Limekiller!

Felix (from “Felicia,” happiness), Felix didn’t speak. That is, she didn’t speak words. But a tiny figure moved from who knows where, from the cubby-hole, probably; and uttered a tiny voice. Skippy. The little cat. And she picked it up, and she crooned a sound to it as she cuddled it and bent her head over it. And he realized that it had originally been his cat and comrade alone, that it had shared its master and captain with her; that she could not fail to recall these things herself. Skippy had been a part of him longer than she had. And she held it. And she sang a small wordless song to it.

Off to starboard in the very last light he saw a waterspout, rather like a sketchy impression of a brontosaur with a long twisty neck coming out of the water. Two things were essential to create a spout: for one, you had to have the funnel-shaped vortex of wind; and for another, you had to have the ever-yielding ocean, drowner of men. Neither one could do it alone. Was this a metaphor for his own life down here? Seemingly so calm, his own persona, sometimes calm to the point of indolence, was there nevertheless something latent within him which roused up the elements and elementals of this seemingly placid little nation, itself apparently calm to the point of indolence: so that when the two of them came together, heaven and earth and fire and water were tom apart and reassembled to form shapes unheard of? The, whatever it was, call it the national collective unconscious, may have lain inert until he came upon the scene: a national undersoul awaiting his own catalytic presence? An ambience composed of history, the jungle, the ocean and the night: long subdued. and long awaiting… Was that it? Could that be true? that the explanation? Of course, as an explanation, it was incredible.

But what credible explanation was there?

The seemingly sweet and placid pre-Columbian Indians, touring the antique waters of the not-yet Spanish Main in their long dugout canoes with their long cane bows: arriving on these coral strands to sack and burn, enslave the children and the women, and then eat the men in their great victorious cannibal feasts (cannibal, carribal, caribee, Caribbean). then the Spanish swineherds, pious killers of Moors, suddenly becoming overseas conquista- dores and viceroys, destroyers of enemy. the French fishermen converted into buccaneers. the English merchant adventurers and woodcutters transformed to pirates and warriors. Black folk caught and enslaved by other Black folk and sold like codfish in the African markets to strange White folk who carried them over the seas to till the soil and clear the forests. Red men enslaved by Red men, White men enslaved by White men and sent over the wild wastes of seas for the crimes of having supported King Charles or King Monmouth. Cannibal fires, galleons plundered and burned, stinking sullied slaveships each one leaving at least one burning village behind; and the forge fires which heated the shackles. Colonial wars and slave rebellions, Indians massacring Black folk and White, Whites and Blacks massacring Indians; American spilling American blood because of dynastic wars initiated in Europe. And then the fearful rites of Hurican, Quetzalcoatl, and Setebos, overlaid with Old World witchcraft and with ju-ju and obeah, and wax mommets thrust through with thorns, and the voodoo dolls, and the unclean spirits conjured up and given forms and escaped into the woods, there lying latent until -

— until there came down from the oft-times frozen North the very quick corpus of one John Lutwidge Limekiller, from the wild lands of hungry Wendigo: and the Beothuck and Micmac and Huron, torturing their own captives until themselves dead of musket-balls and brandy rum and small-pox -

Was it that he carried with him a pressure like an aura which none might see but which nevertheless and at once and from time to time in its times and seasons swooped down, turning and twisting and sucking up the sea of superstition to form some (so to speak) waterspout, capable nonetheless of killing and of laying waste? Did he, had he, not alone once, but again and again, turned the latent lewdness of ancient times into psychopomps and psychodramas to be played out again and again in the present?

Was he, although as unwilling as any hunchback with his immovable hunch, a wizard with his own immovable wizardry?

Did he, like some old Italian “thrower of evil eye,” cast infection by his very glance?

It was a fearful summing-up for him to make, and while making it, and speaking it, he stared intently at Felix: and intently she stared back. And, when at the ending of his summation he stumbled into excuses, “I can’t help it, I can’t help any of it, I just —”