Of Silver we heard no more . . . but I daresay he met his old negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small.
An earthly paradise then for Silver, complete with its piratical trinity: Flint, Silver, Silver’s island wife.
It was just the sort of place Stevenson would soon set sail for himself. Taking his royalties from Treasure Island, and his tubercular cough, the great writer would leave dour Edinburgh and bleak Britain for good. Sail to the South Seas, to the Gilberts, to Tahiti, and finally to Samoa, where he is buried.
Jim finishes his drink and watches the sky light up across the cove. Stevenson dreamed it all before, Jim thinks. He sent Silver ahead to scout, to reconnoiter, to lead him in.
VIII
Hieroglyph
I have never seen the sea quiet round Treasure Island. The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise.
—Treasure Island
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,
August 1973
Cadillac and Fergus are out in the rowboat, hauling up the tall plywood frame they’ve been constructing on the lawn. They must have towed it from the dock. Jim crutches out the door across to the picnic table to watch.
“Owee.” He hears Cadillac whistle her approval as the structure rises out of the sea. In shape, it’s a simple tripod consisting of three tall, thin legs of plywood, two bound with struts like a ladder, the third angling back to give support. In the Thoroughfare, the racing dinghies risk their positions at the starting line to take a look, luffing and tacking at the mouth of the cove.
Jim lowers himself quickly onto the picnic bench, the sudden rush of blood to the stump sharp and overpowering. He takes off his jacket, thrusts it under his thigh to alleviate the throbbing. Tinny music from a radio on the race committee boat spills across the water. The boat idles off the green gong. On board, the teenage boys will peel off T-shirts to suntan, it being a fairly hot, windless day. If they’ve any sense, they’ll have set an upwind leg to start, counter to the tide, allowing the sailors to drift back.
It must be near the last race of the season. Jim feels the drawing in of winter, the ends of past summers. He imagines his mother bustling about, Frau Leiber overseeing the packing of swimsuits, tennis rackets, summer clothes. Pieter in his blue fisherman’s hat coming to take him for a last adventure. The fearful apprehension of school, the cold drunken stupor of his past winter. The cruel cut of age.
Now Fergus clambers over the gunwales of the rowboat onto the bottom strut of the frame, jumping up and down to dig its legs into the seabed. Whorls of mud rise in the clear water.
“You go first,” the girl directs from the boat. Jim can hear their voices clear across the water. He notices the male fish hawk circling above, casting an eye over this unusual activity in the cove.
“What if it breaks?” Fergus worries. “Then you won’t get a chance.” Ever considerate. The frame shudders under his weight. Cadillac laughs. If it breaks, she evidently thinks that will be worth seeing.
She leans forward to reach for the wet suit in the bow and steps into it. The dull black of the suit slipping over her blacker skin. While Fergus’s chest gleams city-white above knee-length Bermuda swimming trucks.
How unlikely it is that these two should ever have met. It seems to Jim they’ve materialized unsummoned from two distinct parts of his past. He would not have predicted they’d get along so well, almost as if the girl is Fergus’s long-lost sister after all—he remembers his son’s accusation on the phone. His son. Jim can hardly take credit.
Adjusting his hot thigh, Jim realizes all of a sudden what he’s seeing—Tosca’s great New Georgian diving frame. The one they’d never built, resurrected here and now in the Penobscot. He remembers Tosca tracing an outline in the sand, pestering Jim to let him build one. Boasting how he could swim long sky, flip like a fish leaping from the sea.
Christ, the thing would have been a goddamn beacon for the Japs.
Do you regret it? Jim imagines Cadillac asking him this in her direct manner. She’d sit across the table from him, arms up on his books and papers, ask him that with an unabashed directness—if she knew. He looks out at the muddied water.
Not then. That is an answer.
Not even when the navy threatened to court-martial you? Jesus Christ, he’d killed other Japs on Guadalcanal. Why should this man be any different? He was following orders: Kill Japs. The way you killed them, what you did with them after, was it relevant?
But later? Ever? He looks at the girl out in the rowboat.
Maybe. Yes, when he visited Helen in the hospital and felt there was his punishment, his retribution. And again, years later, when the dead man’s words were read aloud to him from the thin rice paper with the hieroglyphic characters. He’d kept the book all these years. He could show it to Cadillac now.
He pulls a cigarette from the crumpled case, watches a blue damselfly alight on the bare skin of his arm, and thinks of another girl who came in and out of his life just as fleetingly as Cadillac. Just as unasked for, unwanted.
Her name was Misako. She was a young Japanese doctoral student who came to the museum to research the tongue structures of the nectar-feeding birds of Hawaii. It was work he’d begun before the war when he and Bryan had been the first to suggest that the honeycreepers, Drepanidinae, be classified by tongues rather than plumage and bill shapes. Their work cut short by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Because, after that, all Jim and Bryan and anyone else cared for was signing up.
At first he’d felt angry. He resented the fact that a Jap was continuing his own work. He was taciturn and unhelpful. It made no difference to him that Misako was a second- or third-generation Japanese Hawaiian and spoke with a gentle West Coast lilt. Any mention of Japan could make him spit. But she’d remained so impeccably polite and quietly determined, bringing in skins for him to look at and pickled tongues, some fleshy, others tubular, some with highly evolved brushlike tips. In the end, he’d done about all he could. He’d helped her craft her dissertation though he never earned a goddamn degree himself.
She was fastidiously neat, handsome, so elegantly dressed you’d never have guessed she was a birder or any kind of naturalist for that matter. Hardworking when most other kids her age were squandering their youth, taking drugs and playing guitar and hanging out on the streets. Fergus too for a while. It could make you want to weep.
He remembers one day bringing in the rice paper book to show her. He didn’t offer how it was he came by it. Even showing that book to a Japanese was a confession. She took it from him in her small, white hands. Her fingernails painted, he remembers, a bright, unusual color, blue as this damselfly.
“Go on,” Cadillac shouts. “Fly off the top.”
At home, her father used straight saplings and tied the wood together with rattan. He could make a diving frame in an hour. When they were small, they’d beg and beg and he’d put them off, claiming he was busy with his birds and other things. He liked to aggravate them with his delays, laughing at their childish impatience, their eagerness, fanning their desire. You can get what you want but not that easily, he seemed to be teaching them.
Then on their way back from school, they’d see the tall structure jutting up far across the water, beckoning them. They’d run up the thatched pier, shedding clothes and school satchels, which had little in them: a single Solomon Islands School jotter, a pencil; both were scarce. Race down to the beach.
From a distance, the diving frame looked like the big A the teacher drew on the board with chalk. Her brothers flinging themselves from the top looked like
dark punctuation marks that had broken loose. A comma, a question mark.
“Jump like a frog,” Cadillac would instruct, happily dangling from the bottom rung, her arms looped over the smooth wooden strut, her legs splashing in the warm blue of the bay. She’d laugh as they bent their arms and legs, stuck their heads forward in midair. “Drop like a coconut.” Her brothers drop, curled up like balls. “Be an exclamation mark!” She liked to test them on things they learned at school.
“Be a knight jousting. Be Queen Elizabeth. Be a Wildcat bomber.” This one they knew. Sailing out over the water with open arms, sputtering and whining like engines, they plunged into the sea.
Misako opened the book carefully, conscientiously, with the quiet respect she gave to everything. She took her time, glancing over the pages. It was another thing he noticed, she was not unnerved by silence. She let it gather in, giving Jim the chance to think himself back—to Tosca and the islands.
Would you like me to read it to you?
Please.
It was then—Jim answers Cadillac’s unasked question—only then that I truly considered the reality of the dead man’s existence, the nature of his character and thoughts.
It seemed to Jim, he was being offered a glimpse of the tangled, wounded landscape of his own mind.
She started somewhere in the middle, translating a description of men retreating through the jungle after a failed attack on Henderson Field. The men carrying litters, the wounded carrying the dying. All of them hungry. And he could see it again before him—the narrow red-earth trails, the thick brush and tangled vines. A lifeless arm dangled from the side of a litter. He smelled the sweat, the viscosity of blood. Ripped flesh, wounds that would soon begin to rot in the heat. The loneliness of dying so far from home. The horror of death in youth.
The Japanese soldier was a lieutenant like himself. Guadalcanal was also his first posting. His battalion had been devastated by General Hyakutaki’s ill-planned attack on Henderson Field, which took place soon after Jim’s arrival. Later, he was routed from the hills around Mount Austin. He survived. Sick, delirious with hunger, the island lost, he’d been evacuated along with hundreds of others from Cape Esperance, only to have the barge sunk by an American PT boat. He wrote of boats circling in the dark, American GIs picking off drowning men in the sea. Whooping like cowboys at a roundup.
He survived that. Pulled out of the water the following night by a Jap destroyer, he’d been taken to Rabaul, where he recovered and awaited his next assignment. His entries became increasingly cynical, pessimistic, and melancholy. Heavy with foreboding and resignation. With the knowledge that things were not going well.
Today No. 3 Company left for Lae in New Guinea. Though weary and with bloodshot eyes, they managed to sing as they marched, saluting the past glories of our splendid Emperors. One of the old gunka songs we learned at the military academy.
I went down to the jetty to smoke. The Captain came. He turned toward me and I lit his cigarette. We knew we would not see these men again.
Jim feels dizzy and light-headed, as if he were looking down, or back over his shoulder at something that had just moved, eluding him. The dead man’s words flit all about him like sunbirds.
He’d kept the book. Even though orders were to hand over any document to Intelligence, for whatever information it might yield on Japanese intentions or morale. It was another transgression. He’d felt protective of it, covetous. As if his Jap might have written something there for him. That only he would understand. The Jap’s words, smooth and pure as sun-bleached bones.
“Go on,” Cadillac urges. A sailor bellows encouragement from a Herreshoff. The frame juts some fifteen feet above the water, it must be that deep underneath.
Jim has never considered Fergus brave, with his wet suit and kayaks, his mild, unfailingly considerate manner. At times, he’s found his son a disappointment. But now, watching the boy scramble up the rickety frame, the struts bending, the whole structure wobbling wildly, he wonders if he’s been impatient and wrongheaded. Whether bravery, freedom, delight might come later, in other forms. Whether there are qualities he’s not only overlooked but has never seen. Quiet ones, like the boy’s kindness and beauty.
Fergus tucks his hair behind his ears. He’s at the top of the frame now and Jim doesn’t think he’s ever seen his boy look so free. He envies him up there, though it makes him giddy. Even from that height, the boy should have a clear view across the island, be able to see Ames’ Knob, its one hill, the water tower, the small collection of houses that make up the town.
Further off, on a clear day like this, he’ll be able to see Stonington, Isle au Haut, and Brimstone. He’ll have a bird’s-eye view of the racing dinghies blowing up the Thoroughfare, their gaff-rigged sails like butterfly wings. He’ll be able to peer right down to the bottom of the cove if the mud’s settled. Or right down into the fish hawk nest.
Jim’s about to shout out, to ask the boy to count the chicks for him—two by Jim’s reckoning—when the whole frame shudders violently and Fergus launches himself into the air. A neat swan dive, arms outstretched—as if he were embracing the sea, the whole world.
He feels the free fall in his own chest. His heart beating so hard, so loud. A sudden pounding in his ears and even more intense pounding in the stump. He blacks out for a moment, losing vision and consciousness. He finds himself clutching the table.
I’m dying, Jim thinks. If not this moment, soon. Either his heart’s going to give or the stump poison him with its infection that’ll spread to the blood. He hadn’t realized how well the thing was before. He lowers his head between his hands to steady himself and clear the dizziness.
“Bravo, bravo,” the sailor hollers through cupped hands. Cadillac shouts her approval too.
And if he doesn’t die—Fergus will take him to the hospital at Rockland where they’ll hack the rest of his leg off. Leaving him worse off than he is now. With an even more grotesque stub. Jesus Christ, he can’t imagine becoming completely dependent on Fergus, or his brother Cecil. Being fully immobile or sick. They wouldn’t relish the prospect either. He’d make their lives a hell.
He can’t imagine anyone loving him that much.
He pulls himself upright just in time to see Cadillac fly off the top. Her body curls to execute two perfect somersaults—just as Tosca boasted.
Hemingway’s wife had it wrong, Jim thinks. That first time, when she stumbled across Papa in the front hall of their house in Ketchum, Idaho. With the breech of the gun open, a note to her propped on the gun rack.
What she might have done was leave him to it. She might have walked past, run if she had to, out into the front garden with its view of the Sawtooth Mountains. It might have been a better thing to do, though maybe impossible.
Jim’s been rereading his old copy of Across the River and into the Trees, and discovered an article tucked in the back flap. Front-page news of the great man’s death by shotgun accident, datelined Ketchum, 1961. He unfolds it on the table before him.
A gun accident by the great hunter himself? Who would believe it? He skims the article, noting how all the facts point to a different conclusion. Hemingway, given his first shotgun at age ten. His experience in three wars: Italy, Spain, then France. The fact that his father had shot himself too, with a Civil War pistol.
Papa had been discharged from the Mayo Clinic just days before his death, after being treated for “hypertension” and kept there for two months. After three months the year before.
Tapping the edge of his cigarette pack, sliding one out, Jim remembers the sad and sordid details that came out after. The times Papa had tried before and been stopped. Interrupted by his wife. Tackled by the local doctor. Held back from pushing himself out of a plane, the private one chartered to take him back to the clinic. Stopped from walking into its propellers when it landed.
And all for what? So they co
uld subject him to their rounds of electric shocks, to the treatments that damaged both his manhood and his memory. The things he relied on to write, and to live. His friends later told of the great author standing all day in front of his typewriter, typing out gibberish, or nothing.
Committing Hemingway to a hospital must have been like caging a wildebeest, a great wounded animal. Jim had seen the sheer inhumanity of it. Jesus Christ, how do you cure hypertension, depression, paranoia, delusion, all things Papa suffered from? Harding’s true psychoneuroses? And was it an inherent weakness, a disease to be driven out by any means, or was it a reasonable enough response to the things men saw?
He folds up the article, slips it back into the book cover. Wheels himself across the room for his gin.
Her last few days, Cadillac comes down to the boathouse bringing wildflowers that grow along the bank of the millpond. Queen Anne’s lace and curling sprigs of wild pea. She arranges them in an empty glass. She cuts colorful feathery cosmos from Sarah’s garden and orange nasturtiums with their lily pad leaves. Not the great sunflowers now towering taller than a man’s shoulder.
“Too gah’geous to cut.” Sarah beams. She says they’re the best she’s ever grown, owing to the unusually hot summer. She’ll wait until they begin to droop, then cut the heads and dry the seeds to eat.
Cadillac brings the finds from her bedroom: her collections of stones, domed sea urchins, orange crab shells, sea glass, the jar of feathers, not knowing where to put them. “Can I leave them in the cupboard here?” she asks. She brings the pandanus mat, laughs because she says she’ll have to get used to sleeping on a bed now. “But you won’t mind if I sleep on the floor when I come back.”
When I come back. She feels badly about going. He can tell because she keeps saying that. She’s looked at the Yale calendar. Thanksgiving’s her first holiday.
Bird Skinner (9780802193636) Page 22
