by D R Sherman
The boy heard the soft explosive grunt of effort which came from behind and above him, and the shadow of the man moved on the water.
He screamed. In that moment, he realized for the first time the full extent of his treachery and betrayal. It was more than he could bear. He did not think of the girl as he lunged forward and drove the dolphin away with his flailing arms, nor was it the knowledge of her inevitable repugnance and horror which prompted him to act. He was not thinking of her, or even of the debt he owed the fish. He was thinking of himself, and of his dignity as a human being.
It was the last thought he was ever to have. He felt a gigantic blow against his back. He felt the flesh and bone under his left breast burst open as the blow on his back went right through his body, and then he felt no more.
The man stared in horror. “Jesus forgive me!” he cried suddenly. “What have I done?”
He sat down in the boat, down on the planking, and he reached over the side. He lifted his son out of the water, and he lifted him out in his arms with the pirogue listing so heavily that the gunwale was down in the water.
He turned awkwardly, holding the boy in his arms, and he rolled over on his side a little and got his right knee under him while his left leg lay stretched out straight and stiff in the bottom of the boat. He pushed himself up, searching frantically for somewhere to lay the boy. He did not want to put pressure on the harpoon and hurt him more. It was bad enough now. It had gone in through his back and the point of it was sticking out eight inches the other side of his chest.
His eyes fell on the bow thwart. He inched forward, his face darkening with the strain of holding the boy. It never entered his head that he might be dead. That was too monstrous a thought to contemplate. He laid the boy down carefully, with his belly across the thwart and his knees on the planking supporting the weight of his body. He looked as if he were bent forward in prayer, except for the shaft of the harpoon which stuck up out of his back. There was only a little blood. It had diluted with the water on his back, and it showed pink against his golden-colored skin.
The man unfastened the line from the harpoon with great care. He snatched up the oars and began to row. He drove the pirogue as he had never driven it before, and the oars whipped and lashed under the fierce power of his stroke.
The dolphin leaped beside the boat. The man watched it lift high into the air, and in that instant when it seemed to hang suspended before crashing back into the sea he saw the big fish turn its head and peer down into the boat. It jumped again, closer this time, and it looked into the pirogue once more.
“Go away, fish,” he said aloud, and then he began to think of what he could do.
Madame Morel, he thought numbly, she will take us in the car to the hospital in Victoria and the doctor will take the harpoon from his back and mend the wound I have made in him.
The pirogue ran aground with a slight jar. The man shortened the anchor rope and threw the stone into the sea. It was a waste of precious seconds, and though it distressed him, he knew that it was a thing which could not be overlooked. He would have to go fishing again.
And the boy also, his mind cried fiercely, desperately.
He scrambled out of the boat, his stiff leg making all his movements clumsy. He lifted the boy, carrying him face down, one arm under his chest, the other supporting his legs. He splashed through the shallow water and up the beach, stumbling in his haste, the iron stirrup under his left heel digging into the sand.
The mother of the girl saw him first. For a moment she stared in shocked disbelief. She saw the harpoon in the boy’s body, and the point of it sticking out below his chest. She cried out incoherently. The bubbling scream in her throat rose to a shriek. She turned and flew to the steps which led down to the beach. She took them three at a time, crying and sobbing to herself as she stumbled down them half blind with her grief. She reached the man in a last breathless spurt and halted panting in front of him.
“Oh my God!” she cried faintly.
“The hospital, Madame Morel,” the man said. “We must take him in your car.”
The woman stared incredulously at the man. Was he blind? Could he not see? She looked closely into his eyes, and she saw the shocked, sightless vacancy in them. She understood.
“Put him down, M’sieur,” she said quietly.
The man shook his head doggedly. “The hospital-”
The woman stepped forward and cut him off. “He is dead, you foolish man!” she screamed. “He is dead and you have killed him!”
The man shook his head ponderously. He had known it in his heart, carrying the limp weight of the boy up the beach, but even now he could not bring himself to believe that all of it was finished.
The woman reached out suddenly, and with a strength she had not known was in her she lifted the boy from the arms of the man and bent and laid him down on the beach She put him down on his side, and she kneeled beside him in the sand.
She peeled the mask gently from his face. It was half full of blood, and his sightless blue eyes were wide and staring, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
The sight of it all destroyed the last of her control. She laid her face against his cheek. It was crumpled and ugly in its grief, no longer gentle and smiling as it used to be. She began to sob. There were no tears in her eyes, but the force of her grief shook her whole body.
The man watched her in growing amazement. He dropped clown on one knee beside her suddenly, his left leg stretched out straight behind him. His face was stiff with disbelief, but far back in his eyes there was a look of dawning comprehension. He reached out and shook the woman gently.
She lifted her head. She saw and understood the look in his eyes. She stared back at him dully, uncaring, her Shoulders sagging and limp.
The man was silent for a moment longer. “But why?” he asked. “Why did you leave him?”
The woman’s eyes clouded. “There—there are things which happen, and it is too late afterwards to—”
She broke off abruptly, and both of them turned to stare up the beach in the direction from which the girl’s shrieking cry had come. She was running towards them, and Pierre Vigot ran at her side.
The man turned to the woman, and their eyes met and held at the same moment. “I will tell no one,” he said.
She looked at him questioningly, blankly. She knew that his remark held some significance for her, but she was too tired to reach out and grasp it.
She stiffened a moment later, alarm leaping through her, but then it went away and left her drained and empty once more. She shrugged wearily: none of it seemed to matter now.
The man studied her a moment longer, and then he shot a glance at the girl who was now only twenty yards away and running harder than before. He noticed irrelevantly that her mouth was open. He turned back to the woman.
“He loved her very much,” he said.
“Yes, I saw the change in her too,” the woman admitted slowly.
“Then perhaps it is just as well,” the man said quietly.
“In the end it would have hurt him more than dying, because nothing could have come of it.”
He stood up suddenly, pushing himself off the ground with his hands and his one good leg. He stared down at the body of his son, and there was no feeling in him now.
The girl halted in front of them in a shower of sand. “What has happened?” she screamed.
She looked down, and she saw the body of the boy. Her eyes widened in horror. She stared, and her mouth opened and closed, but the words did not come. The woman rose, and she pulled the girl against her breast, shutting out the sight of death.
“It was an accident, Danielle,” she said.
She felt the girl shudder, and then an instant later she felt her begin to tremble. She held her closer as the violence of her trembling grew and her own body shook with the shock that it absorbed.
Pierre Vigot looked at the harpoon that had gone into the back of the boy. It was very tragic, and it was very
simple. Roger had put his harpoon into a tiger shark, and when the shark died it changed back into what it had been before it died. He reached out and touched the fisherman lightly on the arm.
“I am sorry, Roger,” he said.
“I am also sorry, Pierre,” the man replied heavily.
“I tried to call you when you were taking the pirogue out.”
“We saw you, the boy and I.”
“I had some good news for you.”
The man nodded absently. Along the line of the beacli, from both directions, and from the grove of dark green coconut trees he saw the people who came hurrying towards them. He did not want them to see his son, not as he was, not with the harpoon through his body.
He bent down low, bending from the waist, and he caught hold of the harpoon with both hands just behind the barbed head. He straightened up a little, turning the body of the boy as he did it, and then he placed the sole of his right foot gently and carefully against the chest of the boy. He strained evenly on the harpoon, but it did not give. He put a little more of his strength against it. He felt it begin to move, and then after that it came more easily and he drew the shaft of the harpoon out of the body of the boy. It came free with a small sucking sound, and blood welled quickly from the gaping hole below his breast from which he had drawn the wood.
The man straightened up. He felt strangely light-headed. He stared blindly at the harpoon in his hands, and his fingers Convulsed on the blood-smeared shaft. In that instant a raging madness overcame him. He wanted to break the shaft of the harpoon over his thigh and snap it in one vicious movement of expurgation.
He raised the harpoon, holding it parallel with the ground, and he began to raise his right leg, bending it at the knee and lifting his thigh. There was the anger and rage in him to break it, but he hesitated. It was an excellent shaft, and a well-balanced harpoon, and he knew he would have to go fishing again, even if it was without the boy.
“You did not hear me, Roger?” Pierre Vigot inquired softly.
“I heard you,” the man said, not taking his eyes from the harpoon.
“Then let me tell you that I spoke to M’sieur Morel late in the evening yesterday,” the big Creole said. “I begged him to give you more time to find the money for your rent, and he agreed to wait until you were well and fishing once again.”
The man’s head snapped round. He stared at Pierre Vigot for one incredulous moment. Shock and horror twisted his face. His dark eyes filled with pain and dismay. He stared at the Creole a little longer, and then suddenly, as if he had drawn a mask over his face, it grew calm and impassive once more.
He raised the harpoon a little higher, and he brought his half-raised leg right up till the thigh was parallel with the ground. Deliberately, very deliberately, he brought the shaft smashing down across his raised thigh. It snapped in two with a report like a pistol shot.
The woman spun around, fearful and uncomprehending.
“It is only the harpoon,” the man said, and he dropped the pieces on the sand.
He saw the alarm leave her face, and as he looked into her eyes he thought he smelled the sweet scent of mountain flowers which had been warmed against the breast of a woman. It took him far back to long ago.
He glanced down at his son. He saw the dark blood on the near-white sand, and he thought of the long walk up the side of the mountain with the body of the boy in his arms. He did not know as yet how he would do it, but he knew he would find a way.
He lifted his head slowly, and he stared out to sea, and just then the dolphin leaped fax out near the reef and the bright light of the sun on the spraying water hurt the man’s eyes and made him squint.
He looked away. He felt very old, and there was a sadness in him that went deep down into the bones of his heart. He glanced down at the boy again.
It will be easier to carry him, he thought, without the harpoon in his back.
THE dolphin leaped again, a little farther out, and in the sky above it a frigate bird wheeled suddenly but then continued on its way as it saw the dark shadow beneath the water which fled straight out to sea.
About the author
“Ron” Sherman fell in love with the Seychelles—known as “the South Sea Islands of the Indian Ocean”—years ago, when a ship on which he served stopped there and he discovered the golden beaches, the lush greenery rich with fruit, and the unhurried people. (“Did you ever see a man walk down the road using a banana leaf as an umbrella?” he says, to help explain the islands’ charm.) Some time later, he managed to buy a coconut plantation on Praslin Island; now he and his wife plan to move there in the near future. Mr. Sherman was born in India and educated in England. He became a ship's radio officer at seventeen, and spent four years at sea before turning to a miscellany of land-based jobs, including his present one as a railway station foreman in Bechuanaland, Africa. His first professional writing was inspired by an intense dislike of the captain of a tanker on which he sailed. “In that story,” he says, “I killed the tanker captain off and fed him to the sharks in the Indian Ocean, through which we were passing at the time.”
Brothers of the Sea is Mr. Sherman's third novel. Doing research on dolphins for it, he discovered that these intelligent and amiable creatures, beloved by ancient civilizations, are now being intensively studied by marine scientists —one of whom is compiling a dictionary of dolphin “language.” The dolphins’ brain-to-body ratio compares favorably with that of human beings, and they are alert, playful and sympathetic, helping not only each other but human beings. Ancient Creek stories of dolphins rescuing drowning seamen were paralleled only recently by a dolphin which came up under a drowning woman in Florida and pushed her to the beach; and in a New Zealand harbor, a few years ago, a visiting dolphin allowed swimmers to pat it and—like the one in Brothers of the Sea—gave a girl a ride on its back.
