The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 46

with a torch. That place drained us of desire. If not for Grandfather, we might have laid in anchor until self-pity finished us. That is a dull sort of exhaustion. One cannot eat, or drink, or think in a reasonable pattern. Perhaps that is why Grandfather could act so effectively. His thinking was not reasonable, part in the present and part in the Sinai, or Palestine, or Babylon, wherever there was a space and time that called forth the prophetic. While we whined about cholera, dysentery, the charnel house that was Port Praia, Grandfather pursued his ministry. He got below, wrapped Goggle-Eye’s body in a blanket, weighted it, prayed loud and long over it, then passed it over the side with a psalm (131 in the Fiddle Bible): “Lord God, my heart is not proud, nor are my eyes haughty. I do not busy myself with great matters or things too marvelous for me. No, I submit myself, I account myself lowly, as this weaned child once clung to its mother. O Israel, look for Lord God now and evermore!”

There was a splash. Grandfather sobbed, stood, turned on us, then exploded in a muscular scolding, “You are alive! Sinners, you live!” He strode from the bow to the cockpit, shouting, “Praise Lord God we have lived while one of his children, one of the meekest among us, has not! If we all die now, we have received infinitely more than that poor dear child ever got! Are you thankless fools? Clear way! All hands to stations! Passengers below! Make ready the lines! Up anchor! And praise Lord God! Praise him!”

I threw myself at the mainmast and hauled lines in a fit. I wanted to hurt myself, anything to make me feel alive, to make me forget that old man’s, that ghost’s, story, to keep myself from seeing what had probably come to me, a true vision, when that old man had said, “Hell was full.” So I worked, shouted orders, helped Wild Drumrul with the anchor. We all scrambled over Angel of Death, feeding on the energy that was Grandfather. We left the harbor in a daze. The sea was up, and we were rocked hard with double-crossing waves. There was a tightening in the electrically charged air; there were deep reports to the west, not gunfire this time, thunderclaps across the sea. We knew we were heading into a storm. We were for it. We had to clear Port Praia. We wanted bad weather to wash off some of that rot. I understand now that I was in some sort of mind-fever—another hint of the shape-changing that would overwhelm me later in life—which I did not come out of until I paused to pull on my foul-weather gear. While I was in the gangway, Cleopatra came up behind me suddenly. Her eyes were red, her face glowed with a beauty and a fear I remember now as her very nature. It was certainly one of the things that made me love her. The truth, Grim Fiddle says, is that she was my graven image. I stopped before her like a pagan. I started to weep, for Goggle-Eye, for Port Praia, for us. It is the first instance I can recall that we shared an intimate thought, even if it was just to acknowledge that we were too young, and that there were things in heaven and earth that we had never imagined. She broke the spell, asking, “Lazarus won’t, can’t. What did you find?”

“I can’t either. I just can’t.”

“It is important, Grim. Tell me what you saw. Who did that? You know. What is it? What’s wrong? Why won’t you tell me?” “What do you want me to do, describe that? Who did it? Don’t ask me, don’t ask me again!” I raised up. I raised my hand. And why? Earle must have been watching us; he was instantly there, stepping between, turning her away, blocking me with the same enormous backside that had given me privacy at conception. A swell took the ship, throwing me to the deck. I rolled over and got topside, remained there daylong, driving myself, taking in the sounds of the building storm and of Grandfather’s fair-equal temper. It was exhilarating, rejuvenating, and up there I regretted my transgression. I was ashamed of how I had acted with Cleopatra, because I understood that when I had made ready to strike her, her imperious demands, it had not been Cleopatra I was striking out to silence, it had been my own prodigy. I had panicked rather than confront what I saw clearly for what it was the moment she forced me to think. I saw that Port Praia had been destroyed by the exiles and refugees who called themselves the fleet of the damned.

The Free Gift of God

ONLY Grandfather’s metaphor is appropriate to the tempest that swallowed us southwest of Port Praia. We sailed into oceanic valleys of the shadow of death. We had the force of several gales over the deck and were picked up and carried along the crest of the waves like a twig; if we had fallen off line just a touch we would have gone over. I recall one moment that overwhelmed me: I was struggling at the wheel to keep us into the wind, when of a sudden I looked up to see what I thought were clear skies to the east. I called to Grandfather and the rest, that we were saved, that the storm was broken. Grandfather catapulted into the cockpit, wiped his eyes clear of caked salt, and looked up to where I pointed. He straightened gracefully, then he raised his arms high and screamed, “A fine laugh, Satan!” I saw my error. What I had thought were white clouds marking a break in the weather was in fact the white crest of a cliffside of water. Angel of Death shot up that wall, dipped hard at the top, then plunged again