remix my lit

How to Domesticate a Pirate [St Helena Remix]

by Christopher Currie

He walks the grounds on the days before his death, a scarf muffling his face, protecting his throat from the random slashes of the wind. So strange that all the will in the world would keep him here, in this modest house with only one cannon facing the water. He wanders out to the edge of the garden, as far as he is allowed to go, stepping carefully as if on parade. His feet have softened from their little use; every part of him, in fact, grows ever more indistinct. In his sunbrowned face his smile is a white flag.

Strange, to have grown so calm. The island warmth, until weeks before, was his glad companion. In better, earlier days, when acceptance had settled silently to his shoulders, he had spent time lying beneath palms, accepting shadows with weightless relaxation, as above him giant fronds pitched in glow-worm greens.

But his body had shunned its own issued invitation. His health is reeling out of him, like tunes from a battered fiddle. He is thirsty now, always thirsty, but no matter how much aqua vitae he ingests, no matter how much orgeat he screams for in those long draining hours of night, his tongue still tastes of salt. He is a man, he knows, disappearing from the inside out. Doctors, physicians, healers-they ebb and recede. They are all but long fingers probing, the cold flutter of useless hope.

And on this morning, the morning of his death, Napoleon lends his weight to a flat rock, exhausted from thought. It is then he feels it, a sense of the end of everything. When the time is right, he thinks, death begins to call you ashore. It feels unlike anything he has felt-neither seduction nor quite reason. Either way, it is so obscenely sad. He pulls down his scarf with four fingers, to free his mouth, to gape it at the wind. He longs to be filled with every inch of the remaining world. He throws himself to the grass, he breathes the sweet life and sweeter decay; he grinds dirt into his hands.

He feels them coming, the thick boots of the Governor’s sentries. He hears their cries washing through the air above him. He wants them to wait, he begs them with his eyes and ears, but before he sets another breath their thick arms are under him and his only solid view is the blank slated sky. He lets his panic subside only when pain overtakes it. His stomach, burning, tender as an opened oyster. His body passes under doorways and frightened faces, yields, eventually, to the starched resistance of cotton sheets. Doctors’ fingers trace his pulse. A priest smooths down thin Bible paper.

His bedroom seems to fill with strangers, those doomed to care for him-unconditionally, painfully, gratefully. But Napoleon’s head is already elsewhere, already exiled from this earth. In the short hours that follow, his mind fills with all he has left behind, and all he has never seen. His mouth trembles with whatever else is left. Else, else else. France, armée, Joséphine.