Green Shadows, White Whales

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Some must have read his lips, for no fewer than a half dozen indignant villagers leaped back as if he had leavened the air with brimstone.

“Drink this against the day.” I arrived with the champagne.

“But will it cure at noon?” John drank.

“One hour at a time,” I said. “Where’s the reverend? Oh, there he is. Reverend!”

The reverend came from the hall, smelling of hounds and horses. “I have been out commiserating with them for partaking in this wicked enterprise,” he said, and added quickly, “Oh, not the wedding, for sure. But the hunt. Everyone seems happy. But no one has invited the fox.”

“We asked, but he pleaded business.” John smiled. “Are we ready?”

The Reverend Mr. Hicks grabbed a champagne from a tray as it passed, gulped it, and said, “As we’ll ever be.”

The lords and ladies and liquor merchants gathered, simmering with the good drinks, hiccuping with the bad—a medley of pink coats, celebrating joy; and black, promising unfaithful husbands and mournful wives.

The Reverend Mr. Hicks positioned himself in front of the glare of Tom and the dabbed-at and snuffling nose of Lisa, who peered around as if blind.

“Shouldn’t there be a Bible?” she wondered.

A Bible, the reverend almost cried out, as he searched his empty hands.

Tom scowled but said:

“Yes. While Unitarian, we are Protestants. A Bible!”

The reverend looked around for someone to fill his hands with such a useful tool, which Ricki did in great haste, wondering if it was proper.

Off balance in two ways, the weight of the thing being one, Unitarian practice another, the reverend clenched the book but did not open it, fearing that some lost chapter or verse might leap to disquiet his mind and capsize the ceremony. Placing the Bible like a brick on the lectern, an ignored cornerstone to his peroration, he lit out:

“Have you been living in sin?” he cried.

There was a still moment. I saw the muscles under Tom’s pink riding coat flex and tear themselves in several directions; one to punch, one to pray.

I saw the clear crystal lid come down over one of Tom’s blazing eyes, in profile, shutting out the dear minister.

Lisa’s tongue wandered along her upper lip, seeking a response, and, finding none, slipped back to neutral.

“What was that again?” Tom’s eyes were burning lenses. If they’d been out in the sun, the Reverend Mr. Hicks would long since have gone up in smoke.

“Sin,” said the Reverend Hicks. “Have you been living in it?”

Silence.

Tom said, “As a matter of fact, we have.”

Lisa jabbed his elbow and stared at the floor. There was an outbreak of muffled coughing.

“Oh,” said the Reverend Mr. Hicks. “Well, then.”

What followed was not a ceremony but a sermon and not a sermon but a lecture. Sin was the subject, and the bridal couple the object. Without actual circling and sniffing their hems and cuffs, the reverend managed to make everyone in the room acutely aware of underwear and of ties that choked. He wandered off the subject and then wandered back. It was sin this and sin that, sins of the lovers and future husbands, sins of the put-upon and not always guaranteed brides. Somewhere along in the hour he mislaid the ceremony. Finding it in the corners of his eyes, and in Tom’s concentrated glare, Mr. Hicks hesitated and was about to ricochet back to pure sin, if sin ever was pure, when John shortened the hour.

He let one crutch slip. It slammed the floor with a fine crack and rebounding clatter.

“Tom and Lisa, do you take each other as man and wife!” cried the Reverend Mr. Hicks.

It was over! No one heard the shots or saw wounds or blood. There was a shared gasp from three dozen throats. The reverend slapped his revised Unitarian Bible shut on mostly empty pages, and the locals from the pub and the town villagers, pressed to the windows, leaped back as if caught by lightning, to avoid the direct-current gaze of Tom, and at his elbow the downcast eyes of Lisa, still recirculating her blush. The reverend ran for the champagne. By some accident never to be explained in Ireland, some of the cheap had risen to spoil the best.

“Not that.” The reverend swallowed, grimaced, and gestured his goblet. “The other, for goodness’ sake!”

Only when he had rinsed his mouth and swallowed to improve the hour did color tint his cheek and spark his eyes.

“Man!” he shouted at Tom. “That was work. Refills!”

There was a show of hands waving goblets.

“Gentlemen, ladies!” John reminded them of their manners. “Cake to go with the champagne!”

“John!” Ricki jerked her head. “No!”

But it was too late. All turned to focus their lust on a bridal confection which had waited, gathering dust, for eight days.

Smiling like an executioner, John brandished the knife. Lisa took it as if she had just pulled it from her breast and desired to shove it back in. Instead she turned to bend over the lonely and waiting cake. I crowded near to watch the speckles of dust flurry up from frosting stirred by Lisa’s breath.

She stabbed the cake.

Silent, the cake was obdurate.

It did not cut, it did not slice, and it gave only faint tendencies to flake or chip.

Lisa struck again and a fine powder puffed up on the air. Lisa sneezed and struck again. She managed to dent the target in four places. Then she started the assassination. With a furious red face above and the knife gripped in both hands, she wrought havoc. More powder, more flakes.

“Is the damn cake fresh?” someone said.

“Who said that?” said Tom.

“Not me,” said several people.

“Give me that!” Tom seized the knife from Lisa’s hands. “There!”

This time, shrapnel. The cake cracked under his blows and had to be shoveled onto the plates with a dreadful clatter.

As the plates were handed round, the men in their pink coats and the women in their smart black stared at the broken teeth strewn there, the smile of a once great beauty laid to ruin by time.

Some sniffed, but no aroma or scent arose from the powdered frost and the slain brandy cake beneath. Its life had long since fled.

Which left the good souls with a confectioner’s corpse in one hand and a bad vintage in the other, until someone rediscovered the rare vintages stashed against the wall and the stampede for the saviors’ refreshment began. What had been a moment of statues-in-panic wondering how to be rid of two handfuls of failed appetite became a wonder of imbibation and loosened tongues. All babbled, churning around and about every few minutes for a refulfillment of Mumm’s while Tom, suffering the rejection of a lost salesman, slugged back brandies to relight the fury in his eyes.

John stomped through the crowd, not hearing but laughing at jokes.

“Pour some on my crutches,” he cried, “so I can move!”

Someone did.

It would have been pitiful had it not been ludicrous to see the gentry wandering with platefuls of hard rock-shrapnel cake, picking at it with forks, saying how delicious and demanding more.

On the third go-round the crowd turned brave, abandoned the vitrified cake, and filled their empty glasses with Scotch. Whereupon there was a general exodus toward the yard, with people feverishly seeking places to hide the last of the concrete cake fragments.

The hounds in the yard leaped, barking, and horses reared, and the Reverend Mr. Hicks hurried out ahead with what looked to be a double double in his fist, garrulous and cheerful, waving to what he thought were village Catholics near the hounds and Protestants by the horses. The villagers, stunned, waved back, in pretense of a religion they despaired of to the point of contempt.

“Did he …,” said Tom, behind me.

“Did he what?” Lisa sneezed.

“Did Mr. Hicks … did you hear him say, ‘I pronounce you man and wife’?”

“I think so.”

“What do you mean? Did he or didn’t he?”

“Something like.”

“Something like?” cried Tom. “Reverend …? Toward the end of the ceremony … ”

“Sorry about the living-in-sin bit,” said the reverend.

“Reverend Hicks, did you or did you not say ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’?”

“Ah, yes.” The reverend wrinkled his brow and took another snort. “Easily fixed. I now pronounce you man and wife. Go thou and sin some more.”

“And sin no more!” corrected Tom.

“Ah, yes,” said the Reverend Mr. Hicks, and wove himself into the crowd.

“I rather like that.” Lisa sneezed happily. “Go thou and sin some more. I hope you’ll be back early. I sent someone to dope the fox in hopes of an early night. Are you really going to climb on that silly horse with all those drinks?”

“I have only had six,” said Tom.

“Shit,” said Lisa. “I guessed it at eight. Can you really mount that damn horse drunk?”

“I’m in fighting trim. And I’ve never heard you swear. Why today!”

“The Reverend Hicks, in his sermon, said it was the end of the world. Can I help you up on the funny-looking steed?”

“No, my dear,” Tom said and laughed, because people were listening.

With great dignity he strode to his horse and propelled himself into the saddle. Through gritted teeth he said, “The stirrup cup!”