Long John Silver takes down Tom
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Monday
With plans to make today’s post about last night’s Super Bowl winner, I was hoping the Eagles would carry the day. Not because I particularly cared for either team but because I had a great poem in mind should they emerge victorious:
The Eagle
By Alfred Lord Tennyson
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Well, the Eagles fell all right, although not in the predatory way that Tennyson envisions. Kansas City won on a last second field goal 38-35.
Unfortunately for me, to choose a work about Native American chiefs would make me complicit in the way the Kansas City moniker caricatures and thereby belittles Indians. I needed something else.
The idea came when I saw the transcendent Patrick Mahomes win a second straight game while all but playing on one leg. I believe he sustained his high ankle sprain against the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC championship game and then reaggravated it late in the first half of the Super Bowl. Nevertheless, he played lights out when he returned in the second half. Especially impressive was a 20-yard scramble late in the fourth quarter, setting his team up for the winning field goal. One could see him wincing after the play.
So what literary characters operate on one leg? Captain Ahab comes to mind except that he ends up in the loss column. Moby Dick, only slightly larger than some of Philadelphia’s defenders, proves too much for him.
So instead I turn to Long John Silver, who walks with the aid of a crutch. One scene in particular will resonate with Philadelphia fans because it reveals Stevenson’s legendary pirate, like Mahomes, to be a stone-cold killer.
Jim, the protagonist and narrator, has discovered that Long John has murderous designs and has corrupted many of the men aboard the ship. Jim slips from a boat that Long John is rowing ashore, hides in the brush, and then witnesses Silver and his confederates murdering some of the honest shipmates. In one case, the murder occurs, as it were, offstage:
Far away out in the marsh there arose, all of a sudden, a sound like the cry of anger, then another on the back of it; and then one horrid, long-drawn scream. The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire…
I imagine that scream emanating from Philadelphia’s defense as Mahomes, as it were, carved them up.
And then there’s the murder that Jim witnesses first hand. Shipmate Tom, who is at that moment confronting Silver, also hears the scream and understands what it portends:
Tom had leaped at the sound, like a horse at the spur, but Silver had not winked an eye. He stood where he was, resting lightly on his crutch, watching his companion like a snake about to spring.
“John!” said the sailor, stretching out his hand.
“Hands off!” cried Silver, leaping back a yard, as it seemed to me, with the speed and security of a trained gymnast.
“Hands off, if you like, John Silver,” said the other. “It’s a black conscience that can make you feared of me. But in heaven’s name, tell me, what was that?”
“That?” returned Silver, smiling away, but warier than ever, his eye a mere pinpoint in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. “That? Oh, I reckon that’ll be Alan.”
And at this point Tom flashed out like a hero.
“Alan!” he cried. “Then rest his soul for a true seaman! And as for you, John Silver, long you’ve been a mate of mine, but you’re mate of mine no more. If I die like a dog, I’ll die in my dooty. You’ve killed Alan, have you? Kill me too, if you can. But I defies you.”
And with that, this brave fellow turned his back directly on the cook and set off walking for the beach.
So that seems that. After all, what harm can we expect from a one-legged man? Unfortunately, as the Eagles learned to their sorrow, quite a lot. Long John too, we learn, is a precision passer:
But he was not destined to go far. With a cry John seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air. It struck poor Tom, point foremost, and with stunning violence, right between the shoulders in the middle of his back. His hands flew up, he gave a sort of gasp, and fell.
Whether he were injured much or little, none could ever tell. Like enough, to judge from the sound, his back was broken on the spot. But he had no time given him to recover. Silver, agile as a monkey even without leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment and had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenseless body. From my place of ambush, I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows.
Jim momentarily loses consciousness from horror, only to awake to see Long John, as it were, receiving the trophy:
When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head. Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a wisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly on the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had been actually done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment since before my eyes.
If you are an Eagles fan, is this what it felt like? You have my deepest sympathy.