Beyond Reprieve

Although I wrote Beyond Reprieve long ago, it bears a distant resemblance to a book by Alice McDermott called Absolution, which was published in 2023, because of their shared setting in Saigon in the early 60s and similar treatment of personal and national shame.

My tale follows a pair of newlyweds as they travel into a militarized zone in northern Greece while the entire world is focused on the chaotic transfer of power in Saigon, where both the protagonist and I spent our childhoods.

It uses the moment of suspense between the American evacuation and arrival of the city’s conquerors (with its suggestions of the fall of Kabul) to explore tipping points both for our planet, which hangs in the balance as it resonates between flash points, and the couple’s relationship. After being saved from suicidal impulses, it’s Nora’s turn to save Seth, who is fighting to turn incipient madness into grace and find his existential footing.

I hope you enjoy chapters one and six, which you'll find below, as much as the following novelists, who were kind enough to read the manuscript.  

“I enjoyed reading it very much. I like your combination of scope (history, war, geography, culture) and intimacy (Seth and Nora’s relationship and how it changes them). The dense prose is interesting and the dialogue is filled with subtext. People don’t simply talk back and forth, but their conversations weave together to create silences and complexities…. I like your project: It seems both ambitious and personal in all the best ways.”

Lan Samantha Chang

Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

"I finished your novel... and enjoyed it very much.... the protagonist's voice was unmistakably your voice and I sensed you were mostly writing from close, lived experience.  I felt such vividness in the vignettes of life, in the child’s observations and emotions in the face of large, dramatic and consequential events, in the unfolding romance.  These things rang true."

Geraldine Brooks

Author of Nine Parts of Desire, Year of Wonders, March, People of the Book & Horse.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Please contact me at caldwellnd(at)aol.com if you're a literary agent or publisher and would like to invest yourself in publishing the book.

© 2016  Duncan Caldwell

Beyond Reprieve

Duncan Caldwell 

-  PART I  -

Fool’s Mate

Chapter 1

After the passengers had crossed the ramp, the crew forced so many sheep across it by kicking their dyed rumps that the animals choked the deck, pushing everyone aside.

“You can either sit on a sheep or take to the lifeboats!” Seth joked as he hopped on a winch and offered Nora a hand. Someone shouted, and he saw a deckhand wading through the flock, cursing in Greek.

“He wants you down! I’m not climbing up there!” Nora bridled.

Seth was about to jump into the melee of maddened eyes and horns before the sailor could snag his belt and haul him down, when their fellow travelers, who were mostly locals, scolded the man and climbed into the lifeboats as usual when the decks were mobbed. As the deckhand squabbled with his persecutors and finally withdrew, the boarding parties stripped the lifeboat covers and hoisted a widow out of the flock, where she’d been bobbing like a blackened survivor in a whitened sea.

“Come on,” Seth coaxed his bride. “Everyone does this when they’re shipping animals.”

“I’m looking for a real place for passengers. You can come with me or –“

“There isn’t any place: I know the ferry. We’ll have the waves beneath us, and -”  

“Madame!” A man with a brushy moustache and crinkled eyes urged as he leaned over the gunwale, looking for all the world like Stalin bending over a podium to accept a girl’s flowers. “It’s all right. Let me help you.”

Nora wavered. “Efcharistíes,” she thanked him, taking her benefactor’s hand before Seth’s as the two of them lifted her out of the mob. But even though the revolt had carried the day, she was fuming -

“You abandoned me,” Nora snapped in a near-whisper as she huddled in the bow of the lifeboat, “because you just had to be first! What the hell did you hope to prove? For someone who's so worried about getting caught, you’re sure bent on sticking out!”

“Like a sore thumb?”

“If you wish.”

“Ouch!” Seth flailed and sucked the right one. “I guess I jumped the gun.”

“I'll say - I'LL SAY! How dare you endanger us both and maybe even somebody else with your pranks?” she demanded near tears, referring obliquely to her pregnancy so as to avoid taking their baby for granted.

“I didn’t think of that,” he confessed as he suddenly grasped a bit of her fury. “I thought I knew the routine. But you’re right - if we're going to pull this off, I have to keep a low profile. Oh, I need you so!”

He put an arm around her, but she stiffened and scowled like a figurehead.

*

Eventually, though, the excitement of skidding above swells, the annunciation of new lands, and his attention mollified her, so that she regarded her husband sideways, and pecked him forgivingly. “You did choose the best seats,” Nora admitted.  “It’s like a flying boat.”

“A baby ark of the air,” Seth cried through an increasing headwind that forced them either to shout or nuzzle, and speak in each other’s ears. “Which makes us the good shepherds!”

“Aren’t the poor things going to be slaughtered?” she called back.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he admitted. A ewe erupted from the swarm milling along one side of their hull by pawing the red splotch on her neighbor’s tail, and succeeded in fixing Seth with slit pupils just long enough for him to see her as an individual, before the animal slipped into the fray. “Corcyra’s been getting richer, so it’s probably the mainland’s turn to send mutton.”

“If only it were a fairy tale,” Nora cried in consolation.

“And we weren’t shepherding souls.”

“At least that sounds Greek.”

“I can be so blind.”

“Oh, come off it. That’s what I love about you: being an optimist when you know better.”

“Thanks. But I stopped myself from saying it was like riding on Magritte’s floating boulder - stuck on an untenable world. How’s that for pessimism?”

“Pretty bad.”

“And the worst thing is, I think he modeled his grim rock on a hand-axe - which makes you wonder how long he thought we’d been going wrong.”

“You imagine too much!” Nora beamed, imitating one of Zorba’s sayings, and shouldered Seth in admonishment.

“You think?”

“Now you even see artifacts in paintings!”

“What do you expect of an archaeologist?”

“And an obsessive one at that!”

“Touché,” he confessed, glancing down, as he heard his inner self jest, Not to say ‘obtuse’!

“There’s something so mesmerizing about a wake,” he reflected aloud as the bow wave perpetually surged from the ship, and collapsed in dissolving skeins. “Like looking into fire. If only we could see through the glitter” - mullet streaking through foam. Light flickering through murk. Then darkness - darkness beyond knowing: alive as sleep.

“It’s beautiful, but terrifying. I prefer looking at the horizon.”

“Long and level, like a mason,” Seth cracked as he pulled her closer and watched the globe roll towards them, bringing a landmass out of the sea: Ulysses’ islands. Another escapist, returning with lame excuses after turning his back on a burning city…

The mass congealed and parted into opposing coasts, which fumed like anvil-shaped clouds. The combination of teetering upon an edge and watching dark apparitions rise from the horizon reminded Seth of his eagerness as he’d climbed to the brink of the family garage – where it rose to a cliff above strangers’ gardens - to be the first to spot smoke gushing out of Saigon. He’d been so sure of the importance of reporting the first smudge as he took a compass bearing, slid down the roof on the seat of his shorts to keep his bare legs from being scorched, dropped to the wall separating the garden from the servants’ quarters, and then leapt, that even blood and pain hadn’t been enough to stop him from picking himself up and finishing his dash into the Spensers’ white house to call the embassy, after he’d stumbled and stung his knees on gravel.

He felt dazed with an amalgam of nostalgia, grief and inadequacy as he remembered scrambling back to the crow’s nest with his mission accomplished to ogle gushers huffing and puffing into black monsoons. If only we’d been able to read the omens, he thought as the mother ship and lifeboat plowed vertiginously into the rapids, giving Seth the impression that the world was sliding from under them. Not that the clouds were all that mysterious. Even as a child, he’d known from newsreels at weekend matinees that the tarry billows contained firemen tussling thick hoses through a stream of phantoms - which suddenly loomed as desperate faces – before veering away, pulling children and carts through haze. As the tempests mushroomed again on-screen, the same stern voice that accompanied fireballs as they bloomed over deserts blared into the flickering darkness, denouncing the infernos the Viet Cong were lighting around the city as indignantly as his father intoning “Fee-fi-fo-FUM!"

But neither his dad nor the newsreel giant could stop saboteurs from packing more huts with explosives, and sending new wildfires raging through the shantytowns, which refugees from the embattled countryside were even building over water around the outskirts, to drive survivors deeper into the capital while tightening its noose.

Seth recalled a Saturday when his mother, Meg, had been dumb-founded by his refusal to accompany his sister, Becky, to the climax of the kids’ week with its slapstick, cliffhanger and western.

“You’re not sick, so you must be hiding something,” his mother divined as she squatted in front of Becky, snapping her raincoat, since it was pouring outside.

“I just want to finish Treasure Island –” young Seth replied so lamely that his sister exploded with impatience.

“Just leave him,” she pleaded. “We’re going to be late!”

“You probably owe some kid baseball cards again,” Meg persisted. “Are you afraid of being bullied?”

“He just wants to read comics and my friends are waiting for me!” Becky shrieked. “Please, Mom!” And, truth be told, there was no reason to deprive Becky just because her brother was malingering, so Meg rushed her to the theater and decided to grill him later.

Not that Seth would ever have confessed!

The matinees had grown agonizing as he indulged in the monstrous presumption of adoring a classmate who radiated such beauty, in his eyes, that she glowed amid the dark, popcorn-crunching ranks. What could he do – blurt out his adoration and run? Pretend he was just teasing?

His sister had finally broken the impasse by promising to plead his case while he stayed home. Seesawing between mortification and reveries after they’d left, Seth paced the bedroom he still shared with his go-between, trying to predict the verdict. But the more he grappled with the enigma, the more paralyzed and craven he felt. He couldn’t help himself as he huddled behind the balcony’s cement pilasters, hugging his knees in a puddle after the rain stopped, and watched the gate. He was so focused - so sure that fate was coming from the street, that he ignored the phone tinkling from within, and didn’t even put two and two – more like millions and millions! - together when his father roared.

The screen had exploded into kindergarteners watching coming attractions up front, where they could see without bouncing in their seats. Soon adults were shouting and screaming behind closed doors, phones were ringing off the hook, and his mom came back with Becky - who’d delivered Seth’s avowal to his sweetheart in the nick of time, in the lobby, where the girls had lagged long enough to survive - and hugged him so hard - even asking him if he’d had a premonition – that he was as stunned as if he’d been caught in the act.

Then the siblings were whisked to their school near the airport, and were guarded with other children who’d escaped unscathed, while their parents bustled like moving targets till the planes came. Finally, the kids were lined up along a roofed walkway and were called - one at a time - to go to adults who were “quietly” driving them from the staging area directly onto Tan Son Nhut’s runways.

Becky was beckoned first and passed in tears. Then it was his turn, and his feet were taking him past his remaining classmates and empty schoolrooms, which were about to be turned into barracks, leaving the known world, when his heartthrob – shining - broke rank and intercepted him - making him flinch and soar.

“I love you forever!” Robin whispered in his ear.

He'd been towed away in jubilation and grief, but had finally been coaxed into a plane with a last look over a wasteland plagued with mechanisms. Forklifts scavenged in the throats of air transports, emptying their ribcages. Fuel trucks shunted among lumbering aircraft on moiling concrete. Helicopters rose and fell on dust devils.

But the cortege of cars had liquefied into mirages, abandoning his plane for the next flight. He knew there wasn’t a chance of leaving together any more, but kept falling back anyway in hope against hope – and then bolted, only a foot or two for a last look, just as the steps lurched, bearing him away in panic-stricken awe – as isolated as Aladdin on a carpet - when the rolling stairs braked amid commands and curses, and a steward leapt from the hatchway to drag him back into the fuselage wriggling like a fish.

Every time he looked out the porthole after they took off, the plane was still grinding across oceans of clouds. And the world was sunk in grief.

Chapter 6

All he really knew was that the only intruder who’d ever come over their own wall had come in hunger. Seth remembered how he’d been awakened by a crash and shouting, and run to the top of the stairs. Below him, his father was scrambling in his loosened red bathrobe over a naked glistening man. “Get him to bed!” his dad screamed. The maid surprised Seth by seizing him bodily from behind and carrying him squalling to his bedroom. But not before he’d had an eyeful. Flapping fish, the gibbon mauled and splayed, even the thief's head wound, staring eyes, shiny ribcage, and chicken-neck penis, and his dad straddling him as he shouted for Meg to hurry with alcohol and bandages.

Eventually, it all came out: first Seth’s pet rooster had disappeared; then, the next night, his father had heard someone moving downstairs, and eased down the steps with his putter. But the shadow had sensed him and flashed towards open shutters just as his pursuer swung, intercepting the abstraction and sending it reeling into Ed’s prize aquarium, where discus fish were paired for life beneath the stairs. To make matters worse, the paradisial pool had toppled, and flooded the skirmish with hidden shards, so that the underdog howled and groped and bled, while Seth’s father cursed and subdued the man with holds that he would make allusions to, but never show the kids. Spying through his curtains, Seth finally saw white-uniformed policemen harassing the stumbling culprit across the driveway at the end of their nightsticks.

But Ed Spenser was sickened. He’d cut his knees badly, generally lost his temper, not to mention a small fortune in fish, and felt sullied. And not just in expected ways. Even though the intruder had tried to steal the silver, the man was basically after the family pets and the general’s pepper plants. And the police had been so evasive when Ed asked why the hell the intruder had come naked and oiled - like he was coming to an orgy!

Their houseboy, Kiet, had finally clued him in. Apparently, there was some tradition against escalation - even in self-defense – so you weren’t supposed to try stopping an unarmed intruder with anything more than your hands! By coming like an eel, the thief had made it practically impossible to get a grip on him while wrestling fairly.

But the assumption had broken down. How was an American from the far side of the planet ever supposed to know? So now, here Ed was, just defending his home, but sullied. If foreigners like him, who were there to help, after all, were seen as being somewhat uncouth before, such awkward incidents made them look positively barbaric! There was no point in broadcasting the gaffe, so Ed insisted that the police should do nothing more than give the burglar a good talking-to, since his victim was going to be magnanimous this time, and wouldn’t press a charge. After all, he’d given the guy an ugly whack and the thief and his friends would now think twice about intruding.

But it would almost have been better if his father had prosecuted the man, Seth thought, remembering how indignant his dad had been when he found that the police had compensated for the American’s apparent fickleness by leading their prisoner outside - and tying him to window bars. Just like putting him in stocks, Seth reflected ironically, wondering if his dad had seen the parallel with Puritan punishments when he halted before the burglar dangling from the scalding grill with his mouth full of flies – before storming into the station to upbraid the cops.

No, probably not: the children had overheard Ed telling guests how appalled he’d been at such cruelty and the fact that his victim was hanging in public - making him, as the foreign aggressor, look even worse – but he hadn’t said anything about the way American colonists used to shame people.

Not that it mattered, since Seth knew that his dad had been all too aware of the absurdity – perhaps even the arrogance - of his next move, when he’d made a second incident out of the burglary by demanding that the chief free the thief then and there! It was no use second-guessing his father now, when it was all over - for one thing, because he’d obviously done the right thing, and, for another, because he’d won the battle, although the intruder could hardly grovel by the time the lawmen cut him down.