The Pop’s Rhinoceros (21 page)

The singing ended.

Winter loosed its grip slowly that year. He remembered these days—his mother had called them something. Tricky gods used them to lure out the dull-witted to inspect their winter wheat or even turn a little topsoil. Get them out there in the open, get them grinning up at the blue of the sky, mopping at a dribble of sweat somewhere out in the fields, the dark red earth turning pink as it dried. … Then a deluge falls out of the sky. Ha, ha. Rainwater spattered in the mud outside the door. They would leave soon, one way or another. They might have left already, Bernardo’s sharp appetite for inaction notwithstanding. His friend had spent the cold months sitting on his arse, eating, and complaining of what he ate. He had moved a large pile of stones from the north side of the monastery to the south at Brother Hansjürgen’s curt request. That was it. In fact, their continued residency puzzled Salvestro, his own acquiescence in it. These thoughts were like planks and beams sent up from a stricken ship, knocking dully together in the water just below the surface. Unfinished business. Like Ewald, and Ewald’s bloody boat.

“She tends to loll,” Ewald had warned him the week before his ill-fated plunge in the barrel. “Keep the weight amidships.” He had been nervous, fingers drumming on the wood of the stern, though whether this was at his own presence or for the safety of the vessel, Salvestro could not tell. “She is old, but she is sturdy,” he had said. “My grandfather built her when our fields were poisoned with salt.” Salvestro had waited to hear the remainder, but Ewald had been quiet for a minute or more, only tapping his fingers against the strakes, gingerly, as though frightened of awakening a large, irascible animal. “This boat was his revenge on the sea,” he had said at length, and then he had begun to ramble, as though once his mouth was open every memory he held of the vessel before them had chosen this moment to make its escape in a great scramble of complaints and long-nurtured resentments.

His grandfather had built a boat. Alder was light and pliable, easy to work, and plentiful on the mainland. Skiff-steering, punt-poling inland watermen
threading their craft through the bodden and stagnant marshes about Stettin and Wollin, skimming over the swampy shallows of Greifswald, humping their lightly timbered scows over the Frisians’ dikes and dams, all swore by alder. But, from the rainswept safety of his cabbage field, Anselm had seen black-hearted squalls blow up out of nowhere, whip a five-foot swell from the usually placid water, and thrash the cogs west across a heaving sea. The smaller boats always seemed to have disappeared some little time before, but Ewald’s grandfather’s landlocked soul had quailed. He needed adamantine walls to save him from the hurling waves, a bulwark made of mountains to brook the sea’s capricious fury, a palisade to cower behind while the water did its worst. He made his boat from oak.

Clinker-built and stoutly braced, with a sail to run before the wind and oars to row back in, Anselm captained the sturdiest smack on the water. It would take a whirlpool to spin it, a broadside of cannon to break it. It would take two men straining their shoulders from the socket to shift it an inch. Oak, he discovered, was heavy. Ewald, when he eventually inherited the vessel, discovered this, too. Hence his employment of a good-for-nothing ne’er-do-well who would tramp the width of the island each morning to help him launch and handle his seaborne pride and joy, his helpmate and general scapegoat: Ploetz.

With Ploetz aboard, Ewald ventured out for his first season afloat, hallooing and waving to join the fleet and exact his due from the brine. Fishing would be his sweet revenge on these sour waters, this soil-poisoning sea. But, breasting the swell, casting his net, steering his vessel in pursuit of the herring, Ewald soon noted that his boat was bigger than the others, rode lower in the water, rolled more, and despite a sail twice as wide as a man, seemed to have trouble keeping up. When the shoal moved farther out from the shelf, or darted along the coast, the Rügen boats would quickly spin about and scuttle after. If a gale got up, they merely scudded in to a sheltering lee, darting out once more when the wind died down. Ewald’s boat lumbered. It wallowed, and Ewald cursed Ploetz for his scrawny arms and lack of speed. And when a squall did blow up—half dreaded, half hoped for in Brüggeman’s violent secret dreams, a chance at last to pit his vessel against the damnableness of the sea—the Rügen boats simply ran before the wind and were gone, while his own more bravely built craft lurched about in a sea of glue, invariably catching the worst of the rain as they slogged the final league home. They would reach shore drained of strength and up to their knees in water, often too tired to drag their vessel beyond the negligible reach of the tide, which pulled at it, and tugged at it, and sometimes dragged it out to sea. It never seemed to drift far. He named his boat the
Stormhammer
. The Rügen men dubbed it the
Anvil,
but after the first season they did not see it often. Ewald and Ploetz fished alone.

Some ugly aura hovered about the the
Anvil’s
wales, something eerie about this particular death-tub. Oak is too heavy a wood for these fluxey waters, too obdurate for a sea mindful of its icy history. Pitting the strength of its grain against the rare flexings of these waters’ muscle, it is a craft more suited to shore
than sea, a bearer of landlocked dreams. Afloat, and despite Ewald’s tinkerings with ballast and the height of the mast, it wallowed and lurched, getting itself into all kinds of watery trouble.

Contemplating it now, Salvestro reflected that it might be just as troublesome ashore: over the course of the winter the overgenerous heavens had spilled a small and somewhat mad sea into the uncovered vessel, its stillnesses and agitations, freezings, meltings, and refreezings telescoped into a single season. He looked down gloomily at a brimful boatful of rain.

The Boat Sea was muddy brown, with bits of straw floating on its surface. The bowl he had reserved for bailing it out was put to work, and soon the ground about him was swampy with water. He had worked close to an hour, and the Boat Sea’s level had fallen no more than three inches. Several times already he had tried to tip the boat onto its side. He tried again now. No luck. The vessel seemed to be made of lead. His bowl was small and awkward to hold. It was an unhappy afternoon. At least it was not raining.

“Good day, Salvestro.” The voice startled him. He had heard no approach. Standing by the edge where the ground gave out was Brother Gerhardt.

“Brüggeman’s boat,” the monk continued when Salvestro said nothing. He caught sight of the bowl. “You would be better served by a siphon.”

Salvestro nodded, not knowing what a siphon was, shifting uneasily in the mud as Gerhardt moved nearer.

“You are to return it?”

He nodded again, and the monk turned to look out over the sea, which swirled about and slapped at the red earth twenty feet below. He turned back.

“How?”

Over the past few evenings this question had been meditated in the dark of the beet loft: a rope would be needed, a winch mechanism of some sort or a brake, perhaps as simple as a stoutly anchored post with a couple of turns of the rope around it, Bernardo on one end, himself on the other armed with a pole to push himself clear of the drop, for the boat would swing and spin if dangled over the edge like that, would collide with the face, possibly. He thought of himself clinging within, Bernardo letting down slack artfully so that the prow would rear up at the moment of hitting the water. There was the mast to consider, too. It would get in the way. Masts did. And Bernardo would have to be instructed, drilled. … He thought of the launch of the barrel all those months ago.

“I don’t know,” he managed at last, still somewhat tongue-tied at being addressed by this person, the very person about whom his vaguest and most pervasive fears and misgivings had coalesced in the previous months.

They contemplated the boat, then the Boat Sea slopping in its hull, united for a moment in the conundrum.

“Bail her dry. I will have Hanno, Georg, and some others carry her down to the water tomorrow after Nones. Do you know when that is?”

“After midday,” Salvestro hazarded. The monk nodded, then abruptly continued
past Salvestro, past the side of the church, disappearing from view around the corner as Salvestro thought to shout, “Thank you,” which was ignored. He had expected to be accused of something. Perhaps Brother Gerhardt was not so bad after all. Bail her dry. Right. He set to work.

Scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh …

Hanno and Georg. That was good. Gerhardt’s offer meant Bernardo’s services were no longer needed. That was good, too. He would want to come. He would have to be put off. Ewald would not want a great lump like Bernardo splintering his chairs and frightening his children. There had been children, hadn’t there? Now that was a strange thought. Ewald, and Ewald’s children.

Scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh …

For he wanted to see Ewald alone. Why? (Scoop.) Had wanted to since first planting his foot on the island, in fact; just the two of them
(splosh)
like old times, just as he had imagined. Then, the door opening, himself standing there, Ewald clapping him on the back (scoop), come in, come in. … But, as it had actually turned out that first day of his return, it was not Ewald at all but Mathilde who had looked the two of them over—with something like horror.
(Splosh.)
And Ewald, too, come to think of it, appearing in the doorway behind his wife. Horror. And no wonder! No wonder at all, considering the appearance of Bernardo. And so far as Ewald knew, he himself had been dead, drowned years ago. Obviously Ewald would be shocked. Yes, not horror, but surprise. And if he had been a little tight-lipped after that
(scoo
—a fumble, recovered—
ooop)
and puzzlingly absent sometimes, then that was undoubtedly for some similar reason. Shock, yes. He should have thought of that before. That was it. That was it for sure. He did not blame Ewald. He did not blame Ewald for any of it.

“You!”
(Splosh.)
The forgotten bowlful spilled down his front as he was jerked from this reverie, and for a moment it was as if time had twitched and fallen in overlapping folds, for there was the same gray-habited figure, standing in the same spot, shouting at him, “What are you doing here?” But it was not Gerhardt.

“Well?” HansJürgen insisted.

“Emptying the … Tomorrow I am to return Brüggeman’s boat. Brother Gerhardt will help me get her down to the water. …”

“Gerhardt? It was Gerhardt here?”

Salvestro nodded, which seemed to throw HansJürgen into a sudden ill humor, and waving Salvestro aside, he stamped off in the same direction as his enemy.

Scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh,
scoop,
splosh …

When there was no more than three thumbs of evil-smelling water standing in the bottom of the hull, Salvestro was able to tip the boat. He watched the last of the Boat Sea dribble out and add its moisture to the quagmire about him. It was almost dark. Later, it began to rain.

There was a commotion that night, a few shouts being enough in the hush of
the monastery to wake the two of them. Then calmer voices muttering together, two or three of them somewhere outside the beet loft. Salvestro thought he caught the question “How long?” and its answer “Not long. Tomorrow.” A sudden silence followed, as though their own invisible presence had been wordlessly indicated. Footsteps moved away. One of the voices had been Gerhardt’s.

Tomorrow came. Monks were huddled together in little groups in the cloister, darting glances at one another, one occasionally marching to a neighboring group. A few looked up as he stood there, but he was paid no more attention than that. Some of the monks were talking in intent whispers, hands being placed briefly on shoulders. An unfamiliar urgency was in the air. One of the youngsters, Wulf, brushed past him, followed by Wolf, whose sleeve he caught hold of.

“What is happening?” he quizzed the novice.

“The Abbot,” replied Wolf, white-faced.

“He is dying,” added Wilf, red-eyed, bringing up the rear.

The trio hurried off again. At that moment shouts were heard, heads turned upward, and Gerhardt hurried in from the other side of the cloister, accompanied by Hanno, whose face was dark red with rage. In an instant they were engulfed, but no, no, no, the moment was not come, he was waving them off, making little placatory gestures with his hands. Salvestro turned away and walked back to the beet loft.

Midday came and went. Wanting to know what was so obviously in the air, Bernardo had hauled himself upright and gone to find out. “How would they know?” had been his question when Salvestro had told him that the Abbot was about to die, and his companion had struggled to answer. Pulling the dimwit out of Prato, he had offered the wisdom that he would rather die on the island where he was born than at a wool market turned slaughterhouse. Then Bernardo had asked what difference
did
it make? He had a genius for such questions. What difference did it make? Dead was dead was dead. An hour passed, and he had given up the notion that today the boat would be returned, when one of the younger monks whose name he did not know poked his head in the door and told him that Brothers Gerhardt, Hanno, and Georg were all waiting for him and he had better hurry himself up.

“Ready?”

“No.”

“Wait…”

“One, two …”

“Ngggh … No.”

“Right?”

“Down.”

“Uhhh.”

“Oooof.”

“Three!”

From the boat, Salvestro watched the three monks’ retreating backs. He watched the mast wave about above him as the boat slowly settled, then reached for the oars and began to pull into open water. Soon he was fifty yards out, the boat more lumpish even than he remembered. The monastery was a scrape of gray cement and stones, the church a black wound in its center. He turned north-west, dabbing ineffectually with a single oar, the prow obstinate in its inertia.