With Cringle’s waistcoat shawled over his shoulders for warmth, and holding a horn of rum in his hands, he found a space in his sporadic madness to tell how he’d come within three feet of forcing open a door in the crate after the rope broke but was stopped by the density of air around it, a natural defense of the thing inside, which did not so much occupy a place as it bent space and time around itself like a greatcoat. He could force his bare feet to go no farther. This was just as well, for dark coils of the creature’s defecation were everywhere, slithering with insects, worms, and sluglike beings that apparently lived inside its bowels. All at once, the crate rocked gently as something crab-walked from one side of the box to the other, scritching its nails on the walls, muttering to itself like a devil chained inside a mountain for a thousand years, its voice gently syllabled and honeyed, as sacramental as a siren’s, or peradventure its very breathing was a chant so full of love and werelight, vatic lament and Vedic sorrow, that the boy’s heart bade him listen more. He slapped his left hand over his mouth, clamped his right hand over the left, and bent down on one knee, this being a brain-rinsing song the boy somehow felt he knew. Down in that lichened chamber, down in this shrunken air scattered with galleywood and bosun’s stores, down in a vault swimming with imponderables, he forgot where he was and why he had come: a sea change nicer than any of us knew, he said; and then the creature’s lay whistled from his own lips like the sweetest of fluids whelming through his windpipes, and he was inside the luminous darkness of the crate, himself chained now yet somehow unchained from all else, sadly watching young Tommy O’Toole, sensing as if through the lotic skin of a stingray or crab, and they were a single thing: singer, listener, and song, light spilling into light, the boundaries of inside and outside, here and there, today and tomorrow, obliterated as in the penetralia of the densest stars, or at the farthest hem of Heaven.
When he had finished, his eyes ashimmer after peering into the heart of things hidden and his body swaying to music none but he could hear — after this, there was no sound forward and aft except the creaking of rigging loud as a bonfire. “Blimey.” A deck hand ran his fingers through his hair. “It eats people, that’s what it eats.” Squibb was tight as usual, trying to stand erect, weaving on both feet, tilting first left, then right. He lifted the cross from his neck and, his eyes closed, kissed it. “Saints preserve us.” A few chaps shivered, and not simply from the wind’s chill gnawing through our coats. All could see the ship’s boy would never come about. He was lost to us.
“You can belay that kind of talk,” said Cringle, buttoning his coat up on the boy. “I take it you’ve work to do, so be at it. Prompt, if you please.” His arm waisting Tommy, Cringle assured him he would come to no harm. He promised to erase his name from the work roster and, being the sort of quartermaster given to rising at night to pull back the covers on others who’d kicked them off when sleeping, fearing they might be chilled, he led him to his own berth, which the ship’s boy was to have for the rest of our voyage home.
Entry, the fourth JUNE 28, 1830
Homeward bound on May 30, we left the fort with the Republic leaking like a sieve, hoping again to cross the Flood, but this time with the sides of the ship bloated, scorched by the sun, and with barnacles clotting her stern-piece. She reached the latitude of 20° south, and longitude 10° west, sailing full and by without serious mishap on North Atlantic trade winds until on the fifteenth day the weather turned squally. Pellets of rain hammered the sails so heavily Captain Falcon was obliged to shorten the main topsail and let the ship sail under bare timber. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he told me. “Just see that you and Squibb double-lash the longboats and secure the galley.” But his voice wobbled, and I knew he was not telling me the worst. It was the stormy season of the year off West Africa. And during the bleakest nights when curdling fog rolled in, obscuring the stars and sky, making precise calculations of our position impossible, when the wind wheeled unexpectedly from NW to NNW, twirling us like a matchbox or toy ship of balsa wood — those nights, Falcon and the few men still loyal to him stayed awake through each watch in the skipper’s cabin, sipping coffee laced with rum, crimped foreheads tilted together over maps and compasses spinning widdershins. Younger lighthands lost their appetites. Tommy, relieved of all his duties, couldn’t hold down as much as a sea biscuit, and neither could I, mainly because Squibb and I cooked the slop and I saw him spit into it when he was angry with the crew. Older sailors swore, suddenly got religion (there are no atheists at sea, as they say), and fingered their crosses, whispering prayers for fair weather, and scheming all the time — anyone could see this — on ways to seize the ship and steal her cargo.
Dependent as we were on each other, hardship brought out small kindnesses as well as cruelty, even from the most unlikely people, among them Nathaniel Meadows, a barber-surgeon who looked, for all the talk of his being an ax-murderer, Biblically meek: a crankled little stretchbelly with fishy eyes and big scarlet ears, who kept his hair slicked back with seal’s oil. He had no chin to speak of, his jaws dropping straight down into his neck. He smelled like the dogs on ship. He superstitiously carried a clump of Liverpool sod in his trousers when at sea, a habit shared by many old salts; but unlike anyone I have ever known he had the unsettling habit of blinking rapidly when he spoke. There was a space between his teeth, which gave his s’s a faint whistling sound when he pronounced them, as if he’d swallowed a flute but got it only halfway down his trachea. Some deck hands said his mother had been frightened by a field mouse when she was carrying him. That wasn’t hard to believe. He looked like a titmouse in human form. And Meadows had no chest at all — that is, in profile his body curved like a question mark, and you’d associate his tamed, quiet manner with, say, reformed alcoholics, or men who’re recovering from a stroke. Meekness aside, I still gave him a wide berth. “ ’Ello, mate. ’Bout to do my laundry, I am,” says he to me. “Just wonderin’ if you need anythin’ washed, Mr. Calhoun.”
His arms loaded down with the wash of others, he approached me by the spanker-boom, where I was biting into the last of my breakfast, a biscuit going bad, on the verge of molding, you know, visibly all right on the outside but, once I sank my teeth in, it tasted as if it was loaded with dust. I tossed it to one of the children in a jolly boat, then put down my kid (eating tub), and stood to the sound of sudden growling behind Meadows’s legs. He’d brought one of the dogs with him, a half-starved mongrel who apparently wanted something dark to chew on. I drew back.
“ ’Ey, don’t mind him,” said Meadows. “ ’E’s just hungery.”
“I can tell.” His dog starting sniffling at my crotch, poking his nose between my legs, which convinced me it might be time to do my laundry after all.
“You want your shirt washed or wot?”
I slipped it off and placed it on top of his pile, noticing there one of Cringle’s blouses and the ragged cloths a few of the Allmuseri used to cover themselves. “Meadows,” says I through clogged sinuses, “you’re scrubbing clothes for the slaves too?”