Mr Darwin's Shooter (21 page)

MacCracken became aware of Covington standing at the door in the half light. ‘The folk over the way are grieving,' he said. ‘Nought is of comfort to them. They wail and gnash their teeth and throw themselves on the ground.
Look
at me, MacCracken.' The doctor-become-patient turned his eyes sideways at the old sea-dog. ‘You never look at me and see me true.' Then, to MacCracken's amazement, Covington began to undress himself. His clothes rustled with sand. Shedding it from his fingers he stood in his underdrawers brushing his grizzly chest-hairs. ‘The soil is precious insubstantial in this part of the country, being nothin' but grit. Mrs Covington has great success in growing thistles for her milker, that's the best I can say for it.' With a puzzled, irritated manner he slapped at himself more—muttering ‘thistles'—and then peeled off his last item of clothing, his damp, clinging long johns smelling distinctly wet-horsy: until he was revealed stark naked.

The reminder of horse fitted him any way MacCracken chose. His lips articulated themselves around words disdainfully, as if avoiding prickles. His yellowed toenails curled slightly upwards demanding a trimming, and it seemed as he rocked on the balls of his feet they were broad hooves. He was a bruised, scarred, ruptured dombey, this strong-boned, coarse-sinewed man, smoothly round in the
belly with a maze of subcutaneous veins standing out. He brushed his flattened pubic hair and peered downwards, lifting aside a squat, mottled penis. ‘Get out from under there you shallock.'

There was no falseness about him. Nothing about him detracting from his dignity. And yet, it seemed to MacCracken, it was on this point that Covington was in constant battle with himself. Thus he had lain on MacCracken's impromptu dissecting table at the very start—a promising old cadaver with skin the colour of plums—and emanated, even in unconsciousness, a disgruntled questioning purpose. Today his colour was silvery, and he was touched with a faint, rosy finish from his exertions—strawberry roan you might say. ‘Tip him over and straighten him out, wrestle him down till he ceases to kick,' thought MacCracken, mentally lugging him to his dissecting table for another try. Cleave him from head to tail and what would you find? Not the thing that Covington was craving, surely, not the longed-for fullness of soul, not there—only blood and breath of man and beast. For that other part a different sort of examination was called for, with no sharp instruments, lancets, fleam-toothed saws, bandages or lint; but an art of understanding akin to revelation.

What would MacCracken have to be for that?

The question defeated him. Better. That was all. Better and striving.

Mrs Covington entered, giving a quick, exasperated
tsk
, and asked if Covington was ready for his bath.

‘Does it look as if I am?' he preened.

‘I am sure the doctor has seen grander sights.'

Covington stood slapping his chest as his wife busied herself bringing his buckets of water. He made no move to help as she strained and grunted, hauling pails from the kitchen cauldron. Her service was a point he made about their life together. In a while the tub steamed and was
near-full. When the temperature was to his liking Covington dismissed her and lowered himself into the water. MacCracken heard him sigh.

Was MacCracken to lie on the chart table until kingdom come, with a hard pillow under his neck and a light cotton wrap thrown over him? It seemed he was—to stare at plaster rosettes in the ceiling, cultivate his aching jaw and think his own thoughts as Covington played with the soap and cleaned his ears and nasal passages. Water slapped the sides of the tub, and before MacCracken registered that Covington spoke, he was aware that the man had been speaking for a time.

‘… which is how it seems to me. Are you afraid of me, MacCracken?'

No.

‘Respect me?'

Yes.

‘Like me?'

Not sure.

Like? That was a flimsy emotion to have around such a monument.

‘I don't give a damn if you like me, whatever your answer may be. But you have cause to be grateful to me. I fancy to think it is why you accepted my hospitality, for once without cavil,' Covington chuckled, ‘even if I struck you.'

The question Covington didn't ask was whether MacCracken loved him—as he might love a father, say.

Love you? How could I not?

MacCracken had a sensation of warmth and affection riding above every other contradictory feeling and taking him over. Yes, he loved the man plain and simple—mere
liking
was below that peak like a flea on a plain. His own father, an insurance broker, was a sarcastic, disdainful man who undercut his son's achievements lest they highlight the disappointments in his own. Nothing was ever good
enough for that crabby Bostonian, Sandy MacCracken, and on the day of MacCracken's graduation as a physician his Pa spent a good part of the celebration supper winkling from the assembled gowned professors the information that his son had scraped through his examinations on a wing and a prayer—and they had scant hope for him except as a provincial sawbones. So the hard-won scroll and mortar board that MacCracken had scored in the first place as much to please his old man as for any other reason, became just a fresh target of derision. Nothing was ever good enough for the man and so MacCracken gave up the bother.

Covington's bathwater slapped against the sides of the tub and MacCracken drowsed. The opiate suffused him with a kind of wisdom. Down the walls he watched the afternoon light turn pale as clouds raced over. Wind played around the cottage. He made Covington into the one who believed in him and bothered him for his own good, made him the one who passed back understanding of the world like a flaming torch, and placed it into his trembling hands.

Lying on the chart table possessed by hallucination, MacCracken felt himself swallowed and heaved out again by a whale, and it was not an unpleasant experience. A Covington kind of a whale he believed it should be called, all crusted with molluscs and trailing weed, and splashing the sides of its bath. He heard an insistent tapping sound and believed it was the whale's jaws clicking appreciatively and reminding him how lucky he was. There came that humming voice again, and low vowels of Spanish. MacCracken seemed to be swimming for an eternity in deep blue water made of billowing muslin curtains. Then he blinked and saw it was a set of trim fingernails making the tapping sound, and looking up into a pair of sleepy eyes, at lips that were half smiling, half downturned in seriousness, he hoped she was real. Those eyes at the edge of creation. That light drifting across them, a net of stars. Was
she real?
Theodora?
MacCracken's character declared itself and broke from its flimsy framework. He would be strong—just by sighting an aquiline nose, pale freckled cheeks and a floating, encouraging smile. Theodora. He fell in love with her then and forever, and in a surge of resolution decided she would be his wife.

Covington spoke to her in Spanish, and then she was gone.

 

When next MacCracken woke, a wild wind was blowing. It was the southerly buster that rarely touched them, but now moaned around chimney pots and rattled a lonely pane. It slipped under the door and rustled the sand that Covington had spilled on the bare boards. Mrs Covington came in and chased the sand with a broom. ‘What a mournful day we are having,' she said, and backed out of the room having a little pile follow her.

‘What is it to be liked?' Covington stirred himself in his bathwater.

I am liked. It has its moments
, attempted MacCracken.

‘It is a great thing to be liked, next down from love. Or up, depending on the outcome.'

Was Covington asking about himself? About Theodora? If MacCracken fancied her one way or the other? So soon? He rubbed his sore eyes and pressed the tender upper part of his cheeks, where his sinuses were aching. He got the hint that matchmaking was in the air, yet thought it might be his own construction on the matter, or else it was of such a clumsy sort he could scarcely credit the process.

‘That boy was liked, but he drowned. He drowned because he loved our liking.'

At the thought of Charley Pickastick, MacCracken felt his chest thicken. What an easygoing keen-eyed humorous young chipper he was. Involuntarily a sob made its way towards MacCracken's throat and he choked it back,
fearing the pain to his jaw and regretting throwing his skinny watcher a silver coin the first time he ever did, thus starting the urchin's passion for diving from the wharf.

‘If you're thinking he drowned happy you're a fool. It was a life ended, all its days stolen.'

‘I'm a fool,' thought MacCracken sourly. ‘Will I never get it right, even when my thoughts are being read, old bully-boy?'

‘What is it like to have love taken from you? Given so freely, and then taken?' Covington raised himself from the tub, cascading water, and reached for a cloth to dry himself. All his sinews were taut and he twisted himself around as if ready for another dive into the deeps. ‘Do you know that, MacCracken? Can you tell me?' Covington advanced on the temporary bed with the cloth around him like a Roman toga. ‘These questions gnaw. Why do we begin asking them, and when we do, why is it God hides his face?'

Don't stand so close to me dripping grey water, your breath smelling of green waterweed belches, old timer.

‘We are better off as dogs. They live on liking, loyalty, and a few odd bones. They have no knowledge of death, but only their eyes grow sleepy, and they dream.'

Covington eyed the crumpled letter that had fallen to the floor.

‘What is this?'

My dignity, if you please
, objected MacCracken, his voice box making only a muffled squeak.

‘How does it start?' grunted Covington, echoing himself and smoothing out the crumpled pages and eyeing the words greedily.

Don't know. And if you are alluding to Miss Georgina Ferris and her disappointments of me I would ask you to mind your manners, sir
.

‘This letter …'

Yesss?

‘It is most satisfactory …'

You think so?

‘Except it shows you in a flimsy light.'

Indeed.

‘You shall improve on yourself, MacCracken.'

I had the same thought.

‘Otherwise there's no hope for us.'

Us?

Darwin's new book, that was of such importance to the man, and by connection of almost unbearable curiosity to MacCracken, sat on the shelf untouched, wrapped in Evans's waxy brown paper. Covington knew it was there and MacCracken knew that its presence ruled him. Shedding his toga, Covington's eyes swivelled into every corner of the room except the bookshelf. He pulled on trousers, shirt and smoking jacket. ‘Where is my damned cravat?' he bellowed. Mrs Covington scuttled in with a hank of spotted silk steaming from the smoothing iron. Covington allowed her to fuss, to stand on her toes and work at his collar with a stickpin the size of a skewer.

‘There was never such a strong handsome chump as this one,' she opined over her shoulder, making sure her husband couldn't read her lips, ‘so cheerful and bright when I first knew him. Courageous, with the world at his feet. He needs you, doctor, don't let him down.'

Cheerful and bright were words MacCracken had never considered for Covington. They served the way lush and verdant did for a desert.

When the good wife was gone Covington stood rather pompously dandified with his back to the package while he filled his pipe and set up a blaze of tobacco smoke. His eyes looked puffy and tired. The exertions of the morning had done him no good, this man who had gone without sleep more nights than one.

‘There is something I cannot do alone,' Covington declared.

I already had that hint.

‘It concerns the matter of non-creation.'

MacCracken frowned to convey ignorance.

‘
If
it is a fact,' Covington continued.

MacCracken still didn't understand. A tighter frown gathered between his eyes, which he shot at Covington like a bullet.
What in the name of blazes' brightness are you talking about
?

‘Non-creation,' said Covington, ‘is the idea that the Garden of Eden and the Flood of Noah are merely stories men tell each other. That when God said, “Let there be light,” there was no great flash. There never was. Non-creation is the notion that there's been more time on earth than any mortal is able to calculate, and that those who love the Bible are fools. One such a fool stands before you, MacCracken.'

With this, Covington gave MacCracken such a hang-dog pathetic look that MacCracken made a gesture of offering his hand, which Covington, to his astonishment, came and took and squeezed.

You a fool?
MacCracken answered somehow.
But you move me, my friend, almost to tears. No fool could ever do that.

‘There is something you don't know about me,' said Covington querulously. ‘I have been shy to show it to you, lest I seem a relic like a mammoth or the sabre-toothed tiger. I am a natural religious man. I have my
Pilgrim's Progress
by rote, my Genesis, my Psalms, and my Gospels all in order.'

Covington mopped his eyes and blew his nose. He found a chair and took up a position at the edge of the table, where his eyes met MacCracken's at an equal level.

‘You see, I once had a great text that comforted me, and I still have the same text, but it brings me only fear.'

It goes?

‘“The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.”'

Covington let the text hang in the air, then added: ‘I was put to work digging out the unseen, I played my part, and believe me, MacCracken, I was a great worker in the enterprise. Most willing, you might say.'