father, a good man, all parts of us beneath the surface can feel this. Our veins seem to spread through our skin and out into the cove. They are jellyfish limbs, licking out at all that which is alive and suspended around us.
There is little time left, too little to keep spinning out our futures. Their lantern lights have neared the place where the path splits. They hesitate a moment just before the fork, afraid of Long Kate even now. So I, the second daughter, stand up on my toes and speak our eulogy. Every few words, the sea crests my lower lip and I must pause to spit. Then I return to telling how she was named.
That day it was Benjamin Horn, our father, stretched out on a table of ship’s timbers. The old Manisses woman—Church’s mother to hear him tell it, though we are as much Manisses Indians as he—was fishing with her fingers for the lead ball father had taken just below his ribs the evening before. The pistol shot came from his own father, and it had been the second shot fired, just after our father put a shot of his own in the chest of old Jim Dunn. The last action was father’s when he stuck a marlingspike through the neck of the man who shot him. While James Dunn’s father and our grandfather spent the evening in dying, the townsfolk had tied a bandage around our father’s wound hastily, to stand him just through to see the noose come morning.
But they would need to lay hands on him again. Jim Dunn’s eldest son James had shifted our father from the stockade during the night and brought him to our mother, a girl of twenty who lived with Church’s strange family as an adopted daughter.
She sent Dunn back to the town with a bottle of whiskey that she had steeped with the fly agaric mushroom months before, knowing the wreckers could come for her at any time. Dunn would flee the island in the days to come, but first partook as that bottle was passed around the circle of men steeling themselves to find our father and bring him to justice.
34 | Psychopomp Magazine