Entry, the seventh SAME DAY

In the shrunken air of Falcon’s cabin there were secrets too scandalous for me to share with the ship’s company. This was not a knowledge I wanted, but it waited to ambush me, like the Old Man himself, amidst sacks of drachmas, nuggets and bars of gold, and church boxes from sacked coastal towns, strewn along the floor. Anything not destroyed by the explosion, Atufal and Diamelo smashed because it windowed onto the savage world of their enslavers. Where-soever my eyes ranged, aft toward the enormous upended bed, forward to his broken inventions by the larboard wall, his lodgings recalled abandoned manor houses raped and harried by brigands, and thus for a brief moment nothing here was familiar to me. A post-Christian roomscape, it struck me — me whose head was half full of Allmuseri words. The room swirled so for a second I had to plop my hands on my knees, put my head down, and wait until the ship’s hull stabilized. But even then I felt culturally dizzy, so displaced by this decentered interior and the Africans’ takeover, that when I lifted a whale-oil lamp at my heels it might as well have been a Phoenician artifact for all the sense it made to me. Yet in the smoking debris there was movement, a feeble stirring of Icarian man, the creator of cogs and cotton gins, beneath contraptions that pinched him to the splintery floor.

I found his legs trapped under timber. Therewith, I gripped wood with one hand, pushed aside with my other his torn sea charts, lire, egg-sized rings, almanacs, and his log, which he often sat upon to reach his table, then tried raising the beams off him without wrenching my own back. Falcon gave a gruntlike oof. Alow and aloft he was scuppered. When he crawled a few inches by grabbing the base of a bookcase and dragging himself forward, cartilage in his shoulder crackled like worm-addled wood — or, on deeper planes, the unhinging of his atoms. I saw half the ribs on his right side were broken, that he strained not only to deny a physical pain involuted and prismatic but deeper wounds as well. What were these? I could see that all he valued would perish from the indifference of Allmuseri who would no more appreciate the limits and premises of his life than he would theirs, whereby I mean his belief that one must conquer death through some great deed or original discovery, his need to soar above contingency, accident, and, yes, other pirates like John Silver and Captain Teach, his pseudo-genius — to judge it justly — which could invent gadgets but lacked genuine insight, which rained information down on you like buckshot, but in the disconnected manner of the autodidact, which showed all the surface sparks of brilliance — isolation, vanity, idealism — but was adrift from the laws and logic of the heart. All at once I found that I was still ensorcelled by a leader who lived by the principle of Never Explain and Never Apologize. But I pitied him too, for his incompleteness. I pitied him, as I pitied ourselves, for whether we liked it or not, he had changed a people simultaneously for the better and worse, made himself the silent prayer in all their projects to come. A cruel kind of connectedness, this. In a sense we all were ringed to the skipper in cruel wedlock. Centuries would pass whilst the Allmuseri lived through the consequences of what he had set in motion; he would be with them, I suspected, for eons, like an ex-lover, a despised husband, a rapist who, though destroyed by a mob, still comes to you nightly in your dreams: a creature hated yet nevertheless at the heart of all they thought or did.

“Cap’n, this is Rutherford. Do you know me?”

“The galley swab?” His mouth opened horribly in a face as flat and foul-looking as a sea boot.

The skipper’s nervous system, that deep structural mechanism none of us can reason with or talk to, was so damaged from the percussion of falling beams he could not control his bowels or the spastically dancing muscles of his face. Thus, smiles followed morose expressions. These were replaced by petulance, surprise, delight, then grief, as if behind the tarp of his skin several men and women were struggling to break free. I suffer you, then, to consider my shock at seeing him this way, fighting to the end to appear singular and self-reliant when, inly, all Nature in him was seditious. Although dazed by this reel of involuntary emotional masks, I’d seen enough of shipboard surgery to know his only hope was a stiff shot of rum, a sterilized knife to hack off everything below his knees, and henceforth precisely the sort of dependency on others a swashbuckling sea rover — a man so fixed and inflexible in his being — would find intolerable. “Aye, I know you. Is it the end of the world, Mr. Calhoun?”

“Sir?”

“It came to me as I lay here, a nightmare that this was the last hour of history. Nothing else explains it. The break-down. I mean, how thorough it is, from top to bottom, like everything from ancient times to now, the civilized values and visions of high culture, have all gone to hell in fine old hamlets filled high with garbage, overrun with Mudmen and Jews, riddled with viral infections and venereal complaints that boggle the mind and cripple whole generations of white children who’ll be strangers, if not slaves, in their own country. I saw families killing each other. People were living in alleyways. Sexes and races were blurred. I saw riots in cities and on clippers. Then: the rise of Aztec religion and voodoo as credible spiritual practices for some, but people were still worshiping stage personalities too. On and on it came to me. Crazy as it seems, I saw a ship with a whole crew of women. Yellow men were buying up half of America. Hegel was spewing from the mouths of Hottentots. Gawd!” His whole body shuddered from stem to stern. “I was dreaming, wasn’t I?”

“Maybe, Cap’n. Things’ll never be that way.”

One or two moments went by as he creased on his left side, still as the ship’s figurehead, his skin paggly and scabbed, one of his sock suspenders broken (he had invented, I should record for this record, suspenders that ran from your shirttail to your socks so you never had to pull them up and always had a shirt that looked crisp, smartly starched, and capable of passing military inspection, including after a battle), his face relaxed and voice low, calm as island currents.

“You’re uncommonly quiet ’n’ calculating tonight. Is it ’cause you betrayed me, Mr. Calhoun—”

“Nossir. I did exactly as you asked.”

“True?”

“Your plans, and those of the mutineers, got on the wrong side of the buoy and beached. I’m sorry, sir.”

“Then we underestimated the blacks? They’re smarter than I thought?”

“They’d have to be.”

He nodded, wrinkling his nose at, I presumed, his own fierce odors. “Mr. Calhoun?”

“Here, sir.”

“What’s not changed is that I still need you to be my eyes and ears. I cannot write, so you must keep the log. No matter what becomes of me, I want others to know the truth of what happened on this voyage. Will you do that?”

“Cap’n, I’m no writer. I don’t know how a ship’s log is done.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re a bright lad. Do your best. Include everything you can remember, and what I told you, from the time you came on board. Not just Mr. Cringle’s side, I’m saying, or the story the mutineers will spin, but things I told you when we met alone in secret.”

To this I reluctantly agreed. I took his logbook from the ruins. But I promised myself that even though I’d tell the story (I knew he wanted to be remembered), it would be, first and foremost, as I saw it since my escape from New Orleans.

“Now, then,” he said, satisfied that I would be his biographer, “can you tell me how the situation stands?”

“The Africans have the ship. We’re steamin’ blind. They want us to lay a course for Senegambia, whereupon the remaining crew will be released, if you can guide us there.”

As I spoke, color faded out of his face. His fists, small-knuckled, squeezed open and shut at his sides. “They don’t own this ship.”

“Captain, they do. You can’t change that.”

“Naw, you don’t understand. Neither do they. The slaves think they’ve wrested the Republic from the crew, is that it?”

“So it would seem.”

“They’re wrong.” Muscles round Falcon’s eyes tightened. “She wasn’t our ship from the start, Mr. Calhoun. Every plank and piece of canvas on the Republic, and any cargo she’s carrying, from clew to earring — including that creature below — belongs to the three blokes who outfitted her in New Orleans and pay our wages. See, someone has to pay the bill. I’m captain ’cause I knew how to bow and scrape and kiss rich arses to raise money for this run. I didn’t come up in the last bucket, you know. I knew how to reach ’em, which wasn’t easy, ’cause they don’t like to be seen. Each one of ’em expects his investment to be returned. Mebbe tripled, like I promised. If we fail, they won’t be forgiving. These are the men we have to appease, not them whoresons and rowdies outside. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. We suffered the unexpected. Surely they’ll understand. But I’m telling you they won’t see nothing ’cept that I took their money — a lot of money, lad — and they’d just as soon see us drown, if I sail home empty-handed, as hear me report their fixed capital seized control of this brig and swung her back to Bangalang.”

The ship’s finances was a field where my ignorance was complete. On economic matters my heart was simple, my mind slow. I kept quiet. But was Ebenezer Falcon telling me that he, at bottom, was no freer than the Africans?

“A month before we left I visited one of these brahmins, my hat in my hands. Oh, I grinned and all but gave him my backside to pat. If any of the hands’d seen me I’d never be able to show my face in public, let alone raise a crew that wouldn’t laugh at me. But it worked, Mr. Calhoun. I was just the crab he wanted, says he, to bring back blacks as valuable as the Allmuseri. I remember going over the crew list with him in his parlor. A simple room, you understand, but long as the main top bowline, filled with pale, eastern light in early morning and simple furnishings such as men of modest means might select. He came to breakfast in a waistcoat cut deep in front, not a wrinkle in his breeches, and his hair combed in a négligé style. A perfect gentleman of taste and proportion is what his toilet told you. All that was to hide the fact he’d made a bloody fortune running slaves and supplies for the British during the last war. See, only poor men put on a show. Which is what I did, ’cause I wanted this contract bad enough to beg for it. I figured this run’d be money for old rope. That easy, you understand? He let me do most of the talking, complimented me on my Latin, my expeditions down the Nile, my schedule for self-improvement, my travels and diverse translations, a few of which (unread) were on his bookshelf behind us ’cause he had a controlling interest in the Boston publishing house that produced them. He let me talk — get it—’cause even though the lubber could barely write his name he didn’t have nothing to prove in this world. He could buy men such as myself with his pocket change. Buy beauty, if he couldn’t produce it. Buy truth, if he was too busy to think. Buy goodness, even, for what blessed thing on God’s earth don’t have its price? Who ain’t up for auction when it comes to it? Huh? Tell me that? All the while I gabbed, squirming in my seat beneath his family’s coat of arms (the head of a Negro), sipping hot coffee from a cup that kept shaking in my hands, he was just smiling and studying me. Not as one man studies his equal — and I was more’n his equal on water or in the wilderness — but the way I’ve seen Ahman-de-Bellah appraise blacks fresh from the bush. I did not like the feeling, Mr. Calhoun. Nor did I like him. He ain’t been at sea for half a dogwatch. I felt closer, if you must know, to the illiterate swabs and heathens I’d gone through hell with on ships and in the heart of stinking jungles. Thing is, he made this voyage possible.” The Old Man was quiet for a long time, his eyes like bits of ice, his complexion paly, whiter than lamb parchment. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed, like a man in church. “His name is Zebediah Singleton, and a third of this tub is his.”

“And the other two-thirds?”

“Elihu Griswold, a Georgia planter, owns a big slice, but I don’t expect you’d recognize these names. Like I said, these blokes don’t like to be seen. For good reason too, given all the crimes they’ve committed. The last one is a Creole speculator named Philippe Zeringue.”

“Ngonyama won’t listen to any of this, Captain. There are fifteen Africans now, but only four Yanks. They have the arms and we do not, nor any chance for regaining our course if you—Philippe Zeringue, did you say?”

“You know him?”

“No, but — uh, I believe I’ve heard the name.”

“Well, three of these rebellious Allmuseri are his

“Which three?”

The Old Man shrugged off my question, talking on about an invisible economic realm — a plane as distant from me as the realms of religion and physics — behind the sensuous one I saw. Suddenly the ship felt insubstantial: a pawn in a larger game of property so vast it trivialized our struggles on board. My months on the Republic seemed to dissolve, delivering me back to Papa Zeringue’s smoky restaurant, which I’d never left, and then it was he talking in front of me and not Falcon, laughing at my Illinois country-boy ignorance of how the world worked, telling me there was no escape from the webs he had woven in New Orleans, across the sea, and even into the remotest villages of Africa. But how could he do this, I wondered? Buy and sell slaves when he himself was black? Was this not the greatest betrayal of all?

“Of all what?” asked Falcon.

I’d spoken in my reverie without knowing it. “Nothing,” says I. “Captain, I think I’d better go to my bunk and lie down. But you must promise to do as the Allmuseri say. Our lives depend on it.”

“I’ll tell ’em what I told you. But first I must ask you for one last favor. Have you the gun-ring I gave you at the fort?”

I held up my left hand.

“Give it to me, please.”

He waited, pensive, staring past me to Nacta’s back in the doorway, his features like fog, remembering his nightmarish dream of things to come. I could not tell whether he accepted the Africans’ conditions or if he was hatching some new treachery and, frankly, after learning that Papa was my real boss, that his reach extended this far, that I still had to answer to him, I felt too defeated to say more. I handed over the ring. He shipped a face suddenly full of scorn, one that told me Get Out. I did, glancing at the brand on Nacta’s shoulder, then at the others as I went, perplexed and perversely fascinated by which of the blacks belonged to a black. Making my way aft, I saw Ngonyama and Diamelo enter the captain’s room. Part of me knew Falcon was sifting through the wreckage for a weapon. I knew if he found one he would shoot them, but I thought this possibility slim until, as Cringle leaned over the rail near me, his Protestant stomach perpetually knotted and belly full of wind from Squibb’s baking, we heard a single shot like the crack of doom on Judgment Day. I felt that shot in every fiber. My scalp began to crawl. The mate spun on his heels and sprang in four steps to Falcon’s door. Nacta pushed him back. Then I couldn’t see clearly as the other Africans clewed up at the entrance. Someone, Akim said, was dead. I clawed through the crunch of bodies, hoping it was not Ngonyama, that Falcon, in his stupidity, had shot Diamelo instead. Inside the room I was restrained by Ghofan. He held me with both hands. Said, “This one gave him the gun.” He was shouting at Ngonyama, who made answer that “Rutherford came in unarmed. Let him go.”

Released, I stumbled forward and found myself beside Diamelo. He was peering down at Captain Falcon, whose ringed hand, his right, was tight on the trigger of a Philadelphia derringer that had blasted away half his head, painting the wall behind him pink with kernels of bloody scalp big as peppercorns, a pâté of brains and blood, and left us — as all in the suddenly silent room knew — alone and sightless on strange waters, our chances for reaching home and dropping hook dashed by his death like driftwood.


As runaway slaves follow the North Star, having no guide to their homeland but a single light overhead, so the Republic steered by the stars for a fortnight. No matter, as Cringle told me, that the source of this fire in the heavens had likely died a millennium before the earth cooled, or that all our dreams were pinned upon an illusion of light, a trick of perception: we sailed on. And on, the clipper now a crippled Ark of blacks bandaged in canvas, begging for attention, calling night and day for food, medicine, and consolation. Petty fights and rumors broke out like disease itself, causing divisions we did not need, for our first priority was getting the ship into trim. If decks did not need scrubbing, then headstays needed tarring; if not that, then slack-standing rigging had to be overhauled, replaced, and repaired, for you cannot touch a single rope without altering the intricate tracery of the whole design. Poor old ship! She was not worth a powder shot now. At times, late at night on calm waters, I almost thought I heard her weeping for herself and our pitiful skeleton crew of half-starved ex-slaves. Without much water, without good canvas, and almost without an experienced crew, we were buffeted about by contrary winds, thrown off course frequently, so that often we flew in circles, retracing our path, or fell into a trance of sea and wind too frail to propel us, drifting aimlessly like men lost in the desert, our sails mere rags and ropes in ill repair.

Oddly enough, Diamelo spun leeward and suffered the greatest loss when the Old Man’s body, weighted and bundled in sailcloth, was brought on deck and pitched into the Ditch. He watched nervously as Cringle and I cracked open the skipper’s sea chest and distributed his gear before the mast among the slaves to lighten ship, and because it just made your duties too damned hard to have reminders of a dead shipmate sculling underfoot. But Diamelo wanted these reminders. All along I had tried to steer small when near him and not cross his bows, because he never spoke to the Americans except through a third person. Whenever he had to hand anything to Cringle or Squibb, he threw or slid it toward them with his toe. Deeply, deeply he hated us. Daily he led a whispering campaign against Ngonyama, accusing him of treason against his own people by serving as Falcon’s liaison to the slaves. I said that wasn’t so. He called me a Cooked Barbarian and told me if I spoke out of turn again I would be thrown in irons. Physically he was thin as a drainpipe, so lubberly I could have taken him down in two, maybe three seconds. Weeks below had left him bony, with large, froglike eyes that fastened onto you like fingers; swollen feet; and a tight skullcap of crinkly hair that could easily double under the boiling African sun as a natural pith-helmet. So it was not so much his stature that sometimes swayed and stoked up the others when he spoke as the purity of his racial outrage. This he kept close to him like a possession — imagine how one holds a cat — a point of reference that made every event prior to his enslavement pale by comparison. After hearing him plead earlier for our heads, it was easy to see his bondage in the barracoon, then in the ship’s hold, as the most significant, the most memorable, even the finest hour of his life, a memory to safeguard and strengthen, to designate as the anno Domini demarcation since his birth two decades before. Prior to his imprisonment, said Ngonyama (who knew him since childhood), Diamelo had been a soger who drank palm wine and drifted indifferently from one occupation to another; been the village wastrel; the first at every dance, the last to leave; the boy who peeped at women when they went off to pee; the bully who proved himself on smaller boys; the hunter who hung back until the prey was dead or declawed; the sleepy student bored by muscle-banging field work, contemptuous of the doddering elders, impatient with the painstaking years required to master one of the complex Allmuseri crafts. But there in the crowded barracoon Diamelo found his long-delayed focus: Ebenezer Falcon, a true (godsent) devil to despise. A dragon so exquisite in his evil that Diamelo, never a boy to impress his people by his skills or social contributions, discovered no one spoke of his flaws and personal failings when all their lives were wreckage. He had but to breathe one two-syllabled iambic word, Falcon, to hold their ear and magically control their emotions. If the Old Man had thrown Ngonyama’s sense of direction into doubt, he had inadvertently handed Diamelo’s to him on a plate. In three weeks the wastrel previously cool toward his tribe’s culture became its champion, a change the older Allmuseri, like Ngonyama, found unconvincing, opportunistic at times, even false, though none could afford to criticize him during their crisis below. But a champion must keep his dragon alive. It must not disappear, as the skipper did when he slipped his cables. Nay, retired dragon-slayers tended to be as directionless as soldiers after a war.

Although we’d flung half the skipper’s things into the Drink, shrewd Diamelo told the others his presence was still dangerously alive inside and out, fore and aft, in the steerage and forecastle, bulwark and waterways. Perhaps in them now as well. The evil had not been exorcised. The dragon was not simply a man but the spirit behind his ship, his way of seeing and speaking the world. Therefore he proposed new, emergency conditions for our conduct. The master’s house must be dismantled. Only Allmuseri was to be spoken by the crew when in contact with the newly empowered bondmen. Cringle was to use maps Ghofan was preparing; he did not trust the ones Falcon had left. In addition to this, he forbade us to sing songs in English, his oppressor’s tongue, whilst we worked. He said we must learn their stories. Nurture their god. Allmuseri medicine was to be used to treat sickness and injuries. We were not, of course, to touch their women; in fact, we were to lower our eyes when they passed to show proper respect for a folk we did not understand, had abused because of that, and now must come to for a wisdom we’d ignored. Last of all, until we reached Senegambia we were to dine only on dishes familiar to the Allmuseri — six upon four, since our rations were low.

Little of this lasted, except for each of them going below to feed their god. On both sides, African and American, survivors of the revolt felt too battered to embrace an entirely new regime. When Diamelo offered his proposal, they voted with their feet. Why? Brother, some days we ate candles. Oil. Leather when we had to, saving scraps of dandy funk (or biscuits) for the women and children, who warmed a bit toward Squibb and me. Nevertheless, Diamelo continued to wash himself in salt water whenever Cringle’s shadow fell upon him, cleaned utensils if I touched them first, and took an unusual interest in the operation of the ship’s cannons.

To make matters worse, Death climbed in through every portal. Falcon had left us a drifting laboratory of blood-chilling diseases. That figured, in a way. I mean that blacks would not take the helm of the Republic until the ship was damned near damaged beyond repair, a shadow of her former self, her days of greatness gone — in other words, a vessel you couldn’t give away, even if you tossed in a thousand-league guarantee. We dragged contaminated, pungled bodies to the rail. Two of the Allmuseri had Guinea worms. Being no surgeon, and not feeling all that good himself, Squibb was obliged to improvise as best he could. His prior shipboard experience served him well. He could detect plague by its sweet scent; scarlet fever by an odor like biscuits; insanity (he swore) smelled like rats. Most wounds required amputation. After lopping off the limb, the bloody stump was swathed in a strip of leather, which Squibb left until the whole thing dried out; then he scalded the nub with hot oil or tar, and this meant three of our hunger-bitten deck hands — the newly liberated Africans — were lurching about their tasks minus one leg, or with only two fingers on one hand, or without an arm. To any observer it would seem that a crew of invalids staggered upon the deck. The best dental work Squibb could muster was extraction. He destroyed the exposed nerve with arsenic. Atufal spent his free time carving false teeth for these unfortunates, sometimes using the frontal teeth of the dead to strengthen these crude replacements for the living. As might be expected, every mother’s son on board had lice and eczema, was continually scratching, covered with red blotches, complained of fever, constipation, fatigue, and the bloody flux. Most went barefoot and, therefore, bled about the feet and calves from scratches that ulcerated almost overnight. Besides this, there were cases of distemper, a sort of maddening fever degenerating into a frenzy so violent that the victim ripped away his clothes, shredded his skin, or that of the man next to him, to hanging ribbons, then leaped into the sea. And these, I must add, were the milder cases aboard ship.

Far more dreadful were the sufferers from Black Vomit. This affliction attacked the nervous system and brain. Those so infected took on a yellowish tinge. Fell comatose. Their pulses sank almost too low to feel, and then came fits of delirium. Screams that kept the rest of the crew on edge or near nervous exhaustion, because the victims of Black Vomit went from apparent health to rot in a period of two days. In addition to this, and to crown it all, a handful among us showed signs of tetanus from wounds we had received during the fight. Squibb made heavy water helping them, and remarked sadly, “We’ll be quarantined afore any port lets us put to. Yuh know that, don’t yuh? This bloody ship smells like a pesthouse.”

That stench, I noticed, was on Cringle. When not at the helm, navigating by guess and by God, he lay in Falcon’s cabin, poring over maps and pulling his hair, his skin rucked and sagging, burned down to half his weight. His body jumped with fever. His head was full of bald patches, the remaining tufts of brown hair being starched, bleached, and brittle. Squibb diagnosed his affliction first as typhus, then scabies, and finally as sea scurvy. Actually, it was all three. His legs were swollen. Two wisdom teeth were loose in his head, wobbling in gums going putrid, but he would not stop riffling the skipper’s cabin for sea briefs and old logbooks, or clues — anything! — that would show us the best route back home. “ ’Twas that storm,” he speculated, his topsail-yard voice tightened to a throaty rasp. “I’ve not seen the like of it. Grayback waves over the gunwale. Lightning in the sails. Sky and sea were torn for a spell, or that was what I felt from the bridge.” Leaning back in a busted three-legged chair, nearly tipping it, he pushed away his maps so as to ease his eyes. “You should never have gone for a sailor, lad. If you’d stayed home, you and that lady’d be spliced by now.”

I did not wish to think of Isadora. I rose, felt the sea fall, then my belly, and sat back down. “Have you no running fix on our position?”

“None. Could be near Martinique or São Miguel, for all the bloody charts tell me. We’ve strayed off course, left the sea whose ways I know, and come into a rogue sea I know not.”

“Forget the charts, then. The stars—”

“The heavens are all wrong. That’s what baffles me. They’ve not been in the right place since that gale gave us a dusting. We should never have taken on Allmuseri. They’re foul-weather Jacks. The world tilted because of it, or someone switched the sky on us. You tell me what happened. I’m a simple sailor, Rutherford. All I know is Castor and Pollux aren’t where they should be for another thousand years, or maybe where they were when Copernicus was watching the sky.” He gave a sigh. “Maybe it’s me. .”

“Then we are lost?”

He cleared his throat, but nothing came out. Cringle pinched the bridge of his nose to relieve pressure on his eyes, hesitant to answer me now, and as he rested I remembered the tales spun by old tarpots barely able to hobble up and down the wharves in New Orleans, about cursed ships that sailed forever and were damned never to touch shore. All were created by some catastrophe, they said. After a captain poisoned his crew. Or a high-seas riot. Or when the mates slit a master’s throat in his sleep. Sometimes she was seen off ports struck by plague. Had we become such a phantom ship? As one throws out a net, I pitched him a question, hoping to break his silence and bring something back:

“Why did you sign on?”

He started. “What?”

“Why did you sign aboard the Republic?”

“It wasn’t my decision.” Now he was rubbing his forehead. “My father is a very influential man, as people remind me often — a father to be proud of, I suppose. When he was fifteen he came to America from a poor fishing village near Dorset, came in the belly of a steamer, like the blacks, with two shilling and a half crown in his pocket, and in twelve years he turned it into a fortune that’d buy his family’s village twice over. And people love him, yes, they do, because he is charitable and helps anyone who started out with nothing, as he did. He holds contempt only for the privileged, but ironically that is precisely what his fortune has produced.” Cringle laughed brokenly, his pipebowl bobbing from his mouth like a buoy. “McGaffin was right. I don’t belong here. Like my other appointments, this one was. . arranged.”

“For what purpose?”

“Not mine, I assure you. If I understand his reasoning, it’s because I’ve made a bad show of everything else. He’s arranged many jobs for me, you know. I’ve been a bookkeeper for his company. Papa’s heir secretly despised by the employees who smile because he’s the boss’s son, then whisper behind his back about how unfair ’tis he’s standing in the way of someone who’s been there forty years. That sort of thing — do you see?”

I didn’t, but I didn’t admit it.

“I tried, of course; I wanted to prove to him that I could make a go of things on shore, as he did, but men like him or Falcon have always made me feel contrary. Sooner or later I find myself disagreeing with them, or doing something to defy their smugness, or saying, ’No! Your way of doing things is not the only way.’ Before this I was a clerk, a customs inspector, a higgler, an apprentice to a tailor, then a cabinetmaker, and twice engaged to women he thought suitable for me and, well. .” The mate smothered a belch. “None of them panned out. He was disappointed. I was disappointed.” He squinted at me. “D’you know what it’s like having a father such as this?”

“Hardly.” I tried to laugh to lighten his spirits. “I don’t even know who my father is. Mine was never there to expect anything of me, or to make me expect much from myself. I have no family traditions to maintain. In a way, I have no past, Peter. At least that’s how I’ve often felt. When I look behind me, for my father, there is only emptiness. . ”

“Then you’re luckier — and freer — than you know. You can never make a man like my father accept you on your own terms. Nor can you argue other alternatives with him, because material success is a pretty tyrannical proof for one’s point of view. Truth is what works, pragmatically, in the sphere of commerce. You can’t surpass him, because he’s done everything, been everywhere before you got there, knows everyone, judges everything in terms of profit and how wide an impression it makes in the world, and hasn’t left you any room to do anything except join his legion of admirers. And, worst of all, you must admire such awesome success as his, even though he feels, of course, that your mother corrupted you too much with books and crafts when you were young — it’s always the mother he blames, you know, for spoiling you with poetry, or. .” He lost track of his thought and rubbed his bladelike nose. “I’m here, Rutherford, because if he can’t have a son who’s a captain of industry, like himself, or a forceful personality like Falcon — they were old friends — or his favorite aide in his company, one William Jenson by name, who is really his son in spirit, I believe, one of those orphans who fashioned himself by his own hand, as my father says he did, and don’t even ask me to tell you how it feels to see him grooming this lad, who looked at me with such self-satisfied smirks that I could have strangled him. . if he can have none of these, then he wants, I suppose, a ship’s captain. Should I fail at this, there’s nothing else, because I shall not go crawling back to work in his company.”

“And you?” I asked. “What do you want?”

“Right now, I want to be left alone.” He laid his head on the table, cradling it in the crook of one arm. “All right? Just for a few moments before the first dogwatch begins. .”

I urged Cringle to sleep and helped him to his hammock. Across his shoulders, neck, and backside there were boils and chancres, some hard, some softened to the point that pus drained from the sores. The smell of him was terrible. A cheesy odor, which spread thick and palpable on the air when I leaned closer to cover him with a stiff stretch of sailcloth. His gums were infected too, bleeding down his throat, breaking his sleep with a rattling cough, like maybe both his lungs were riddled with holes.

And how did your narrator fare? Little better than the ship’s bravos, I confess. Whenever Baleka cried bitterly for her mother and no one could calm her, when Diamelo threatened to beat Squibb because the Falstaffian cook couldn’t decipher orders he gave in Allmuseri, or when one of the Africans was too weak to work and fell behind, the first thing I was forced to do was forget my personal cares, my pains, and my hopes before repairing to the deckhouse where the sufferers were sprawled. I placed a hand on each of their foreheads and listened. Though tired and sleepless, I clowned and smiled for the children; I told American jokes that failed miserably in translation. I prayed, like my brother, that all would be well, though I knew the ship was straining at every seam, making water, that beneath the thrashing waves there was only bottomless death, the extinction of personality, with not a sliver of land on the horizon, and perhaps all would not be well, as I told them until I worried the words into meaningless blather, perhaps only disaster lay ahead of us, but the “useful fiction” of this lie got the injured through the night and gave the children reason not to hurl themselves overboard before the first blush of whiskers had a chance to appear on their cheeks. If you had known me in Makanda or New Orleans, you would have known that I doubted whether I truly had anything of value to offer to others. Obviously, my master thought I did not. Once in Illinois when I felt jealous of Jackson’s chumminess with him and wanted to get on his good side, I asked, “Sir, what do you think I can do for others?” Peering up from under his brow at me, wearing a pair of Ben Franklin wire-frame spectacles, he replied, “Yes, that is the question, Rutherford. What can you do?” That helped my morale not at all. It made me feel as if everything of value lay outside me. Beyond. It fueled my urge to steal things others were “experiencing.” Believe me, I was a parasite to the core. I poached watches from Chandler’s bureau and biscuits from his kitchen; I pirated from Jackson’s trousers the change he made selling vegetables from his own garden; I listened to everyone and took notes: I was open, like a hingeless door, to everything. And to comfort the weary on the Republic I peered deep into memory and called forth all that had ever given me solace, scraps and rags of language too, for in myself I found nothing I could rightly call Rutherford Calhoun, only pieces and fragments of all the people who had touched me, all the places I had seen, all the homes I had broken into. The “I” that I was, was a mosaic of many countries, a patchwork of others and objects stretching backward to perhaps the beginning of time. What I felt, seeing this, was indebtedness. What I felt, plainly, was a transmission to those on deck of all I had pilfered, as though I was but a conduit or window through which my pillage and booty of “experience” passed. And momentarily the injured were calmed, not by the lie — they weren’t naïve, you know — but by the urgent belief they heard in my voice, and soon enough I came to desperately believe in it myself, for them I believed we would reach home, and even I was more peaceful as I went wearily back to help Cringle at the helm.

Not so with Ngonyama.

“This evil is visited upon us,” he said testily, stepping over his injured tribesmen, giving them water, which we had to ration closely, “for the crewmen we killed.”

“Do you think Diamelo sees it that way?”

He shot me a stare so fierce, like sparks from a blacksmith’s forge, that I had to look away. “Who else is there to blame? All well and good for you to blink at sin, Rutherford. You’re a Yankee”. His wide lips curled a little in contempt. “None of us were brought up to accept failure, or laugh it off, as you do.” Crabby, he rubbed his chin, then said an English swear word I never dreamed he knew. “I shall never understand you, Ndugu. We were forced onto this ship. Why have you wandered so far from your home?”

He really meant all that. As will happen with a man of his beliefs, he saw the sickness upon us as a moral plague and held himself responsible for our suffering. The aftermath of the mutiny stopped his spirit cold. Riveted it. Nailed him fast. He had slipped into relativity. He could not move forward, and thus lost ground to Diamelo day by day. (But I must add he kept us alive by not telling Diamelo all he had learned at the helm.) It all had to do with an old Allmuseri belief (hardly understood by one Westerner in a hundred) that each man outpictured his world from deep within his own heart. A fortnight ago he had thought murder and lo! the mutiny was manifest, as if a man’s soul was an alchemical cauldron where material events were fashioned from the raw stuff of feelings and ideas. That meant an orthodox Allmuseri, as he was, had to watch himself twenty-five hours a day and police his heart. As within, so it was without. More specifically: What came out of us, not what went in, made us clean or unclean. Their notion of “experience,” I learned, held each man utterly responsible for his own happiness or sorrow, for the emptiness of his world or its abundance, even for his dreams and his entire way of seeing, so that an Allmuseri pauper might be rich if his heart was clear, and their kings impoverished if they harbored within themselves hunger, grievances, or hatred, as Ngonyama had done toward the crew, wishing misery and death upon them. All that, it seemed, had flown back upon him like spit hurled at an enemy against the wind. And now Ngonyama grieved less over what lay ahead of us than what lay in the immediate past, this rift, this vast rupture he had caused within himself by permitting the execution of so many.

Never a night passed but I entered the quiet, disheveled fo’c’s’le — full of mildewed clothing and rusted weapons covered with fungi — and, standing at the room’s center, imagined I heard those murdered tars: McGaffin’s snarl; fetching music from Tommy’s flute; the yammering of Fletcher and Meadows; and the nerve-jarring Har! Har! of forty pirates in a gin-duel. As I struggled to describe every detail of our passage in the captain’s log, I longed for the crewmen lost to fill the ship’s room again, for our lonely drifting to disappear, and, as in a dream, delivering me back to Isadora’s sitting room, where I would set my teacup clicking down on her candlestand, cross the carpeted floor on my knees, and bury my face in her skirts, begging her to take me in and forgive my idiot blathering about wanting excitement and saying all the beautiful things I’d meant to tell her to balance how I’d hurt her sometimes. Like a wife she would watch me closely to see my reactions to the portraits of women in popular magazines, or on the street, faintly jealous if I stared at them too long, but never showing it, wounded but too proud to let on that I had brought her pain, this woman who, I knew, had paid my bills back home. And it came to me, there in the darkened room, that perhaps Papa was right and there were only two kinds of people in the New World: debtors such as I had been all my days and those who, like Isadora, paid the rent for all the rest. But the dream never doorwayed into her rooms, and the furnishings of the fo’c’s’le took on a grim finality or gave me such a feeling of there being nothing beyond these groaning timbers, this endless sea, that I wept shamelessly like a child.

“Ruth’ford,” said Baleka, catching me like this. “Can I get you anythin’?”

I blew my nose. Croaked: “Dry socks.”

She hung back, a little rattled to see me blubbering and biting my nails, her hair tucked under an African headwrap or gele, as their women called them. As with all Allmuseri children, Baleka never displayed her feelings directly. Frankness was a Western virtue that offended the blacks a time or two. She policed herself from doing or saying anything that might displease others. Thus Baleka could only be read at angles by paying attention to the subtlest of vibrational shifts in her voice, the slight emotional spin she put on ceremonial action, the nearly imperceptible imprint her feelings left, like heat from hands on glass, upon Tribal behavior so ritualized, seasoned, and spiced by the palm oil, the presence of others it virtually rendered the single performer invisible — or, put another way, blended them into an action so common the one and many were as indistinguishable as ocean and wave. I wondered if she thought it weak for a grown man, a Westerner, to weep. Turning my back to her, I blew my nose on the hem of my blouse, and said, “Yes?” My voice croaked. “What is it?”

“It’s your turn to feed it.”

Baleka looked at her bare feet. Instantly, I knew what she meant: the creature Falcon had captured had to be fed. Every day it had to eat. Heretofore, the more pious of the Allmuseri had done this, but eventually the duty fell to everyone. I was the first of the Americans luffed in for the chore. But on what did it feed? None of the Africans who went alow had been with it for more than fifteen minutes. None had taken food. It was a duty I dreaded. Still, I felt compelled to see what sort of cargo Falcon had believed would make his fortune shoreside and, just maybe, hasten the millennium.

Weakly, then, feeling unsteady in my spine, fearful that perhaps I, too, had the first signs of sickness, I descended into the chamber with a glim and rope tied at my waist. The darkness there was blacker than chimney soot. There, where the scuttles were closed, the smell rivaled stagnant water in a swamp. The air was stale, potted. The silence was so heavy I swear you could hear a maggot pump ship on sailcloth. No wind stirred within these walls, but the flame of my lantern swayed violently as if things were stalking to and fro. My chest began to ache. Feeling the urge to vomit, a backwash of fluids in my throat, I bent forward, but nothing came, and now I was so weak I could neither stand nor sit, and simply lay still. About five paces to my right was the box. Otherwise, I saw nothing. Something was off, my nerves told me. I felt an edge on the air, a skin-prickling charge like that before an electrical storm, the chamber releasing an elemental whiff of something just spoiling to happen: catastrophe hunkering, fleetingly visible in the corner of the eye. And then, as if cued to the gathering chaos I felt within, the crate opened and from it stepped a dark man, his features striking in the stylized way of Benin sculpture, the bone in the bridge of his nose boldly cut, his cap of short hair a mosaic of burls. This, I knew without noting another detail, was the dangerous, shape-shifting god of the Allmuseri. And I knew the infernal creature — this being who delighted in divesting men of their minds — had chosen to present itself to me in the form of the one man with whom I had bloody, unfinished business: the runaway slave from Reverend Chandler’s farm — my father, the fugitive Riley Calhoun.

Загрузка...