St Juan Seven I saw succumb to the waves in open ocean five were blown beyond the eyes of this your servant and one poor souls made it nearly to shore before the deluge claimed it on the farthest edge of this island where the white cliffs look over the waters thick with mussels The prow of this ship bore an octopus and it was trimmed in red and I pray that I may offer some relief to the families of the sailors lost to the waves upon her deck Father Michaels closed the register leaving a single strip of acid free paper in as a bookmark It’s rough he said It’s been a while since I needed to do much Latin translation and there are some variations from the priest’s native Spanish that complicated things but the bit about the octopus is suggestive The prow of the San Telmo was decorated by an octopus Carrie agreed fiddling with the corner of the translation Father Michaels was being extraordinarily extraordinarily helpful and the translation he had produced only a week after being asked was just about all Carrie could have hoped for but she still felt exposed 6
and adrift sitting there in the rectory without Chris to ask awkward questions Chris had begged off visiting Father Michaels with the excuse that he had a job application he needed to fill out which was either a blatant lie or a symptom of just how hard Maddison’s leaving had hit Chris Carrie had not had time to decide He was moping but that was to be expected The question was mostly what direction his moping was going to go would he decide to throw all his energy into the search for the San Telmo or would he decide to try pretending it had never existed in the first place Although Carrie was usually the only one who ever tried to pretend things never happened Chris got more and more attached to something the harder you tried to discourage discourage him and the harder you tried the more obvious he made it that he was still on the problem Carrie Father Michaels said and Carrie abruptly realized she’d zoned out The priest was looking at her with some concern Is everything all right Yes Carrie said and then inwardly winced at 7
how fake she had sounded Luckily Father Michaels was kind enough not to press the issue and instead pushed the register across the coffee table to her Well as I was saying he said deftly removing a cat from the side table and shaking cat hairs off of a map That’s the only part of the parish register that mentions the wreck I did skim the rest but it seems that witnessing the wreck was terrible enough that Father Gonzalez did his best never to mention it again What is interesting is that description of white cliffs and mussels because Archer’s Grove used to have white cliffs somewhere somewhere Carrie asked White cliffs put her in mind of Dover Castle and the English Channel not Florida But there were some endangered mussels that grew almost exclusively on Archer’s Grove I honestly don’t know Father Michaels said But they sound as though they might be a landmark of sorts so if you were going looking that would be a good place to start Huh Carrie said 8
Only about a quarter of the island is the right place for sand marshes Father Michaels added spreading out the map which proved to be a geological geological map of the island It narrows down your search a bit So if there’s a point on the island that once had white cliffs and currently has beds of mussels Carrie said thoughtfully You don’t happen to know anything about the history of the geography of this island do you she asked Father Michaels shook his head I’m afraid not he said I studied divinity in school with a minor in Greek and Latin so if you wanted to know about the religious history of the island I could help but not the mineral composition of the island Carrie sighed and started gathering up the translation translation Father Michaels had given her It looked like she was going to spend the rest of the week in the library Anyway thank you for translating this for us she started to say Her phone buzzed 9
