Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1) (11 page)

“Where’d you get this?”

“Me brother clerked for Gleason’s law offices in Cork. The vernacular rubbed off a bit, ye might say.”

Whatever could Samantha be thinking of? Heart and soul she had been on poor Mr. Butts’s side. And now here she was trying to help out Mr. Sloan. Why couldn’t she keep her overactive mouth in check? She was painting a minister of God in black and whitewashing this callous and greedy schemer.

The broadest, wickedest grin spread across the man’s face. “Good on you! Sam, my dear, you’re a beaut!” He scooped up his raisin bread with marmalade and took a giant bite. “Delicious. You’re a good cook. And a good woman.”

Good. She was good and she was helping him oppose Rev. Vinson, which made the minister bad and the ideals of justice and fair play she shared with him not good.

No, Mr. Sloan, she was not good. Not inside. Fortunate, that the existence of God was in question. She’d never pass muster if He could really see inside her as some claimed.

“When’s dinner?”

“The potatoes will nae be ready for a while yet. I just put them on.”

“Then cut yourself a slab of this. It’s good stuff.”

She did so, and her breastbone tickled just a bit. Samantha Connolly might not be the paragon of goodness others claimed she was. But Mr. Sloan was right in this regard: the not-at-all-good Samantha could bake a good loaf of bread.

Chapter Eight

Coral Reef

“Is that it?” Luke Vinson pointed at a distant green blob on the line between sea and sky.

“Mebbe so.” Burriwi shrugged and grinned with what looked like four dozen huge teeth. Luke often wondered if the aboriginal mouth contained the normal complement of thirty-two. Sometime, when the moment was right, he’d ask one of these people if he could please count his teeth. It probably wouldn’t harm his relationship with them; they all thought he was nineteen and six to the quid anyway. One more crazy request wouldn’t matter.

This was not the moment, however. Their little one-master thunked along from swell to swell, hitting the wind chop exactly wrong for a smooth sail. Keeping one hand draped over the tiller, Burriwi slackened the boom guy the slightest bit and studied the results aloft with a critical eye. He let it out a mite more. The trim looked perfect already to Luke, but then Lucas Vinson, native of Manitoba’s Red River country, was hopelessly a landlubber, painfully at sea when on the sea.

Burriwi’s blue-black potbelly burgeoned up over his loincloth. When he worked for Sloan, Luke noticed, he wore pants, unless it was a difficult tracking job. If his forest skills were the talents needed, he reverted to the forest ways, became at one with the dark and moody jungle. Today his equally prodigious skills as a seaman were on call, and he was as casual, as bright, as lighthearted as the coral sea over which they bounded.

The other sailors on this cruise, introduced to Luke as Burriwi’s nephew and two grandsons, giggled and yabbered like school chums, and indeed this was something of a school outing. What these youths learned today they would one day show their children and perhaps their children’s children—if the race survived that long.

And the race’s survival was number two on Luke’s list of priorities, a very close second place to the gospel itself.

Luke nodded toward the three up front. “Do you ever let the boys sail?”

“Sure.” Somewhere behind the beetling brows, dark eyes twinkled. “Day like today, perfect. Wind’s right, sea’s easy, everything’s apples. Anybody can sail today.
You
can sail today. Me, I’m gonna enjoy this easy sailing. Have a good time. Now rough days, when you’re tacking against the wind and everything’s going rats, that’s when I give them the tiller. They learn how to sail best then y’see, eh? Wouldn’ learn nothing today.”

Luke smiled. “Don’t you suppose they might enjoy this fine sailing once?”

“Let ’em take the boat out then. Today’s mine.” And indeed the man looked consummately content, a sailor attuned to the sea. Luke felt a sudden stab of envy, not at all a Christian attitude. Luke had never felt at ease in a place the way this man so obviously did, not even back home in Manitoba. And Burriwi was equally at comfort in the forest. Could it be that this unlettered aborigine would have fit in just as easily in Manitoba or Princeton or wherever else the Lord’s inscrutable hand happened to drop him? Was his unity with his world a phenomenon of the so-called primitive mind, generalized, or of the man himself?

Social philosophy was pushed to the wings of Luke’s thoughts, for the sea itself had just taken center stage. They were in very shallow water here. The blue sea color had altered itself to a random patchwork of blues, greens and grays. The shining surface ripples prevented a clear view, but Luke could make out a fantasy below of yard-wide coral blobs and ridges.

“Dibbie, which way’s the tide going?” Burriwi called.

One of the youngsters studied the water. “That way.”

Burriwi’s nephew scrambled in beside him. “Naw, that’s the way the wind is rippling the top, Dib. Look under at the way the stuff on the bottom is bending.”

“That way!” Dibbie corrected himself.

“That’s good!” Burriwi chuckled. He glanced at Luke and the smile faded a bit. “You don’ think so, mebbe?”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to stare. It just occurred to me that you and your boys there speak English just as well as any white man. And yet, when you talk to whites and they talk to you, you use that broken English, that blackfeller jibberish. Why?”

Burriwi shrugged. “Whitefellers, they expect it. They use it on me, don’ make me no difference. Makes ’em feel above me better mebbe. Who knows?”

“That doesn’t bother you? That they feel and act so very superior to you?”

The toothy grin burst forth again. “Superior. Tha’s the word I couldn’t think of.” The easygoing grin hardened just a little. “When Mrs. Perkins’ boy, four years old, wandered off, they called me. Getting dark, not much time, no good light no more, and I found him. Gave him back to Mrs. Perkins safe. When the cook wandered off, they call me. I tracked her to the pool. Couple places she coulda gone, but I found where she went.”

“And as I recall, with the rain coming, you had to do that one quickly, too.”

Burriwi nodded. “Eight years ago—longer—a ship got off the way and broke up, couple miles down south here. They call me. Nobody can get out to the reef with a boat, pick off the men hanging there; too much wind, rain. I did it. I got there. Got ’em back safe. Y’see, Lucas? They act superior, sling off at me, talk silly talk. Big-note themselves and mebbe even believe it. But when the land is too much for them. When they can’ make it. Who they call? Who’s the real superior, eh? I know who. If they don’ know, tha’s their problem.”

“Looka da ray!” The smallest boy practically fell in the water with all his gyrations.

A broad, dark, triangular shadow drifted by below the boat. The trailing edges of its five-foot wingspan rippled as it glided along, barely moving.

Luke watched it disappear into the sun-glare. “What does that thing eat, do you know?”

“Preachers.”

Once only a blob on the horizon, the little island lay hard before them now. A narrow white beach defined the line where sea ended and land began. A dozen coconut palms clustered along this nearest shore. Bushes and trees crowned the rest of the tiny drop of land with a thick mound of green. Was this how Eden looked?

Burriwi dumped the sail. They skidded to a halt. “Got the tubs, boys?”

Luke had assumed the three tubs stacked by the mast were sponge tubs; they seemed about the size. They weren’t. As Dibbie whipped one up and over the side, Luke could see a glass bottom in it. Dibbie pressed it into the water as he hung over the gunwale and exclaimed nonstop in two languages.

Burriwi’s nephew brought his uncle a tub and scurried forward again.

Burriwi handed it to Luke. “Try it. Tub, it takes away the sun from the surface, you can see like thin air. You boys, you pull the boat over, you swim home, eh?”

Luke mashed it against the water, tipped it slightly to free a trapped bubble, and gazed. They floated in extreme shallows. Inches below the boat, the coral grew in mounds and blocks. A profusion of other forms studded the coral and the brief snips of sandy floor here and there.

And life. Everywhere, life. No matter where Luke looked, no matter which way he tilted the tub, he saw fish. Silver fish, gaily painted fish, somber fish, tiny darting things. Clumsy looking greenish-blue fish two feet long scraped at coral with thick lips. By sticking his head deep in the tub, Luke could actually hear, however faintly, the gritching sound they made.

He sat erect and looked southward to the horizon. “This is overwhelming. The whole reef is like this, isn’t it?—all the way down to Sydney. And north—all the way up the coast. Fish and coral everywhere, for thousands of miles.”

“Out beyond the island there, same for mebbe an hour’s sail. Another island out beyond. Same that way, that way as far as I ever been.”

Luke hauled in his tub. “Here. Your turn.”

Burriwi shook his head. “You look. I seen it.” The smile came back. “You tell me things I never hear before. Jesus, heaven and hell, sin. Some of the things I know about but called them other names. Everything you tell me you get out of a book. Everything you say I need, you got them out of a book. I ask you a question, you show me the answer in a book.

“This. This is my book. We came here today because I want to show you not everything in the world is in your books. Some of it is in my books. Not everything a man needs is in your books; some is in mine. And I read my books as good as you read yours.”

Luke turned his back on the grandeur of Burriwi’s book in order to think. The thoughts fell into line easily because of the beautiful simplicity of Burriwi’s figure. Phrasing his response was the hard part.

He didn’t get the chance, for Burriwi’s elder grandson spotted a shark below. Luke caught a glance of it—a slim, graceful gray shadow perhaps six feet long, cutting a lazy S-curve. White tips on its fins made it a bit more easily followed, pale smudges gliding deep in the water. As the boys clamored encouragement, Burriwi swung the boom out and caught the wind. Their little boat eased forward, leaned aside, took off in gentle pursuit.

The casual
pas de deux
lasted at most five minutes. Then the final white-tipped gray vestige of their quarry disappeared and they were abreast the south side of the island. With a terse warning about coral cuts, Burriwi nosed the boat onto a patch of sand. Here was a holiday and an adventure, not a theology seminar. Luke abandoned philosophical discussions for the moment and joined the boys as they clambered ashore.

This was not, technically speaking, a shore. It was a reef, coral so near the surface that low tide almost uncovered it. Luke strolled across its jagged flatness with never more than his ankles getting wet.

A score of silver seagulls had just sat down to lunch. They rose and glided away on gleaming wings. They settled a hundred yards off to resume their interrupted dining. A dark, smoky-gray seabird with a white skullcap flew to the far side of the reef.

How Luke wished Burriwi could approach the gospel of Jesus Christ with the same awesome wonder Luke felt upon reading Burriwi’s book. Slim starfish of the most intense blue clung to the shade sides of coral chunks. Dazzling royal blue! An amazing little white clam of some sort had buried itself hinge-down in solid coral rock. It lived in a slotted hole apparently of its own making.

From pictures, Luke identified this nine-inch black, sausage-shaped glob as a sea cucumber. When he picked it up it draped limp in his hands, then exuded a tangle of long white filaments. Before it did that he had no idea what to do with it; now he had even less. Baffled, he laid it carefully in a puddle and continued his exploration.

“Shark! Here’s a shark!” Dibbie stood staring at the coral, fifty feet from the nearest open water. Shark? Impossible. The water was nowhere deeper than eighteen inches on this reef. Luke sloshed and staggered his way to Dibbie’s side.

The nephew crowded in beside him and grinned. “Whitefellers call it a epaulette shark. Jus’ one of the little wobbegongs. Lotsa kinds of wobbegongs. Don’ hurt nobody.”

At first, Luke couldn’t make out anything resembling a shark amid all the blobs and splashes of earth colors. There it was, a skinny, yard-long fish, tan with brown blotches. Rounded outsized fins broke up the shape even more. It lay motionless in a gentle S-curve among the shallow globes of coral. The water was perhaps six to eight inches deep here in its little pocket of safety; its dorsal fins just barely broke the surface. In textbook discussions of cryptic coloration, Luke had never seen an epaulette shark mentioned. It deserved citation as
the
classic example.

Burriwi’s grandsons erupted simultaneously. With lightning speed the shark wiggled and whipped away as the boys leaped forth to catch it. Luke found himself ten years old again and caught up instantly in the heady thrill of the chase.

Why were the boys holding back? They were surely quicker than this, and the nephew just said the thing was harmless. Luke made a wild grab; for a moment only he touched it as it slid out from under his fingertips. A startling sensation it was—cool skin, shiny smooth and yet rough, perhaps like greased sandpaper. The very name shark, this slim fish with the outrageously floppy fins, its presence on this exposed reef and its texture all screamed “unreal!” Nothing in this confusion resembled what Luke would have expected, were he simply reading about it in a book.

The coral mounds and flats rose above the surface here, and the lithe little shark ran out of tidepool water to scurry through. It curled around full circle and came snaking back. Luke dived for it and the world spun out.

Salt water lay in puddles in his lungs. It burned his nose. He coughed, hacking and choking, and didn’t budge the puddles the least bit. Whoever was pounding him on the back finally, blessedly, quit. Cradled in warm gentle hands, his head bobbed. Was the owner of those hands laughing or crying? Laughing. He could see now, however poorly; it was Burriwi’s nephew, with a toothy grin spread across his dark face.