by Cameron Jace
“It’s already been a year?” John jumped out of bed and pulled the door open.
“Yes, Captain,” the sailor said.
“But I thought it was only a few months? How did that happen?”
The sailor politely glanced at the book in John’s hand. “You’ve been reading this ever since. You almost don’t sleep and rarely eat. And never came out to lead the sails.”
Shocked, John lifted up the book to his eye level. “The book did this to me?”
“You must have enjoyed it so much.”
John’s face dimmed and his forehead wrinkled. He pushed the book against the sailor’s chest. “Take it and burn it!”
“But you seemed to love it.”
“That was before I realized it’s haunted!” John exclaimed. “A book that does this to a man is the work of the Devil!”
“The Devil?” the sailor grinned. “You mean that skinny man who works with you.”
John rolled his eyes. “No him. The real Devil.”
“But he is the real Devil.”
John sighed. “He is, true. But I’m talking about the devil we imagine in our head. The red one with the forked tail and dark eyes. The scary one.”
The sailor looked confused and perplexed.
“Just do as I say and burn the book!”
“As you wish, Captain.”
John closed the door and began readying himself to go back. His wife and children could not know about his pirate practicing. He had to return to that good John again.
But first, Pickwick was back.
“What did you learn?” he asked the parrot.
“She loves you more than you can think.”
John smiled, let out a long sigh. “And my daughter.”
“She loves her more every day.”
John’s smile widened. “And my son.”
“He isn’t your son.”
“Don’t be like that,” John argued. “I consider him my son now. How does she feel about him?”
“I can tell you she loves him so much.”
Now John’s smile ate at his face. It was too big of a smile, Pickwick thought it was a bit scary.
But nothing scary happened back on the snowy island. Year after year, Captain Ahab returned home and was a good father. He loved his wife, and raised his children. He watched them grow up, then sailed for another six months or a year to bring food on the table. In his sails he killed and stole, and did everything a good man shouldn’t. But never at home. Never.
His wife admired him sticking up a newer carrot into the snowman outside every year and watched her children grow up beautifully. Now her daughter was eleven, the boy nine. She could not wait until the day came where they stuck something like fourteen or fifteen carrots in the snowman.
A four-member family, far away in the snow, sharing love and happiness. Life was beautiful.
And even though she occasionally suspected John was a different man on the Seven Seas, like most wives, she looked away from the fact, and reasoned that a man could not change all of his past. As long as his family mattered the most to him.
Sometimes she’d caught a glimpse of that colorful parrot outside her window and wondered if it was some sign of good omens to come. She loved the parrot, but it never succumbed to her attempt to feed him.
In her prayers, she thanked God for the man John had become. She didn’t ask about leaving the island, or for more friends and neighbors, nor did she ask for more money — John had been providing so much already. She only asked for forgiveness of her sin with another man in the past. She’d come to realize that not only had John been a bad man, but she had been a bad woman as well. And that somehow she’d been forgiven.
She had simply given up on the virtue of patience. If she’d only had waited for John to change. How had it never come across as a solution: to pray for her husband’s change into a better man?
As for the man who changed John, she’d given up asking. John has said she’d know when the time would come, though it hadn’t for so many years.
Her daily prayer consisted of two things: First, she asked for forgiveness and that her son’s real father would never show up and disrupt the balance of her family — it was unlikely because the man had never known of her pregnancy.
Her second prayer was about John’s relationship with the son who wasn’t his. Though John had been good to the boy, she feared his fatherhood, his blood and bone, would kick in and that he’d wake up not loving the boy, and only loving the girl.
Then, on a night of intolerable cold, she saw the parrot outside her kitchen window again. Thinking it’d freeze, she pulled the window open and it flew in, and settled proudly upon the table.
“I’m Pickwick,” the parrot said — that was years before it turned mute of course.
Absorbing the shock, the mother sat next to it in silence, wondering if she had just heard it talk. She’d just come out of prayer, and her heart was open for whatever the universe suggested to her.
“Did you just talk to me?” she asked.
“I did,” Pickwick said. “And I do not wish to explain how it’s possible.”
“Then what do you wish to talk about?” She longed to touch the parrot, just to discard the possibility of her having lost her mind.
Pickwick let her touch him. “I’m real, and I have a message to you.”
“A message from whom?”
“From me.”
“Ah,” she moped her head, feeling dizzy. “What would that be?”
“I can’t explain much, but I’m warning you of your husband.”
“John?”
“Or Captain Ahab. I’m certainly annoyed by his many names.”
“How do you know him? Did you talk to him, too?”
“Doesn’t matter. Point is I’m suspicious of him.”
“John?” she chuckled, pointing outside where he was collecting wood in this terrible cold. “You’re mistaken. He isn’t the man he was in the past.”
“I’m not talking about the past. I’m talking about now. He hasn’t changed. You should see him on the Seven Seas. He is a ruthless as he’s always been.”
The mother didn’t argue. Her eyelids dropped closed and she took a deep breath. She’d expected to hear this. She’d felt it in her heart, so it wasn’t much of a surprise. “Even so, I only care about he treats his family.”
Pickwick looked outside the window. John’s son and daughter were running into their father’s arms and he playfully lifted them up in the sky. “Can’t argue with that.”
“Then I’d ask you to leave,” she told the parrot. “How do I know you’re not the Devil whispering in my ears?”
Pickwick fluttered his wings, ready to leave, but then his sixth sense itched him like a bad wound. “Listen,” he told her. “Think of who John really is. He is a descendant of Henry VIII who chopped off heads like he was cutting carrots.”
“That’s John fifth generation grandfather,” the mother argued. “A man does not have to follow the same path of his ancestors.”
“But he’s already followed that path,” Pickwick insisted. “All until just a few years ago. The change in his behavior is mind shattering. Purely the stories from a fairy tale.”
“I believe in fairy tales, and in John, and the children.”
“It just can’t be that he is loving his family that way. I swear I’ll pull my feathers if I’m wrong.”
“Then you’d better fly naked from now on. You’ll lose the bet.”
“I have a feeling I won’t. Whoever that man was who changed him, he may have put a spell on your husband.”
“What if?” the mother countered. “I’m good with that. If it’s true, then it was a good man.”
“You’re mistaken,” Pickwick repeated.
“Then what do you think is happening? John is lying about his love for so many years? He is acting? Why would he do that?”
“I have no idea,” Pickwick said. “But I’d say it may have to do with the book he’
s been keeping for so long.”
“What book?”
“One Thousand and One Nights. The story about Scheherazade.”
“He burnt that book long ago,” she let out an uncomfortable chuckle. “He considers it a work of evil.”
“No he didn’t,” Pickwick pulled out a few pages from beneath his feathers and showed them to her. The pages were half burned. “He must have changed his mind and picked it up from the fire.”
“So? What does it mean? He just likes the story.”
“The book is about a storyteller girl who evades her king killing her by telling him unfinished stories every night, for many months until he falls in love with her and breaks his own rule of killing the women he married.”
“So?” the mother shrugged her shoulders at this loon parrot. May be it was her who’d lost her mind, imagining the talking bird.
“Can’t you see? The king changed his mind because the girl got him used to her stories for years.”
“I still don’t see what it has to do with John.”
“It’s the idea that if you get used to something for years, you get too attached to it. So much you can’t give up on it.”
“I don’t understand what you’re implying, crazy parrot.” The mother banged a hand on the table. “Are you saying John is acting so that after years we become comfortable and then something happens?”
“Yes,” Pickwick said. “Thirteen years to be exact.”
“Thirteen years?”
“Yes.”
“Thirteen years of what?”
“I don’t know. Could be thirteen years from the day he turned into a good man.”
The mother’s head reeled. She questioned herself. Why was she still listening to this bird? Or did she feel deep inside something was wrong as well? “How do you know it’s thirteen years?”
“John has a knife. He likes to carve with it on the table in his room on the ship. In the last few years he’s only carved one sentence.”
“You’re lying,” she protested.
“I’m a parrot. I don’t lie. I only repeat what others say,” Pickwick said. “Don’t you want to ask what John carved on the table? Do you know he only carves with this knife when he is angry and drunk? Do you want to know what he carved on the back of every wooden door on the ship?”
“Stop it!” She held her head with her hand.
“Do you want to know what he carved on every wine barrel on the ship?” Pickwick was ruthless. “On every corner in the ship? On the palm trees of the islands we stole from?”
“You cruel little bird.” The mother fell to her knees, hands loose beside her. “What did John carve.”
“Once sentence, over and over again,” Pickwick said. “Thirteen years of snow.”
On John’s next sail, the mother almost went mad.
All alone in her house, she speculated all kinds of scenarios. What could thirteen years of snow mean to John? Even if it did mean something to him, how would she be sure it had to do with him changing into a better man?
Should she be worried? If so, about what, or whom, exactly?
Part of the terrible parrot’s conversation made sense. If John had honestly turned into a better man, why was he still that kind of pirate. If it was to put food on the table, shouldn’t he have found an alternative in the many years that had passed?
The mother’s mind was reeling. She grew obsessed with her now grown children, so much that she wouldn’t let them out of her sight at any moment.
But where would they go? The three of them of them were practically trapped on this island. Even if they decided to cross the snowy hill to the other side where the market and few houses lay, it wasn’t safe there.
She watched her son climb the hill with his sister and the buckets of ice they collected. They usually played a game where when they topped the nearest hill they waited to see if the water would melt in the sun that hid behind the greying clouds. Sometimes it worked. Usually it didn’t.
“Think,” she told herself. “What did John mean by thirteen years of snow?”
One of the assumptions suggested it had nothing to do with the family. Maybe it had to do something with the treasure he was after, or that whale which he could never forgive for taking his leg. Maybe he’d been hunting the whale for thirteen years already — she’d lost count then. Could it be that John had promised himself to give up on hunting the whale after thirteen years?
She stopped to think about that last idea. Maybe John did want to stop chasing the whale. Maybe he wanted to just let go and gave himself thirteen years to end it all.
But why thirteen years?
And why snow?
A long lucid thought led her to believe she could answer the second question about the snow. There was only one place with so much snow. The island where they lived.
It definitely had nothing to do with the sea or the whale. This had to do with them here on the island.
The mother’s heart raced. She was terrified.
Frantically, she looked out the window. The children were still safe playing up the hill. The rest of white vastness was meaningless in every way. She could not fathom what John would need from the snow.
An idea shaped in her head, and she found herself dressing and riding the sleigh pulled by an old reindeer up the hill.
“Mother,” the girl shouted. “Where you going?”
“To get groceries,” she shouted back. “I’ll be back before dawn.”
Reaching the small town beyond the hill she saw the snow still stretched forever across the land. She halted the sleigh and jumped out, heading for a wise man inside a small shoe shop.
“Mister Geppetto!” she called. “I need your help.
Geppetto was an old shoemaker who was one of the few who secretly sailed from here to Sorrow every once in a while. He was a good man, married to a terrible woman in Sorrow, but he never talked about her much. He loved the silence on the island, and the few residents benefited from him being the only shoemaker in town.
“Catch your breath first,” he told her. “How may I help you?”
“You know a lot about this island,” she said. “You know about its folklore and history.”
“Some of it, yes? What would you want to ask me about?”
“The snow?”
“The snow?” He stopped mending a shoe and listened eagerly.
“Why is it perpetually snowing here?”
Geppetto took a moment, thinking. “It’s a cold place, I suppose.”
“How come the sun never shines through the clouds?”
“That would be something to ask the birds in the sky, not me.” He chuckled.
“No, I mean,” she tried to collect her thoughts into a meaningful answer. “Do you know anything about the phrase ‘thirteen years of snow’?”
Geppetto was speechless. Apparently he didn’t.
“Do we have some kind of cycle in this island? Does the snow change or stop every thirteen years?”
Geppetto continued being speechless.
“Nothing?”
“I’ve been on and off to the island so I don’t quite remember, dear,” he said. “Shouldn’t you know about this? How many years have you been here?”
“Twelve years,” she said.
“So if something does happen every thirteen years, you haven’t known about it, however silly of an idea it is.”
“It also means I only have a year before my husband comes back, and then I will know.”
“Good for you,” Geppetto muttered, clearly considering her bonkers, like his wife.
“You don’t understand, Geppetto,” she knelt next to him. “I think something horrible is going to happen next year.”
“Something horrible happens every year, dear. You’re just too young to notice.”
“I guess. John has been so good to me and the children in the past years. Nothing bad happened.”
“Well.” He returned to work. “I don’t want to talk about John.”
/> “Why?”
“I just don’t.”
“Is it because you don’t believe he’s changed?”
“Of course he didn’t change,” he muttered.
If she only had a fistful of salt each time she got into this argument. “How can you say so?” she said. “I saw him help you rebuild the shop last year.”
“He certainly did, but I still don’t believe he’s changed.”
“Why? I can’t understand why no one believes my poor husband.”
“That’s because you look away from the atrocities he still practices at sea. We all know about it.”
The mother stood up, speechless now. This was the one side of the argument she could never win. Again, she wondered if she were too naive believe in her repentant husband.
“I’m sorry I bother you,” she told Geppetto, and walked to the door.
“Wait,” Geppetto said. “You said thirteen years?”
“Yes.” She turned around.
“And you have been hear only twelve?”
“That’s true.”
“And John changed from how long?”
“About seven years ago.”
Geppetto scratched his bald head under a cap. “This doesn’t make sense. I thought the numbers might lead to a clue.”
“Never mind.”
“But before you leave, I have a suggestion,” Geppetto said. “Not that it has any evidence to it. I am just consulting the shoe in my old man’s head.”
“Speak out, please. I need all the help I can get.”
“What if John changed for a reason?”
“What kind of reason?”
“Something that doesn’t really have to do anything with him being a good man.”
“Like what?”
“Like what if the man who visited him that day wasn’t some kind of angel putting him on a path of righteousness as you thought.”
She said nothing. It was a small town. Everyone knew about the man who visited John, but strangely none of them saw him.
“What if the man was someone of greater evil than John?”
“I thought about it,” she said. “But could never imagine why.”
“A man of greater evil might have brought bad news with him,” Geppetto said. “Pirates always do that.”
