I had no intentions, of course, of telling him what of her private condition she had revealed to me, or of her beliefs and their profound effect on me, but I thought that he would be interested in hearing about her connections to the New England abolitionists. Actually, I simply wanted to talk about her, to put her into words — to think about her in a concrete way, so that I might be emboldened to seek out her company a second time and then pursue a true friendship with her.
Father sat heavily at the foot of my bunk and placed his Bible upon the narrow shelf beside him. “How goes it, son?” he asked.
“About the same. Worse since the weather turned” I said truthfully. I lay on my side with my knees pulled nearly to my chin.
He stared down at his hands on his lap and seemed oddly preoccupied. “Can I get you something to eat? Have you been drinking water? You must drink, son,” he said in a low, disinterested way.
“I’ve taken my sips, what I can handle, at least. Nothing to eat, though, thanks.”
He sat in silence for several moments, until I asked, “What’s the matter, Father? Is something wrong?”
He sighed. “Ah, yes. There is. The girl I spoke of earlier. The one traveling with her aunt from Salem?”
“Yes? What of her?”
“Ah, the poor, distracted thing. She’s gone and thrown herself into the sea.”
I sat bolt upright and stared at him in disbelief. “What? Miss Peabody? No, that can’t be true! Not Miss Peabody!” I cried. “How could she do such a thing?”
My first thought was that I had abandoned her. Then that she had gone off and left me behind, that she had abandoned me. All my thoughts were accompanied, as if prompted, by anger. And all were of myself. I should not have left her alone. I should have stayed with her the whole night long. I might have protected her against the darkness of her mind. I might have been able to keep her here in this world, for me. I and me.
“Yes, the same,” Father said. “A sad and very disturbing act. I was obliged to preach a good while to the company this morning. I took my text from Jonah. It’s a vexed and anxious company up there today. And the poor aunt, she’s struck down with grief for her niece. I don’t understand it. She must have been a bitter, angry child. I had to struggle just to make sense of it for the others. For her troubles, to shade her against the blazing sun of a woman’s troubles, the Lord God had prepared her a gourd, and she sat beneath it and no doubt was glad of it. But when God prepared also a worm that smote the gourd and made it wither away, she was like Jonah, who wished more to die than to live. Angry as Jonah in Nineveh was that young woman. Even unto death. You know her name, Owen. How’s that?”
“I believe… I believe that you told it to me,” I said, and lay back down.
He slowly let his breath out. “Yes. Well, I really can’t understand it. Suicide always escapes my understanding. Wherefore is light given to her who is in such abject misery, and wherefore is given life unto the bitter in soul? Wherefore, to one who longs for death and digs for it more than for hidden treasures, to one who rejoices exceedingly and is glad when she can find the grave? Wherefore, Owen, indeed? She was a pretty, smart young thing, Owen. I liked talking with her. A little too much educated by Transcendentalism, though. But despite that, I liked her. She talked right smart to me.”
“Did anyone see her go? When did she do it?”
“Sometime in the night. No one saw. Her bed wasn’t slept in, and when her aunt woke, she sent up the alarm, and the ship was searched stem to stern. But the girl was nowhere aboard. Her aunt has collapsed into grief. And regret. And shame, no doubt.”
“Why? I mean, why regret and shame? She didn’t drive the girl to suicide. A man did that. A coward.”
“I know, I know, but her niece was in her care, and she seems to have loved the girl very much, and now she’ll have to report the sad news back to her parents in Massachusetts. The man, well, whoever he is, he’ll burn in hell. That’s for certain.”
“Maybe she’s still somewhere aboard the ship. There must be places they haven’t searched yet. No one came looking for her here, for instance.”
“I vouchsafed this place, Owen. So you wouldn’t be disturbed. No, she threw herself into the sea, poor child.”
“Horrible.”
“Yes. Horrible. She believed not, and she died in her sins.”
Father went on like that for a while longer, as he often did after preaching or following a particularly upsetting event, muttering scraps and bits of Bible afterward, like sparks flaring in a dying fire. But I barely heard him. I drew into myself and tried to shut my eyes against the vision of the young woman dropping into the black sea, where she is cuffed and rolled and then embraced by the waves, until she is drawn down by the awful weight of her soaked clothing, her long, dark hair coming undone and fanning out above her head as she descends, her arms extended as if for balance, head thrown back for a last glimpse of the starry night above, and when she has no breath remaining, she opens her mouth, and the cold water that surrounds her rushes in and fills her, and her icy body plunges unresisting through the ocean like a shaft of light.
Again and again, I tried to wipe the vision from my eyes, to listen to Father, who was speaking of Deuteronomy now and the laws of treating with those who violate virgins, of the unknown man who had driven this young woman to such an extremity of despair that she would reject the light that God had given her. But his words flew past me like birds.
I hadn’t loved the woman, of course. But I knew that I might have swiftly come to that, and thus her death struck me a blow all out of proportion to the length of our acquaintance. My pain was like an echo of a cry that I had made long years before. Again, I felt not that I had abandoned her but that she had abandoned me, and somehow, as the hours passed, it did not feel like vanity to think that. It felt like anger.
Now I had even more reason to keep to my quarters, and so for the few remaining days of the crossing I nursed my sickness with hurt and gloom and a curiously satisfying kind of mourning — satisfying in that I counted and contemplated all those whom I had lost so far in my short life, and in so doing was distracted from my nausea and general giddiness. Father came and went like a recurrent dream, and I barely knew whether it was night or day.
Until one morning when I woke, and my stomach for the first time seemed settled, and I was genuinely hungry. I sat up in my bunk and placed my feet down on the deck: the ship felt steady beneath me — although clearly we were still at sea and had not yet made land. The waters that carried us had changed, however, as if we had come in off the ocean and were traversing a lake instead.
Then Father appeared at the entrance to our cabin and in high spirits informed me that we had just passed the Scilly Islands off Cornwall and were coasting north in the Irish Sea, headed towards Liverpool. “We’re in Cromwell’s waters,” he said with pleasure. “Imagine that, Owen! Come up and see the headlands off the starboard side. You’ll imagine Cromwell’s forces setting off to conquer and convert the Irish from paganism and papistry. Celts and Angles, Vikings and Romans, Picts and Normans — they’ve been sailing back and forth across these waters for centuries! Conquering and converting one another for a thousand years! It’s wonderful, isn’t it? The mad enthusiasm of these people!” He laughed.
He kept smiling happily and set about packing our two valises, our small luggage. “They’re not like us Yankees, are they? We’re a continental people, you know; they’re island people. And what a difference that makes, eh? They’re like the Fijis and the Hawaiians and those fierce, painted Caribs in their long, sea-going canoes, subduing their island neighbors and then a generation or two later being subdued right back. These days, of course, the Anglo-Saxons are on top and thinking it’ll last for all time. But you wait: someday soon the rowdy Celts’ll be back, and then the Picts. And who knows, maybe the Normans will make another run for it, eh? Napoleon nearly did it, and not too long ago.”