“’H’lo?” I stepped closer. “Mr. Squibb, are you all right, sir?”
“Do I look all right?” He sat scratching under one arm, squinting to see me more clearly. “I’m a wee bit drunk with dinner to fix, and so help me I can’t do it!” The movement of looking up tipped him backward (the ship veering larboard didn’t help either), and I was obliged to catch him under his armpits, then pitch him forward. He let his head hang. “Fix me some blackstrap, will ye, then finish up this mess.”
“But I’ve never—”
“Do it.” Squibb filled his cheeks with wind, then he swallowed. “I’ll show ye how.”
Following his orders, I helped him prepare mess, and mess it was, for the biscuits were hard and full of weevils (“I left two teeth in one of ’em this morning,” said Squibb), the salt beef tasted of the barrel in which it had been packed, not being helped very much by the onions and peppers I added, and would have been intolerable if not for the beer — each crewman, he said, consumed a gallon a day, but in Squibb’s case it was more like three. He was, had been, an alcoholic since his first voyage at the age of eleven, though he wasn’t exactly certain of his age, and precious little else when he was pickled, which was every waking hour, as it turned out. His lips kept the set smile of a lush. There was no risk in his recognizing me from the tavern; he had trouble keeping track of my identity from one hour to the next. And, sad to say, this was probably Squibb’s last voyage. Only a slaver would have him. His right foot was dead. He’d drunkenly stepped off a mizzentop during his last trip, having forgotten where he was, fallen twenty feet, and miraculously landed on his right foot. Which shattered. Where bone had been, Squibb now had a metal rod. He limped, of course. Like most fat people he wore his shirt outside his trousers whenever possible. He was slow, useless except in the cookroom, with lumps and udders in his face from liquor; a liability at sea, but what sailor could not see in Josiah Squibb his own portrait in years to come if Providence turned her back? As for his parrot, he was more or less the cook’s shadow, having his bawdy humor, and even asked me occasionally, “You had any lately, mate?”
“Aye,” said Squibb, sipping blackstrap as I slopped salmagundi into buckets to haul to the great cabin. “I’ve seen some things, laddie. Reason I look so bad is ’cause I’ve been livin’.”
That made me pause in the doorway. Like Captain Falcon, like me and so many other people (except Isadora), he seemed to hunger for “experience” as the bourgeois Creoles desired possessions. Believing ourselves better than that, too refined to crave gross, physical things, we heaped and hived “experiences” instead, as Madame Toulouse filled her rooms with imported furniture, as if life was a commodity, a thing we could cram into ourselves. I was tempted to ask about his “experiences,” to have him share and display them before me like show-and-tell at school. Instead, I asked:
“Was it worth it?”
He flinched. “How do you mean?”
“Are you a better man for all that fast living?”
Squibb stared at me, growing sober now. “Yer a strange one, Illinois. Naw, darlin’, I can’t say better.” He laughed suddenly, but with little humor. “Ask my wives — all five of ’em — and they’d probably say I’m worse for it.”
“Five, is it now?”
“Or six.” Squibb shrugged. “I lose count. I gets drunk, ye know, and I forgets I’m married, and a woman comes along, and before I knows it I’ve proposed again, and do ye know what’s odd? I keeps fallin’ in love with the same kinda woman ovah and ovah again. They all look like my wife Maud — God rest her — when we first met. She was a pretty li’l thing. She ruined me, ye know. Spoiled me. I mean, Maud didn’t even mind when I broke wind under the bedsheets: you know that’s love, darlin’. She had long, dark hair, a waist no bigger than that”—he snapped his fingers—“and eyes dark as wine — they all do. They could be her sisters, for all the diff’rence, and damned if I don’t slip sometimes ’n’ call ’em by the pet name I give her — Stinky.” He sighed, perplexed, and rapped his temples with the heel of his palm, as if to shake his brain back in place. “Ain’t the quantity of experiences that count I sometimes think, Illinois, but the quality. It’s sorta like I keep lookin’ for Stinky when she was seventeen so I kin do right by her this time.”
I left him still mumbling into his cup, and Squibb, I’m sure, didn’t notice my absence for an hour. But what he’d said stuck to me like a barnacle. It seemed so Sisyphean, this endless seeking of a single woman’s love — the vision of the first girl who snared his heart — in all others, because they would change, grow old, and he’d again be on a quixotic, Parmenidean quest for beauty beyond the reach of Becoming. Yet he seemed ironically faithful too, despite his several wives, his devotion to Stinky as deep as any monk’s for the Virgin. A peculiar man, this Josiah Squibb, I thought, though really no stranger than the others in Captain Falcon’s ragtag crew. We were forty of a company. And we’d all blundered, failed at bourgeois life in one way or another — we were, to tell the truth, all refugees from responsibility and, like social misfits ever pushing westward to escape citified life, took to the sea as the last frontier that welcomed miscreants, dreamers, and fools. Only one sailor the mate warned me to stay away from, a dark, clean-shaven fellow, with thin brown hair and the air of a parson about him. Cringle pointed him out to me as he tied deadeyes down the deck from where we stood. “That’ll be Nathaniel Meadows,” whispered Cringle, “and I’d not cross him, if I were you.”
I turned to give him a better look; Cringle swung me around.
“Don’t stare at him, fool!”
“He doesn’t look dangerous,” I said.
“Then,” said he, “your judgment of character is worse than your cooking. Meadows signed on to escape the authorities in Liverpool. He murdered his whole family while they slept, according to the skipper. Axed them all. The family dog, two cows, and a goat too.”
I tried to swallow. Failed. “Why?”
“D’ye care to stroll up ’n’ ask him?”
“Oh, no. . wouldn’t think of prying. Hardly my business, you know, that sort of thing. .”
The mate smiled. “Smart boy.”
Slowly, I gained my sea legs. By and by, I learned to keep down my dinner and keep up my end in the cookroom and on deck with this crew of American degenerates and dregs; but there’s little point in describing individually the other men on board, for the voyage to Africa was uneventful, the men on ship capable at their specialties, and not one of them would live to see New Orleans again.
Only Cringle, I suppose, sensed what was coming. He had a sixth sense about disaster. Ankle-deep in deckwash, he’d stand by the bowsprit some nights in the light of a single lantern, wearing a woolen fearnought to blunt the teeth of the wind, and stare. Just stare. The fact is that Cringle, more than all the others, was out of place: an officer by accident, I would learn, whose precise speech the crew saw as pomposity, whose sensitivity Captain Falcon read as weakness. The Republic was, above all else, a ship of men. Without the civilizing presence of women, everyone felt the pressure, the masculine imperative to prove himself equal to a vague standard of manliness in order to be judged “regular.” To fail at this in the eyes of the other men could, I needn’t tell you, make your life at sea quite miserable. It led to posturing among the crew, a tendency to turn themselves into caricatures of the concept of maleness: to strut, keep their chests stuck out and stomachs sucked in, and talk monosyllabically in surly mumbles or grunts because being good at language was womanly. Lord knows, this front was hard to maintain for very long. You had to work at being manly; it took more effort, in a way, than rigging sails. The crewmen had drinking contests nearly every day. They gambled on who could piss the farthest over the rail, or on whose uncircumcised schlong was the longest, and far into the night lie awake in their hammocks swapping jokes about nuns sitting on candles. (And some of these, I must confess, weren’t all that bad, even memorable, such as one Squibb told one night.