The A'Rak by Michael Shea Read Free Book Online

straggly, unprosperous establishments: weathered plank storage sheds in fenced compounds, that rented lockups for the bags and impedimenta of sailors on shore between berths outbound; bottoms yards where small rental craft were docked: skiffs, yawls, wherries, and caiques; those chandlers' shops for the humbler mariner not above buying used cable or casks, elderly hardbiscuit and jerky, or rusty hoists and tackle already gone to sea; and the sort of little grog sheds where the oldest salts loaf and half-mites of beer are poured and each third grog is free.
    My pullers halted at the gate of a bottoms yard. The gate, which opened onto the plankway the rentals were moored to, was locked, and bore the sign:
     
CLUMMOCKS DOCKING AND BOTTUMS
OURLY TO WEEKLY RAITS.
     
    Through the gate we saw, out at the plankway's end, Olombo standing with a very short-statured figure in black, and with a towering obese figure in a tarry tunic, the eponymous Clummock, I guessed. The small black figure—inevitably our widow Pompilla—exhibited intense agitation, even at a distance. As she addressed the bottoms man, her hands ceaselessly worried and twisted a voluminous black handkerchief whose flutterings seemed a very signal flag of distress—and indeed, the liquidity of the black gauze that so profusely shrouded her likewise semaphored with its bulgings and ripplings that she was passionately imploring, or possibly vilifying, the obese, immobile Clummock. I called out and signalled, and called again before Olombo, who seemed bemused, woke to us, and hastened to let us in. Leading us back down the plankway, he murmured, "In a great dither, the widow. Our coffin's there . . . moored on that raft? She won't have it lashed on the 'shaw, though. She says it has to be rafted upriver before we take to the highway. The raft it's on's rented—brought the casket to town on it, seemingly, from the embalmer. Odd she didn't have him 'balmed here in his hometown, no? Anyway she wants this Clummock to let her take the raft farther upstream on credit, seems she's out of coin. Be calm with her now, Lag, she's a moaner and wailer for sure."
    With a smiling salute, I soothed, "Honored Dame! Rest utterly assured, Dear Pom—-"
    "Dear Heavens! Dear Nuncio! Oh Horrors! Oh help ! You must save us, must solve this disastrous impasse, speak to this fellow, make him see how cruel and stiffnecked and obdurate of him it is to stand fast on such trifles ." Sobs clutched her voice. Her face, a vague oval only in the veils, seemed tear-streaked. I shut up and nodded and murmured awhile as she went on thus—she was plainly one of those women who must be allowed to erupt, to explode, an overflowing kind of little woman altogether, even in the superabundant scent of her sachet—nellopilla, lillorish—just those cloying aromatics one associates with a particular breed of over-wrought muddled dame overindulged all her life by a husband who has long stopped listening to her. Our Dame's scent was strong even for her type, faintly dizzying, indeed.
    Patiently I endured her effusion of words and aromatics. When a shortage of funds seemed to be her theme, I gently asked if it was the rest of our stipend she lacked. The question seemed to stun her to softness. "Why no," she breathed in wonderment. "Here's your fee here, Dear Nuncio. Take it at once." The money belt paid us in full. I passed it among my crew and we parted it on the spot.
    A few careful questions more, one or two outbursts, and clarity at last was achieved, and Dame Pompilla, delivered, stood quietly weeping. The stern-paddle raft bearing the deceased's coffin—an imposing great casket of onyxwood, richly carven—had been hired only as far as its return to its moorage here. But the widow was urgently insistent on loading our crew and 'shaw on it and taking us a further ten leagues upriver of Big Quay aboard it, before setting coffin and crew ashore to commence the overland journey of delivery. The gist was that