Oaves

She never thought she would ever find herself holding a priest’s head in her arms, and consoling him.  Not because she was averse to comforting religious folks.  Oh no.  She had taken on sundry priests as patients in her time.  And following those sessions, some had wound up in far worse shape than Geissel was now in.  But her professionalism prevented her from going so far as to embrace the anguished clergy who graced her chaise longue. 

‘Sorry, it’s such a terrible thing,’ lamented Geissel, and he had an odd moment in the middle of all the weeping where he looked up at the sky and condemned God with robustness.  It happened very quickly.  And he asked for forgiveness shortly afterwards and swiftly turned to prayer. 

Stinson was stunned entirely by his superior’s outburst of emotion.  He realised he had grown somewhat breezy about death over his years in priesthood.  Death was: ceremony – ritual and show.  Yes, a wondrous last end it was; and that subsequent ascension was a singular spiritual moment that was probably only matched by that earlier descension through birth.  Nonetheless, as it wasn’t his own time to progress just yet, he acted presently as a kind of facilitator.  That’s all.  Was it not like that for all ministers?  Why was Teddy Geissel so upset?  He also thought it was a terrible thing that they had lost Walter – yes, it was very very sad – but he was not moved to tears.  Was he wrong for not reacting as Father Geissel had?  What was wrong with him?  Maybe it was because he had yet to suffer the woes of loss, since the only ones who could possibly move him to such a feeling were his parents, and they were still so alive and so kicking that he could almost hear them now from afar giving him advice about how to do deal with this conundrum.  His only thought was to analyse the sequence of events logically.  And that led him from Walter’s fall to the depths back to his dive, and back then to Mrs. Juhl being flung from the boat, and then back to the coffin from which she was flung, and to the night before when he and Masterson had peeked inside her place of rest.  ‘Didn’t you close it after?’ he asked the wolf priest.

‘I did.’

‘Not well enough evidently.’

‘Ah, shut up, you gormless oaf.’

‘You’re the oaf.’

‘But not gormless.’

‘What are you two talking about?’ interjected Captain Littlewood; he looked perplexed, and shaken from all the events; the forfeiture of a man was an especially hard fact for him to acknowledge.  Walter had not been his friend.  Not one bit.  In fact, Littlewood had felt mild contempt for the man with his frilly clothes and pedagogical sensibilities.  The only friendly exchange they had had concerned the beer Carlsberg, a conversation in which Walter stated he knew someone in the company back in Copenhagen and that he would repay the Captain with crates and crates of the stuff once their mission was complete.  Littlewood had liked the sound of that even though he walked away thinking the man was full of shit.  Regardless, it was never good to lose a crew member. 

‘Out with it:  what the hell are yous going on about?’ he reiterated.

In a situation such as this, where an event had occurred under numerous noses which may have sparked controversy if revealed, the guilty party, or parties, were likely to take a moment, perhaps to gather their thoughts in order to compose a believable contortion of the truth, hedge their bets if you will.  But our Aidan Stinson was not that kind of person, so he just blurted out without hesitation how he and Masterson had opened Mrs. Juhl’s coffin the night previously thinking there might be gold in there..... ‘But it wasn’t ME.  IT WAS HIM,’ added the angel-faced one.

‘You shite,’ said Masterson.

Littlewood’s face reddened.  There was a rage there none of them had seen in their Captain thus far.  The incident following the red dolphin sighting had shocked him into sobriety, but now the whiskey was back.  Whiskey was sneaky like that.

He got in Masterson’s face.  Glared hawkishly for a bit.  Then, a powerful shove.  Well, powerful it might have been if delivered to anyone else, but Masterson was too big and too tall – a decent half-foot taller than Littlewood – so the priest hardly budged.  Littlewood didn’t stop with that though; to everyone’s surprise, he went on to make the existentially-fraught decision to punch a man of the cloth on the face.  This blow landed, catching the wolf priest on the jaw, yet still it appeared Littlewood hadn’t done any damage.  Any war-trained eyeball would have deemed the assault bog-standard.  Masterson immediately responded with a punch of his own, and this knocked Captain Littlewood to the deck floor. 

A fury rose up in Littlewood, of the sort that only his lovers and lightbulbs in the dead of night had seen; Littlewood himself was the only one who had never seen it, so he could not have ascertained how horribly ignoble it looked. 

After getting to his feet, the Captain whisked the pistol out of his parka and casually aimed it at the wolf priest’s chest.  Nobody realised he had the thing still tucked in there.

‘If you care so much,’ Masterson began.  ‘Why didn’t you jump in after him?’

‘I’ll fuckin’ kill you, Father, I’m tillin’ ya,’ bleated the unravelling Littlewood.

‘Stop, you gormless oaves,’ Katrine muttered to herself.

Outside of Dolores Costello, there had been no sign of life since the emergence of the gray whale; the sea had resumed its impression of death, once again a slick white sheet like ruptured window-glass; it looked almost as though it was lying there expecting another meal, hoping one of them would slip up again and fall into its clutches... but suddenly there was life again.  Movement in the skies overhead.  And the grim vicinage broke.  Geissel quivered, still sobbing heartsick, thinking a new attack was coming. 

‘It’s okay,’ Katrine said.  ‘No danger.’ 

The lifeform that suddenly appeared was neither gray whale nor gryphon.  Merely a brave barn swallow passing high above them that couldn’t give a shit about recent events onboard Dolores Costello; it just flew on past them, ignoring all their ructions. 

The swallow had lately left Ireland and was heading for warmer climes to escape the approaching winter – little interest it had in the affairs of humans with toasty air and bosky gardens waiting on the other side.  But.... it was going in the wrong direction, the poor thing.

Stinson watched the barn swallow soar off into the northern sky and vanish in the newly-formed cloud cover, a small v doodled repeatedly in disappearing ink until there was no more ink; if he had known the migrating bird was making a big mistake, he might have said a prayer for its safe passage and survival – but it didn’t occur to him unfortunately.