Unspeakable Horror

by Joseph B. Healy

  Esther Irene never once took her eyes off the whaling boat as it slid into the shallows. Even though she didn’t seem to be doing anything, it was obvious she was there in an official capacity. The whalers cut the lashes, and the whale rolled heavily into the water. Esther Irene watched carefully. Other villagers, mostly the boys, took ropes and hauled the large carcass onto the beach. Esther Irene was right there beside it. The two-man crew unloaded the boat and broke down its gun. All of the gear was carried to a shed off the beach. Millington stood beside Esther Irene as she took a large knife and cut shallow, crosswise slices the length of the carcass. Then Millington took his cutlass and cut the slices through, turning the great black fish into red slabs of meat. Esther Irene directed different men to haul off particular sections of meat. The skull was carted away for its oil, and it occurred to me that this meat would be in the cook shops that evening or marketplace tomorrow.

  Esther Irene’s official capacity was obviously the broker. She pulled an oily clump of bills from her pocket and counted out a number of them into Millington’s hand. By this time his crew had returned to take the boat back out to deeper water, where it would remain anchored for the night. The one I would come to know as Veron, the tall one, still carried the harpoon with him. Veron at seventy had leg muscles carved out by seven decades of demanding work. The harpoon he held had a shaft thick around as a three-year-old hickory sapling with a large barb off the hook that would make it impossible for the whale to dislodge once it was set. All the while nobody paid any attention to me whatsoever, not even the children; but, while Millington counted out bills for each of his crewmen, Esther Irene said something to him and nodded in my direction. He did not look at me, and neither did they, but the probability was that they had checked me out and sized me up even before they came ashore. Although no one had yet acknowledged my presence, a white man in a black village is not exactly anonymous, and the whalers, being hunters, would have noticed everything about me. When the crewmen pocketed their money, Millington finally turned and walked over to where I stood. I was only a few feet away across the sand. Both crewmen stayed where they were and watched. The harpooner rested with one foot up on his harpoon, like a Masai warrior leaning on his spear. All the people on the beach stared as Millington approached. I felt stripped and dissected by every eye in Barrouallie. Hester Prynne on the scaffold with the scarlet letter blazing on her chest could not have felt more scrutinized than I did.

  I put out my hand. Millington took it. The veins in his forearm stood out in relief, and his hand was rough to the touch though his grip was surprisingly soft.

  “I’m Millington. Miss Irene say you want me.”

  He didn’t smile. He didn’t try to ingratiate himself in any way. He spread his legs, folded his arms, rooted himself in the sand, and listened with his head down. His crewmen took it all in. I felt as if I had very little time to explain who I was and what I wanted, as if I had only seconds to be rejected or accepted by these men. I put my case briefly, to the point. Would they take me with them? Who was I Millington wanted to know? I had hunted all my life, I replied, and I was interested in men who hunted the way they did. I was also a writer, and I wanted to make a record of what they did because after them nobody would be doing it anymore. It was his boat said Millington. He didn’t mind, but his crew had to approve, too. He called them over. The one with the harpoon, Veron, towered over me. The other, Aaron Moses, stared at me as if we were prizefighters listening to the referee’s instructions. Millington’s accent was so thick and his words tumbled out so quickly that I could barely understand what he told them. There was not so much as a wrinkle of a smile on any of their faces.

  “De watah deah, sometime de watah rough,” said Aaron Moses.

  “Yes,” I said, “I expected that.”

  Veron shrugged.

  “We’ll take you,” Millington said.

  Veron ground the butt of his harpoon into the sand.

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  He barely nodded and let it go. It fell toward me. I grabbed its shaft, hefted it, and was staggered by the weight. Veron’s facial expression did not change. I figured it must have weighed at least fifty pounds and later learned it was sixty.

  “Fawr in de mawnin’,” Millington said. I said I’d be there.

  At 4 a.m. the next morning the moon was still high and big over the harbor. She was full, a radiant disc of white light mirrored in the clement water of the Caribbean Sea. An hour earlier I had kissed my sleeping wife and son goodbye, packed a waterproof bag with camera, film, bright red life vest, two freshly baked rolls, and a can of juice, and driven the narrow coast road in the dark. There were no street lights on St. Vincent. Now, I stood on the jetty awaiting the arrival of Millington and his men. Small waves lapped gently against the pylons. The silence was profound, so deep I imagined you could actually hear someone’s thoughts. Millington showed up first.

  “De watah calm,” he said. “Fish be comin’.”

  I heard a splash, looked over, and saw Aaron Moses swimming out toward the boat. Veron lugged essentials from the storage shed and arranged them on the beach—an outboard motor that he carried over his shoulder, a can of gasoline, coils of rope, the harpoon. Such strength from a man of seventy years—such strength for anyone! The man was a match for no one. Aaron reached the boat, clambered aboard, put the oars in the locks, and rowed her to shore. He jumped out when her belly touched the sand, and he and Millington and I skidded the bow of the boat onto the beach. Veron returned with the mast over his shoulder. I can only guess at what the mast weighed, but I’ll bet it was at least twice his weight—a solid shaft of wood that was a good eight inches in circumference and fifteen feet high. Veron waded into the water with it, and Aaron helped him lay it flat in the boat. Millington attached the outboard. Aaron unwrapped the chamber, butt, and trigger mechanism of the gun and put it together atop the iron quadropod on the bow. He swiveled it from side to side. It moved easily. Veron finished loading the remaining gear, and the four of us pushed the boat free of the beach. Then Millington motioned me aboard and bade me sit in the stern on the starboard side.

  He stayed on the gunwale on the portside of the outboard, Aaron Moses stood on the bow behind the gun, and Veron sat on the mast housing plank in the middle. Neither of them said a word to me. I don’t believe they had even looked at me. I’m not sure if Millington did, either. Maybe he simply pointed out where I was to sit. And stay. These three men were as fierce as any I’d ever been with, more so—men who could not be tamed, men savage and feral, men who took on the largest creature on earth. I admit to feeling unsteady, because of the boat, yes, a little, but more because of these men. I felt it: there was danger all over this adventure. I can’t say I felt fear, but I didn’t feel totally collected, and it wasn’t only because of Leviathan.

  Millington pulled the starter cord on the outboard. It roared to life. He guided the vessel out to the sea. It was five a.m. The water had swallowed up the moon. The sun was just beginning to glow, and the sky was the color of strawberry ice cream. This was the moment I had dreamed about for ten years. The hunt was underway.

  The shore was a faint, gray line in the distance when Millington cut the motor. Faith, as the boat was named, rocked gently in the water. It was the only sound to be heard, but any feeling of peace I had was now replaced with an air of anticipation. Something was bound to happen, but what? And when? As the sun climbed in the sky and burned off the haze of morning, its glare upon the water intensified into sheets of bright light. It became impossible to keep my eyes open without sunglasses, yet Millington, Aaron, and Veron scanned the surface of the sea searching for sign without so much as a squint. They could tell, simply by the way the water moved, what swam beneath it.

  “Shark,” called Aaron Moses as he traced a path with his finger just in front of the bow.

  I did everything but jump out of the boat, and still I couldn’t see a thing. One flying fish, then two, then three leapt out of the
water on the port side and skimmed for yards before darting back below. Millington mumbled about something feeding on them and that’s why they fly. None of the men said a word to one another. This crew had been together so long they didn’t need to. Veron bent to lift the mast. The muscles in his calves and thighs bulged with the weight. Aaron turned from the harpoon gun to help him. They maneuvered the foot of the mast to the lip of the hole in the housing plank, walked it up, and dropped it in with a solid thunk of wood against wood. Veron unleashed the ragged sail. Instantly the wind filled it with a loud thwop. It billowed out, its patches holding, and Faith slipped lightly through the water. In the span of a few minutes, the shoreline had totally disappeared from view. There was water, three hundred and sixty degrees of it, and sky, and a horizon that never came any closer. I had entrusted myself to the seamanship of a man I had only met a little more than twelve hours ago—an unknown sailor and a leaky boat. The thought went through my mind that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all; but, as soon as it did, Millington slapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a spot off the stern. A whale was sounding—a humpback—probably a quarter mile distant. I turned in time to see the great tail slide into the water, its flukes silhouetted against the sky. It was the first time I’d ever seen one. Even at a distance it seemed huge to me; and, yet, the sea had swallowed it up so easily.

  “My God,” I thought. “It’s there, in this ocean, and so am I.”

  Veron reset the sail. Millington adjusted the rudder and fixed a course toward the spot where we had last seen the whale. Aaron stood on the bow, slipped off the gun’s safety, and lined up the deadly point of the harpoon. In that split second, so many disparate feelings surged through me. I wanted to get closer to the whale, wanted to join in combat with such a colossal creature, but to do so probably meant its death and possibly my own. Millington and his men were here to slay the giant in order to ensure their own survival. They were not here to witness a primal encounter but to engage in one. Without death, the experience would be incomplete. Without death, there would be no triumph. There would be only the punishing hunger of unbearable poverty.

  Aaron Moses sang out, “Big one deah. Come up. Come out de watah deah.”

  As we approached the spot, Veron trimmed the sail and allowed the current to carry the Faith. We waited. The sea absorbed all our concentration. I got my camera ready and shot pictures of the crew in the meantime. For all the attention any of them paid me, I might as well have been a barnacle on the hull. Somewhere in the millions of gallons of water beneath us swam the focus of all our attention. I remembered medieval woodcuts showing whale-like monsters savaging the vessels of helpless seamen and then plucking them from the water by their heads, and I thought about how easily the humpback could surface below us and capsize our modest boat. I considered taking out my life vest and putting it on, but nobody else wore one, so neither, I decided, would I. It might seem rather harebrained that I would risk my life rather than risk their contempt, but, at that moment, I had another point of view. What was to keep them from tossing me overboard? Who’d know? As for the life vest, my wife had insisted I buy it and implored me to wear it; but, at that moment, while my mind shuffled through all the perilous possibilities of what might happen, most of me believed that none of them really would. And if one did? I hoped that she’d forgive me, and that I’d be someplace where I could get the message out.

  We waited patiently over a peaceful sea. Nothing breached the surface of the water. After all, this was not the thundering surf of the North Atlantic, nor the South Polar Sea where a man overboard would freeze and die in seconds. It was the Caribbean, warm and soothing to the touch. Hurricane season was still months away. The sun glittered on the water. The Faith rocked gently as a cradle and nearly lulled me to sleep. We waited. I was in a kind of daze when I realized something had changed. A wisp of cloud, powered by an easy wind that wasn’t there a second before, passed in front of the sun, and it lost some of its shine. The air temperature seemed to drop, not much, but perceptible. Our bow rose and fell then rose and fell again and again as a series of low-level swells passed under the hull. On the way out here the Faith had taken in a few inches of water; but, until this moment, the crew had not bothered with it. Now it was sloshing around our feet, and Veron began bailing it out with an empty gourd. The wind came on a bit harder, rattling the hardware on the mast and snapping the edge of the sail with the sound of a wet towel flicked against a tile wall. A wave rolled in from the starboard side, my side, and pitched the boat over so far to port that the gunwale nearly touched the water.

  Millington tried to start the outboard. It coughed and died three times before it finally caught. He brought the boat around as Veron stopped bailing so that he and Aaron could muscle the mast out of its housing and lay it flat. I stowed my camera and took up the bailing to be of some use. Aaron slipped and went down under the weight of the mast. His leg twisted under him, and he caught the full load on his shoulders. A little to the left would have split his head; but, as it was, he shook off the wallop like a fullback shakes off a tackler and helped Veron settle the mast securely against the bulkhead.

  When the rain came it came on fast, like rain always does in the tropics. It doesn’t sneak up on you, doesn’t tease you with a light drizzle. It just unloads, all at once, like a fighter with a sneaky right hook. A freak storm assaulted us with a hammering downpour suddenly driven by a hostile wind. It came from every direction; and, since the Faith was an open boat, there was no way of avoiding it. We were totally exposed to whatever the weather had in store. Waves broke over the boat and bombarded us with spray. In seconds I was as soaked as if I had jumped into the sea itself. Bailing made no sense now because the breaking waves dumped more water in than we could possibly bail out. Veron and Aaron Moses hunkered down under sheets of torn and tattered plastic. Millington stayed in the stern manning the tiller and coaxing the outboard. He concentrated on the sea ahead of him and struggled to keep a steady course. He seemed to know where he was going though I don’t know how because he had no compass and there was no land in sight. I had no raingear, so I hunched over on the other side of the outboard and made myself as small as possible. I will get through this, I told myself. This cannot last forever, and I will get through it. Just then a trough opened up in front of us, and the bow plunged down into it. Almost immediately, the stern reared up in the air as a roller heaved under. I grabbed the gunwale to keep from being tossed overboard. This was angry water. It churned up foam and spray. No green, no blue, no clear, just white, hissing, punishing water. Then the bottom dropped out from under us like a trapdoor on a gallows, and the Faith plummeted straight down, slamming with the full force of her against the hard floor of the sea. Walls of water poured down on both sides of us, but the Faith, thank God, was dauntless. She shook off the water and shimmied to the surface as the bottom filled in. A nanosecond later, when I thought it could get no worse, my guts lurched and I knew, oh, my God, how I knew! It hit me with no warning. I realized it before my brain could even form the thought. I had never felt it before or since, but there was no questioning what this was. I was seasick. My insides kicked into spasm. It was awful. All I could think of was, “My God, don’t let me throw up in this boat!” They’d toss me for sure.

  Again we plunged and heaved, and again a wave broke over the boat. I must have had my mouth open because this time I swallowed a bucket of salt water. I gagged but held it in. When would this be over? Soon, mercifully, we reached shore.

  The next day, again at 4 a.m., Millington hitched a dragline off the stern once we were under sail. When he spotted the school of skipjack he sailed right into them and hooked one almost immediately. The fish was dark on top with a silver underside; but, aside from a single leap, it didn’t put up much of a fight as Millington pulled it aboard and killed it with a wooden club to the head. Millington quickly unhooked the fish, rebaited the hook, and returned his line to the water. Aaron Moses was behind the harpoon gun swinging it
from side to side as he tried to get a bead. The harpoon gun went off with an explosive crack, and a scarlet patch appeared in the water. The dead skipjack left a ribbon of blood in its wake as Aaron hauled it aboard. A skipjack (a species of tuna) is only about three feet long, so I was surprised that he even hit it given the primitive quality of his weapon. He pulled out the light harpoon, and Veron took over. Veron held both fish over the side of the boat and butchered them so the blood would flow into the water. He quickly cut them into chunks and tossed them back in. By this time, Millington had dragged a third one over the stern. Veron clobbered it and butchered that one, too. He left its meat bobbing beside the boat and its blood drifting with the current.

  After butchering the skipjacks, Veron and Millington trimmed the sail so that we would drift along with their remains. Millington baited another dragline, this time with a small pogie taken from the belly of one of the skipjacks, and Aaron reloaded the harpoon gun. We were back to waiting. Aaron, on the bow, sang out:

  “Mongoose, mongoose, come out de watah deah. Come out de watah. Roll ovah.”

  The big harpoon still lay unused where it was first stowed by Veron. Millington stared after the slack dragline. Blackfish can run in schools of hundreds or even thousands, but also pods of a dozen or less, and I imagined them, exceptionally social animals that they are, signaling one another by clicks and whistles, coursing like underwater wolves after their prey. I knew that fierce hammerheads and dog sharks, which travel and hunt in packs like wild dogs, were out there, too, as were bull sharks with heads wider than long, the most common attacker of human beings. Millington, who does not shy away from a lethally wounded, sixty-foot, 80,000-pound whale, professes not to be troubled by sharks, either, but he has dreamed of being ambushed by one as he puts bloody chum into the water. The sea is smooth and calm, and then the monster’s jaws suddenly rupture the surface and rip off his right arm at the shoulder. In the dream he remembers his detached arm quivering in the shark’s jaws as if the thing were waving good-bye. “Like a horra pitcha.” He laughs when he tells me about it—horror picture, indeed.