That Peopled Bone

THE LAST SAILING OF THE ’HENRY CHARLES MORGAN’ IN SIX PIECES OF SCRIMSHAW by A.C. Wise

“Spaces of blankness within the waves suggest the presence of hands, shapes of absence rather than definitively carved things.”

Irregardless of the above 1841 date in the title being an approximation of the ‘1843?’ (sicnificant) in the story happening just an hour ago to be reviewed from the Mills book which was linked above yesterday — this is remarkably an inadvertent companion piece with that woman in the wood, where, now, from the sea ‘she’ is depicted climbing the wood of a becalmed whaling ship of yore, in tyched items of scrimshaw as carved upon various objects and inked in. Scored in. “…lines etched upon dead matter, darkened by ink.” A slow motion serial, almost flicked projection on tusk bone, baleen or whatever, of images described meticulously, images of this creature who may not even be female and a surgeon or butcher later cutting into its flesh like a new scrimshaw…after ‘she’ married the captain? With religious overtones. Or at least “as if to implore God.” With a powerful incision into the reader’s mind, still burrowing.

“A faint pattern of crosshatching behind the captain, but separate from him, suggests a shadow watching from an unseen distance.”

Like scrying a scored piecemeal diary we scry this scrimshaw.Also like that peopled bone above?

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THE WOMAN IN THE WOOD by Daniel Mills
From the diary of James Addison Thorndike II (1828-1843?)

Not that there is necessarily exegesis of the diary itself by a later editor, as in the previous story, but there is certainly an attempted exegesis by the near 15 years old diarist himself thus evidently while the ink was still wet! James, by what he writes unscored, is staying, because of his own so-called ill health, with his Uncle Timothy, a Calvinist, and his much younger second wife Sarah, with a two year old daughter whom she still breast feeds while pregnant with another, Timothy’s first wife having been said to walk into the wood to meet with another man. Who is it talking with double tongue or forked scoring when he is later told the true circumstances of the woman in white who led his first wife into the wood, amid powerful visions I will not tell you as they are scored out? But one can read between the lines or, or rather, listen to a second voice between the authorial lines. About dead sucked-out sheep and a woman thrusting herself upon James to score out what was already within her womb… except my review is between the lines and what you have just read here about this work is ex cathedra. At least it doesn’t spoil it.
Preacher Gale was the town’s butcher, too, by the way. Following God’s Dinelaw, no doubt. The old woman riding on a cannibal author’s back who also thus walked, without walking, INTO THE WOOD, notwithstanding.