The Journey Home

by K'Anne Meinel

  Cass worried about what was happening back on the farm. There was nothing she could do about it but she hoped that the good Father Aames had passed on their names and ranks so that their armed forces knew they were all alive and well. She would hate to think they might be listed as dead from the volcano. Their families would have received a telegram or a visit from someone in the Army to tell them of their death. She hoped not to cause them any upset, she thought of how Stephanie had looked when she left, she thought about how angry, upset, and hurt she had been when she announced she was leaving so long ago. She imagined how she would feel if someone told her about her death. She looked at the picture that was in her shirt many times and Annette had caught her gazing at it in the boat. It was dog-eared already from her fingers and it had gotten wet in her shirt.

  Annette was very well aware of Cass’s love for Stephanie. She had told her friend many stories about her and the two of them. Knowing that Annette would keep her ‘secrets’ as a good friend and a fellow woman who had known the love of another woman seemed to open up the normally quiet woman. She tried to be a good friend and not let her own feelings for Cass to cloud her judgment but she had to admit she was lonely, very lonely. The atmosphere as they took their walks was friendly but at weak moments Annette knew it was dangerous to be alone with Cass.

  Tonight the moon seemed extra-large in the beautiful clear sky. The storm that had moved in right after their arrival was long gone and all they had were endlessly beautiful days and nights.

  After walking for a ways along the beach they stopped under some palms and Cass looked up. “Those stars look nothing like they do back home,” she commented.

  “That’s because they have the Southern Cross instead of the North Star to guide them here,” Annette answered and tried not notice how Cass’s neck looked, so inviting, so white against the darkness of the palms.

  Cass chuckled, “So practical!”

  Annette smiled back, she enjoyed spending time with her friend and she hastily looked away so Cass wouldn’t catch her gazing longingly at her.

  Cass didn’t know what impulse came upon her but as she looked at Annette she wanted to desperately kiss her, suddenly she remembered the approximate date and she said, “Annette?” She waited for her to look back at her before leaning in to give her a kiss as she murmured softly, “Happy New Year.”

  The shock of Cass’s soft lips on her own held her immobile for a second but as Cass went to pull back to end the impulsive kiss Annette threw her arms around her to hold her as she returned the kiss whole heartedly. Annette was surprised when Cass didn’t pull back again or push her away and instead put her own arms around her. She deepened the kiss opening her lips and lightly licking Annette’s to moisten them, to caress them, to plunge her tongue inside as they began to fence and play. She pulled her body closer and used her hands to caress through the thin material of the clothing they both had on molding her body against her.

  “Oh Gawd,” Cass suddenly pulled back in shock breathing deeply taking a step back. She lifted her hand to her mouth feeling the tingling, the want and desire lingering. Her body was protesting the loss of the heat and contact with Annette.

  Annette felt like crying out at the loss of Cass against her but she instead said nothing, she didn’t take a step forward, she didn’t take a step backwards. She just stood there waiting for Cass to say something, to do something.

  “Oh God, I am sorry Annette, I am so sorry.” She looked down shamefully and sobbed a little hugging herself with her arms as she bent over. “That’s not fair, I am so sorry.”

  Annette reached out to pat her on the shoulder and couldn’t help the pat turned into a caress as she said, “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.”

  Cass rose up and pulled out of range. The temptation to throw Annette to the sands was there, who would ever know? Stephanie was far away and she would never tell her…Stephanie…oh God, she had nearly betrayed her. It was like a bucket of cold water splashed on her. “Whose fault is it? Surely not yours!” she demanded forcefully, angrily.

  Annette shook her head, both regretfully and sadly. She suddenly felt that she was old and wise. “It’s just fate.” She spread her hands out in supplication. “It’s just the way things are. I love you, I will always love you,” she confessed.

  Cass stared at her in shock at the admission her eyes widening in the dark.

  “But,” she continued, “It’s just not meant to be. You are an honorable woman and it’s not like you can take me home with you. You won’t be able to stay with me; we can’t take our pleasures and just go back to the real world. As much as I would like to,” she smiled wryly, regretfully. “I can’t do that either, not to you, not to me, and not to Stephanie even though I will never know her.”

  “I love you too,” Cass confessed, she was shocked by her own admission. She felt Annette deserved it though. She did love her. “I don’t understand it though, how can I love you both?”

  Annette looked at her sorrowfully. “I’ve known for a long time, I suspected it from you, but I don’t have the answers. I do know you would be miserable if you did this to Stephanie. You can love me as a friend but never anything more and I’m okay with it. We will both survive this. I will carry this in my heart forever.”

  She sounded so anguished by what she was telling Cass that she nearly took a step to pull them together again. “You have to find someone, someday…” Cass began but Annette shook her head and held up her hand to silence her.

  “Someday, just not now of course. I’ll look but I will always hold a part of you in my heart. Just as a part of Ellie will always be there.” She shrugged philosophically. “It’s just bad timing on our parts, if we had met under different circumstances…”

  “I am sorry.”

  She nodded. “I don’t want to lose your friendship though.”

  “You have it, forever.”

  “Can I hug you without it being odd between us?”

  Cass took the step to close the distance between them and wrapped the woman in her arms. She sighed and whispered, “I will always love you.”

  Annette closed her eyes for a moment imagining this all in a different time and place and hugged her closer for a moment. Cass understood it was a way of saying goodbye to what neither could have.

  “YOU ARE SINFUL, YOU ARE UNCLEAN!” a voice raised in outrage caused them both to jump and pull back abruptly. Standing before them was Father Aames looking outraged at finding the two of them together. “You are IMMORAL, what you do is a SIN!” he raged shaking a fist at them.

  “Father,” Cass began trying to explain but was at a loss of what to say to him and wasn’t even sure that was the proper address. They had barely seen the reclusive religious man since they got there.

  “You must be gone! You are sinful and corrupt, I won’t have you corrupting my children!” he raged, his voice carrying on the wind down the beach.

  “Father, you misunderstand,” Annette tried and she stumbled as she turned to reach out to him.

  “Stay away from me, this is Sodom and Gomorrah!” he thundered and began to run down the beach.

  “Wait, Father, WAIT!” Cass called to him as she started to follow but stopped to help Annette.

  “Go Cass, I’ll catch up, you’ve got to explain,” Annette encouraged her. Her limbs wouldn’t allow her to run, she was still healing.

  Cass looked back only a moment to nod and then ran after Father Aames.

  “STAY AWAY, you heathen, IMMORAL!” he shouted as he ran away from them in genuine terror.

  Cass was gaining on him, she was younger, more physically fit and he was older and running erratically in his madness. He was shouting as he went, mad, incoherent ravings. She saw him at the end of the beach before he ducked into the jungle on a path. Despite the darkness of the jungle, the night, she could see where the whiter sands of the path went through the lush foliage and followed. She nearly stumbled over a body across her path. She stopped and leaned down
to turn him over. A moan escaped him and then a squishing sound, an odd little pop, and then a sigh and silence. Cass wished she had light to see who it was but she suspected it was the Father since his ranting’s had stopped. Her wish was soon granted as a villager came running up the path with a torch.

  “Here,” she called. “Bring that here so we can see…” she tapered off as the light enveloped their area of darkness sending it away and revealing that it was indeed the Father. She could see where he had fallen and what he had fallen on. In the unsteadiness of his haste to get away from them, he had run onto the path which had runners of plants inching out onto it, a root must have caught his foot and he went sprawling only to fall onto another plant sticking up. She could see where it had pierced his abdomen, when she turned him over it must have pulled out of him too near his heart. His breathing had already stopped as the thin wall of his heart pumped out his blood onto the sands. She stared at this in horror as she realized he was dead, quite dead, and there was nothing she could do.

  “What happened?” a familiar Australian accent asked in consternation. She looked up to realize that half the village had been aroused by the Father’s ranting’s as he ran and were now standing on the path and into the jungle vying for a look to see what had happened.

  “He was running from the beach, I tried to stop him, he was upset and he ran here on the path,” she began and then pointed to the roots exposed by the torch. “He must have tripped there, and fell on this here. Look, it punctured him here.” The amount of blood was alarming but it was all over the root. There had been no chance to save him.

  “Is he dead?” another voice asked stupidly.

  Cass looked up at the many faces looking on in concern. She got almost painfully to her feet as she nodded and looked down at the poor old man. “Yes, he’s gone.” It was then that she noticed that Annette had come up behind her and was looking down at the awful sight.

  One of the villagers said something, Cass could tell by its tone that it was a question but she couldn’t understand him. She looked at the many faces looking at the corpse and glancing back up at them and then Annette.

  “Let’s get the poor bloke and wrap him up,” someone said finally and Cass nodded as she stepped back.

  A blanket was found and they wrapped the poor Father in it. The villagers bore it back to the village and put him in his hut. Between sign language and gestures she was given to understand that they would burn it tomorrow when it was light.

  “Are you okay?” Annette quietly asked her as they returned to their hut.

  Cass shrugged. “I don’t know.” They didn’t say another word as each was left to their thoughts.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  The next morning it was Cass who went through the Father’s things to find a next of kin, a relative, a bishop perhaps to inform of the good Father’s death. What she found was surprising. He was not even a Father but merely a religious man who had escaped from going to jail, atoning for his sins by bringing God to the ‘heathens’ as he saw them. He didn’t write in his journal what he had done but apparently it was a crime so heinous that he felt that he must hide, he must atone, and his self-imposed prison on the island was the only way. Cass took the cross from around his neck as she arranged him in peaceful slumber in the hut before they burned it. She took his well-worn bible and some identity papers before they torched the thatch. Villagers stayed close to make sure it didn’t spread to other huts. Everyone stood there wondering what to do until Cass remembered a well-known passage that was read at nearly every funeral she had ever attended and recited it from memory. Several voices chimed in as she began:

  “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

  he leadeth me beside the still waters

  He restoreth my soul:

  he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

  I will fear no evil:

  for thou art with me;

  thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

  thou anointest my head with oil;

  my cup runneth over.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

  and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.”

  Cass and the others watched until the fire died down as the hut and all his ‘worldly’ goods except for what she clutched in her hands was burned. The ashes were allowed to float away on the breeze once they stopped smoldering.

  “I don’t mean to be insensitive about the good Father, but what are we going to do now?” Adam, one of the Aussies asked Cass as Annette stood by watching her.

  Cass turned to him with questions in her eyes not comprehending. She was still holding his bible, his journal which was equally thick, his cross, and his identity papers which she casually stuffed in the bible and then the cross as though a page marker before closing it. His ‘secret’ was safe with her for now. “What do you mean?” she asked numbly.

  “Well, he was the one arranging with one of the islanders to get us off here and all, we haven’t heard anything in quite a while, now what do we do?”

  Cass nodded. She wasn’t sure now that the Father had sent on their information and she didn’t know what to do. “Let me think about it, we can send that boy again, but we will have to figure out how to communicate with him.” She was speaking her thoughts aloud but not really to her audience.

  He nodded and turned away. He could see she was saddened by the loss. What he didn’t know was she was feeling guilty, as though she had caused his death despite his mad ravings. No one had asked why he was running on the beach, at night, and why she was the one that found him. They didn’t ask and she hadn’t told anyone, she hadn’t discussed it with Annette who stood and watched her concerned.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  It took Cass about a week before she felt she could do anything. She had read his entire journal and she felt he was mad. Whatever he had felt he had done, he had ‘expunged’ his sins by preaching to the villagers, learning their language so that he could share his ‘word’ with them. They had respected him; given him a home, but Cass wondered if anything had really been learned. She found the boy that had been sent to the other island. She made gestures and drawings in the sand to make him understand about the radio island and she thought she made him understand that he needed to take her there. He kept tapping the journal she was still carrying as though she should write a note that he would carry. She had seen several torn pages in the journal that must have been used from time to time. She hoped he understood that he was to take her there and not just the note.

  “Are you sure you should be going with him alone?” Annette asked her worriedly as she watched Cass getting ready to leave in the small boat that the boy had procured.

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine, it’s the only way to make sure we are rescued, I don’t know what the Father sent over there to be radioed and I think going in person is the only way to assure that our message is clearly sent.” She looked at Annette and tried to reassure her, they hadn’t really had a chance to talk since…and with the few villagers crowding around and the Aussies who had wanted to send one of their own along they wouldn’t have a chance. The boy refused to take one of the men, they hadn’t treated the villagers well over all and Cass was one of the few who had tried to be pleasant, tried to communicate, to learn, and respected them. The villagers weren’t stupid, they weren’t the ignorant savages that some thought they were. They were simply different. A different culture. A different society. Since Cass had reached out to the boy he had gotten permission to take her to the other island, the air talk island. They had nothing in their culture to compare it to, they didn’t understand it, but they were willing to help because Cass asked politely, she made an effort, and had been equally respectful to them and their ways. One of the
Aussies handed her his rifle at the last minute.

  “You never know what you might encounter out there, use this if you need it, it’s got a full chamber,” Rory said bashfully.

  Cass nodded and got in the boat as the boy waited for her and they were soon paddling off.

  This boat was much smaller than the one that had brought them to the island in the first place. It seemed much more capable of capsizing in the vast ocean with its huge waves and Cass helped out by paddling and the boy not only paddled but steered since he knew the way. She, even with her work developed muscles was tired by the time they arrived at another island. She could vaguely see an antennae peeking up through the jungle but it was well hidden and hard to see with all the foliage. She did see an inlet with a well concealed little boat, something more modern than the canoe type of boat she had ridden in on. There was netting over the top of its hidden sanctuary and a well-worn path leading from the cove into the jungle. They headed up this path and were soon to a hut hidden amongst the foliage.

  “Hello?” Cass called as they approached. She didn’t want surprises and she hoped neither would whoever was manning this station.

  A man immediately came out of the hut astonished to hear English spoken. He was amazed to see a woman there. A white woman walking casually with a gun held in both hands. “Where in the world did you spring from?” an American accent asked her astounded. He couldn’t believe his eyes and then he spotted the boy with her.

  “Pete! What have you got there with you and where did you get her? Do you have another note for me?” he smiled in greeting as the boy, unable to speak English nodded and smiled in return.