And the mule-bell tinkling through.
Across from the hotel stood the abattoir and the market building. The very early morning noises were a series of bellows, bleats, squeals, and screams which drowned out cock-crow and were succeeded by the rattle and clatter of vulture claws on the red- painted corrugated iron roofs. Then the high voices of women cheapening meat. But all of these had now died away. Beef and pork and mutton (sheep or goat) could be smelled stewing and roasting now and then as the mild currents of the air alternated the odors of food with those of woodsmoke. He even thought he detected incense; there was the church spire nearby.
But there were certainly no young ladies around, lovely or otherwise.
There had been no very lengthy mule trains for a very long time.
There had been no flotillas of tunnel boats at the Town Wharf for a long time, either, their inboard motors drawn as high-up in “tunnels” within the vessels as possible to avoid the sand and gravel and boulders which made river navigation so difficult on the upper reaches of the Ningoon. No mule trains, no tunnel boats, no very great quantities of chicle, and everything which proceeded to and from the colonial capital of King Town and St. Michael’s going now by truck along the rutted and eroded Frontier Road. No Bay boat could ever, in any event, have gotten higher up the river than the narrows called Bomwell’s Boom; and the Saccharissa (Jno. Limekiller, owner and Master and, usually — save for Skippy the Cat — sole crew) was at the moment Hired Out.
She had been chartered to a pair of twosomes from a Lake Winnipeg boat club, down to enjoy the long hours of sunshine. Jack had been glad enough of the money but the charter had left him at somewhat of a loss: leisure to him had for so long meant to haul his boat up and clean and caulk and paint her: all things in which boatmen delight. Leisure without the boat was something new. Something else.
To pay his currently few debts had not taken long. He had considered getting Porter Portugal to sew a new suit of sails, but old P.P. was not a slot machine; you could not put the price into P.P.’s gifted hands and expect, after a reasonable (or even an unreasonable) period of time, for the sails to pop out. If Port-Port were stone sober he would not work and if dead drunk he could not work. The matter of keeping him supplied with just the right flow of old Hidalgo dark rum to, so to speak, oil the mechanism, was a nice task indeed: many boat owners, National, North American, or otherwise, had started the process with intentions wise and good: but Old Port was a crazy-foxy old Port and all too often had drunk them under the table, downed palm and needle, and vanished with the advance-to-buy-supplies into any one of the several stews which flourished on his trade. (“A debt of honor, me b’y,” he would murmur, red-eyed sober, long days later. “Doesn’t you gots to worry. I just hahs a touch ahv de ague, but soon as I bet-tah. ”)
So that was one reason why John L. Limekiller had eventually decided to forget the new suit of sails for the time being.
Filial piety had prompted him to send a nice long letter home, but a tendency towards muscle spasms caused by holding a pen had prompted him to reduce the n.1.1. to a picture post card. He saw the women at the post office, one long and one short.
“What’s a letter cost, to St. Michael’s?” the Long was asking. “We could, telephone for a reservation,” the Short suggested. Jack was about to tell them, unsolicited, how fat the chance was of anybody in St. Michael’s having a telephone or anything which could be reserved, let alone of understanding what a reservation was — then he took more than a peripheral look at them.
The Long had red hair and was wearing dungarees and a man’s shirt. Not common, ordinary, just-plain-red: copper-red. Worn in loops. Her shirt was blue with a faint white stripe. Her eyes were “the color of the sherry which the guests leave in the glass.” Or don’t, as the case may be. The Short could have had green hair in braids and been covered to her toes in a yashmak for all Jack noticed.
At that moment the clerk had asked him, “What fah you?” — a local, entirely acceptable usage, even commonplace, being higher than “What you want?” and lower than “You does want something?” — and by the time he had sorted out even to his own satisfaction that he wanted postage for a card to Canada and not, say, to send an armadillo by registered mail to Mauritius, and had completed the transaction in haste and looked around, trying to appear casual, they were gone. Clean gone. Where they had been was a bright-eyed little figure in the cleanest rags imaginable, with a sprinkling of white hairs on its brown, nutcracker jaws.
Who even at once declared, ‘“And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three, and the greatest of these is charity,’ you would not deny the Apostle Paul, would you, then, sir?”
“Eh? Uh. no,” said Limekiller. Pretense cast aside, craning and gaping all around: nothing.
“Anything to offer me?” demanded the wee and ancient, with logic inexorable.
So there had gone a dime. And then and there had come the decision to visit St. Michael of the Mountains, said to be so different, so picturesque, hard upon the frontier of “Spanish” Hidalgo, and where (he reminded himself) he had after all never been.
Sometimes being lonely it bothers the way a tiny pebble in the shoe bothers: enough to stop and do something. But if one is very- lonely indeed, then it becomes an accustomed thing. Only now did Limekiller bethink himself how lonely he had been. The boat and the Bay and the beastie-cat had been company enough. The average National boatman had a home ashore. The two men and two women even now aboard the Saccharissa in jammed-together proximity — they had each other. (And even now, considering another definition of the verb to have and the possible permutations of two males and two females made him wiggle like a small boy who has to go —). There was always, to be sure, the Dating Game, played to its logical conclusion, for a fee, at any one of the several hotels in King Town, hard upon the sea. But as for any of the ladies accompanying him anywhere on his boat.
“Whattt? You tink I ahm crazy? Nutting like dot?’’
Boats were gritty with sand to fill the boggy yards and lanes, smelly with fish. Boats had no connotations of romance.
Such brief affairs did something for his prostate gland (“Changing the acid,” the English called it), but nothing whatsoever, he now realized, for his loneliness. Nor did conversation in the boatmen’s bars, lately largely on the theme of, “New tax law, rum go up to 15c a glass, man!”
And so here he was, fifty miles from home, if King Town was “home” — and if the Saccharissa was home. well, who knew? St. Michael of the Mountains still had some faint air of its days as a port-and-caravan city, but that air was now faint indeed. Here the Bayfolk (Black, White, Colored, and Clear) were outnumbered by Turks and ’Paniar’s, and there were hardly any Arawack at all. (There seldom were, anywhere out of the sound and smell of the sea.) There were a lot of old wooden houses, two stories tall, with carved grillwork, lots of flowering plants, lots of hills: perhaps looking up and down the hilly lanes gave the prospects more quaintness and interest, perhaps even beauty, than they might have had, were they as level as the lanes of King Town, Port Cockatoo, Port Caroline, or Lime Walk. And, too, there were the mountains all about, all beautiful. And there was the Ningoon River, flowing round about the town in easy coils, all lovely, too: its name, though Indian in origin, allowing for any number of easy, Spanish-based puns: