by R. T. Kaelin
She didn’t move for a few minutes, and he wondered whether she had fallen asleep. Then she raised her head and looked over at the sink full of dishes. Her eyes strayed to the sagging string of tiny multicolored lights shining bravely at the window, proclaiming the joy and light of Christmas in spite of everything. Some tears came, but they were brief. She rose from her rickety chair, crossed to the sink, and began to run water. Then she reached into a nearby cabinet for a metal cookie sheet. As she did so, a shadowy figure—an older version of Mrs. Lopez—shimmered into life around her. The figure looked over at him and smiled. Thank you.
He wanted to stay and watch Mrs. Lopez make cookies with her mom, but the voice came: Well done. Now, let’s go. A lot of people need comforting tonight.
Can I really do that? Can I help them all?
The voice “laughed” again. Only Santa gets all around the world in one night, right? No, you will only give a few gifts tonight. But you should know that there are lots of us. Do what you can. Go where you are most needed.
Who ARE you?
I’m like you…one of the lost ones. We couldn’t give while we were alive, but because we yearned to help others, we are blessed now. You will help those who are lonely and in despair—those who have given up. You’ll help them find joy again, and you get to give your gifts every night of the year! Me, I like to hang around the hospital on 3rd street and the retirement home on Lincoln avenue. Now, isn’t that better than being Santa Claus?
I’d still feel better if he was real…
Who said he wasn’t?
YOU did!
Did I? I may have been mistaken. Now, get to work…and Merry Christmas!
* *** *
Officer Langley shifted uncomfortably in the saddle, reached down with a gloved hand, and patted Benjamin’s neck affectionately. Ben shook his head and blew through wide nostrils, the curb chain on his bridle jingling, his breath steaming forth in two jets of white vapor. Ice had formed on his whiskers and the long hairs above and below his bright, brown eyes. He was better equipped to withstand the cold than Langley was—Ben was a half-draft, his body stout and his winter coat more than adequate—but he still wasn’t happy about the sudden return to the subarctic.
“Come on, boy…let’s get moving. Maybe a nice, brisk walk will warm us both up,” Langley muttered, barely audible through the dark blue muffler covering the lower half of his face. Ben moved forward obligingly, his heavy-shod hooves clopping out a pleasing rhythm on the icy asphalt. Langley regretted not putting Ben’s rubber boots on, but it was too late now. He wasn’t too worried; even the criminals kept off the streets when the temps dropped this fast. As a nod to the season, a single brass sleigh bell had been attached to Ben’s breastplate. Langley liked the sound it made, and so did Ben. He nodded his head a little more than usual, long ears “flopping to the beat.” The sound of the bell was a reminder. “Hey, buddy, it’s Christmas Eve! We’ll both have the day off tomorrow…”
Langley turned the corner, passing the Catholic church, crossing himself as he did so. “Here’s hoping we can have peace on earth, at least for tonight.” It would be nice to have a break from the drunk, the disorderly, and the deceased. He always worried about the local vagrants in weather like this—those who could stand the company went down into the tunnels beneath the city, but the meeker ones were afraid. They often stayed above in the cold. So much for inheriting the earth.
Ben snorted, slowed, and stopped, turning his head to look intently at the doorway to “Lindy’s Chocolate Emporium”. Langley sighed—Ben wouldn’t stop and stare at a pile of rumpled newspaper unless there was someone inside it. He caught sight of a pale hand protruding from a dark sleeve, and his spirits sank. Ah, nuts. Not again…not on Christmas Eve.
“Come on, Ben, let’s take a closer look.” Langley knew what he would find; he’d seen it before. He was a kindly soul, and this sort of thing really got to him. No one should have to die this way—without the comfort of a single other person who gave a damn. “Whoa, Ben. Stand, now.” Langley prepared to dismount, a wave of sorrow washing over him.
Don’t be sorry for me. Wherever people suffer, I will comfort them. When they are dying, I will reassure them and help them find courage. I will be there to love them and help them, even as I am helping you now. Some have the joy of giving only while they live, but I will give love and comfort forever. No one will ever know my name, but they’ll be thankful all the same. Do you not feel better already?
Langley didn’t know why, but he did feel better. He felt comforted—that wonderful security that comes from being loved, like he used to feel when curled up in his father’s lap in front of the TV. Taking a deep breath, he dismounted, the pain in his half-frozen feet shocking him back into reality as they hit the sidewalk. His tall equine partner lowered his head, nuzzling at one of the crumpled sheets of newspaper that had blown away to expose the dead man’s face.
I know you can’t realize it, but you’ve just laid eyes on the happiest man in the world. Goodbye, Officer Langley. Lots of folks need comforting tonight. Merry Christmas!
“Merry Christmas,” said Langley in wonderment, looking into the gray, dead face of the man in the doorway. It wore a smile—the smile of a man who had been given his heart’s desire.
*
Spurn Babylon
by Tobias S. Buckell
Originally published in Whispers From The Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction ed. Nalo Hopkinson (2000)
Easing back on the throttle of company’s yellow Scarab powerboat, just clearing the rocky point of Hassel Island, I found myself stunned by the lack of yachts. Usually St. Thomas’s Charlotte Amalie harbor was a forest of masts and a rainbow of hull colors. Now, only two ships sat at anchor, looking lonely and out of place. The recent hurricane that had closed down the islands airport, forcing my company to send me here by boat rather than plane, had swept this anchorage clean.
Even more incredibly, a three-masted square-rigger lay lopsided on the waterfront’s concrete shoreline.
“Where’d that come from,” I wondered aloud.
I shook my head, wishing I had a camera.
* *** *
It didn’t seem like things were all that bad, I thought later, sipping a Red Stripe and relaxing underneath the flapping awning of the Greenhouse Restaurant. Even only two weeks after the worst hurricane in the Virgin Island’s recorded history, things looked okay. Maybe even ‘irie,’ as my supervisor seemed to glory in saying, trying to imitate local dialect. I distantly understood that half the houses on the island were uninhabitable, and I could smell seaweed no matter where I walked. But these islands were well known for recovering quickly.
I let the condensation roll off the side of the brown bottle and down the back of my hand, a cold contrast to the heat shimmering off the concrete all around me. In the distance a generator hummed, keeping even more beer cold. Life went on.
“Evening,” someone said.
J. Ottley sat down into the seat across from me. The plastic hinges squeaked. He removed a well-worn straw hat and set it on the table. His long sleeved shirt was soaked under the armpits. He ran the St. Thomas cell of B.E. aerospace division, one of three sections.
“Evening to you.” I replied, handing Ottley the keys to the Scarab. Sombrero Island held our main launch pad complex, weathering the storm with minimal damage. St. Croix supported additional docking and shipping facilities for our sea-launch sections and shipping for the launch complex. St. Thomas housed even more shipping facilities. I’d spent the last week running around St. Croix helping rebuild damage to the sterile clean-rooms that prepared satellites for launch. Cutting edge. Now it was time to check in and make sure our warehouses here in St. Thomas were okay. “Ottley, what is that?” I pointed at the ship across the street from us. A thick patina of silt hung to its sides.
Two brown-skinned men with dreadlocks and baggy grey trousers stood around, poking at the hull. A few uniformed students in red trousers and white sh
irts from the local public school had climbed aboard. They hung from the long wooden pole that stuck out of the front of the boat. The bowsprit, I think it would be called. The topsides seemed about seventy feet long. It looked just like my mental image of a traditional old wooden ship.
“An old ship,” Ottley said. “Very old. From under the sea.”
And that was all he would say. He gave me folders with pictures of the damage taken to our warehouses. Roofs ripped off, boosters inside damaged. There was water damage to a few satellites.
Yet my eye kept wandering from the pictures of fractured composites to the silhouette just on the edge of my vision.
A waterspout spawned by the recent hurricane must have sucked the ancient wooden ship up from the silted bottom of Charlotte Amalie harbor. And then set it next to the asphalt road in a pool of stagnant seawater and gray harbor mud. But even as I tried to envision that, I struggled. There should be more damage. What strange force had preserved it from decay?
* *** *
I spent the next day busy coordinating the recovery efforts. We had a warehouse near the airport, more or less on the west side of St. Thomas; one in Red Hook, the east end; and an office in town. I tackled Red Hook first. Later, as the sun began to shimmer and kiss the distant salty horizon, I sat down exhausted on a lounge chair next to the pool and bar of the Marriott Hotel; Frenchman’s Reef. From the pool I could see the entire curve of the harbor and the whole waterfront skyline.
Charlotte Amalie is a beautiful little Caribbean town. Its Dutch architecture is mostly symmetrical, and the facades of the stocky two-story buildings reflect that with arches and squared windows in even numbers. The colors of the walls are vibrant bright yellows, pinks, clean whites, contrasted with red-shingled roofs. Similarly colored tiny houses cluster all over the steep mountainside.
And sitting there I realized a familiar wooden shape was still up on the waterfront.
I took out my surveyor’s monocle and zoomed in. The dark-skinned crowd still surrounded the ship, and they had tools. I could see them hacking away at the hull. It seemed an inefficient way to move the ship.
Another sip of Margarita later, I left to find my room.
* *** *
I hired a taxi to take me out to the warehouse near the airport. It was a blue Toyota pickup with bench seats and a large canopy strapped onto the bed. “Safari bus.” I sat in front with the driver, who had what sounded like reggae thumping away in the cab. A harsh, scratchy voice in a strong accent swore and belted out angry lyrics.
“Buju Banton,” he said, turning it down.
“Sorry?” I didn’t understand. He pointed at the tape and I understood; the name of the singer. “Airport.”
“Right.”
New York taxi drivers had nothing on island driving. We took off out the driveway and onto the road. Every corner seemed the last, with the pickup leaning, the contraption on the back shifting as we turned. Particularly since I couldn’t shake the conviction that we were driving on the wrong side of the road, the left. The driver honked and waved at every other car or pickup going the other way, and at the pedestrians alongside the street
The road took us down gently into town, and there we slowed to a crawl with all the other cars. Finally, I could get a close look at the ship. Crowds still surrounded it, but I didn’t think they were government workers. Children, old women, a Rastafarian with long dreadlocks and tattered jeans; some of them wielded tools, scraping away at the ship. Others stood around, singing hymns, or just watching. Many had tears in their eyes.
Some of the wet planks were pulled away to expose ribs. I could see the dim gleam of white inside. Skeletons? It suddenly dawned on me that this was an old slave ship. Horrible. I shivered. St. Thomas had been one of the center points of the trade, being one of the best natural harbors in the Caribbean. Had a pirate ship fired and sunk this slaver in the harbor? Divers often searched the bottom after large cruise-ships stirred up the silt, looking for history. But here it had been brought straight to land.
I leaned over and tapped the driver, who was just as fascinated as I was.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Taking care of it,” he said. He had a strong accent: “Tekkin’ cyare af it.”
“What is it?” I whispered.
“It old,” he told me. “Very old.”
* *** *
I had lunch again with Ottley. It was nice to relax and talk business with the skinny round-faced local. We reviewed plans for fixing the warehouses. Afterwards, I walked out onto the concrete walkway that extended across the bay, following the old shoreline.
“You goin’ ah see it?” a passerby asked me.
I nodded.
I left my beer on the table, feeling that standing there and looking at the ship with a beer in hand would be sacrilegious. I felt this strange, deep tugging that called me closer.
The crowd around the ship parted and let me through. I could see a full range of color. From the darkest black man to the pale and grizzled yachtsmen, they all stood around watching me. Work paused. The wind kicked up a haze of dust that brushed past, tugging up my shirt and cooling the sweat on the small of my back. Someone coughed.
Placing the tips of my fingers on a plank, I looked at my tan hand and wondered how I fit in. I pressed against the wood, and it gave slightly, soft with age. Beyond that I could feel something else beneath the surface. A sense of history, the past talking to directly to me. It was a knot in my stomach.
And yet, I still remained distant. Maybe because my ancestors were mixed, and I could never bring myself to identify with either side. It was the same struggle I had with deciding what 'race' box to check off on paperwork, or applications. Black? Definitely some: there's my unnaturally easy tan. White? During winter I would blend in with the average mall crowd, an easy anonymous decision. Or even maybe a little Latino, and some Oriental thrown in for good measure. I was trapped in dispassion. In the end, I always chose 'other.'
I pulled away, and an old graying Rasta next to me nodded.
“Hear it call,” he said in a deep voice. His muscles stood out as he grasped and ripped a plank away. I looked into the heart of the ship. Sometime during the night the bleached remains of the scattered skeletons had been removed, but the chains and manacles still hung from the bulkheads and partitions, the iron blacker than the skin of the man standing next to me. They should have had barnacles on them, or been rusted, yet they gleamed at me as new as they day they were made. What force was at work here?
Then the moment passed, and the crowd began to attack the hull of the ship again. I wandered off and found a stand selling Johnny Cakes, fried dough of some sort. Pates were a rolled up pastry with meat inside. One of each and a Coke made for a good lunch.
* *** *
Early the next morning I went through the motions of moving our office to a building in better shape. But even in the back streets of town I was near enough the ship that it dominated my thoughts. At lunch I wandered through the alleys with small shops and cool shade until I ended back up at the ship.
“Eh, whitey-man. Hyere.”
The same old Rasta greeted me. He’d been waiting. He handed me a pick and I joined him at the hull, pulling off the old planks. We spent a sweaty hour ripping off old wood and stacking it up near the sidewalk. After that we took a lunch break, eating pates, squatting on pieces of wood. Two skinny old fellows slapped dominoes on a table, and Soca music drifted over from a small tinny speaker.
Eventually three other men joined us. The Rasta passed around a joint, and the five of us sat in silence for fifteen minutes, seeking enlightenment, drifting to the warbling in the air.
“Come.” The old Rasta got up, and I followed him around to the other side.
Here I found my surprise. They weren’t just taking the ship apart; they were rebuilding it. New waterproofed lengths of wood replaced the old. I hadn't paid attention before, but the sound of sawing I'd heard while pulling planks off was not that of
the old planks being broken apart.
“Why are you rebuilding it?” I asked. “Will you make it a museum?” I was trying to understand. The Rasta shook his locks.
“The whore of Babylon fall soon, we have ah be ready.”
“The whore of Babylon?”
“Babylon America,” he told me, shaking his locks. “Jus' like in Revelations.” Revvy-lay-shons. “U.S. Virgin Islands part of Babylon, is time for we to spurn Babylon.”
My head spun from the sweet smoke in the air, and I blinked. The ship hummed.
* *** *
It scared me. The wooden planks, the manacles, the calm intensity of the people working at restoration. Yet they didn’t plan to restore it. I would have understood restoration. I wanted to help with that, to rediscover a hidden part of myself, make peace with myself. Just like the Jewish I read about who returned to Auschwitz.
These people were planning something different though. I didn’t understand what. So I drank alcoholic drinks with umbrellas back at the hotel. Every time I visited the bar at the pool I could see the waterfront, and I couldn't push the ship out of my mind. It was a relic, a reminder, and a key, and I didn’t understand how to use it.
I wandered through the silent corridors looking for anyone, until I found a single busboy. He sold me a packet of his best red. I lit up on the porch of my roof and smoked until I feel asleep on the cold tile.
I dreamed of naked and emaciated black specters rising out of the muddy waters of Charlotte Amalie harbor, thousands of them, marching in force up through town, and then swinging out towards the point that the hotel sat on. They picked me up and carried me back down into the sea with them.
