Free Green shadows, white whale v5 by Ray Bradbury

place.
    John stood between so we could not reach or touch Ricki.
    Unaided, shaking her head, Ricki got to her feet.
    "Damn you," cried Huston, "back on that horse!"
    She tried to climb back up, but she was dizzy. Huston shoved her up in place. She looked around at the green grass, the fence her husband and, finally, at the horse under her, and at me.
    I felt my mouth move. It made no sound but it shaped two words:
    Merry Christmas.
    Merry Christmas, her mouth said, silently, back to me
    Merry Christmas.

11
    I had now read Moby Dick all the way through three times. That's three times eight hundred-odd pages. Some parts I had read ten times. Some scenes as much as twenty. And along the way, throwing out the junk, getting rid of the fat to X-ray the bones and the marrow in the bones.
    I was and remained a pursuer of the Whale. I was a small ahab, with no capital up front. For I felt that as fast as I swam, the Whiteness outpaced my poor strokes and my inadequate boat: a portable typewriter and great white pages waiting to be covered with blood.
    Himself and I put our blood on it, but that was not enough. It must be Melville's blood and tears. He was Hamlet come alive on the castle wall and Lear on the moor. Sometimes we heard him cry most clearly. The rest of the time, his voice was drowned in salt tides that by arriving and leaving put us off balance. There were days when My Leader, for all his talent for massaging actors into shapes and editing their shadows into recognizable parades, could not help me, nor I him.
    There were days, in sum, when we stared at each other, shrugged, and then began to laugh. We had bitten off a minnow and discovered it was Leviathan in all its biblical size and maniac fury. Laughter was the only release from our dumbness, which could become stupidity if we dared put down some of the ideas that had crossed our lips, to be buried in whiskey.
    One day, in the midst of our Melvillean ignorance, I suddenly leapt to my feet and cried, "I'm gone!"
    "Where to?" said the monster from the Directors Guild
    "Heeber Finn's."
    "To do what?"
    "Cram the Whale in a large mug to drown him."
    "Can I come along?" said the Beast.

12
    "And even further back," said Finn, in the midst of yet another monologue behind the bar, "there was a terrible event, best remembered and not seen."
    "What year was that?" asked my director.
    "Around about the Easter uprising," said Finn. "And the big houses beyond burned to ruins, knocked flat in their tracks. You've seen the remains?"
    "I have," said John.
    "The patriots did that when they was mobs," said Finn. "My father was one."
    "And so was mine," said Doone.
    "And mine, and mine," said all.
    "A sad time."
    "Not all sad, thank God. For once in a while, God lets go a laugh. And it had to do with me father and the father of our own Lord Kilgotten. Shall I tell you the start, go, and finis?"
    "Tell," I said.
    "Well," said Finn, "in the midst of the Troubles, in the cold snows of late winter that took Easter by surprise, my father, and all the fathers of all the dimwit boys you see leaning here, holding up the bar, stumbled upon an idea that lit, or you might say ignited, a plan that—"
    "What was the plan, Finn, what was the plan?" said all, though they had heard the tale before.
    "The plan was this ..." whispered Finn, leaning across the bar to tell his winter secret.
    The men had been hiding down by the gatekeeper's lodge for half an hour or so, passing a bottle of the best between, and then, the gatekeeper having been carried off to bed, they dodged up the path at six in the evening and looked at the great house with the warm lights lit in each window.
    "That's the place," said Riordan.
    "Hell, what do you mean, 'that's the place'?" cried Casey, then softly added, "We seen it all our lives."
    "Sure," said Kelly, "but with the Troubles over and around us, sudden like a place looks different. It's quite a toy, lying there in the snow."
    And that's what it seemed to the fourteen of