Dark Benediction

He nodded, remembering vaguely that he’d heard something to that effect—but he’d chalked it up as hallucinatory phenomenon. He walked to the rail and shone his light toward the water. The boat was there—tugging its rope taut from the mooring as the tide swirled about it. The bottom was still fairly dry, indicating that a recent rower had crossed from the island to the mainland.

“Think you can hold onto the rope if I let you down?” he called.

She gave him a quick glance, then picked up the end she had previously touched and tied a loop about her waist. She began crawling toward the rail. Paul fought down a crazy urge to pick her up and carry her; plague be damned. But he had already left himself dangerously open to contagion. Still, he felt the drumming charges of conscience… depart from me, ye accursed, for I was sick and you visited me not…

He turned quickly away, and began knotting the end of the rope about the rail. He reminded himself that any sane person would desert her at once, and swim on to safety. Yet, he could not. In the oversized clothing she looked like a child, hurt and helpless. Paul knew the demanding arrogance that could possess the wounded

help me, you’ve got to help me, you damn merciless bastard!… No, don’t touch me there, damn you! Too many times, he had heard the sick curse the physician, and the injured curse the rescuer. Blind aggression, trying to strike back at pain.

But the girl made no complaint except the involuntary hurt sounds. She asked nothing, and accepted his aid with a wide-eyed gratitude that left him weak. He thought that it would be easier to leave her if she would only beg, or plead, or demand.

“Can you start me swinging a little?” she called as he lowered her toward the water.

Paul’s eyes probed the darkness below, trying to sort the shadows, to make certain which was the boat. He used both hands to feed out the rope, and the light laid on the rail only seemed to blind him. She began swinging herself pendulum-wise somewhere beneath him.

“When I say ‘ready,’ let me go!” she shrilled.

“You’re not going to drop!”

“Have to! Boat’s out further. Got to swing for it. I can’t swim, really.”

“But you’ll hurt your—”

“Ready!”

Paul still clung to the rope. “I’ll let you down into the water and you can hang onto the rope. I’ll dive, and then pull you into the boat.”

“Uh-uh! You’d have to touch me. You don’t want that, do you? Just a second now… one more swing… ready!”

He let the rope go. With a clatter and a thud, she hit the boat. Three sharp cries of pain clawed at him. Then—muffled sobbing.

“Are you all right?”

Sobs. She seemed not to hear him.

“Jeezis!” He sprinted for the brink of the drawbridge and dived out over the deep channel. How far… down… down…. Icy water stung his body with sharp whips, then opened to embrace him. He fought to the surface and swam toward the dark shadow of the boat. The sobbing had subsided. He grasped the prow and hauled himself dripping from the channel. She was lying curled in the bottom of the boat.

“Kid… you all right, kid?”

“Sorry… I’m such a baby,” she gasped, and dragged herself back to the stern.

Paul found a paddle, but no oars. He cast off and began digging water toward the other side, but the tide tugged them relentlessly away from the bridge. He gave it up and paddled toward the distant shore. “You know anything about Galveston?” he called—mostly to reassure himself that she was not approaching him in the darkness with the death-gray hands.

“I used to come here for the summer, I know a little about it.”

Paul urged her to talk while he plowed toward the island. Her name was Willie, and she insisted that it was for Willow, not for Wilhelmina. She came from Dallas, and claimed she was a salesman’s daughter who was done in by a traveling farmer. The farmer, she explained, was just a wandering dermie who had caught her napping by the roadside. He had stroked her arms until she awoke, then had run away, howling with glee.

“That was three weeks ago,” she said. “If I’d had a gun, I’d have dropped him. Of course, I know better now.”

Paul shuddered and paddled on. “Why did you head south?”

“I was coming here.”

“Here? To Galveston?”

“Uh-huh. I heard someone say that a lot of nuns were coming to the island. I thought maybe they’d take me in.”

The moon was high over the lightless city, and the tide had swept the small boat far east from the bridge by the time Paul’s paddle dug into the mud beneath the shallow water. He bounded out and dragged the boat through thin marsh grass onto the shore. Fifty yards away, a ramshackle fishing cottage lay sleeping in the moonlight.

“Stay here, Willie,” he grunted. “I’ll find a couple of boards or something for crutches.”