by John Harris
Joe looked from one to the other of them and opened the conversation warily. “Where’s the boy?” he asked. “Where he get-a to?”
“I dunno–” Rosa said heavily.
“Who put out the other anchor?” Joe looked boldly at his wife, trying to brazen out his conduct, trying to hide his shame. “I would have done that too. Only I feel-a ill. I have to go and sleep it off.”
“I know,” Rosa said. “You were drunk.”
Joe glanced at Frankie, who stared through him unseeingly, then he studied Rosa cautiously again, wondering why she didn’t throw the teapot at him.
“No, Mama,” he said carefully, feeling his way towards an excuse. “Not-a drunk. Not Joe.”
“You were drunk,” Rosa said more loudly, her voice metallic and flat, like the ring of a cracked coin. “You were drunk just when we needed you.”
Joe put down the cup, uneasy at her quietness. Calmness of this kind was usually the prelude to fireworks, but somehow this time it was different. The fireworks seemed to have gone out of Rosa.
“Did you put out the anchor?” he asked.
“No. Willie did. We helped. That’s all.”
“Where’s he went then?”
“He’s not come back. He put the anchor out but he never came back. I reckon he let the wind take him. He’d never try to row back against this. He’ll be on the beach now, waiting for it to die, or sheltering in somebody’s hut.”
Joe rubbed his stubbly chin slowly, looking at his wife, bent and old, his belly sticking through his worn vest like dough.
“He use the dinghy?” he asked eventually. “In this-a lot? On his own?”
“What else could he do?” Rosa turned her empty mug round slowly in her hands: “The engine wouldn’t go. You weren’t around to help him. He did what he thought was right.”
She paused and sighed. “I guess he tried hard. He stopped us moving, that’s for sure.”
By the following morning, the wind had died altogether. The clouds had dispersed and they could see the big palms along the ridge upright once more, their tufted tops motionless against the clear sky.
Neither Rosa nor Joe said anything about their thoughts but they were both thinking of Willie. Throughout the previous day, Frankie had prowled restlessly in the wind, watching the shore, impatient for Willie’s return, her eyes sweeping the bare expanse of the lagoon, searching the ship as though she expected to find him there, dependable and solidly reassuring as always.
Rosa had watched her miserably, unable to offer anything in the way of comfort beyond the same reiterated sentence – “He’ll be ashore waiting for the wind to drop” – and in the evening, Frankie had crouched silently in her bunk, staring into nothingness, unspeaking, uninterested in food. Rosa and Joe had sat in the cabin beneath the dim lamp whose glass was blurred by smoke from an uneven wick, drinking tea without talking, until eventually Frankie had turned her back on them, and without saying a word, they had gone to the old iron bed and lay in the darkness, still occupied with their thoughts.
None of them slept much and the following morning as soon as it was light Rosa and Joe went thankfully on deck, glad to be out of the silent, stuffy cabin.
The sun was out as they climbed through the hatch, and a group of island pirogues were approaching them across the lagoon from the distant decaying houses that huddled against the slopes of the mountains, the crews of Polynesian mixed blood and wearing screwpine hats and trousers marked with the American army stamp. None of them spoke English and as they drew alongside, they began to point astern of them.
“They’ve got the dinghy!” Rosa turned as she saw Frankie had followed them on deck and was now staring at the pirogues excitedly, her dark-ringed eyes hopefully bright again.
“I don’t see no Willie, though,” Joe said heavily.
Frankie ignored him. “He’ll be ashore, Pop,” she said. “Perhaps he’s hurt. Maybe he wants me to look after him. Maybe he broke a leg. What are they shouting, Pop? What are they shouting?”
Joe turned his sad spaniel eyes on her. “They want us to go with ’em,” he said. “They want us to go ashore.”
The beach was littered by the sea-wrack of the storm, broken palm fronds like shattered scimitars, a tree shorn of its roots and branches so that it was naked-looking and indecent, a few small sharks and dead jellyfish; scraps of driftwood and broken shells, one of their own oars, saturated and black with water, a door from a house, boxes, a wrecked canoe, its outriggers splintered. The land crabs stalked their way through the debris, following the water down the beach as the tide receded, sidling unheeded among the mynah birds and the flocks of scarlet finches that picked among the rubbish.
The untrodden sand was cool after the rain, and the lagoon was shot through with colours like a butterfly’s wing. The bush beyond the beach was soaked and silent, steaming slightly as the sun rose higher, the leaves drooping in the heat.
One or two islanders laboured over shattered houses that the hurricane had destroyed and flung against each other, sagging, their silver-grey thatch torn away and spread in great swathes along the ground, their poles bare like gaunt ribs in the sunshine. Under the weight of a great fallen tree, the village store leaned in a tangle of woodwork through which they could see kerosene lamps and buckets and tins of food scattered about in pathetic heaps.
A village pig was rooting among the long morning shadows that draped the rocks and a blue heron trod daintily in the shallow water where a piece of sennit rope and the remains of a bamboo fish trap washed backwards and forwards with a couple of rotting coconuts. The air was crystal clear and still.
They found Willie when they least expected to, just above the high water mark, surrounded by the litter of the typhoon. The islanders had pulled him out of the sea and covered him with palm fronds and they could see his hand protruding from beneath the greenery as they approached, covered with wet sand and starred by the sodden flowers that had showered from the trees. Rosa crossed herself quickly as Frankie stopped dead, the colour draining from her face, shocked into rigidity, and all the others stopped dead with her, waiting for her to go on.
She stood straight up, slender and stiff in the sagging jersey and the ragged pants that clung to her legs and hips. Her eyes were wide, a look of stricken disbelief in them. Her hands were straight down at her sides, her fingers twitching. For a moment, Rosa thought she was going to fling herself down on top of Willie but she just stood there silently, her lips moving, her eyes staring in that anguished way that was agony to Rosa.
Joe looked at his wife, undecided, wondering what to do.
“We ought to bury him,” he said.
“No. We’ll take him back aboard.”
Rosa was quite calm, devoid of feeling. Her eyes were dry and all the emotion seemed to be drained out of her in the need to care for Frankie.
“Bring him along to the dinghy, Joe,” she said in a voice so hard it didn’t seem like her own. “I’m going back with Frankie.”
Joe stood on the sand, old and bent and fat, then he watched Rosa and his daughter face the sea, and he turned and signed to the islanders to help him.
When the islanders arrived with Joe, they stretched Willie on the cabin table and covered him with the best blanket they had left.
Frankie was sitting on the bow, staring at the land, her fingers fiddling with the cross Willie had given her. She had not turned her head as the canoe had bumped alongside, had completely ignored the silent shuffling as they carried him below, and Rosa was anxious to be finished with the heart-breaking business before the feeling came back into her and her senses began to function again.
“I’m going to lay him out proper,” she said. “Make him look decent.”
“You want me to help, Rosie?” Joe faltered, still uncertain of her reactions.
“No. You keep Frankie outa here. I’ll do it on me own. I’ll say something over him. I’ll do it nice.” She held up her hand as he began to speak. “Don’t say anything or I’ll bus
t out squawking.”
She took a basin of water and washed Willie’s face and combed the sand from his hair. Then she crossed his hands and put near him a flower she had begged from one of the islanders who had worn it in his hair. Slowly she took out a scrap of candle and lit it.
“It isn’t a holy one, Lord,” she pointed out, lifting her eyes humbly. “But it’s all we got.”
Then she slowly and painfully lowered herself to her knees.
When she had finished praying, she stood up, her eyes burning but still holding back the tears, and Joe gave the islanders one of Willie’s notes as payment for their help. From the deck, he watched the canoes disappearing again across the lagoon. Frankie was still on the bow, still heedless of what was happening, and Joe glanced at her for a second before he lowered himself slowly into the cabin.
Rosa was sitting on a box alongside the table with its shrouded shape, her hands pressed tightly together, wishing Joe could give her strength and courage when all the time she knew he couldn’t. Oh, Lord, she was saying, repeating it with fierce persistence, make it come right. Don’t let me give in to it. Make me keep going to look after Frankie and the others.
I should have known, she kept upbraiding herself. I should have known it was the certainty of death in him that sobered him and made him old before his time.
She had vivid frightening pictures in her mind of Willie sinking down into the dark fathoms, rolled backwards and forwards by the eddies of the tide, and she prayed that Frankie wasn’t seeing them too. Make it come right for her, too, Lord, she begged. Make it easy for her. Frankie was far too young for grief such as only the old should have to bear.
She looked up questioningly as Joe stood beside her, eyeing the blanket uneasily.
“What are we going to do, Mama?” he asked.
Rosa raised her eyes slowly to his. She knew that Joe and Joe alone was responsible for Willie’s death. Tired, doing the job the wrong way, the hopeless way, there would have been no hope for him. She looked again at her husband and knew she would never face him with his guilt. It was too late now, and Joe was too weak and too old to be held responsible. They were both too old. They had always been too old for the thing they had undertaken. They had never had a chance of succeeding.
“I reckon we ought to take him to Papeete,” she said. “Then folks will know what happened to him. There’s his mama and the other boy’s mama too. She’ll sleep easier then.”
She looked gaunt and older than Joe had ever seen her, and he resolved on the instant to behave himself in the future, knowing all the time it was a promise he couldn’t hope to keep.
“It was my fault, Rosie,” he said humbly.
“No, it wasn’t your fault.”
She saw him again as a plump young man with a collar that was too tight for him and the limp posy of flowers and, oddly, at that moment he was nearer to her than he had been for years.
He eyed the blanket again.
“Mama,” he said thoughtfully, “when they see the way you fix him, they mebbe think we like him a little bit. Then we get into trouble.”
“I laid him out decent,” Rosa said stiffly. “If the Devil was dead aboard of here, I’d do it for him too. They won’t think things like that. It doesn’t matter if they do now, anyway,” she pointed out. ‘We got nothing to lose. It’s all over and done. We’ve nothing left. We’ll lose the boat and we’ve spent all our money.”
Joe looked up, remembering the notes he had taken from Willie’s clothes, the dwindled roll he had rifled at Aiotea to pay for the gin which had been the indirect cause of Willie’s death, and it suddenly felt hot in his pocket and poisonous. He fished it out and spread it slowly on the table alongside Willie.
“There’s a few quid here, Mama,” he said. “That’s all that’s left but it’ll help. You’d better have that too.” He shoved it at Rosa, trying to get rid of it before he began to regret what he was doing.
“He was just like a son,” Rosa said, staring ahead of her.
“Yes, Mama. I guess so.”
“We had two sons, kind of. Now we got none at all. But I reckon it’s the best way. They’d have got him in the end and then what would he have to look forward to? What could Frankie have looked forward to?”
“I had everything in the world to look forward to!” Frankie had come silently into the cabin while they were talking and they turned to face her, flushing slightly as she spoke.
“There was nothing I was scared of with Willie,” she went on. “Police. Gossip. Doing without. Nothing. I’d have gone on running and doing without – and starving, too – if Willie’d been with me.”
Rosa watched her daughter. This was a new Frankie, no longer the old harum-scarum Frankie who had sped barefoot along deserted miles of beach after crabs. This was a woman, adult and mature and facing life. The wonderment that had been in her eyes had disappeared and it saddened Rosa to think it had gone so soon.
“I’d have gone on for ever,” Frankie continued. “Willie showed me what it was like to love someone. He was kind and gentle. I had nothing to be ashamed of in loving him, whatever he’d done.”
As she stared at them, her face crumpled and, with a sob, she flung herself into Rosa’s arms.
“Oh, Mama,” she cried. “I feel so lonely.”
Rosa held her close, heavy and tired in her shabby clothes. “Come on, Joe,” she said slowly. “Let’s be off. We got a long way to go.”
“They’ll impound the boat, Mama.”
“Yes, I know.”
“That means we don’t be able to dodge-a no more.”
Rosa shrugged. “Ain’t any point no more,” she said.
Joe studied for a moment, staring at his feet, trying to put his feeling for their grief into words. “Mama,” he said after a while. “He growed into a man with us. We oughta to see him off proper. We oughta to have a flag and fly it at half-a-mast.”
“He won’t mind either way.” Rosa spoke without looking at him, her head held high.
“Allasame,” Joe pointed out. “I guess he’d be proud. We got a old red blouse of yours. I could tie that up.”
“OK,” Rosa said. “Go ahead. At least, it’ll make ’em realize we’re coming in of our own accord and not because we’ve been caught. We wouldn’t ever have been caught,” she ended defiantly, “if he hadn’t gone and died. Willie’d have thought of something. That’s for sure.”
Six
Fred Voss started up in bed at the thunderous knocking that quivered his door.
“Who’s that? What the hell goes on?” he snapped.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, as Flynn burst in, and sinking back on the pillows, he reached for a cigarette. “What’s happened? Have we missed ’em again?”
Flynn’s face was white and for a few minutes he didn’t speak. “He dodged me in the end,” he said at last, keeping his anger back with difficulty. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Voss sat up sharply. “Who’s dead? Keeley?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
Flynn gestured. “The Salomios – they’re coming in.”
“Coming in? You mean, they’ve given up?”
“Yes. The launch that went over to Aiotea set off for Apavana this morning when the weather subsided and met them coming out. They went alongside to put a party on board but the old woman wouldn’t let them. They want to bring her into Papeete on their own. They’d only accept the help of a couple of sailors to work the boat. That’s all.”
“Good for Mama Salomio. Go on.”
“They had Keeley’s body on board.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Flynn seemed calmer now. “I suppose it happened during the hurricane. It’s all a bit garbled by this time. The doctor on the launch took photos and identified him and they buried him at sea. There’s no doubt about it being Keeley.”
“God, what a story!” In spite of his words, Voss looked serious and devoid of enthusiasm. “How’s M
ama Salomio?”
“Why?”
“Oh, nothing. I thought she might be a bit cut up.”
“They’re all right.” Flynn suddenly seemed indifferent now that Willie was dead. “Tired as hell, I understand, and pretty thin, but they’re fit and well. Your story’s reaching its grand finale.” He looked up at Voss under his eyebrows. “You can cable home and tell ’em to get out the band and tune up the trumpets.”
“I’ve a suspicion the Salomios aren’t going to enjoy trumpets and bands.” Voss scowled. “I got a cable this morning. The readers’ poll is finished. I’ve got the pleasure of telling them what every nosy bastard in Australia thinks they ought to do with their lives. There’s a move on foot to make the boat into a museum and put them in charge of it. That’ll be fine if they don’t want a museum. I only hope they’ll feel what they did was all worth while.”
“Does it matter?” Flynn asked.
“I don’t know. They’ll have enough money now to buy a new boat anyway. Two if they want ’em.” He stopped and his eyes opened wide, as an idea occurred to him. “By God,” he said, “I’m going to take on an unpaid job of fending off all the bloody sharks who want to sell ’em something, all the pompous bastards who want to be condescending. I’ll make it easier for them and see they get what there is for themselves. Perhaps it’ll make up for the readers’ poll.”
He looked at Flynn, feeling better. “When will they be here?” he asked. “I’ve got to prepare myself for the role of protector of the poor and lowly, the friend in need and the friend indeed.”
“I don’t know.” Flynn seemed to have lost all interest in the chase. “It’s a long way. We might as well wait here. Keeley’s already identified and buried. We can’t do anything and they’re in safe hands – unless you want to go half-way and meet ’em.”
“God, no! Let’s leave ’em alone. There’ll be plenty of ghouls deployed about the place without us.” Voss looked up at Flynn. “Who gets the reward?”
Flynn hesitated. “I don’t know. Seagull’s after it naturally. He’s coming into Papeete with the naval launch and the Salomios – determined to get his share of the kudos and the money. He’s been on the radio. I’ve been holding him off.”
