“Lay yourself forward or below tomorrow at noon.”
“What?”
“If you have any friends on this ship”—he glanced at Baleka, who refused to release the fingers on my left hand—“tell them to lay below too.”
He was gone before I could draw sense out of him. After he left to join his tribesmen below, I stayed for a time by the gunport, the girl’s grip on me stronger than before. “We’ll be all right,” I said, though I didn’t believe a word and was troubled by what Ngonyama, that crafty bastard, had told me, and furious at the cryptic tone he used sometimes. Really, when he talked like that, with a wink in his voice, it put me in a mind to clobber him with a caulking iron for his own good. “Universal Native,” I’d call it, the high-flown, inscrutable way whites made the Cherokees talk in dime novels, or the Chinese in bad stage plays. It certainly wouldn’t serve him well back in the States, or endear him to the slave lords who awaited him in Louisiana. Nonetheless, his warning bothered me. I half believed him; half I did not. But we had only a few hours or so of daylight before the impenetrable darkness of the ocean sank over us. Accordingly, the skipper was lashing the crew to make repairs—“You men get aloft!”—hauling them one by one to their feet to secure all the sails with spare gaskets. “And keep a bright lookout.” Others to report on damages below, and double-breech the lower decks. And still others to make fast the boats and haul unnecessary cargo — but not his prized crate — to the rail and pitch it over to lighten us. Erewhile, his lighthands went feverishly to work at the pumps, but their hearts were hardly in it; they worked nervously, waiting for the sea to throw its next seizure. A few deck hands talked of quitting the ship, taking to the remaining boats, and abandoning the blacks who — the boatswain claimed — had caused this troublesome gale and boiling sea to turn us back to Bangalang.
“Steady up there,” said Cringle icily when he overheard them. “And you can stow that kind of talk right now. The captain says he’ll haze any man that tries to leave the ship.”
“Then”—the boatswain spat inches from the mate’s boot; he pushed his low-crowned black hat back on his head, its ribbon hanging over his left eye—“we’re dead already.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me, McGaffin!”
Cringle’s right hand touched the owlhead pistol in his waistband. The boatswain only exhaled, then spat again, this time hitting the mate’s leg. “You’re the one who kin stow it, Cringle — or shove it mebbe, and that self-servin’ rummy Falcon too, cose water was me woman before you was in long pants, and I know trouble when I see it. Them niggers is weird. A tribe of witches and strangelings. They kin do things. And if you ain’t noticed, sir, there’s water under the keelson, one of the bloody winches is broken, sir, and the hand pumps are chokin’ up. You’re as good a shipmate as ever put a hand to sail, Mr. Cringle, I don’t doubt that, but sometimes I think you come to be quartermaster by crawling through the cabin-house window instead of through the hawseholes like the rest of us. God almighty, man, any tar on board’ll tell you the skipper can’t get this rotten piece of driftwood home — he’ll drown the lot of us — and it’s your business, I’m sayin’, to put things right before it’s too late. D’you know what I’m arstin’ you to do? D’you have enough skin for it? Cose if you’re too fish-hearted to do what you promised, some of us who’ve had enough will do it. See if we don’t!”
Cringle could not reply. This list of problems stole the mate’s wind. He looked flustered and put out, his lips pressed in hard. Like that, he spun away. Me, I had business of my own to tend to in the galley, and perforce hurried below, Baleka hanging onto my dripping shirttails like a barge in tow.
By nightfall Squibb and I had the galley in “shipshape,” if you’ll pardon the expression. The steward was feeling pleased with himself. Actually, he was probably squiffy from the genial influence of a tot of rum. Baleka had finally fallen to sleep in a corner, and the cook and I were on our knees, swabbing and squeegeeing when McGaffin, peeling off his oilskin coat, came through the hatch, followed by Cringle and five men as grim as any I’d seen, the terror of the storm still upon them. I saw their boots first as they slid past me, dirtying the floor. Silently, they took seats on the benches as a jury might, or men come for a hanging. I noticed immediately they were armed with cutlasses, knives, ship’s tools easy to convert to bludgeons. McGaffin sat on the edge of the galley dresser, a little higher that way than the rest, his big hands with curly black hair on the backs folded on his hips. Cringle closed the door, the quietest of clicks as wood kissed metal. Squibb dried his hands slowly on his apron, rose up on one knee, then the other, and gave me a glance, his whole air saying Careful! as he filled a mug of tea for each of them. “Illinois, I think mebbe yuh should leave.”
“No,” said Cringle. “We need every man we have here.”
“Do we now?” McGaffin paused with the mug just below his mouth. “Every man, I’ll agree, but this one ain’t no sailor, he’s a stowaway, remember? A workaway. I been watchin’ him since you found him in the longboat. I didn’t see him sign any articles. He ain’t got no stake in all this.”
“In what?” I asked.
“The ship, boy! You come along fer the ride, I reckon. But after you’ve gone back to farmin’ or fogle-huntin’, the rest of us got to think about our future and families, God love ’em, if we live to see land again, which I’m startin’ to doubt more ’n’ more every day.” He set his mug down. “You got a family?”
I thought of my brother and said, “No.”
“You got a gel?”
I thought of Isadora and said nothing.
“See, then? It don’t matter wot happens to you, does it?”
Right then, Cringle’s hand cutting through the air for McGaffin to stop made the candles affixed to the wall behind him flicker, casting his own face in shadow. He coughed, clearing his throat, and said, “Rutherford, we’re here to decide the best way to put this ship back on a steady course. A crew has to trust its captain. Those of us here don’t. We think it’s time to change leadership.”
“You mean mutiny?”
“I didn’t call it that.”
McGaffin frowned. “That bother you?”
Their eyes, full of hardness, bit into and held me to see if it did; stares aimed like shotguns, gazes so steady and critical I felt as if I were on stage or had the square frame of an oil painting around me. To my left, firewood crackled in Squibb’s oven, splashing an eerie coralline light on their faces, and a peculiar warmth on my legs, for my clothes were still damp, except there on my trouser legs, where the heat made the cloth stiff. All this time I stood motionless, unsure what to say. Silence, never doubt it, was equally a sin in their eyes — eyes I had seen before, I realized, under the sun-blackened brows of slaves: men and women who had no more at stake in the fields they worked than these men in the profits of a ship owned by financiers as far away from the dangers at sea as masters from the rows of cotton their bondmen picked. No less than the blacks in the hold these sea-toughened killbucks were chattel. McGaffin’s gaze drifted to my left hand.