The Death-Defying Pepper Roux Read Online Free PDF

down so as to steal the brackets. Sand hissed across the deck. There was nowhere to hide. Even his thoughts could not catch their breath.
    If I say…the darkness shall cover me…. Yea, the darkness is no darkness….
    “Mama! Aunty Mireille!” The half belt came unstitched: The hook, still embedded in its fabric, banged into the back of Pepper’s legs as he ran. “SaintConstance! Father Michel! Mama! Holy Mary!” But maybe the saints and angels locked up house at night and shut their shutters, as Mama had always done. “Roche! Stop! I’m the captain! Don’t!”
    He almost tripped over the partly raised hatch cover: The hold gaped below him like the mouth of Hell, and the smell of Roche was in every breath that he gulped down. Colliding with the foot of the funnel, Pepper began to climb—if he could just get up high!—but feeling for handholds, he soon met only with hot metal, and dropped back down, fully expecting to land in Roche’s arms.
    His fall to the deck knocked the wind out of him. Nothing softened his landing. Nothing. Nothing and no one.
    Looking back the way he had come, Pepper imagined the momentary flicker of an angel’s white, lacy robe. But of Roche there was not a sign. Gasping and reeling, he fled to his cabin and spent the rest of the night on his callused knees, burned palms pressed together, apologizing to everyone in Heaven that he could think of for the sin of being alive.
     
    He supposed the knock at the door was Duchesse bringing his breakfast, but it was the first officer. Pepper (remembering the lost bill of lading) hastily shut the door in his face. What to do? Berceau knocked again, louder and more urgently. Pepper opened the door.
    “Accident on deck, sir,” said Berceau. “Roche has…taken a tumble.”
     
    Apparently, Roche had lost his footing during one of his nightly prowls, skidded on some spilled sand, and fallen twenty feet into the open hold, landing on a length of rusty metal fencing. His face had the agonized, waxy whiteness of the saints in the church at home.
    So this was what a fall looked like: neither quick nor clean.
    Pepper went down on his knees in the cluttered hold. “Don’t worry, Roche. Lie still, Roche. Soon get you out, Roche,” said Captain Pepper Roux.
    Roche opened a red-rimmed mouth, but no words came out. He looked up at the square of sky above them, and seagull shapes drifted across his vacant eyes. The crew had thrown a blanket over him, but a line ofsharp points still stuck up through the cloth, like the bony spine on a mackerel. Rummaging in his jacket pocket, Pepper brought out a prayer, penned in his aunt’s purple ink on lilac notepaper—a prayer to Saint Constance.
    Kindly pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
    Your obedient servant,
Mireille Lepont (Miss)
    It was hard to know where to put it on a naked man, so Pepper tucked it into Roche’s armpit, murmuring an apology.
    For surely the fall had been meant for Pepper? Surely the seagulls had gathered over the site of a death days overdue? The hold had yawned for Pepper but accidentally swallowed Roche.
    The man impaled on the scrap iron turned his eyes on Pepper, reached out a trembling hand, and caught him by the throat. The hand was very cold, and powerless to grip. Taking it in his own, Pepper began to recite the last rites, tugging each icy finger in turn, just as hisaunty had done for him when he was little.
    But before the end, the hand slackened and the eyes turned upward into the skull. Roche had mopped up death like a lump of bread mopping a greasy plate.

THREE
PROTESTER
    T he business of the last rites vastly impressed the crew of L’Ombrage , gathered around the brink of the hold. For the first time, they looked at their Old Man with startled respect. They were even more impressed when Captain Roux proved to know the funeral service by heart…though no one offered to pry Roche off the rusty metalwork, so Pepper had to stop short of the bit about committing