Excerpt from my novel FATE.
                               

                                           Captain Zebro Allard-Goodman

                                                     “But let me tell you about Captain Zebro Allard-Goodman. The man was a man of his time … there was no doubt about that ... you will not meet many like him in your own lifetime.”
       Beneath that hardened man-exterior lay the gentler truth of him. Each harbor carried the echo of some past romance. You could say the man mind-adjusted his lifestyle to suit the what-if question. An existence in choice but profound connections that would return to haunt him in old age, not because the man did anything wrong … but because he missed those days that made his life worth living for.
       He lived his fate as he felt was just.
       He bore no regrets and lived with the memories.
       But if only life were so simple.
       Zebro spent his time with hard men who knew nothing of the fine things in life. But the warmth of a woman’s affection stood in sharp contrast to the vast, unforgiving sea that surrounded him and the men he depended on to sail the Irish Lass. His crew exhibited unwavering loyalty and competence for Captain Zebro. He doled out discipline, yes … but never to bring a man down in humiliation, and never the lash. Discipline was handled by the coin. It could hurt more than any lash on the back.
       He paid them on time, and with a bonus when earned. He fed them well. Men could revolt because of food. Hunger, he believed, should not be allowed to grow when it could be prevented. And he gave the lascars fair treatment. Their word counted for something aboard the Irish Lass. If a lascar knew the sea better than the captain, Zebro listened. If one knew the rigging, the wind, or the temperament of a ship, he listened to that too. A man did not lose his knowledge because of the color of his skin. And Zebro was not too proud to learn from a man he commanded.
Yet … what he truly desired was not found among the companionship of men, but rather in the intoxicating presence of women. He would charade about the scent of a woman ... as though the very air had become something worth remembering. He found deeper joy in their company ... in conversation, in shared laughter, in the intimate stillness that grows between two like-minded souls when a soul is troubled. It was not preference alone, but temperament.
       He admired their perception, their emotional intelligence, the richness of their presence in balancing his man-energy. His attachments were sincere, but never careless, and always respectful, but they had their place in his life. And it was all because of his French mother, her genteel nature and how she carried herself as a woman … it was as if he was still looking for his mother. There is another name for that thing-a-ma-jig, but you don’t need me to tell you that.
       Among friends, he was known for his enjoyment of life, fine wine, fine food, fine women and nothing to excess so he wouldn’t get tired of fine living. But it was partly his own conscience that was in play because of the three fingers on his left hand. No thumb, no small finger. It looked, for the want of a better description, like an eagle’s talon. He was born that way. His mother called them the Three Wise Men. But when Zebro was much younger, his father also called them the three little piggies, and would tease him in play … savage Irish humor that made the boy proud of his birth difference.
       What others might have called a deformity became a sign and symbol to Zebro of strength and what a name could imply to another man without a spoken word between them. He learned early to be comfortable in himself ... and therefore comfortable with women who were his guidance in his early years. People stared. Some said he was touched by Lucifer himself. But he measured himself differently... by fairness, by character, by generosity, by the way he treated his fellow man and woman, and by name.
       His mother and his teachers were all women … and the women in Jesus’s life played their part too … even a Savior needs women's company … need I go with Mary Magdalena here … or do I really need to spell out what I mean by women around Jesus? Surely not. Yes, women played their part for Zebro in a man’s world too.
       Reared in two cultures, Zebro loved both and dishonored neither. From his mother, he inherited the arts ... sculpture, painting, literature, books he handled like living things. Before reading, he weighed a volume in his hand, studied its cover, felt its grain, then buried his nose deep into its pages, breathing in paper and ink to the embarrassment of onlookers and the quiet delight of booksellers … and always referring to books as … She … just like his Irish Lass was … She … and the little voice in his head was … She.
       From his father, he inherited independence, his manhood and nothing less than Irish blood-pride ... descendants of Vikings and good men it was said, hence the family name … Goodman. And his father in his dealings was nothing less than a … Goodman.
       His mother, the proud French name of Allard, meaning ‘noble strength’, was proud of her own family history of people who lived by the arts. And so, Zebro combined the two names in using them in honor of his parents … Allard-Goodman. I told you … Zebro was the man who respected what was in a name and what it meant to carry it … and he had earned that right by blood.
       His father’s devotion to the sea bordered on worship, his reason for being passed down like a sacrament that was given into his care … but the man was born at sea when his Irish parents were caught between countries and religion, but between them, his parents formed him ... romantic, complex, fair, and just, though complex might be his own doing. It was passed to Zebro.
       In his teen years, after a storm remembered by Zebro as the fiercest recorded, his father changed. The Irish Lass and her crew were nearly lost in the Atlantic returning to Blacksod Bay. In knowing this was his end, promises were made to God Himself by his father ... promises that were kept.
       Promises that made a mark.
       Faith replaced the what-ifs and the maybes.
       Devotion replaced bravado and a Goodman to be Gods-man.
       The sea was no longer only Neptune’s domain but God’s testing ground. That awakening to Gods-man shaped the values carried home to a wife and son. It was spoken that the man had some enlightening experience in seeing the Angel Gabriel guiding him out of a storm and home to Blacksod Bay in saving the Irish Lass. From that life-changing experience, Zebro’s father made a promise to God Himself to change his ways and follow Him and Him alone.
       As I said, the man returned home a changed man. In later years, Captain Zebro’s parents turned missionary, giving thanks for spared lives and seeking to carry God to the less fortunate who lived with pagan gods in remote lands where no white man had ever set a dancing foot on. They felt a profound conviction that this was the destination to which God was guiding them, a place where their faith could flourish and make a significant impact on their fellow mortals. It was a calling that resonated deeply within their hearts … a simple life for simple mortals in the face of God Himself, who became super mortals in the face of endurance.
       But no one truly knew their fate when they did not return to the missionary house on their appointed date. I can only tell you that it was rumored they died together among the aboriginal people of southeastern Papua New Guinea, wandering into the hinterland singing hymns and God’s praise one morning but never returning to praise God Himself for bringing them to this land of pagan gods.
       Their story drifted back downriver in fragments … so it was said. It came in whispers, in voices that carried the weight of fear, and the distance of lands he would not yet see. It came as a warning in justifying God’s work … but maybe, just maybe, pagan gods had more of a say in what goes on in a land before any Christian God’s name was known.
       Some said they were welcomed first and treated kindly … but that’s on hearsay. Others said hunger spoke louder than prayer when the rains failed and the yam gardens withered, and the pagan gods moved away, abandoning the village when they were needed most … but when traders going up-river saw dead natives floating downriver, they knew something had gone wrong.
       That was when every-man stories began to circulate.
       It was also said they were prepared as any hunted meat would be. So went one of many stories. Wrapped in leaves of wild cinnamon and banana, laid on warm stones in a pit tended by elder women who understood the rites and the solemn acceptance of an ancient law. To the villagers, it was not murder, not pride, but their way in pleasing their gods and feeding their people in the souls of other mortals. It was said to be respecting where one life fed another.
       No cruelty had come to them … but respect for their spirit where human blood was rubbed into dark skin.
       No wild celebration in drunken macabre … but shamanic guidance.
       Pagan gods were fed first and the children next. Then the older adults and the men who hunted. The women and village dogs took the bones and sauntered off into the jungle to chew on them in their own perversity of survival.
       But as true as I am telling it … no one knew their true end.
       And that is all anyone ever knew.
       No certainty.
       No grave to kneel beside.
       No witness to the stories that a river carried them away. Captain Zebro never received bones to bury. When asked, and some did, and you know, you will always get some gombeen who will ask just to see if he would twitch, but he would nod once and say, partly in a smile...
“They walked where they believed they were meant to walk. With God Himself and trust in Gabriel and Mother Mary’s guidance … it was nothing more than doing God’s work that turned in on them.”
       He did not mock missionaries.
       Nor did he mock cannibals.
       The world, to him, was rarely simple enough to be passed off in mockery. He understood hunger ... not only the hunger of the body, but the hunger that drives men into faith, into war, into love, into foolishness, and into death.
       He had seen it in the sea.
       He did not challenge the sea.
       He negotiated with it.
       He had inherited it in blood.
       A passable faith remained with Captain Zebro, though not a thunderous repentance that his father took on in later years. More like a quieter vigilance, an awareness that he was not alone. And when he loved ... and he did love ... he loved without judgment, without race, without faith poking at him ... because he understood how quickly perceptions vanish and loved ones in faith. How a man and a woman could walk into a horizon and become only a story carried in a son’s heart was what made him take each day as it came in expecting nothing more.
       Zebro, listening as a boy, could picture the ritual, not in fear, but in the haunting rhythm of inevitability and the way gods and God work in a mortal world. His inner voice had shivered as She recounted it, pressed into him more than words ever could. He did not hear the story as a spectacle in gory details. He heard it as an inheritance, and what was his fate. He heard it as what was to be his true meaning in understanding life.
       He remembered wondering, as a boy, how a man and a woman could vanish into the bush and become only a story, a rumor, and a memory in the hearts of others, but the making of the man he would become. That wonder stayed with him, folded into his patience, his fairness, his awareness of survival. The flesh wrapped in banana leaves. The hot stones. The elder women. The whispered taste comparison from those who were told or knew the difference, that it was something like kid goat.
       These details lodged deep in him, forming the quiet pain of understanding he would carry all his life. He learned early that the world was rarely simple enough for mockery. That hunger bent nations and broke men, and yet it could be met with solemnity, law, and ritual, depending on which god you prayed to.
       Only the story settled in Zebro as a boy, where silence had done all the talking. He carried it quietly as a measure of what man is capable of.
       Not as horror.
       Not as anger, but as what man was capable of.
       For now, Captain Zebro Allard-Goodman stood at the helm of the Irish Lass ... three fingers curled firm upon the wheel like an eagle’s talon. A man shaped by love, by his fate, and by silence where graves should have been and no grave to kneel at and call his parents …  and ask … Why.