AHMM, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "A brother who was nothing but a burden. Miguel had had the responsibility of a violent, stupid, ungrateful man for so long that it's probably no wonder he snapped,” Wiki said, then added, “There was also a woman involved."

  "A woman?” Captain Smith's tone became alert.

  "Miguel wished very much to marry her, but it was impossible while he was encumbered with his brother. That was why he signed himself and Alfonso onto the Paths of Duty—he hoped that his brother would find life at sea to his liking, and would become independent at last, which would allow Miguel to return alone to Rio to resume his courtship. Instead of settling down, though, Alfonso just got into more trouble. It must have been very frustrating—so frustrating that it drove Miguel to murder."

  They had arrived on the beach. Captain Smith stopped, his boots planted firmly in the sand and his fists set on his hips while he contemplated his shabby ship. His expression had become moody. “A woman, huh?” he said again.

  "Aye, sir,” said Wiki.

  "Women—they're the very devil. Believe me, boy, the sex is best avoided,” the jilted shipmaster assured him earnestly. “Take my advice, and you'll grow up a much happier man."

  Wiki paused. He might be only seventeen, but like most Maori men he had matured early, and had quickly learned to enjoy the company and comfort of warm and lively girls. However, because he had also learned some wisdom in dealings with men, captains, and officers, he opted for diplomacy.

  "I'm sure you're right, sir,” he blithely lied.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Joan Druett

  * * * *

  CONVERSATION WITH JOAN DRUETT

  AHMM readers first made Ms. Druett's acquaintance in the November 2004 issue. Her story “Brethren of the Sea” appeared at the same time that her first Wiki Coffin novel, A Watery Grave, was published. Her book Exotic Intruders (1983) first led her down the maritime path. Ms. Druett tells us that in researching that book she became fascinated with the eccentric ship captains and passengers who brought the invasive animals and plants to the South Sea islands. She has since published six nonfiction books on the lives of the men—and women—who peopled the whaling ships in the nineteenth century and, more recently, four novels in the Wiki Coffin series. Before she turned to writing Ms. Druett taught biology and English literature in New Zealand.

  AHMM: You've written many non-fiction books about the age of sail. What first drew you to this subject matter, and what about it continues to engage you?

  JD: I literally fell into maritime history, when I stumbled into the 140-year-old grave of a whaling wife on the island of Rarotonga. Her name was Mary Ann Sherman, and she had been the wife of Captain Abner Devoll Sherman (well-named, as he was a devil who went in for a lot of flogging, particularly picking on the steward). Mary Ann was twenty-four when she died in January 1850. How could I not be fascinated?

  AHMM: What has particularly surprised you—or surprised your audiences—about this era?

  JD: Having read hundreds of seafaring journals, letters, and memoirs written in both the forecastle and the cabin, I never stopped being amazed how the personalities of the long-dead writers jump off the pages they wrote. I think my readers marvel that I so obviously consider these past seafarers my friends.

  AHMM: You were already well known for your nonfiction when you started your mystery series. What prompted you to make your move to fiction?

  JD: My agent! She asked me to try a historical mystery series set at sea, and I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to describe the experiences of one of the many adventurous Polynesians who sailed on American ships. This happened mostly on whaleships, which is why I have set the mystery stories on Wiki's first ship after he ran away from New England, the old Nantucketer Paths of Glory.

  AHMM: Your series is set during the U.S. Exploring Expedition. What attracted you to that expedition as a setting for your novels?

  JD: I reviewed Philbrick's Sea of Glory for the Boston Globe, and thought what a wonderful background it would make for the series. (Note the resemblance to the name of Wiki's first ship!) All that conflict between the officers, and all those colorful landfalls, the tremendous amount they accomplished—I found it all fascinating. I also find it constantly intriguing that the expedition has been lost to history.

  AHMM: As a New Zealander, why did you chose an American Expedition?

  JD: Because I am totally in love with American maritime history. Can you think of anyone else who owns FOUR histories of the U.S. Navy? And that doesn't count the fifty books of American whaling history I own.

  AHMM: Tell us a little bit about your series protagonist, Wiki Coffin. How did he come about?

  JD: Wiki Coffin is based on a real Maori who sailed with the U.S. Exploring Expedition. He was Jack Sac, or “Tuatti” (probably Te Aute), who hailed from the little island of Motiti, off the eastern coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The officers of the expedition wrote so condescendingly about him that I wondered what he thought of them. To describe this, I needed a character with fluent English, and so Wiki became half American, with an American education, and with an American friend to confide in. He also needed a good sense of humor, and Wiki has plenty of that.

  AHMM: Your latest nonfiction work is Island of the Lost. Can you tell us a little about that book?

  JD: In the year 1864 there were two ships wrecked on totally uninhabited Auckland Island in the subantarctic, where winds blow with unbelievable force, and temperatures hover about freezing at all times of the year.

  In the far south of the island were five ordinary seamen from the Grafton, who worked together under the strong leadership of one man to create order out of chaos, building a house with a huge stone hearth, a forge, and a tannery. Though they had to manufacture every single nail, and most of their tools, they even managed to build a getaway vessel.

  Meanwhile, twenty miles of impassable cliffs and chasms away, nineteen seamen from the Invercauld floundered ashore. Lacking leadership and a sense of community, they succumbed to chaos, breaking apart into separate groups and even descending to cannibalism. Only three survived, to be rescued by a passing ship.

  This is no simple castaway account. Instead, it is a true story illustrating the importance of leadership, brotherhood, and camararderie. In these uncertain times, it is a testament to what the spirit of man can achieve, and what happens if we don't pull together.

  Very excitingly, it is going to be made into a film—by South Pacific Pictures, the producers of the blockbuster Whale Rider.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: CLAUSTROPHOBE by Terry Black

  At first, he wouldn't wear the mask. He said it was claustrophobic. “You try covering your nose and mouth and going to sleep,” he said. “It's like lying in a coffin. All you need are worms and some damp soil."

  Celia clamped the mask over his face, cinching the straps tight. “Come off it, Jim—you're down in the mine every day, but you can't put something over your face?"

  "That's different,” he said irritably.

  "Well, get used to it. You heard the doctor. If you go to sleep without the mask, you could die."

  "How do I know the mask won't kill me?"

  Celia smiled serenely. It might at that, she thought. But she only said, “Stop fussing,” and put the light out, pulling the down comforter up over her shoulders against the evening's chill. After a while Jim accepted the inevitable, settling down with the mask firmly in place. Soon he was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and regular, thanks to the compressed air machine.

  Doc Powell had told them about it when the results came back from Jim's sleep test. “You have sleep apnea,” he said, displaying a cutaway chart of the respiratory system. “When you sleep, your throat closes and you stop breathing. The body starts gasping for air, fighting suffocation, and then you breathe. But it's very bad for you—like holding your breath until you can't stand it, over and over, all night long."

  The good news was that it was treatable. Jim was giv
en a square gray machine, shoebox sized, that pumped air into his lungs through a flexible hose and face mask. It kept him breathing evenly all night long, which lowered his blood pressure and reduced the risk of stroke and heart attack.

  "It'll add years to your life,” Doc Powell promised.

  He sounded so convincing, Celia recalled, listening to Jim's now-regular breathing. But he was wrong.

  * * * *

  Jim had to be up early the next morning, before dawn, for the morning shift at Bone Hollow. He'd be down in the mine before the sun came up, and not home till it set again. He'd wonder aloud if the sun was still up there—"I'm like a vampire, I never see it"—living in a world of perpetual darkness, deep beneath the earth. Toby Mercer came by to pick him up at four forty-five a.m., and they drove off to the mine in his Chevy pickup.

  Which left Celia all day long to do the chores and tend the house, and anything else she thought worth doing.

  Today she had a special job.

  It had to be done carefully, so that Jim wouldn't notice. She'd need a drill, their new garden hose, a hacksaw, and duct tape. All were stashed in the garage. She put away the breakfast dishes, got a load of laundry going—cotton whites, heavy load, warm rinse—and set her plan in motion.

  She took the garden hose, measured it carefully, and sawed it clear through. She took the drill into the bedroom, bored a hole through the baseboard by Jim's side of the bed, and widened it to the diameter of the hose. She went outside, played the hose through the opening, went back in, and spliced the hose into the flexible tube from Jim's air compressor, sealing it with duct tape. The other end she taped to the exhaust pipe of the family Buick.

  That night, she'd grind a sleeping pill into Jim's after-dinner beer. He'd pass out in bed, insensible. She'd go outside and start the car, and Jim would breathe a mixture of compressed air and carbon monoxide.

  Later, she'd replace the spliced tube with an undamaged spare. She'd take the doctored tube and hose and pitch them into the Susquehanna, then go home and call 911 and say, “Come quick, please, my husband's not breathing!” The coroner would blame natural causes because Jim had been considered at-risk from the moment they'd discovered his sleep apnea.

  He'd be swiftly, expeditiously dead. And she'd no longer be a miner's wife.

  * * * *

  It was supposed to be a temp job, just a stopgap until he found something better. Fresh out of high school, Jim and Celia were planning their lives together, dreaming big about the future. Jim was taking business management classes, grooming himself for an executive position at one of the big firms in Harrisburg. But he needed something to cover expenses and the mines were hiring. Besides, the benefits package was too good not to enroll. Jim meant to keep taking those classes, really he did, but the work was exhausting and the money was better if you took more hours, and somehow over the next few months Jim's part-time job became full time, then full time plus, then lifetime.

  He was never tan. His skin was rough from the work but pasty white from lack of sunshine, and he smelled like the mine, a greasy composite of dirt and methane. Worse, the coal dust would get in his clothes, into the carpet and furniture. She never saw him anymore but she could smell him, and taste him, and feel his dirty residue in everything she tried futilely to clean.

  She'd scrub his workshirts and scrape his boots, and think how their ambitions had given way to the daily challenge of just getting by.

  Celia thought about that hard and often, going over it in her mind, as the husbands talked about tearing rock from a hole and their wives jabbered endlessly about bleach and detergents and those hard-to-get-out mineral stains. Every day was like the next one; the best you could hope for was to end up no worse off than when you started.

  She would pay the bills and do the chores and wait out the hours until Jim came home all dirty and spent and ill tempered, until finally Celia knew two things. First, that she could not live this way, not another year, not another minute. She was suffocating in this bucolic wilderness. And second, that she had a way out, an escape hatch, thanks to the generous life insurance policy provided by Cowper and Baldwin's human resources department.

  A policy she was soon to collect on.

  She finished her laundry, tidied up around the house, and decided to prepare Jim's last meal, shepherd's pie, made of ground beef and mashed potatoes topped with cheddar cheese. The perfect meal before lying down to a carbon monoxide nap.

  She was pulling it out of the oven, savoring its rich aroma, when the phone rang.

  "Celia, turn on the TV!” It was Julie Sutton from two doors down. “There's been an explosion down at the mine!"

  * * * *

  At first, details were sketchy. The explosion had shaken the earth; cameras showed smoke and fire pouring from the mine entrance. Rescue technicians were setting up a command base, assessing the disaster. Eighteen miners were known to be trapped underground. Julie's husband was one of them.

  Jim was another.

  Celia took the Buick into town, remembering to untape the exhaust pipe. She found Julie at the Civic Center auditorium, where families and friends of the trapped miners were gathering. They looked haggard and lost, sloppily dressed, all asking the same questions: What have you heard? Have they found them? Are they alive?

  The crowd kept growing by the minute. Word of the disaster had spread rapidly throughout the close-knit community of Whisper Creek, drawing neighbors together in a way nothing else could. In a company town, everyone knew one of the miners, or their children or close relations. If an entire town could panic, they were doing it now.

  Except Celia, who feigned sadness but felt no particular grief of her own. She thought merely, Now I won't have to kill him. Luck, or fate, or God is doing it for me.

  "I'm so scared,” said Julie.

  They were standing in front of a message board in the Civic Center mezzanine, normally devoted to announcements of lost pets, bake sales, or used cars on sale with “some repairs needed.” Now the messages were of a sadder variety. Eighteen pictures had been tacked up there, with room for well-wishers to write in their comments.

  * * * *

  I LOVE YOU STEVE COME HOME. DAD YOUR GOING TO BE ALLRIGHT. MARK DON'T GIVE UP JESUS LOVES YOU.

  * * * *

  Julie approached Dave's picture, touching it as if her husband could somehow feel it. She sniffled but didn't cry. She wrote be safe and dropped the pen. Celia looked at Jim's picture, grinning stupidly with his miner's hat on sideways, his eyes raccoon dark from coal dust, the mouth of Bone Hollow yawning hungrily behind him. She wrote to jim and passed the pen along to a woman with red-rimmed eyes in a floral print housecoat.

  "It was methane,” someone was saying, in a little knot of people standing off to the side. “There was a pocket of gas, built up over time. Must have been a spark, set it off."

  "Maybe someone was smoking."

  "No one smokes in a mine."

  Celia wondered if it even mattered what had caused the explosion. The bottom line was the roof had collapsed, they were sealed inside, and rescue was uncertain. Unless a miracle happened, they were just hours from suffocating.

  Jim was going to die, just as she'd planned. He was even going to die how she'd planned. The parallel was so striking she could almost see a linkage between the events, as if the tragedy looming in Whisper Creek was an echo of her own intentions.

  Just a coincidence, she thought uneasily.

  "Can I have your attention?” asked an amplified voice.

  At the front of the auditorium, a nervous man in a too tight suit stood facing the microphone. He held a couple of crumpled sheets and kept looking at them as he spoke.

  "My name is Douglas Wertham,” he said, looking ill at ease. “I'm the managing director of the Cowper and Baldwin Mineral Company, and I'll be passing along information as we get it. Unfortunately, I don't have much to tell you. We do know the section of the mine where those men are trapped is equipped with emergency breathing devices, with ho
urs of extra oxygen should they need it."

  "They had them in the Sago Mine,” someone yelled. “They didn't work."

  "I can assure you the devices are regularly inspected, and fully operational."

  "Are they alive?” asked a harried woman, pushing to the front. “Are they alive?"

  Wertham sighed. “We hope so. But we can't be certain.” He glanced at his notes. “I can tell you that we're bringing in special drilling equipment, rescue technicians, and advisors from the Mine Safety Administration in Uniontown. All we ask is that you keep on praying for the best.” For a moment he seemed to look right at Celia. “Everyone wants those men to be all right."

  She blanched, looking away.

  Wertham left the stage. People surged toward him, shouting questions, but he had nothing more to tell them. They were left to stand and wait in the Civic Center auditorium, all but one of them dreading further news.

  * * * *

  Hours passed. Wertham announced that they were trying to pinpoint the men's exact location using mine maps and surveying equipment, but it wasn't exact because they didn't know how badly the mine had been damaged, and where the men were at the time of the blast. The plan was to drill down into the tunnel and verify that the men were still alive. But they could miss by three feet, and have to start all over again.

  Or hit it squarely and accomplish nothing, because the men were already dead.

  Celia watched her friends’ hopes rise and fall with each new rumor, stuck between hope and despair, unable even to resign themselves to failure. She watched their desperation and tried to mimic it herself, tried to play the grieving housewife, begging a God she didn't trust for an outcome she didn't want, as the anxious minutes passed.

  At 2:05 a.m they stopped drilling, withdrew the bit, and moved to a new location. The foreman of the rescue team spoke furiously, his words not carrying to Celia's ears but his attitude plain in the glow of the arc lamps. Julie made the sign of the cross. Celia sighed and tried to get comfortable in a camp chair brought in for the occasion.

  At four fifteen a.m. Wertham announced that the drill had broken through into tunnel nine, where the first team had been stationed. They'd been hoping the survivors would strike the drill bit with their hammers to signal that they were alive. But no one had. The only alternative was to go in and find them, which could take hours or even days.