Beautiful Blood

Of an evening, the people of the beach community come to sit on his verandah, singly for the most part, though on occasion a family will stop by, and they will talk of this and that, the weather, the fishing, their hopes for their children, a piece of gossip overhead in town. From time to time they will express their dissatisfaction with the direction of their lives, they complain about their lot and frequently express some need. They could use a new net, a communion dress for their youngest, a spirit level, a larger skiff, a more dependable clock, a cow to replace one that has died. Often, as if by a miracle, they will one morning find a communion dress neatly folded on their doorstep, a skiff bobbing at anchor just offshore, a net draped across the pilings of a rickety pier. Rosacher realizes that these small gifts are but another example of the kindness of monsters. He has no children and he is grateful that he did not have to watch a son grow to manhood, becoming in opposition to his father a person of sedate habits and accomplishments, viewing himself as a decent man, a moral entity, only to awake in the end to his own monstrous nature, his fundamental indifference to others’ pain. The people of the beach have become his surrogate children, children he can keep at a distance and bless whenever the mood strikes. They appear to understand and respect the anonymity of his charity, infringing upon it only during moments of drunkenness during which they demand money or liquor or some other inessential that will do nothing apart from establishing a dependency—to these he does not respond.

Lately he has begun writing in a journal, recording fragmentary conversations, his observations of people and the natural world, bits of description and ironic commentary. A recent entry goes as follows:

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“Two weeks ago, while walking on the beach, I came upon a wooden whistle, one of mine, half-buried in the sand, carelessly tossed aside by a forgetful child. A tiny crab, no bigger than the nail of my little finger, had made its home inside it. Finding this conjunction of the crab and the whistle irresistible, appealing for its incongruity, I carried it home and set it on my verandah railing. The crab must have been terrified. It remained within the whistle for most of the evening, but I managed to entice it forth with a few crumbs of fish from my dinner plate. Having eaten, it scuttled merrily to and fro along the railing, seeming to have gained new confidence in its home, safe now from known predations and the erratic movements of the tides.

“I’ve fed it every night since and it appears to be growing larger. One day soon it will find the whistle too constraining and will emerge for a last time and explore fresh opportunities for food and housing in the wider world, or perhaps it will drift out on the tide, becoming for a brief span a mariner. I imagined it to be an exemplar among crabs, a crustacean genius nurtured by its musical house and taught to seek in all things a grand design, inspired to explore the possibility of land beyond Punta Manabique, to visit places that I, in my frail shell, cannot, sunset countries with beaches of rose and peach, surmounted by indigo cliffs and stars flashing signals from the depths of the universe that promise spectacular realms of light, infinite answers, a moral with which to caption our petty tale…but then my reverie was interrupted by Walker James joining me on the stoop, and the thought of answers and morals evaporated as he chatted about his day, discussing his daughter’s earache, the girth of his prize sow, and the cupidity of a local tavern owner, a man who ‘wouldn’t stand you a drink unless the sun duppy come down and sour his whiskey.’ On an island of storytellers, he was acknowledged one of the best, and that night he told how the tavern owner became infatuated with a Spanish lady from the mainland and the increasingly ludicrous acts he performed in his efforts to win her affections. Thereafter we sat for a while, enjoying the heavy crush of the surf and the palm fronds lashing in a north wind that threatened a storm by morning, the sky beyond Manabique ablaze with a shrapnel of golden fire. Then Walker heard his name called by a woman’s voice from off along the shore. He stood and stretched, working out a crick in his spine, his head thrown back.

“‘Look at all that glory. Richard,’ he said, gesturing at the heavens. ‘Don’t it make it make you a trifle sad sometimes, how we won’t never hear a story to match all this sky and stars?’”