John Gardner - The King's Indian - Stories and Tales

“ ‘Blind, ye think?’ says Wilkins. ‘You’ll see who’s blind! Tell him when ye see him I was busy to the last. Faithful assistant, manufacturer of tricks. Can a man become one with the universe, undo the separation that makes sinners of us all? Impossible, ye say. Yet, behold, I seem to!’

“ ‘Not shoot!’ Ngugi shouted, and leaped at him, but not fast enough. Wilkins’ face exploded, dark blood in the bandanna, and it was over, the repercussion still booming, deafening, in our ears. The Jerusalem’s tragedy was finished, or just begun. I could suddenly see things far away, like the mind of a tree. Miranda in her cabin sat up in the lingering twilight, knowing, and believing like all of us the thing was her fault — overweening lunatics, all of us — and screamed, and the scream like a lightning bolt slammed down on us and we looked up, chilled. Back in Nantucket the two old men, sly practical jokers, looked startled, went ashen, but the next instant couldn’t remember what it was that had startled them. ‘Yer move,’ said Tobias Cook, though he wasn’t certain of it, and frowned at the old worn checkers as black as midnight and red as blood.

“Wilkins lay bleeding, motionless, above him the ventriloquist’s dummy he’d built, blown faceless, at his shoulder on the bulkhead the crudely carved but ornate memorial of some mortal presumably dead long since, returned to the universe (as Tibet’s book tells), paroled forever from Discipline, word full of hardness: A. G. P. We carried up Wilkins’ body and lowered it away.

XXVII

“There was no breeze. It was the eighteenth day of that eerie calm. The smell of land lay all around us. We waited for change, any kind of change. Even that maelstrom we’d heard about would be better than this endless hovering. As for Flint, we hunted the devil in vain. We dared not hope that he’d discovered some means of abandoning us— preferably Wilkins’ way, and Kaskiwah’s. But we saw no sign of him, and no sign he’d been into the galley biscuits. We were not easy in our minds, for all that. I was certain now that Miranda wasn’t merely asleep in the ordinary sense of asleep. She was listening, and what could she be listening to but Flint? We searched the ship from top to bottom, again and again. Not a trace. We worried on.

“On the eighteenth day of the calm, as I say, black Ngugi and I stood on deck, waiting, listening for wind. The plan was changed now, barring accident. We’d steer for home as soon as the sky remembered us. Icebergs glinted in a circle around us, and the water was full of a strange music, choral, like the singing of sunken angels.

“ ‘Whales,’ Ngugi said.

“His head was tipped. He was listening the way men who love symphonies listen. ‘Mighty singers,’ Ngugi said. ‘No one believes but those who have heard. Have many songs, all with many parts. They sing to live, like the Negro, someday like the white man.’ The ship was ringing like a violin.

“ ‘What are they singing?’

“ ‘Joy,’ he said. ‘Sorrow.’

“I studied him. ‘Then how can you kill them?’

“He touched his lip as if the question had troubled his mind before, then smiled, slightly baffled. ‘How else come hear them? Everything very expensive, this world.’ I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Poe’s Ligeia.

“We listened. Whatever else might be true or merely imagined on this ship of absurdities, it was true that the whales were singing— to each other and to us, or so it seemed. On the other hand, it was also true that there were huge white birds on the yardarms. I could see straight through them. I felt some word tugging at me, deep in my mind, demanding my attention. And then, suddenly, Ngugi touched my shoulder. I smelled it myself the same instant. Fire.

“We flew to the deck but we couldn’t reach Miranda before she’d set the second blaze, candle in tribute to her father’s grand purpose, Death or Absolute Vision among the Vanishing Isles. She was in the same torn rags, her flesh still horribly bruised and swollen. She seemed drugged, or sleepwalking — perhaps drawn to this cruel last trick by some telepathic command from Flint. Ngugi seized her arms and gave a cry of anger and frustration like a child’s as she scratched and bit him. He threw her down on the deck; we heard the thud of bone. The aft sails and mainsail were sheets of yellow flame.

“ ‘Cut ‘em off,’ I shouted. “Save the masts and yards or we’ll never see Nantucket!’ Already they were going up the rigging, slashing at the ties, leaping and swinging from the yards like gibbons, the burning sails sagging, collapsing towards the deck. If the flames reached our cargo of oil and wax we’d last about three seconds. There was no possibility of shouting out orders against the roar of the fire. But they knew. You don’t sit a whole year on a ship full of whale oil and fail to guess what a spark might accomplish. They were there, reaching up with their bare, dark hands, all hatches closed, my lordless crew, and no sooner had the burning sail crashed down than over they went with it, a dozen seamen, down into the ice-cold sea to swim it away from us. So the masts stood bare, dangling rope, and every stay was smoking.

“ ‘Woman!’ said Ngugi, bright tears on his cheeks. Then, to the others: ‘We find more sail.’ They turned instantly to search the ship for something to make sail of, but before they’d gone a step they were stopped by a voice booming, ’Stay where ye be!’ We turned like one man, and there on the poopdeck, where a minute ago there’d been no one at all, stood Luther Flint in all his grim, satanic glory. He looked as he’d looked in his theater days, great gleaming triumphant stovepipe hat and majestic tailcoat, his arms reaching out like an orchestra conductor’s — except that his hair was wild as a rooster’s and as icy white as snow. ‘Get him!’ I shouted, ’get him while there’s time!’ But it was already too late.

“ ‘Cover Upchurch, lads,’ cries old Flint, and behind my left shoulder comes the voice of none other than Swami Havananda, that is, Wilkins, that we’d buried in the sea: ‘He’s covered, sir,’ and he lets out as evil a laugh as was ever yet heard on earth. I couldn’t catch my breath.

“ ‘You with the bone in your nose, put yer hands on yer head,’ Flint tells Ngugi, and Wolff’s voice comes from close to the black harpooner: ‘You heard ’im.’

“My rabble of a crew was staring all around, confounded and shuddering at those voices of deadmen from the empty air. On the deck Miranda was beaming, triumphant and crazy as a loon, as if it was her eyes she’d set on fire. Meanwhile, Flint’s voice is mournfully intoning, ‘Yer sleepy, very sleepy …’ and he’s swinging his eyes from man to man, and it comes to me by heaven he’s out to Mesmerize the pack of us, and it’s working, too: I can see them weakening, slouching a little, tipping their heads like a man that’s beginning to hear the mumble of a dream. He swings his evil eye on me now, and he strains so hard his eyeballs bulge. Beside him on the poopdeck stands my friend the white bird, shaking his head, looking weary and disgusted. It strikes me that Flint looks a little perplexed. He’s overstraining, as if meeting some curious resistance. And at last, of course, it comes to me what his trouble is. He can’t decide which eye to look in!

“ ‘Very sleepy… sleepy…’ says Luther Flint.

“ ‘The devil in hell I am,’ says I. Which is true, it strikes me; I’m wide awake, old wall-eyed John, though I’m the only one left, all the others are standing there like statues with clothes on — including ( it comes to me) Miranda.

“ ‘It ain’t working, Doctor,’ says Wilkins’ ghost.