Three Views of Crystal Water by Katherine Govier Read Free Book Online Page B

the pearling business, though not as his father would have had it. He was known neither for acuity nor gambler’s instinct, or skill at selling. He’d be remembered as the one with the gift of the gab, a man of words, armed with a poem when a dirkin or a kreese might do better. Some thought they could get the better of him because of this tendency, but it rarely happened. John Keats and his fellow poets were good company, better, he judged, than his country folk, the English, with their lordly manner.
    The next day James and his father stayed on shore with the traders. Late in the day there was a commotion as one of the boats came in. He thought at first they’d taken on a log and laid it out on the nets between the divers’ feet. Then he understood that this burden was a man. He could see the black head and arms. It was a diver, his lower body wrapped in a sail. The sail was soaked in blood. The man had lost his leg to a shark.
    The boy saw his face; his eyes were closed, his mouth open, as if he had looked on something of awe and had retreated inward. The leg was with him at the momentalthough James understood it was discarded later. He and it were a strange colour of grey.
    There was an outcry, then, about the shark binder. Right on the spot the military Poo-Bah brought him up to account. The Superintendent was high on his horse. He bellowed and the conjuror ought to have quaked, but he was consummate in his act of defiance.
    ‘A man has been attacked by a shark? Shark binder, it is your task to keep the sharks away. How can you explain the failure of your charms?’
    The man stood firm, if you could call his fantastical gesturing firm, undulating his torso and sniffing the breeze for a message, or an excuse. The whole affair was understood as theatre, amongst the Europeans, and the conjurors, too, but not amongst the divers. They stood wide-eyed with terror, but obdurate. It was in their power to shut down the entire fishery; they need merely refuse to sink. It was a lesson to James. The naked ones, because they risk death, had the power.
    A crowd gathered around these two men. Papa and he moved in to hear. The shark binder defended himself, waving his arms weirdly and impressively and calling out explanations that surely made no sense even to him.
    ‘What does he say, what does he say?’ the English asked.
    ‘He says that a very great witch issued a counterconjuration,’ explained the Superintendent disgustedly from his horse. ‘That was why the shark bit. He says he will prove he is stronger than she is by issuing an even greater charm to bind the sharks for the rest of the season. I suppose I shall have to pay him double.’
    ‘Do you see?’ whispered Papa. ‘He can’t lose, that conjuror. He’s got it covered either way.’
    The conjuror began with further charms, more exaggerated and bizarre contortions, ululations, screechings and mumblings. Finally, his adherents appeared to be satisfied. Only then did the owners begin to unload the oysters. Theylay in heaps to be sold in lots, unopened. When the auction began the bids were fast; each lot went to the highest bidder who then came and hauled away the bags.
    It was on that day, in Ceylon, that James saw one more extraordinary sight. A small girl about his age. Proper, dressed for a garden party in flounces of white all dotted with yellow. Sashed and bonneted like Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet, in all that sand and wind she held, over her small self, casting a useless pale shadow in which she was careful to stay, a red, ruffled umbrella.
    His eye was drawn to the red umbrella. Red spot in the centre, making the whole scene revolve around it. She was the eye of the storm, that’s what she was. She was the heart of the matter.
    ‘Who is that?’ he asked his Papa.
    ‘That?’ his father replied, following his finger. ‘Don’t point!’
    There were thousands of people on the beach. He had to point. ‘The girl with the umbrella,’ he