A Boat Load of Home Folk Read Free

cabin.
    â€œThe others are going ashore now,” he said. “How about you?”
    Greely glanced up, his eyelids hooded, his eyes vague.
    â€œIf you don’t mind waiting a few minutes,” he said, “I’ll be through with this.”
    â€œMay I help?” Stevenson asked not expecting he might have to.
    Greely was always a surprise. “My shaving gear,” he said solemnly, “and some underpants drying in the galley. And those books.”
    He packed his own crucifix into a leather bag and slipped that into his case while Stevenson gathered up the last few things. They smelled of prayer and old paper and the musk lollies that he sucked endlessly. His lips were moving quietly even now, the teeth clicking against the hard pink sugar.
    â€œAren’t you well?” Greely asked curiously as they went slowly up the steps. Stevenson had stopped for a moment, his hand to his side.
    â€œI’m not sure, really,” Stevenson said. “I get a bit ofpain now and again. I think it’s nerves. Family stuff. You know how it is.”
    Greely didn’t, but made clucking noises as he heaved his body upwards, crawling into the daylight.
    â€œThere,” he said. “Forgive my delaying you.”
    The others had vanished from the deck.
    Looking over the side Stevenson saw their upturned faces like a savage garden swaying in the dinghy. He had missed the orgy of leg and thigh and overbalance and the wild frantic moments when Miss Trumper misjudged and splashed one sandalled foot into the harbour. The native boy was still grinning, but standing politely back holding the tow-rope and swinging it gently. He swung more than rope—it was the half-timid, half-insolent gesture of the black-white relationship. Stevenson recognized it for that and rubbed the boy’s frizzy skull as he passed.
    â€œHold her still now,” he said. “You’ve two big fellers coming.”
    Sky, boat, harbour, passengers rocked. The priest squeezed in beside Miss Paradise and shared the diminutive shade of her peachy frilled parasol. The boy tugged the outboard motor into life and they took to the harbour side at the end of a curve of silver. Looking back at it a variety of symbols lit each mind—crescent, circle, blade, life-source. Some were right. Some wrong.
    The thermometers in all the houses that morning stood at ninety-four point three.

   II

September
    T HE summer Lake came to Port Lena it rained hammers of wet. All the muddy waterfront streets were punched into slush, but it was Maugham country along which he drooled and oozed. Preciously, preciously with the deep chocolate and the milk-coffee slime playing about his consecrated feet. He said Mass in a mixture of pidgin and beach-la-mar and he would ease a gluey finger around his neck and, gazing across water to the horizon where mainland lay, would pray for winter, for the mid-season, one, two degrees behind, but full of the dry, the pouring blue.
    â€œHere, boy. Jimmy, James fella,” he would say grinning his tired fake Yank smile as he came in the mission yard. And up they’d run from the school below the church, the fellers, the brown eager fellers and the shy smaller ones who held back, and he would pat a head or a shoulder and they would grin their great toothy grins and rub the backs of their pink-palmedhands across their broad noses or scratch their fuzzy tops. When he kicked them a ball they’d babble like chooks.
    Ah God, it was good to be loved so. If it weren’t so contrived, he would admit.
    â€œUnkindness—this fella hurt that one fella,” Father Lake would say bending over his smaller parishioners, “is the worst sin of all.” He fidgeted with his cassock that he wore only to the first mass and became aware of the prickly heat creeping under his arms and the terrible itching of his feet as the heat grew more alive.
    â€œBut, father,” asked one of the younger ones