coast and beneath the rising mountains behind us, beneath rich soil and once volcanic rock, men and machines burrowed for wealth.
Figure 4.
7.
Suffice it to say, before the arrival of Death, danger here on The Communion Islands consisted entirely of a knife and a block of volcanic stone on which to blunt it.
Men certainly lost their way, but nothing became of it. Women became ill with half-born children and themselves alike, simultaneously, but they always recovered. Infants fell at the feet of their vibrant island parents, and were simply picked up. Life expectancy—strange concept that!—life expectancy for those who never left The Communion Islands was, simply, Eternity. We were a nation composed almost entirely of brown skinned children, tanned, tempering in the island sun, and permanent.
Consequently, we looked at our local world as abject novices, never old enough to be old. We were constantly beginnings, not more, but determinedly not less. Openings. Alphas. Originals. Island kids in all our unadulterated kiddery. Flowing with new and unfathomable life about which we had little understanding and few concerns. We opened ourselves to everything. Why wouldn’t we? How couldn’t we? Why shouldn’t we?
You could hear our island nascence in our ordinary daily conversations, which rarely dwelt on anything but the unknown. Indeed, today a common opening on The Communion Islands remains:
“Do you know. . . ?”
As in, “Do you know, it might rain today?” addressed to someone (say your dearest friend, or a fisherman) who you might rightly suspect would know this.
More poignantly:
“Do you know, today is a good day?”
Or more tellingly perhaps, on account of these, our origins:
“Do you know what?”
“Do you know when?”
“Do you know why?”
As you can imagine, some visitors have mistaken some idiosyncrasies in our way of speaking for irony, as if the entire population of the Communions is given over to speaking in circumlocution, real meaning hidden in the thick jungle of our belief in opposites, situations presented in determined islander reverse. Other islanders, at the time, even thought of us as cruel and unprincipled. Can you believe? Accusations were frequent that we lived a kind of metaphoric life, devoid of any real feeling, perpetually young and persistently inattentive to the problems of others and of the real world.
Ha! Let me report. A youthful islands, we craved (and had long craved) what we did not yet know.
Figure 5.
1c. By the Chin
And so. . .
The clerk looked at my newly delivered bat-loving passenger: Death, standing in flustered red-hatted dishevelment in front of him. Had I been a small beetle clinging to the slatted wooden wall of what was the only building in The Communion Islands masquerading as an administrative facility (scrape, scrape, scrape, I go, beetling on that Death defying wall) I’d say the two of them were propped on the frames of the two doorways, the outer and the inner, opposite. The boy, taller (but younger and less certain) and Death smaller (but weary from travel and unsure of whom she was about to address, because already Miss Apple had inadvertently failed to introduce the young man to Death, falling instead into a peculiarly satisfied grimace, as if simply observing the two of them in the same room resolved everything that had befallen her that morning).
And then, first placing her black case awkwardly down on the sandy floor, Death began, one ebbing conversational piece at a time, to draw from the young clerk the truth about The Communion Islands. And she did so by questioning him about bats.
“Have you seen any barebacks? No?”
. . .
“Blossoms?”
. . .
“Any giants?”
The young clerk entirely unaware, in return, began to tell the story of the islands, so extraordinary, so unfamiliar, and so unknown to Death that he rekindled in her something of her own barely known past and almost completely lost love of Life. He brought back in Death something she had long been missing or, more accurately, had never found.
At least, that is how we like to tell the story of their meeting.
It might have been, alternatively, that Death merely recognised a job opportunity. All that talk of an island of children and of unchartered living places, it might have been . . . All that stuff about an island of youth, and a history of self-reliance. . . All that young clerk stuff about the abundance of The Communion Islands. . . . It might have been that Death merely recognized an opportunity and, seeing it hanging there in a tree so black and yet so bright, so aware of its surroundings and yet so blind, so ready for flight and yet so surrounded by the walls of its habitat, that Death took out her enormous silver gun and promptly shot it. I know the version of the story that I prefer.
But hey, all this arrives second-hand! I merely report! No one was there but those reported: Death appearing as a bat-loving middle-aged doctor and the clerk a dark boy born in a tiny village in the Cloud Mountains. Raising their voices together, their differences more obvious than their similarities. But getting on, by all reports (though she had been around, to coin an expression, and he hadn’t), as one questioned the other.
Meanwhile, pale Penny Apple, out behind the counter, began to glow so red, with embarrassment we can only assume, that she might well have combusted. The so-called “Waiting Room”, now barely half full on account of it being late. Almost empty, in fact, except for the McOrdles [Mrs and Mr and their four smallest], whose children used to come down with blemishes and broken bones at the turn of each tide; but, of course, always survive.
By the time two tales were half told Death and the young clerk were down at the Shoreline Hotel, drinking together, their voices like the barks of Fur Seals, their differences [sunny headed clerk from Upper Cuth; black pompadoured visitor , Death] thrown to the wind, until eventually they fell into slumber together on the table top, covered over only with the smiling embers of change.
Figure 6. The Human Heart
2a. The Conception, Birth and Life of Death
Shall I insert here a long section here regarding the founding and, later, the growth of The Communion Islands? Sure, I could do that. Isn’t living a lively industry?
We could spend some time talking about the building of buildings, towns and such, and then a formal section about transportation and communication, a glossary of local words with a neat historical index, a clever investigation of agriculture and pesceculture, fishing that is, a typology of island employments from sweeper to builder to butcher and baker, a nod to the arts, with a thumping local dance routine, a rollicking yarn about the power we have generated from the falling waters of streams and rivers. Perhaps for effect show the young clerk weaving himself through the scene, full of his own impending demise.
Dramatically, we could have Death flying around the islands in her shiny black cape, her memory of her own birth floating on her shiny black shoulder like a sprite of forest sunlight, perhaps a medical degree in her pocket from some prestigious school in London or Berlin or fine old Prague, to make that somber connection with her dear old ma whose body was undoubtedly preserved in a dusty glass case in a oak lined room (I make this up, but it can be imagined).
I like that idea, actually. I think if a woman comes to an island and brings about something, anything that would have otherwise not existed, something that her presence invests and inflects and bears boldly onto our island landscape, then she should be lauded for that effort.
Oh,