The Shark God Read Free Page B

competing mission societies. Sometimes the Anglicans squabbled with Presbyterians and Roman Catholics over God’s new kingdom, but eventually deals were cut, islands were traded back and forth, and palm-thatched cathedrals rose on the shores of every major island lying in the 1.5 million square miles of ocean between New Zealand and New Guinea. By the time Henry Montgomery crossed the reef at Nukapu to pay his respects to Patteson’s ghost, a sturdy iron cross had been erected on the scene of the martyr’s last stand. He was assured that the conversion of Patteson’s murderers was a fait accompli. Perhaps that is why he left Melanesia after his three-month tour of the islands—that’s right, his was not the hair-raising adventure I had constructed as a boy. My great-grandfather, above all, was a storyteller. He went home to write, to glorify the names of his mission heroes. And the shark spirits and ancestors who had watched over Melanesians for thousands of years receded in the shadow of the new god, while the old knowledge went fallow in Codrington’s academic jottings.
    Yet something of Melanesia did follow the missionaries home to the northern drizzle. I saw it in my great-grandfather’s portrait, in the way he seemed to gaze through the shadows to some unseen light. I saw it in his writing, which was not the same after his brief tour through the region of magic. He had always insisted that the Apocalypse, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, would be played out in every age. He may once have meant this metaphorically. Not anymore. In Melanesia he concluded that supernatural power was real, and it was usually the devil’s work. Sorcerers’ use of charms to inflict death or disease was a manifestation of the Evil One’s will. He wrote: “I see no cause to disbelieve, in fact, it seems to me reasonable, that Satan, in whose bond they are as heathen, should be able to bestow a hurtful power upon some of them.”
    Henry Montgomery was proud of the rationalist tradition that had influenced his church, yet he sailed back to Tasmania and then home to England a mystic, desperate to see a manifestation of hisown god. He was convinced that something about England’s cold climate made it difficult for his countrymen to commune with the supernatural world. He despaired: “It seems to be a fact that the nearer the home of your race is to the Equator the easier it is for your race to see the unseen: and the further from the Equator the harder it becomes.”
    He would wait years for his own god to appear to him. But after his retirement to the family estate in Donegal, Ireland, after hundreds of communions, thousands of hymns, and a hundred thousand prayers, the vision finally did come. Henry was wandering in his garden above the shivering waters of Lough Foyle, in the half-light before dawn. He was ready.
    First came the ghosts of his ancestors, tramping one by one through the roses. He was not afraid. They spoke to Henry approvingly. They had seen his work and knew it to be good. A mistlike veil settled upon the garden. Daffodils and snowdrops began to stir as though whispering in their own secret language. The ancestors raised their faces and their hands to an unseen spirit, and they urged Henry to follow it into the stone church they had built amid the oaks. He crept to the church door, pushed against its worn grain, and slipped inside. That’s when he felt his Lord looking down on him. He fell to the stone floor and covered his eyes. God asked Henry, just as he had asked Abraham: “Lovest thou me?” Henry did not reply. He could not bring his lips to form words. All he could do was weep with shame and awe, and know that the Lord would accept that as his answer. He awoke with the light of Easter morning, feeling a new vigor for the pilgrim path he had followed to Melanesia and intended to follow all the way to heaven.
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    Tales of visions are like mist