I bit my lip and nodded, unable to think of anything other thanyour girl, Sparta had said. And Nathan hadn’t contradicted him.
“I have a much better idea,” I said softly and pushed past him into the hut. From the dresser, I took the pad for the shopping list and grabbed the pencil from the kitchen table. Why hadn’t I thought of it earlier?
There was something I could do for Sparta, something I had done all the time at home. Something that would make him happy in a completely different way. And I had almost forgotten it.
Nathan carried Sparta effortlessly to the dock while Troy and I retrieved the mattress. We laid him down so that he could face west, and because he had chills from the fever, we covered him with several blankets. I saw his legs, which had a bluish marbling. A harbinger of death as Nathan explained to me when we went to grab the moonshine and the decoction from the old sickbed.
“What exactly is the secret ingredient?” I asked, pointing to the green-brown liquid in the glass bottle. For the last few weeks, Nathan had been saying it was made of birch leaves, snakeroot, lavender, and willow bark, but those things couldn’t produce such extreme effects. And they weren’t that expensive.
To my surprise, Nathan shrugged as if it didn’t matter anymore. “There are three. Coca, belladonna…and poppy. A strong potion.”
“Indeed.” Coca, belladonna, and poppy, no wonder he had hidden it so well.
“This stuff will make his last hours more bearable.”
For a few seconds, we stared at each other, Nathan’s gray eyes clear and open as if he was ready to reveal all the secrets of his soul to me. Even his mouth was soft. “The next few hours will be hard. If you can’t do it without crying, you should stay away for Stanton’s sake. He needs our strength now, not sentimental tears.”
“I’m coming with you. I won’t cry.”
He looked at me for a moment and it was as if a memory flickered between us.You cry quite often, I think, but he nodded. “Good,” was all he said.
Later, we all sat with Sparta and watched the sunset that bathed the distant black treetops of the other island in a fiery red light. Sparta’s states of consciousness changed from clear to absent as if he was quietly exploring the dimension he would travel to. Maybe we were all merely travelers here on a stopoverbetween worlds. I didn’t know. I only knew that my own journey had brought me here because my dad or his company had something to do with all of this. With death and dying. With Sparta personally. But also with every single man sitting here. Sparta held what I had given him earlier like a treasure in his hands as he spoke of Coldville, about his son, Sammy, who had been born standing up, which the natives said was great luck. He spoke about how he had met Grace at a dance, the daughter of a friend of his father who lived in the village over, and how he had married her in the forest chapel in Coldville. How they both had to bury their parents far too early and how they swore to leave Coldville as soon as they had saved enough money.
Nathan would occasionally moisten his lips with moonshine, and now and then, he and Pan would pour the brew into him spoonful by spoonful. Afterward, he smiled blissfully, and when it grew dark and the moon rose, he stopped talking but breathed heavily and irregularly.
It was time for Nathan to tell Sparta a story about his son’s future, just as he had wished.
And he did. I didn’t know where the words came from, he who otherwise hardly spoke a word. I could almost see little Sam in front of me, growing up and fighting with his peers for the prettiest girl in the schoolyard. How later, when he had long since left Coldville, he met this girl again by chance in Montreal, and how he married her on a short trip to the same forest chapel in Coldville to honor his father, whom he had lost far too early. Stanton Foster. And naturally, Samuel looked like his father, with his father’s prominent chin and his dimples when he laughed. Long, wild dreadlocks. And sometimes, during the few dark hours of his life, Samuel thought his father was with him, feeling his love through all time and dimensions.
In his story, Nathan gave Samuel five children, two sons and three daughters. The youngest and bravest, Grace, namedafter her loving grandmother, returned to Coldville decades later. She found Coldville as her great-grandmother had once immortalized it in her diary. A lonely place full of raw beauty. With singing, clinking ice in the cold winters, with colorful night skies over the dark coniferous forests, and summer days in sharp colors. Jade-green lakes, cobalt-blue rivers, and ebony-black firs. The streams and lakes were clear, the fish healthy. It was a new home.
Nathan’s voice became progressively softer as Sparta’s breath grew weaker and weaker. Contrary to my promise, my tears flowed, but Sparta seemed far away. He couldn’t see them and Nathan accepted them silently. I looked up at the sky, which was a robe of midnight-blue organza and silver diamonds. Mom had once owned a dress like that. I had christened it the moon-and-stars dress. She had said it was a beautiful name because it sounded like freedom. Soon, Sparta’s soul would also be released from his sick body and then he too would be free.
The thought was supposed to comfort me, but I only cried harder. I cried because he had to let go of his son and his wife. I cried because I had suspected him and because I realized far too late who he truly was. I cried because this might be Dad’s fault and I had thought about Dad less and less in the last few days. I cried because I knew there was a memory inside me that would hurt me when I found it.
At some point, Nathan wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. “It’ll be over soon. Go if you can’t get through it.” He said it gently and without reproach, but part of me would have seen that as cowardly, as running away from reality and the truth, so I stayed.
The last few minutes were hard to bear. Sparta started choking, unable to breathe. He was spitting up blood. Nathan lifted his upper body to make it easier for him to breathe, and when Sparta started having cramps, he sat behind him, wrappedhis arms around him, and held him tightly. He rocked him gently like a baby and spoke words as solemn and soothing as a prayer. My heart stung with pain and respect.Gott hjarta, Nathan. Pan had been right. Nathan McCormack might be hotheaded, angry, and wild. He might feign cruelty to hide his fear, but he had a pure, good heart, as pure and good as his past allowed.
When it was over, Nathan closed Sparta’s sightless eyes. We remained silent and we remained silent the next day too until the evening when it was time to bury Sparta. Nathan had cleared that with him and now I learned what Sparta had built the raft for. Why he had built it. He had never expected to live much longer. When he boarded the Agamemnon, he had given himself no more than two weeks. He had told Nathan he wanted to be cremated in the Atlantic, his ashes scattering in all directions.
“If he had known then how many weeks he had left, how many precious days, he would probably have stayed in Coldville,” Nathan stated sadly, “although he never wanted to burden Sam and Grace with his final hours. He was tough as nails.” Nathan gathered the branches that they had dried over a fire in a hut and I helped him carry them. “Stan didn’t want a white cross or a grave in the swamp where a vulture turtle might eat him.” He smiled thinly, and Icarus ruffled my hair as if I was the one who needed comforting here, yet they were the ones who had known Sparta much longer.
Even before rigor mortis had set in, they had tied Sparta’s emaciated body to the raft and were now distributing the dried wood and Spanish moss according to a certain system. Shortly before sunset, we took the raft out into the wide basin of the Atchafalaya, pulling Sparta behind us on his final journey. He had no possessions that we could have given him. His few belongings had remained at home or on the Agamemnon, so wehad only placed the pencil drawing I had made for him in his folded hands. A picture of Sam and Grace as he had described them to me.
Now we were far out and a light wind blew over the rippling water like the breath of a ghost. The sun was low on the horizon and a flock of pelicans frolicked among the scattered tree stumps and swamp cypresses. A golden shimmer fell across Sparta’s thin face, making it soft and peaceful.
“It’s time before the wind gets too strong,” Nathan said, letting go of the oars. Icarus, who was sitting in the back, untied the raft from our boat so that it bobbed freely on the fine waves. Swallowing, I watched as Nathan lit the long branch that I had wrapped a shirt sleeve around on land and then soaked in liquor. He deftly leaned over the edge of the boat and threw the burning torch onto the raft before Pan took the oar and paddled the boat out of danger with a few powerful strokes.
Sparta’s dreadlocks caught fire first. There were hissing, crackling sounds, and then a jet-black column of smoke rose into the sky between the blazing flames. Screeching, pelicans burst from the water and flew away, an army filling the air. It was as if they were informing the heavens that a soul was on the way.
“We say something?” Pan asked suddenly, his eyes noticeably glistening.
Nathan stared out across the water as if searching for a sign of Sparta’s soul. “The dead no longer need our words, Kjertan. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” His voice sounded dark and rough. He was silent for a moment and the flare of the orange-red column of fire on the dark basin sent a shiver down my spine. “But if you want to say something, say it. Stan wouldn’t mind, it’s a tradition in Coldville.” Sparks of fire rained down and landed on the lake like black paper.
Pan seemed unsure, but he took a deep breath and said several sentences in Icelandic before translating: “Everythingthat comes, goes back again. Everything good is protected. So is your soul.”
As the raft burned brightly, Pan rowed toward land because the smell of burnt flesh was almost unbearable. From a great distance, we watched as the column of smoke gradually turned white and the flames died down, the raft merely a faint glow in the darkness. It would burn almost completely because Nathan and Pan had treated the wood somehow.
