Michael, Brother of Jerry | Page 8

you fella boy go to hell close up."
There was a silence.
"You like 'm five stick?" Daughtry insisted of the dark interior.
"Me like 'm," the darkness answered, and through the darkness the
body that owned the voice approached with such strange sounds that
the steward lighted a match to see.
A blear-eyed ancient stood before him, balancing on a single crutch.
His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid membrane, and
what was not yet covered shone red and irritated. His hair was mangy,
standing out in isolated patches of wispy grey. His skin was scarred and
wrinkled and mottled, and in colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a
grey coating that might have been painted there had it not indubitably
grown there and been part and parcel of him.
A blighted leper--was Daughtry's thought as his quick eyes leapt from

hands to feet in quest of missing toe- and finger-joints. But in those
items the ancient was intact, although one leg ceased midway between
knee and thigh.
"My word! What place stop 'm that fella leg?" quoth Daughtry,
pointing to the space which the member would have occupied had it not
been absent.
"Big fella shark-fish, that fella leg stop 'm along him," the ancient
grinned, exposing a horrible aperture of toothlessness for a mouth.
"Me old fella boy too much," the one-legged Methuselah quavered.
"Long time too much no smoke 'm tobacco. Suppose 'm you big fella
white marster give 'm me one fella stick, close up me washee- washee
you that fella steamer."
"Suppose 'm me no give?" the steward impatiently temporized.
For reply, the old man half-turned, and, on his crutch, swinging his
stump of leg in the air, began sidling hippity-hop into the grass hut.
"All right," Daughtry cried hastily. "Me give 'm you smoke 'm quick
fella."
He dipped into a side coat-pocket for the mintage of the Solomons and
stripped off a stick from the handful of pressed sticks. The old man was
transfigured as he reached avidly for the stick and received it. He
uttered little crooning noises, alternating with sharp cries akin to pain,
half-ecstatic, half-petulant, as he drew a black clay pipe from a hole in
his ear-lobe, and into the bowl of it, with trembling fingers, untwisted
and crumbled the cheap leaf of spoiled Virginia crop.
Pressing down the contents of the full bowl with his thumb, he
suddenly plumped upon the ground, the crutch beside him, the one limb
under him so that he had the seeming of a legless torso. From a small
bag of twisted coconut hanging from his neck upon his withered and
sunken chest, he drew out flint and steel and tinder, and, even while the
impatient steward was proffering him a box of matches, struck a spark,

caught it in the tinder, blew it into strength and quantity, and lighted his
pipe from it.
With the first full puff of the smoke he gave over his moans and yelps,
the agitation began to fade out of him, and Daughtry, appreciatively
waiting, saw the trembling go out of his hands, the pendulous
lip-quivering cease, the saliva stop flowing from the corners of his
mouth, and placidity come into the fiery remnants of his eyes.
What the old man visioned in the silence that fell, Daughtry did not try
to guess. He was too occupied with his own vision, and vividly burned
before him the sordid barrenness of a poorhouse ward, where an
ancient, very like what he himself would become, maundered and
gibbered and drooled for a crumb of tobacco for his old clay pipe, and
where, of all horrors, no sip of beer ever obtained, much less six quarts
of it.
And Michael, by the dim glows of the pipe surveying the scene of the
two old men, one squatted in the dark, the other standing, knew naught
of the tragedy of age, and was only aware, and overwhelmingly aware,
of the immense likableness of this two- legged white god, who, with
fingers of magic, through ear-roots and tail-roots and spinal column,
had won to the heart of him.
The clay pipe smoked utterly out, the old black, by aid of the crutch,
with amazing celerity raised himself upstanding on his one leg and
hobbled, with his hippity-hop, to the beach. Daughtry was compelled to
lend his strength to the hauling down from the sand into the water of
the tiny canoe. It was a dug-out, as ancient and dilapidated as its owner,
and, in order to get into it without capsizing, Daughtry wet one leg to
the ankle and the other leg to the knee. The old man contorted himself
aboard, rolling his body across the gunwale so quickly, that, even while
it started to capsize, his weight was