of being, I was greatly astounded by what first met my gaze.

  “Uhn!” I moaned in surprise.

  I felt to be hovering at the edge of a dream.

  There before me, only a few rods distant, like a corporeal manifestation of some colossal black epiphany, lay a whale. It was resting on the beach, high and dry, monumental and flaccid as a giant cast-off placenta. A pair of boys was bouncing on its rubbery back, poking at it with sticks. One of them dropped to his knees and peered into the leviathan’s blowhole.

  “Hiya down there,” he hallooed. “Anybody home?”

  The other boy laughed.

  The creature’s listless eye seemed to be peering directly into my private self. It was a disquieting sensation to piece together in my thoughts. It felt as if we both – the whale and I – had once, in some timeless realm, shared a life force. We looked to have been delivered from the same wild nightmare. But whereas the whale had expired in the process, I, ostensibly, had been saved.

  Footfalls reverberated in my ear and I struggled to lift my head to look who was coming, but outside of an infantile ability to bat my eyes, I was otherwise too torpefied to move.

  “Looky here,” called the boys. “Look at us!” They waved their arms over their heads and jumped up and down on the whale’s back.

  “You boys get down from there,” someone ordered.

  But they continued to jump and whoop.

  I detected a large contingent coming up on me from behind. Much crunching of sand and rustling of cloth. Much breathy chatter and widespread commotion.

  The group stopped, apparently gazing down on me where I lay.

  “Let me through,” someone said. “Please let me pass.”

  My already extensive confusement grew even more extreme in that instant. For here, of all surprising turns of an event, was a voice that I somehow knew! Perhaps, I considered, I am not so awake and living after all.

  The individual behind the voice knelt at my back and then gently, oh, so tenderly, rolled me over, lifting my head and settling it into the unmistakable topography of a woman’s lap. I peered up to discover who it was so thoughtfully cuddling me, but the sun shined directly into my eyes right then and I could see naught but a feminine silhouette wearing a halo of dazzling brightness.

  “It’s a miracle!” someone declared.

  “God’s grace!”

  And then the whole crowd began offering up praises in a zealotory fashion.

  The lady brushed the sand from my cheek with her fingers. She then tipped a bottle to my lips and let a dribble of fresh water trickle into my mouth, rejuvenating my tongue and gullet area with a much-needed moisture. Mother’s milk never tasted so sweet.

  My caretaker then leaned forward, blocking out the sun, and for the first time I could see clearly who she was. Of course, I should have known it right off. And yet, I was still astonished.

  Oh ho! I thought. Ha-ha and ha!

  Would the gods ever tire of having their
fun with me?

  I swallowed, damping my lips, struggling to bring together the crackling and barely functioning parts of my voice box.

  “Prudence?” I croaked.

  Her blue eyes shined with sudden tears. Her lips curved into the selfsame smile she had graced me with in our dream. And then she bobbed her head.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. It’s me.”

  Prudence laughed softly, and sniffled.

  She lifted my head and shoved my face into the pungent pillow of her rose-scented bosom.

  Then she rocked me in her arms.

  “Oh, Adamiah!” she sobbed happily. “You have found me at last!”

  NEXT THING I KNEW, I was on a bed.

  In a room.

  By myself.

  I did not recall how I got there.

  I felt to be reentering my bodily container one squirt at a time, and this process, being traumatic, caused me to lapse between sleep and cognizance to the extent that large portions of my revivification were lost to me.

  I felt turned inside out and squeezed.

  My head hurt.

  I suspected that some time had passed, but I could not rightly say if it had merely been a few hours, or whole days.

  I lifted my arms to examine myself.

  Someone had shaved and bathed me and wrapped a bandage around my ribcage. My white linen suit had been changed out for a dressing gown. My feet stuck out at the other end from my head, distant and unfamiliar. I strained to become reacquainted with my toes. They halfheartedly twitched, but overall, they felt like they were not yet mine for the wiggling.

  The air was hot and sticky; my back sweated against the mattress.

  An empty chair stood next to a table at my bedside. A pitcher and a cup rested on the tabletop. Beside them lay Adamiah’s locket, closed, its golden chain coiled like a snake about to strike.

  Hmm.

  A single open window offered me a view of palm boughs swaying on a breeze.

  The room’s door was toward the foot of the bed, and beside it hung a painting of Christ walking on water. He held his hands low and open in that come-unto-me manner so favored with such icons, and although he was surrounded by threatening waves, he wore an expression of serene, almost haughty, equanimity. The gentleman looked to have a secret.