Dying: off Cape Horn (a short end story to: "Father Josephus")

Chapter Eight


Dying: off Cape Horn

Part two of two


So I thought I was dead, really dead, and Anna Mae, she was staring at me a few feet away, I’m not sure how many fathoms we sunk, but it was a an awful lot, then I did a odd thing, I closed my eyes, and all I could see was myself in a coffin. I looked handsome though—you know, all dressed in white. And I was crying because I was dead, and unable to help my two grown children. “No,” the man with the black raincoat said, “there will be no coffin for you, or the lady, not where you are dead.” And all this time I could feel my nose and cheeks and toes and fingers going cold, and yet there was warmness still in my blood. And I looked at Anna Mae, and I said, ‘Don’t she look sweet,’ but I lied, she looked numb and waxy and cold and white. I think her lips said, “Touch me!” But I was a coward. And there we were, just waiting—I think for the man with the black raincoat. And we lied there in the water, somehow balanced, not even jerking away from one another. And now when I looked at Anna Mae, it looked like she had iron gray hair, and she opened her eyes, looked around to see where Herb was, but he never came. Then I said to her—mentally—“He won’t!” Then I thought about being a human man again. And my ears or something made a kind of popping sound, like someone was blowing into a little rubber tube inside my ears, and head, it felt cold. And I told myself, I just want to go to sleep. And there was no longer any pain. And I read her, Anna Mae’s mind again, it said, “I wish Herb would get here, down here and not let me drown.” And I thought: if she’s not dead, she’ll be dead, and if she’s saved, she’ll be in an asylum for brain damage, and perhaps better off dead. I don’t think she was born for this kind of life; she simply had to put up with it because she loved a man who loved the sea. Better for her she were dead now, than endure a hundred more storms and then die alone, at least she has me, company. I think she was swearing now, unprintable words, surely not to be inscribed onto her gravestone. Perhaps this is the instant we come to realize, admit, that there is a logical pattern to everything, where we throw pretense to the side, she seen in my eyes what perhaps I saw in hers, the eyes of the dead tell stories to the dead (for at this time the shocked despair was fading):
I was drowning or had drowned, suffocated—I had been taking in water not oxygen, as I should have been. I must have been unconscious for awhile. I figured, Anna Mae, must have figured, she was a high candidate for such a death, for me, it never occurred I’d die this way. I kind of wished at this point I had been born a whale or seal.
I found some light; I wondered who turned it on. Anna Mae was now off in the distance, by the man with the black raincoat, almost palpable enough to be seen. And she had a small face that appeared to collapse in the sight of the demonic creature with the blurring still chains in his hands, more than an invitation to the secret Dark Promised Land; he horridly grabbed her by the hair and dragged her off. And I was left there to wait. Then someone opened a door, fumbled in the darkness beyond the light, said, as he plunged forward, his head lifted slightly, “You know about the crucifix, do you not?”
“Oh yes, yes, of course I do…” I said, and beyond the door there was a terrific uproar, and then faces—many I had known.


No. 568/ 1-13-2010