It wasn’t the Republic sailing east for the Gulf of Guinea, skimming along easily in a six-knot breeze, that awoke me (I’ve been known to sleep through gunshots and tavern brawls), or even the chatter of Captain Falcon’s flea-infested, foul-tongued crew, but rather the cold barrel of a pistol shoved under my shirt and against my belly by Peter Cringle, the first mate and quartermaster, that brought me back to full consciousness from the deepest sleep I’d known in years. An hour out of port, Cringle had thrown back the tarp fashioned from old sail, uncovering me, and I stared up — my mouth and eyes partly sealed and phlegmed by sleep — at a silvery-gray sky aswirl with honking sea gulls, the elaborate webbing of the foremast entangled with low-bellying clouds, and the faces of five men you’d hardly care to stumble upon during an evening stroll: black eyepatches, I saw, beards like tangled bushes, hooks where hands should be — I speak the truth — and they had, like the monocular witches outwitted by Perseus, only two good teeth among them all. “A black stowaway, is he now, Mr. Cringle?” said one, whose mouth could have doubled for the Black Hole of Calcutta. “Let us ’ave him, sir. We’ll throw the blighter overboard and save you the powder — we wouldn’t want you exertin’ yerself too much, y’know, you bein’ first mate and all.”
Laughter exploded round me, but the mate’s expression did not change.
“On your feet, you,” Cringle ordered, and I obeyed because of all the faces present his seemed the most sympathetic. In other words, his was the only one not pitted by smallpox, split by Saturday night knifescar, disfigured by Polynesian tattoos, or distorted by dropsy. Indeed, First Mate Cringle’s whole air spoke of New England gentility. He was tall and straight as a ship’s door, a gentleman from his unwrinkled shirt right down to the spit-polished boots that reflected back winces and deadeyes on deck. His skin was as white as wax, which made him seem like nothing less than a tightly wound toy soldier. “You’ve less than a minute,” said he, shaking with rage, or more like fear, “to explain what you’re doing aboard this ship.”
Quickly I pulled Squibb’s papers from my waistcoat, unfolded them, then thrust them toward him. “I didn’t mean to be asleep, sir,” I said, maneuvering. “I’m ready now to report for work.”
Cringle frowned irritably down the first page. The other sailors, that blustering, braying gang of tormentors, looked over his shoulder like an infernal chorus and seemed to enjoy the agitation my discovery brought him; they watched him more closely than they watched me, elbowing each other and winking, like bullies having fun at the expense of a new boy — a sissy in short pants — at school. Above us birds veered, then vanished into diaphanous layers of mist high as the mizzenpole. The deck was silent, so quiet I could hear blood hammering in my ears and the hungry gurgle of gastric fluids in my belly. At length Cringle shut his eyes. He crumpled the papers in his fist.
“Josiah Squibb is down below, you bloody impostor!”
“Oh.” My breath stopped. “Odd coincidence, that. Imagine! Two of us with the same na—” He leveled the firelock straight at my forehead, but less to frighten me, I thought, than to make a point with the others. “Sir, my name isn’t Squibb. You’ve guessed that already? Uh, right. It’s Rutherford Calhoun, and I only came aboard to return these papers to—”
“Hold your tongue.” He faced around to the others. “And stop your row, all of you, and get back to work. I can handle this myself.”
Under Cringle’s stare the crew turned back, laughing less at me than at the mate, to their business — belaying sheets and halyards — and Cringle’s bunched shoulders lowered a little. He put away his pistol, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, whispered, “Hoodlums, every one of them,” then shoved me toward Captain Falcon’s cabin. “It’s the Devil, I do believe, that sends us the bloody flux, contrary winds, and rumpots like these!” We passed small pens of chickens and Berkshire pigs the captain kept on board for himself, but as we neared the cabin door my stomach dropped. I felt uneasy in my spine. Sweat began to stream into my clothes. The deck beneath me dipped and rose dizzily, and with that motion my center of gravity was instantly gone. My last meal, too, over the railing, which I ran to and gripped with all my strength as the ship — or so my confused inner ear told me — careened left. “Now, that’s a pretty sight. And you say you’re a sailor, eh? I think you’re a farmer, Calhoun.”
Between heaves, I said, “Illinois!”
A softening and a sort of pity came into Cringle’s voice. He withdrew his handkerchief, handed it to me, then watched as my belly turned inside out, like a shirt cuff. “But you’ll feel a lot worse if the skipper’s in a mood for cobbing. What on earth prompted you to stow away on a ship run by Ebenezer Falcon?”
“Debts,” I said, my eyes still swimming. “A woman. Maybe a jail sentence, or. . ”
Cringle smiled, and from out of his flash of even white teeth there flowered the relaxed, boyish grin, it struck me, of a young Presbyterian minister, or someone who’d grown up with a great deal of wealth, privileges, or personal gifts, and felt guilty about them in the presence of those who hadn’t: a man who’d maybe been a concert pianist at age five, or at twelve entered Harvard, or at fifteen solved some theoretical enigma in physics that had puzzled scientists twice his age, and who never spoke of these things without a touch of endearing humiliation because he hated not to be “regular,” yet who, it was clear, carried a core of aloneness within him that nothing on shore could touch. Cringle had, I was to learn, an almost psychotic total recall of everything he’d read. Had he been a woman — he certainly had a feminine air — he’d be the kind who could do Leibnizian logic or Ptolemaic astronomy but hid the fact in order not to frighten off suitors; or, if a slave, one who could bend spoons with his mind but didn’t so white people wouldn’t get panicky.
“Half the crew’s here for those reasons, or some other social failure on shore,” he laughed. “But I’ll tell you true: Jail’s better. Being on a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned to boot.”
“I can’t go back. .”
“None of us can. Come along. Maybe the captain can use someone in the galley. Can you cook?”
“Yes.”
“Liar,” said he. “Doesn’t matter, though. We’ve all gotten used to the taste of maggots in everything.”
At the captain’s door, which had three bullet holes in it, Cringle tried the latch. It was unbolted, but he decided against barging in and rapped instead, and a good thing this was, because from within the cabin, whose curtained windows were pulled shut, I heard the squeaking of mattress springs, then a stifled whimper, and at last a venereal moan so odd in its commingling of pleasure and complaint that I had, of a sudden, the vision of being not aboard ship but instead in a bordello. It made no sense then, those Venusian groans, that gasping yip of orgasmic stings, but soon enough it would. “Has he a woman aboard?” I looked to Cringle for an answer, but the mate wouldn’t look me in the eye; he chewed the inside of his cheek and politely pulled the door shut. “Didn’t I say this was worse than prison?” For another minute we stood waiting, looking at the door, at each other, and finally it opened and a heartbreakingly handsome cabin boy, with curly hair like wood shavings, young but hardly in long pants (and barely in these, for he was pulling up his striped duck pantaloons, tripping on the cuffs), came scrambling out, closing the door behind him, his jerkin unfastened, his face drained of color, and eyes crossed by what he’d been through.
“Good day to you, Mr. Cringle.” He kept his eyes low.
Cringle rubbed his face with one hand, peeking at the boy through his fingers.
“Are you and the captain finished, Tom?”
“Yessir. . I’m sorry, sir, you can go in now.”
The mate forced a smile that must have been harder to lift than a sledgehammer, looking down at the boy as you might a younger brother (or sister) you’d just glimpsed in a stranger’s set of pornographic pictures, pained by his shivering and rubbing his arms and standing bowlegged as if his bum was cemented shut by dried semen, as it probably was. Cringle tousled the boy’s hair, his lips tight, and moved Tom aside. “Tell Squibb”—his voice quivered—“I said he’s to fix you the finest meal he can, Tom.” And then to me: “Of course, you’ll say nothing of this to anyone.”
“Of course,” I said.
“It would not help morale, if the men knew. .”
“I’ve seen nothing,” I said, “but I wonder: Is my silence worth a word in my favor with the captain?”
His fingertips pushed the door inward. “Just go inside, Calhoun.” Ducking my head, I stepped down into a low-studded room, aware of Cringle’s breath and bodily warmth behind me, but of little else, for the cabin of Captain Falcon had the dank, ancient dampness of old ships, or a cave — that, and the clamlike, bacterial odor of tabooed pleasures. The air was denser inside, difficult for my throatpipes to draw. To my left, a small voice, like that of a genie in a jug, said, “Draw the curtains a bit, Mr. Cringle,” and when the mate did so, suddenly raying the room with bright light, a high-post bedstead with valances and knotted with dirty sheets sprang forth in the glare. Now I was rivering sweat. From the ceiling a pyramid-shaped poop lantern with horn windows swung low enough to crack your head, and to the right of that were a washbasin and clawfooted bathtub bolted to the floorboards — perhaps the only other landside luxury in the room. Across from these was a cluttered chart table. Seated at this, with his back to me, a big-shouldered man was barricaded in by maps of the sea and the African bush. On his table lay a gilded, ornamental Bible, a quadrant, chronometer, spyglass, and the log in which I now write (but this months later after mutiny and death, the reporting on which I must put off for a while). He kept to his business, refusing to turn, and said in that shocking voice thin and shrill and strung like catgut, “All right, stand at ease and state yer business.”
Cringle cleared his throat, coughing into one hand.
“We found this boy in the longboat, Skipper. He says he’s Rutherford Calhoun, a friend of Squibb. I thought perhaps—”
“You’ve rung the bell to change watch?”
The mate paused. “I was about to when I discovered th—”
“See to it, then. And shut the door behind you.”
The mate left, glancing helplessly at me. Standing alone, looking at the back of Captain Falcon’s sloping head, shining my boots on the back of my breeches to polish them, I thought that maybe racial savvy might see me through this interview. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but we all know it anyway: namely, that a crafty Negro, a shrewd black strategist, can work a prospective white employer around, if he’s smart, by playing poor mouth, or greasing his guilt with a hard-luck story. At least it had always worked for me before. In my most plaintive voice I told the captain how desperate I was for work, that I’d stowed away because gainful employment was systematically denied black men back home, that New Orleans was so bigoted a Negro couldn’t even buy vanilla ice cream.
“So?” said Falcon.
I told him about my mother’s death from overwork in the fields of Illinois when I was three. (She died in bed, actually, but I could trade on this version and liked it better.)
“So?”
And then I related the hardships I’d received at the hands of my religiously stern master, Peleg Chandler, who gave all his slaves two teaspoons of castor oil every Saturday morning, whether they were sick or not, and called that “preventative medicine.” (It may not seem like much to you, but to me, at age twelve, it was torture.)
“So?” he said again, this time swiveling full around to face me, his elbows splashed on the leather arms of the chair, and as his gaze crossed mine in the crepuscular cabin light, as I saw his face, I felt skin at the nape of my neck tingling like when a marksman has you in his sights, because the master of the Republic, the man known for his daring exploits and subjugation of the colored races from Africa to the West Indies, was a dwarf. Well, perhaps not a true dwarf, but Ebenezer Falcon, I saw, was shorter even than the poor, buggered cabin boy Tom. Though his legs measured less than those of his chart table, Captain Falcon had a shoulder span like that of Santos, and between this knot of monstrously developed deltoids and latissimus dorsi a long head rose with an explosion of hair so black his face seemed dead in contrast: eye sockets like anthracite furnaces, medieval lines more complex than tracery on his maps, a nose slightly to one side, and a great bulging forehead that looked harder than whalebone, but intelligent too — a thinker’s brow, it was, the kind fantasy writers put on spacemen far ahead of us in science and philosophy. His belly was unspeakable. His hands, like roots. More remarkable, I’d seen drawings of this gnarled little man’s face before in newspapers in New Orleans, though I never paid them much attention, or noted the name. He was famous. In point of fact, infamous. That special breed of empire builder, explorer, and imperialist that sculptors loved to elongate, El Greco-like, in city park statues until they achieved Brobdingnagian proportions. He carried, I read, portraits of Pizarro and Magellan on every expedition he made.
Now. . yes, now I remembered those stories well. Falcon, the papers said, knew seven African coastal dialects and, in fact, could learn any new tongue in two weeks’ time. More, even, he’d proven it with Hottentot, and lived among their tribe for a month, plundering their most sacred religious shrines. He’d gone hunting for the source of the Nile, failed, but even his miscarried exploits made him raw material for myths spun in brandy and cavendish smoke in clubs along the eastern seaboard. He’d translated the Bardo Thodol— this, after stealing the only scroll from a remote temple in Tibet — and if the papers can be believed, he was a patriot whose burning passion was the manifest destiny of the United States to Americanize the entire planet. Really, I wanted to take off my hat in his presence, but I hadn’t worn one. Never mind that his sins were scarlet. He was living history. Of course, he stood only as high as my hips, and I had to fight the urge to pat him on his head, but I was, as I say, impressed.
“Sit,” said he, motioning to the chair at his chart table. “I don’t like people looking down at me.”
I could understand that; I sat.
Falcon toddled over to his washbasin, poured water from a bucket half his size, and began to sponge-bathe under his nightshirt, speaking over his left shoulder at me. “And, generally speaking, I don’t like Negroes either.”
“Sorry, sir.” He was frank; I liked that. With bigots a man knew where he stood. “But I can’t help that, sir.”
Falcon half-turned, his eyebrows lifting.
“I know you can’t, Calhoun. It’s one of the things I learned about Negroes after living with the Lotophagi on the African coast. You don’t think too well, or too often. I don’t blame you for stowing aboard.” He squeezed out his sponge. “Poor creature, you probably thought we were a riverboat, didn’t you?”
I fell back against the seat. “This isn’t a riverboat?”
“I thought so.” Falcon wet his hands, then finger-combed his hair, shook off the water, and carried his basin to the door, throwing it out on a man who began cursing like. . well, like a sailor until he saw the captain’s face, and meekly tipped his hat. Slamming the door, Falcon fixed me again with both eyes. “ ’Tis a slaver, Mr. Calhoun, and the cargo awaiting us at Bangalang is forty Allmuseri tribesmen, hides, prime ivory teeth, gold, and bullocks, which comes to a total caravan value of nearly nine thousand dollars, of which the officers and I have a profitable share — quite enough to let me retire after this run or finance an expedition I have in mind to Tortuga or, if I’ve a mind, see my share tripled at the gaming tables of Franscatis in Paris. But if you sail with us to Guinea — that is, if I don’t decide to nail your feet to the floor — it will have to be without pay. Do you see that, Calhoun?”
“Yessir.” I nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
“Good.” After toweling his hands, he took a shirt with frills down the front and a pair of pantaloons from a chest by the door. “I don’t hold it against you for being here. Or for being black, but I believe in excellence—an unfashionable thing these days, I know, what with headmasters giving illiterate Negroes degrees because they feel too guilty to fail them, then employers giving that same boy a place in the firm since he’s got the degree in hand and saying no will bring a gang of Abolitionists down on their necks. But no”—he looked pained—“not on my ship, Mr. Calhoun. Eighty percent of the crews on other ships, damn near anywhere in America, are incompetent, and all because everyone’s ready to lower standards of excellence to make up for slavery, or discrimination, and the problem. . the problem, Mr. Calhoun, is, I say, that most of these minorities aren’t ready for the titles of quartermaster or first mate precisely because discrimination denied them the training that makes for true excellence — ready to be mediocre mates, I’ll grant you that, or middlebrow functionaries, or run-of-the-mill employees, but not to advance the position, or make a lasting breakthrough of any kind. O, ’tis a scandal on the ships I’ve seen, and hardly the fault of the poor, half-trained Negro who hungers like anyone else these days for the glamour of titles and position.” He was grimly quiet for a second, lost in thought, and though it troubles me to tell you this, I almost saw his point, yet only for an instant, for what he said next was enough to straighten a sane man’s hair. “Now that I think of it, you remind me of a colored cabin boy named Fortunata who was aboard on my first trip to Madagascar.”
“He’s aboard now?”
“Hell, no. . Christ, no.” Falcon’s brows slammed together. “We ate him.”
Slowly I sat forward in my chair. “Sir?”
“Don’t look at me like that. I believe in Christian decency and doing right as much as the next man. I have a family, you know, in Virginia, and the man-eating savages I’ve seen, who make it a practice, disgust me. But there’s not a civilized law that holds water”—Falcon’s smile flickered briefly—“once you’ve put to sea.” He held the slow, hurt, sidelong look he’d given me, then began finger-stuffing his nightshirt into breeches that might have been tailored for a child. “We ran into a Spanish galleon and sank her, thank God — we’d have swung for smuggling if we hadn’t — but she left us damaged and with half the crew dead. The foremast was gone, the main yard sprung, and our rigging hung in elflocks. ’Twas an awful fight, I tell you, and we drifted for days without food or fresh water.” Falcon squirreled closer to me, his eyes brighter, wilder than I had yet seen them. “The sea does things to your head, Calhoun, terrible unravelings of belief that aren’t in a cultured man’s metaphysic. We ate tallow first, then sawdust, stopped up our noses and slurped foul water from the pumps before barbecuing that Negro boy.” Falcon added — sadly, I thought, “He was freshly dead, of course, crushed by a falling mast. He tasted. . stringy.”
Shivering, I rubbed my arms, wondering if just maybe the crew list for this voyage and the menu might be the same thing for this man. “I’m sorry.”
“So was I.”
It was silent then, Captain Falcon peering back into his memory of deep-sea cannibalism, a faintly bitter smile twisting his lips and jaw to one side, and I saw something — or thought I did — of myself in him and hated that. Cannibalism at sea was common enough, I knew, but he enjoyed telling this tale — enjoyed, as I did, any experience that disrupted the fragile, artificial pattern of life on land. Once at home, I realized, he would probably boast of his “experiences” at sea, use them to pull rank on those more timid and less vital than himself, interrupting a dinner with his wife’s parson — some psalm-singing milquetoast — to say, “I’ve no taste for chicken dumplings tonight after eating cabin boy, dear,” and they would be forced to look at him in both horror and fascination; yes, this above all else did Captain Falcon and his species of world conquerors thrive upon: the desire to be fascinating objects in the eyes of others.
Even then, as he quietly reflected and paced, tapping the end of his nose, he sneaked a look at me to see with how much reverence or revulsion — it didn’t matter either way since both fed the ego — I regarded him. More of the latter, I daresay, but for a man like this — who was so full of himself that he could not speak slowly or without collapsing one sentence into another, the words spilling out in a rush of brilliant confusion — for an American empire builder even my revulsion was enough to make him feel singular, special, unique.
“Have that mama’s boy Mr. Cringle find you a hammock,” said he, “and tell Squibb to put you to work in the kitchen. You’ll be his shifter and keep the coppers supplied with water and clean. You won’t turn a guinea on this trip, Calhoun, but I’ll wager you’ll be a man’s man when we dock again in New Orleans.”
“Thank you, sir.” I extended my hand. “Like you, sir?”
“Like me?” It seemed to startle him. “Don’t be silly.” He barely touched my palm with his fingers. “No, never like me, Calhoun.”
That was reassuring to me, though he would never realize it. I turned and walked slowly to where Cringle stood on watch, for I was still very weak in the knees, and my stomach had not stabilized either, continuing to chew upon itself as the mate led me through a hatchway on the main deck, then farther down, well below the ship’s waterline, to a soggy pit that assaulted my senses with the odor of old piss riding on the air beside the sickly-sweet stench of decaying timbers. This wet cavity had a name: the orlop, an ammonia-smelling hold with little light and less air, where hammocks swung from mildewed beams and where cargo — sea chests and cable — was stored. He gave me a footlocker and gear, and showed me how to fashion a hammock from sailcloth, but seeing these berths I felt sicker than before. Isadora’s cat-ridden rooms were intolerable, no question of that, but in the Republic’s orlop only an inch of plank separated my boots from the bottom of the sea. “It’s bloody dangerous below,” Cringle said, and you didn’t need a degree in maritime science to see why.
Down there, in the leaking, wishbone-shaped hull, the fusty hold looked darker than the belly of Jonah’s whale; it was divided into a maze of low, layered compartments much like the cross section of an archaeological dig — level upon level of crawl spaces, galleys, and cramped cells so small we barely had enough room to turn around — and, once the forge was going, the forecastle cookroom, where I was to work, was hotter than the griddles of Hell. Cockroaches I saw everywhere. And rats. All this, however, was like a hotel suite when compared to the head. It consisted of twelve splintery boards in the bows — a shipboard pissoir impossible to use in a rough sea because the foul, malarial soup of human feces from intestines twisted by flux flew up round your feet and splattered overhead when the ship met a head sea. “Either this,” Cringle said, keeping his mouth covered with one hand, “or swing your black arse over the side, as the skipper and I do.” His eyes watering, he motioned me to climb back up. “After a month that side of the ship’s so rank the authorities at Bangalang make us clean it before we can put to port.”
All in all, she was a typical ship, I learned those first few days from Cringle, and by this he meant she was stinking and wet, with sea scurvy and god-awful diseases rampant; but even queerer than all this — strange to me, at least — the Republic was physically unstable. She was perpetually flying apart and re-forming during the voyage, falling to pieces beneath us, the great sails ripping to rags in high winds, the rot, cracks, and parasites in old wood so cancerously swift, springing up where least expected, that Captain Falcon’s crew spent most of their time literally rebuilding the Republic as we crawled along the waves. In a word, she was, from stem to stern, a process. She would not be, Cringle warned me, the same vessel that left New Orleans, it not being in the nature of any ship to remain the same on that thrashing Void called the Atlantic. (Also called the Ethiopic Ocean by some, owing to the trade.) And a seaman’s first duty was to keep her afloat at any cost.
His second duty was to stay drunk. Every man “knew the ropes”—specifically, the sheets and halyards that controlled the sails; each knew the ship’s parts and principles, and any one of them, from the boatswain’s mate to the cabin boy Tom, could undertake the various duties involved — to hand, reef, or steer — but only a fool would stay sober when he wasn’t on watch. The whole Middle Passage, you might say, was one long hangover. It had the character of a four-month binge. And the biggest sot of all, I discovered, the most pitiful rumpot, was Josiah Squibb. Stepping timidly into the grimy cookroom after Cringle left me, my arms over my head in case Squibb pegged something at me for stealing his papers, I found the adjacent spirit room open and Squibb as polluted as I’d left him in the tavern. The poor devil’s head lay on a long table littered with strips of salt pork and bricklike biscuits double-baked back on shore. His parrot was drunk too, but his voice was not as faint as Squibb’s, who was in that advanced stage of alcoholic stupor that severs mind from body, both his eyeballs large as eggs, and glaring blankly into a mug of warm beer, as drunks often do, talking to his reflection. “Josiah,” he sniffed. Then answered: “Yes?” “If yuh wants respect, darlin’, yuh got to leave the ruddy cup alone, yes yuh do. Yuh wants ’em to respect yuh now, don’t yuh?” “Yes,” he said, “yes, I do. . ”
“’H’lo?” I stepped closer. “Mr. Squibb, are you all right, sir?”
“Do I look all right?” He sat scratching under one arm, squinting to see me more clearly. “I’m a wee bit drunk with dinner to fix, and so help me I can’t do it!” The movement of looking up tipped him backward (the ship veering larboard didn’t help either), and I was obliged to catch him under his armpits, then pitch him forward. He let his head hang. “Fix me some blackstrap, will ye, then finish up this mess.”
“But I’ve never—”
“Do it.” Squibb filled his cheeks with wind, then he swallowed. “I’ll show ye how.”
Following his orders, I helped him prepare mess, and mess it was, for the biscuits were hard and full of weevils (“I left two teeth in one of ’em this morning,” said Squibb), the salt beef tasted of the barrel in which it had been packed, not being helped very much by the onions and peppers I added, and would have been intolerable if not for the beer — each crewman, he said, consumed a gallon a day, but in Squibb’s case it was more like three. He was, had been, an alcoholic since his first voyage at the age of eleven, though he wasn’t exactly certain of his age, and precious little else when he was pickled, which was every waking hour, as it turned out. His lips kept the set smile of a lush. There was no risk in his recognizing me from the tavern; he had trouble keeping track of my identity from one hour to the next. And, sad to say, this was probably Squibb’s last voyage. Only a slaver would have him. His right foot was dead. He’d drunkenly stepped off a mizzentop during his last trip, having forgotten where he was, fallen twenty feet, and miraculously landed on his right foot. Which shattered. Where bone had been, Squibb now had a metal rod. He limped, of course. Like most fat people he wore his shirt outside his trousers whenever possible. He was slow, useless except in the cookroom, with lumps and udders in his face from liquor; a liability at sea, but what sailor could not see in Josiah Squibb his own portrait in years to come if Providence turned her back? As for his parrot, he was more or less the cook’s shadow, having his bawdy humor, and even asked me occasionally, “You had any lately, mate?”
“Aye,” said Squibb, sipping blackstrap as I slopped salmagundi into buckets to haul to the great cabin. “I’ve seen some things, laddie. Reason I look so bad is ’cause I’ve been livin’.”
That made me pause in the doorway. Like Captain Falcon, like me and so many other people (except Isadora), he seemed to hunger for “experience” as the bourgeois Creoles desired possessions. Believing ourselves better than that, too refined to crave gross, physical things, we heaped and hived “experiences” instead, as Madame Toulouse filled her rooms with imported furniture, as if life was a commodity, a thing we could cram into ourselves. I was tempted to ask about his “experiences,” to have him share and display them before me like show-and-tell at school. Instead, I asked:
“Was it worth it?”
He flinched. “How do you mean?”
“Are you a better man for all that fast living?”
Squibb stared at me, growing sober now. “Yer a strange one, Illinois. Naw, darlin’, I can’t say better.” He laughed suddenly, but with little humor. “Ask my wives — all five of ’em — and they’d probably say I’m worse for it.”
“Five, is it now?”
“Or six.” Squibb shrugged. “I lose count. I gets drunk, ye know, and I forgets I’m married, and a woman comes along, and before I knows it I’ve proposed again, and do ye know what’s odd? I keeps fallin’ in love with the same kinda woman ovah and ovah again. They all look like my wife Maud — God rest her — when we first met. She was a pretty li’l thing. She ruined me, ye know. Spoiled me. I mean, Maud didn’t even mind when I broke wind under the bedsheets: you know that’s love, darlin’. She had long, dark hair, a waist no bigger than that”—he snapped his fingers—“and eyes dark as wine — they all do. They could be her sisters, for all the diff’rence, and damned if I don’t slip sometimes ’n’ call ’em by the pet name I give her — Stinky.” He sighed, perplexed, and rapped his temples with the heel of his palm, as if to shake his brain back in place. “Ain’t the quantity of experiences that count I sometimes think, Illinois, but the quality. It’s sorta like I keep lookin’ for Stinky when she was seventeen so I kin do right by her this time.”
I left him still mumbling into his cup, and Squibb, I’m sure, didn’t notice my absence for an hour. But what he’d said stuck to me like a barnacle. It seemed so Sisyphean, this endless seeking of a single woman’s love — the vision of the first girl who snared his heart — in all others, because they would change, grow old, and he’d again be on a quixotic, Parmenidean quest for beauty beyond the reach of Becoming. Yet he seemed ironically faithful too, despite his several wives, his devotion to Stinky as deep as any monk’s for the Virgin. A peculiar man, this Josiah Squibb, I thought, though really no stranger than the others in Captain Falcon’s ragtag crew. We were forty of a company. And we’d all blundered, failed at bourgeois life in one way or another — we were, to tell the truth, all refugees from responsibility and, like social misfits ever pushing westward to escape citified life, took to the sea as the last frontier that welcomed miscreants, dreamers, and fools. Only one sailor the mate warned me to stay away from, a dark, clean-shaven fellow, with thin brown hair and the air of a parson about him. Cringle pointed him out to me as he tied deadeyes down the deck from where we stood. “That’ll be Nathaniel Meadows,” whispered Cringle, “and I’d not cross him, if I were you.”
I turned to give him a better look; Cringle swung me around.
“Don’t stare at him, fool!”
“He doesn’t look dangerous,” I said.
“Then,” said he, “your judgment of character is worse than your cooking. Meadows signed on to escape the authorities in Liverpool. He murdered his whole family while they slept, according to the skipper. Axed them all. The family dog, two cows, and a goat too.”
I tried to swallow. Failed. “Why?”
“D’ye care to stroll up ’n’ ask him?”
“Oh, no. . wouldn’t think of prying. Hardly my business, you know, that sort of thing. .”
The mate smiled. “Smart boy.”
Slowly, I gained my sea legs. By and by, I learned to keep down my dinner and keep up my end in the cookroom and on deck with this crew of American degenerates and dregs; but there’s little point in describing individually the other men on board, for the voyage to Africa was uneventful, the men on ship capable at their specialties, and not one of them would live to see New Orleans again.
Only Cringle, I suppose, sensed what was coming. He had a sixth sense about disaster. Ankle-deep in deckwash, he’d stand by the bowsprit some nights in the light of a single lantern, wearing a woolen fearnought to blunt the teeth of the wind, and stare. Just stare. The fact is that Cringle, more than all the others, was out of place: an officer by accident, I would learn, whose precise speech the crew saw as pomposity, whose sensitivity Captain Falcon read as weakness. The Republic was, above all else, a ship of men. Without the civilizing presence of women, everyone felt the pressure, the masculine imperative to prove himself equal to a vague standard of manliness in order to be judged “regular.” To fail at this in the eyes of the other men could, I needn’t tell you, make your life at sea quite miserable. It led to posturing among the crew, a tendency to turn themselves into caricatures of the concept of maleness: to strut, keep their chests stuck out and stomachs sucked in, and talk monosyllabically in surly mumbles or grunts because being good at language was womanly. Lord knows, this front was hard to maintain for very long. You had to work at being manly; it took more effort, in a way, than rigging sails. The crewmen had drinking contests nearly every day. They gambled on who could piss the farthest over the rail, or on whose uncircumcised schlong was the longest, and far into the night lie awake in their hammocks swapping jokes about nuns sitting on candles. (And some of these, I must confess, weren’t all that bad, even memorable, such as one Squibb told one night.
Q: What’s the difference between a dog and a fox?
A: About four drinks.)
But Cringle kept his distance; the competition to prove the purity of one’s gender, I’m guessing, made him uncomfortable, even melancholy, and this cost him the respect of the others, who claimed the mate, at age twenty-nine, was a virgin. Little wonder then that he was relaxed only when alone, there on watch, or reading, or talking with me once he learned that I’d grown up in the household of a (Thomist) theologian.
“They can’t feel it,” he said the night before we sighted land, looking back from the rail to where two men were carousing around a lantern. His gaze drifted from me back toward row after row of white-maned, foamy waves. That night the sea was full of explosions, rumblings deep as the earth tremors I’d learned to fear in southern Illinois, like the Devil knocking on the ground’s thin crust. “Three quarters of the world’s surface,” said Cringle, “is covered by that formless Naught, and I dislike it, Calhoun, being hemmed in by Nothing, this bottomless chaos breeding all manner of monstrosities and creatures that defy civilized law. These waters are littered with wrecked vessels. And I’ve seen monsters, oh, yes, such things are real down there.” He laughed bleakly. “Down there, reality fits more the dreams of slugs and snakes than men. ’Tis frightening to me sometimes,” he added, looking from me to his feet, “that all our reasoning and works are so provisional, so damned fragile, and someday we pass away like the stain of breath on a mirror and sink back into that from whence we’ve come.” He fumbled through his pockets for his pipe, then puffed hard to get it going. “They skim along the surface, the others; they have no feeling for what the sea is”. He gave a slow, Byronic sigh. “Sometimes I envy them for their stupidity.”
When he talked like this he frightened me. I wondered if the others were right about his being weak, or enfeebled somehow, and I hardly knew how to reply. “We’ll be on land soon enough. I heard Squibb say we’d put to at the factory within the week.”
The mate smiled gently as if I’d said something stupid. “We’re taking on Allmuseri tribesmen, Calhoun. Not Ashanti. Nor even Kru or Hausa — them, at least, I can understand. Have you ever seen an Allmuseri?”
I had to admit that I had not.
“Don’t feel bad.” His smile vanished. “Few men have. Arab traders will bring them from the interior, I’m told, because no European has been to their village and lived to tell of it. They are an old people. Older, some say, than the!Kung Tribe of Southern Africa, people who existed when the planet — the galaxy, even — was a ball of fire and steam. And not like us at all. No, not like you either, though you are black. In all the records there is but one sentence about these Allmuseri, and that from a Spanish explorer named Rafael García, whose home is now an institution for the incurably insane in Havana.” He was silent again, biting down hard on the stem of his pipe. “I do not feel good about this cargo, Calhoun.”
“That sentence,” I asked him. “What did Garcia say?”
Cringle stared back to the sea, leaning on the rail, his voice blurred, then obliterated by the wind; I had to strain to hear him. “Sorcerers!” he said. “They’re a whole tribe — men, women, and tykes — of devil-worshiping, spell-casting wizards.”