Now that John Adams, one of the four who dragged Bligh from his cabin, stands alone bereft of adult male company, the knowledgeable Polynesian widows remain rooted to their rituals, shouts and laughter of their communally raised children mingling with seabirds’ cries echoing over garden fields they till. They carried the skulls and other bones of their slain lovers until forced by the remaining men to re-inter them. They wear flowers, too, the glittering immensity of ocean sequestering this oddly balanced domestic existence.
Poor Adams’ memory plays tricks. Did crazy Quintal who was dead drunk, then dead, when killed by Ned Young with an axe, mock Mr. Christian from his afterlife? Or did Williams grin from the widows’ waist belts at Young who started their trouble? Had Young’s rotten teeth at last fallen out? Hips sway, clank, clank, this remembered sound unnerving a stranded survivor who thought so many women to himself a godsend at first.
What a life, his old dad, a servant who drowned in the stinking Thames, would have chortled could he have foreseen the lurid action his beached cockney son witnessed, Reckless Jack on the Bounty, now this reluctant patriarch. Balmy weather, time for a bit of skiving – all the time in the world – but worry disturbs barely literate Adams who originally signed on for this saga as Alexander Smith.
When drunk he dreams of a revelatory visitation, an avenging angel who pierces his heart, resurrecting the chest tattoo of Ned Young. The widows share their secrets, but only amongst each other, eating together without him. Hoping to wean them off their heathen rites, recalling Mr. Christian had them recite the prayer of the Prodigal Son, like so many others have done he turns to the Bible, the late Mr. Christian’s found at the bottom of his sea chest. Clink, clink the memory of those hips echoes into a new century of discovery.
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-- Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Across the Margin, BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Griffith Review, Southword, Stand, & The Stony Thursday Book. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.