“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. . ”