These stories are his soul.
JACK LIMEKILLER
by Peter S. Beacle
Limekiller? Christ, of course I knew Jack Limekiller — used to come in here all the time. Canadian, right? Canadian. Skinny kid, drank Montejo Dark mostly. Looked older than he was, or anyway you had that feeling about him. Lord God, Jack Limekiller. I haven’t heard that name in. Christ, who remembers? Limekiller. Damn.
He bought a boat. That was it — Limekiller bought some kind of a small boat. Quit his job, picked up his check, shot it all on a boat, with a bit left over to throw a party in here for his friends, the night before he took off. I remember, I couldn’t keep from asking him, “Limekiller, what the hell you want with a boat? You know how to sail?”
“A little,” he says. Then he grins at me. “No, not really. But figure I can learn.”
“Oh right,” I says. “No problem. Where you planning to study at, Captain Limekiller, sir?”
“The Caribbean,” Limekiller says, rolling it out. “Pirate country. Buried treasure country. Duppy country.” He told me what duppies are, and I’ve been trying to forget ever since. “Pm going to plop my boat down in the St. Lawrence, point her south and just keep going until I bump into something. There’s a place called British Hidalgo that sounds about as far from Canada as a Saskatchewan boy can get. Maybe that's what I’ll bump into, British Hidalgo.”
So I says, “Well, good luck, captain,” and we drank to it. I says “Don’t forget to write. I got a nephew that collects stamps.”
Weird thing is, he didn’t forget. I still get a postcard anyway sometimes. Really pretty stamps, too, with birds and fruit and stuff on them. Old Jack Limekiller. Damn. Tell him Pete says hello.
BLOODY MAN
”Yes, Mr. Limekiller,” said old Archbishop Le Beau. Having acknowledged Jack’s self-introduction with politeness, he now returned to his task of scaling fish. Some were still on the block and some were in the basket and some were in the pot. A time there was (and a place) when archbishops moved before a train of state. But not this archbishop, in this time, in this place — to wit, Point Pleasaunce, in the sub-tropical colony of British Hidalgo.
“They tell me… Limekiller hesitated, briefly. Was it My Lord? Your Lordship? Or was it… it was, wasn’t it… Your Grace?
Some saints levitate. Some are telepathic. It was widely said and widely believed that William Constance Christian Le Beau was a saint. ‘Just Archbishop’ will do, Mr. Limekiller,” the old man said, without looking up. Scrip. scrap. scrip. Jack found himself looking covertly around. Perhaps for loaves.
“Ah. thank you, sir. Archbishop. they tell me that I might be able to pick up a charter for my boat. Moving building supplies, I understand. Down to Curasow Cove? For a bungalow you want built?”
Flop went the fish into the basket.
“Something of the sort, Mr. Limekiller. The bungalow is not for me, you know. I already have a bungalow. It is for my brother Poona.”
Jack blinked a bit at this, to him, Bomba-the-Jungle-Boy note. But it was soon cleared up. The retired Anglican Bishop of Poona, in India, had reached an age when he found English winters increasingly difficult. The Mediterranean, where retired British bishops had once been as thick as alewives, had for some long time been in the process of becoming too expensive for anyone who did not happen to own a fleet of oil-tankers. which, somehow, very few retired bishops did. And so this one had — perhaps after fasting, meditation, and prayer, perhaps on the spur of the moment — written to his ecclesiastical associate, the Most Reverend W.C.C. Le Beau, Archbishop emeritus (or whatever) of the Province of Central America and Darien — smallest Province in the Anglican Church — asking for advice.
“And I advised him to consider Curasow Cove. The climate is salubrious, the breeze seldom fails, the water is deep enough to — well, well, I don’t wish to sound like a land agent. Furthermore, English in one form or another is the language of the land. To be sure, Poona speaks Hindi and Gujerathi and a few others of the sort: precious lot of good that would do him in Sicily or Spain.” Scrip. scrop. flop!
It was desired to enable the retired Bishop to move into his new home before very long. (“Just let him get a roof over his head and a floor beneath his feet, and that will give him the chance to see if it serves him well enough for his taste. If it does, he can have his furniture, his Indian things and all the rest of it sent over. If not, well ‘The world is wondrous large, leagues and leagues from marge to marge.’”) Ordinarily, there were enough boats, Lord knows, and enough boatmen, at Point Pleasaunce, that lovely and aptly named little peninsula, to have moved material enough for several bungalows at a time.
But the present season was not an ordinary one.
Every serviceable vessel from the Point, as well as most of those available from other parts of the colony — those not already committed to the seasonal fisheries or to the movement of sand or fruit: and, in fact, so many, even, of those, that both commodities were soon likely to be in short supply — were busy plying between King Town and Plum Tree Creek. There was no road to speak of into the Plum Tree Creek country, one was in the building, but the Canadian-American corporation setting up the turpentine and resin plant at the headwaters of the creek, which thrust so deep into the piney woods that it might better perhaps have been called Pine Tree Creek — the corporation was of no mind to wait. Hence, a constant line of boats, some pure sail, some pure motor, some sail and auxiliary engine, moved along the coast carrying machinery, gasoline, fuel oil, timber, cement, metal-ware, food: and, empty, moved back up the coast for more.
As a non-National, Limekiller stood no chance of a crack at this lucrative commerce as long as any National-owned vessel was available. However, as a citizen of a Commonwealth country — to wit, Canada — he did stand some chance of a permit to take a charter for this other and infinitely smaller project. The greater the interest the archbishop might take in his doing so, the greater his chances of getting it. And well the archbishop knew it.
The kitchen, like every other country kitchen in the Out- Districts (which was any and every district save that of King Town, Urban), consisted of a wall in the yard behind the house in good weather, and underneath the house, in bad. Every house not a trash house stood on high legs to catch the breeze and baffle. or, anyway. slow down. the entry of the less desirable fauna. The archbishop scarcely had to stoop to peer into the cook-pot as he added to the fish some tinned milk, sliced vegetables, country herbs and peppers; though certainly he had once been tall. Whilst it was cooking, the old man without further word retired to the tiny chapel, its doors wide open, where he knelt before the altar. Limekiller did not join him, but others did: old (the very old), lame (the very lame), some partly, some altogether blind, and a few quite small children who, Limekiller thought, may have been orphans. There were an even dozen of them, besides the old priest himself. They were still there when Limekiller returned from a long walk.