A shlimazl was clinging to the middle of the three trees.
Are those the books in your britches or are you just glad to see us?
He wasn’t glad to see us.
He grasped the mast like the last autumn leaf in a gale. We had little to offer him.
“Should we brain you and then seize your books?” Moishe looked up at him and asked. “Batter your skull or paunch you with a stake?”
“Cut his wezand with a knife,” I said.
“What’s a wezand?” Moishe asked.
“Sounds like the beginning of a joke,” I said.
Nu:
There was a rabbi, a priest, a shaman.
“What would you like them to say at your funeral?” one of them asks.
The priest says, “His life was a humble offering to the glory of God.”
The shaman says, “He was a hawk and had the strength to eat the eyes of darkness.”
“Both very nice,” the rebbe said.
“And what would you like them to say at yours?” the others asked.
“ ‘Look, he’s moving!’ ” the rebbe said.
The shmegegge up the mast said nothing. Maybe it was a problem with terminology.
“The wezand? It’s a gorgl, a throat,” I said. “Come down or we will slice yours.” Certainly my logic was patchy, however my delivery was impeccable and the man began to descend the timber.
He had no books, but instead a parrot in his pants. Azoy. A huge and colourful Macaw.
Love? Not “by any means necessary”—if the bird had feelings, he wasn’t saying. Apparently the mamzer mariner had entrousered the bird in order to have a little something to nosh on later.
We liberated the bird. He had but little thought or gaze for me but flew without hesitation to shore. Perhaps in later years, during times of reflection, there was a place for me amidst his forest of regrets and missed connections when he remembered the noble and shapely African Grey who saved him from the twilight-hued teeth and dawn-red mouth of the Spaniard.
Me: Brightly coloured Macaw down a Spaniard’s pants.
You: Bedraggled grey me-liberator adrift on the goy-tormented sea.
With one hand Moishe held fast to the mast. With the other, he held a blade up to the sailor who, like most sailors, could not swim, could not escape.
But vo den? What did we expect?
Like sailors in the ocean, we are surrounded by life, yet do we know how to survive it? Azoy.
So now we ask this quivering tsiterdiker cabinboy, “What happened to the books?”
Having dug up the chest and finding it filled with a dreck-sculpted triumvirate of little voodoo big machers, the Spanish had blundered into the maroon’s cave. How?
“We captured a shaman on another island. He read tracks that led to the cave and we found the books under some rocks. We carried them to our ship and began to sail away. But our ship began to sink. Somehow it had become full of holes.
“ ‘All hands below deck,’ our captain ordered. We thought we were to patch the hull and bail out the water, but the captain battened the hatches and locked us in. He shot holes in all the jolly boats except one. Then he took the books and the shaman, got into the jolly boat, and rowed away.
“We tried to staunch the leaks, but it was like trying to plug up a raincloud and the ship began to sink. We broke onto the deck with axes. Many leapt into the ocean and drowned.
“I climbed the mast. I could see the captain and the shaman. And a reed moving strangely across the water. Then a man surfaced near the captain’s gig. He spatchcocked the captain from behind then climbed aboard, took the books, and threw the captain’s body into the sea. Then he had the shaman continue to row.”
Moishe took the sword from the sailor’s gorgl, untied a red sash from around his own waist, and offered it to the rattled tsedreyter mariner.
As if his death would not be colourful enough.
But Moishe would row our coracle and tow the quivering trawl of the sailor behind us.
Where would we sail? Into the “And-then-what-happened.” Azoy. Where was that? The man, the shaman, and the books couldn’t just keep rowing. Sha. Did they think they could just Noah it across the ocean in a pea-green shifl and find eternal life? They must have made for the island. We’d catch them.
Then we’d devise some Crusoe plan to build a boat out of logs, chutzpah, chazerai and tree sap, and be gone.
And live forever.
Shoyn tsayt! It’s about time.
Chapter Eight
We travelled as far up and down as to and fro—for the waves rose and fell as if we were on horseback. Moishe made repeated attempts to rein in our filly, to bring her to sand, but the wind rippled in the long leaves of the palms and pulled us according to its own fickle whim. We went around a point of the island and found ourselves before the opening to a long cove.
“Well blow my briny petseleh with an onion,” Moishe said. “Unless my eyes be lying shysters yabbering duplicitous yarns, there anchored in that cove is the Gopherwood Shmeckel.”