He is not your whole brother and you are not the son of the father you think. Here, take it back.
I don’t have a father.
Your father floated to the top, and then sank straight to the bottom where your mother has wormed to.
My mother was buried.
There’s good water beneath your place, and strong current. Your mother does not fear it anymore. Now, get your foot out of the drift and listen: Your father is dead at last of the cut your brother gave him in the troughs of the storm.
He was the fish we fought?
A man of the sea. The mustachioed man of your mother’s Manuel.
Begone, you witch of the sea. Such lies!
But I have your child.
No, no — the child gone over?
The one you birthed from all your clothes.
The boat voted to put the babes and Molly off, for lack of food. I had no choice. I stitched an X to its pocket. I wanted it to have my name at least.
Name, name. Does the minnow bear a name? I was planning a treatise on the names of the healing kelp but no one will read it. They prefer to stare at the sky until the kelp washes over their wounds. Come below now. It’s time. Your babe is here.
Not below.
That’s the fear in you again, the mother-half that fights the father. How far I’ve had to chase you! Come now, the ice shifts, it will close again soon.
The water—
The sweet, sweet salt of it.
Can I not rest on your fishy rump and think it out? For a short time at least.
Oh, thinking, that’s what you’ll do there? Hasn’t the fighting of pirates and all the charnel-making chased thinking clear from your head?
It is thinking that makes me live. My true father, dead?
Seven, and seven. To fourteen.
My brother comes, to spite me.
Live then.
29
It must be the cold. You must have seen things. That woman from before? I have but one eye but even I can see this is not the place for such rendezvous.
Seven. And twenty-eight. Wipe that eye of yours better. Night is approaching. I saw her.
Night is not approaching, day is.
Seven.
You should not go off without me, brother.
Aye.
You won’t leave me again, will you?
I didn’t leave you for nothing, you forced me to go by throwing away my one thing, you brute!
Aye.
Aye.
Do you have a rope?
Am I the child of my mother?
Tie it between us so we cannot part.
Between us? As stupid as that navigator, letting Death have a chance to laugh twice?
I say tie it. I cannot drag my leg on without knowing you are here with me, talk or no talk.
You’ll drag me down.
I’ll lead you out. I know the way.
You do?
I have the bravery, I found it after you left me for good, to see things.
Let us keep to the number.
Quit muttering.
That monk — the Frenchman on the boat that slaved us, he muttered to himself too. I caught it from him. He lay athwart the hatch while you were below. Sometimes while he muttered, he worked out a paper from under his robe and folded it.
He had paper?
He would fold it and fold it, this bit of paper, into a gull that flapped.
Seven hundred and fourteen. He made a bird from a paper?
Aye. I saw it, while telling out one of my stories to keep him from lashing you. It flapped, his bird, like life.
You’ll be seeing our Ma next, as easy as paper flapping from that hardly-a-monk’s hand. Stop flapping yourself.
The snow’s in my face. And you’re dragging the rope.
We haven’t eaten it?
Not much farther.
Not so far that you can fly.
Seven.
If only we had paper, we could burn paper.
Or make a map.
Or a bird.
Or put death on it, like my paper.
It’s the bear.
Aye.
We have been circling it.
Circling sevens. And more.
What’s that great bit of cloud over there? Seen, there, in the side of the ice.
Another trick of the eye.
You’re just trying to throw me off again, first gabbling over the whale’s foul eye, then the story of a fish you can sit on to help you think, then of that detested Frenchman who folded gulls — I swear you are a brother to confound another. Just look and tell me what you see.
A whale.
A fish-whale?
One of these white ones you’re supposed to stay away from, a great white whale suspended in the air with string, and snow forcing its gullet like krill in a wave.
It is not. It’s a gull too close. There’s too much fog to see.
It’s a whale.
Then it’s come for its eye. Give it up, give it.
Never.
You must.
Gone.
Or just a cloud.
Or we’re inside the fish—
— and another’s come to swallow us.
Or something’s slipped out and gone down below, into a hole in the ice.
By the ghost of all the blubber that rinses these seas! It’ll come roaring up next at our feet when we least expect it, it’ll come roaring up and rip off our legs and chew us up alive like one of those map serpents.
At least it’s not — my female parts.
30
Keep walking. First you see things that aren’t there and now this talk of female parts. Seven. I’ve known you since all the seas were fair game, you bastard, we were boys together with our Ma, our gibbetty Ma.
Seeing that we’re going to die, I thought I’d mention my true parts.
The wind has changed, the ice is freezing itself. Did we turn wrong?
It changed, like me.
Now that we’re not going to die just yet, you stop that telling of things, I mean we will die but we don’t have to do it just now. So whatever it is you’re wanting to tell me more of, you needn’t be in a hurry to.
You always admired my backside.
That I did. I do, as a brother should on the sea. But you as a woman? You’re my brother and that’s how brothers get along. Quiet yourself.
Ha! You’ll see — you’ll be rubbing your bloody stump against me, melting the snow for miles.
That’ll keep me walking a league or two more.
I wore curls and a dress until you were out of short pants.
All the young wore them, it was the fashion to dress and curl. I myself wanted powder.
Ma wished to protect me from her drowning and throttling and the dangerous drubs she plunged herself into. She said women had these ways and I shouldn’t be ashamed but that I should hide them all or men would open me up, the men from the sea beside our house, every pirate and captain and huckbutt that sailed or swum up.
I’d die before I’d tell a thing like that on myself. A woman!
Better I tell and we walk a little faster. Seven is the number.
Unless seven is a mistake from the start, another mistake from the start like being from some other parent, our Ma being that way and you being our Ma’s way, a woman that is.
I am a woman so every man I killed coming aboard could be killed for Ma and myself, together.
I’m lifting my boots a little higher just to clear my haunch and get back quick to tell the pirates about the woman they remembered smelling way back before. If it be true.
A siphon for when I made water. A siphon — you never saw.
I never looked. I have my delicacy.
I confess to having used your cutlass to cut my own wailer’s cord as I birthed him one dark night out of Newfoundland. Out of all the clothes I wore to round me, I bore a wailer from the likes of that slaver dressed as a monk. There, I’ve said it twice.