Signals of Distress

by Jim Crace

  Here was a town more preoccupied than Aymer could ever hope to be. He walked up towards the chapel first. He nodded gravely at a balding, elderly woman spinning in her outhouse. Hanks of flax hung from a beam between the hams and herbs. A pig, tied by the leg, sent Whip away. The woman didn’t look up from her wheel. One nod and she might snap her yarn. There wasn’t anybody else to be grave with, or to show the new, forbidding brevity of his conversation. The lanes and yards were quiet and empty, and all the windows shut. The chapel door was open, though, and there were two old men digging in the chapel green, with Mr Phipps the preacher looking on. Aymer might have found some company there – another man who loved debate, who took his pleasures from a book – for Mr Phipps was Aymer’s twin in many ways. Both were prisoners of priggishness, and dogma, and vocabulary. Both had Latin. Both were smitten by Katie Norris. They were two peas, except they disagreed on everything they had in common. So Aymer didn’t catch the preacher’s eye but persevered with his walk, following the path round to some rough-cut steps in rock behind the chapel. They led up to a muddy overhang which opened out to flat, high ground and a patchwork of stone-walled fields. Aymer turned towards the sea. There was a perfect panorama of chapel, town and harbour, with thinning wraiths of smoke haunting the sky in silent, crooked unison and the last remaining smudges of the snow slipping down those roofs that had no warming chimneys.

  Was this worthy of a sketch, a verse, an observation in his diary, Aymer wondered. What was that phrase he’d read that morning in dell’Ova? He took the book from his pocket and found the passage: ‘The solitary Traveller has better company than those that voyage in the multitude, for he has Nature as his best Companion and no man can be lonely in its Assemblies of sky and earth and water, nor want of Friends.’ Aymer read this passage several times. It ought to comfort him, he thought. He was one of life’s ‘solitary travellers’ after all, a Radical, an aesthete and a bachelor. He didn’t voyage in the multitude. He knew that he was destined to a life alone. He looked for solace in the Assembly of sky and earth and water that was spread out before him. But there wasn’t any solace. He couldn’t fool himself. He’d rather be some cheerful low-jack, welcome at an inn, than the emperor of all this landscape.

  Thankfully the sound of Wherrytown at work disturbed his Melancholia. The two men on the chapel green were striking granite with their shovels. Nathaniel Rankin’s grave already had collapsing sides. Down on the shore and all around the salting hall, the local women shouted to each other and clattered barrels. And from the harbour there were the sounds of distant carpentry, of mallets hitting nails, and saws in wood. Aymer could see that there were men hauling recut spars and repaired masts into place on the Belle and much industry on deck and on the quay. But he would need an eyeglass to decipher who was who. Was that a couple arm in arm, standing partly hidden by the ship? Was that the Norrises? The only figure he could name for sure was sitting on a horse and waving his arms like a general.

  Whip didn’t seem to like the height. She snapped at Aymer’s shoes and barked.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Smith.’ Preacher Phipps was standing fifteen feet below the overhang and looking up. ‘What brings you to my chapel? You come to be baptized, I hope? What Scriptures are you holding in your hand?’

  Aymer resisted the temptation to summarize his views on God and churches. ‘I came only to admire the outlook,’ he said.

  ‘What do you see then? A man of God engaged in God’s good work.’

  Aymer couldn’t stop himself. ‘I do not see you working, Mr Phipps. You do not seem to have a shovel in your hands. I did not spot you yesterday amongst the pilchards. Nor do I expect to see you tomorrow labouring with wood and rope.’

  ‘I was not sent here to labour with my hands, but to grace the pulpit. The Good Lord chose me for my Morals not my Muscles. And which of those do you excel in, Mr Smith?’

  ‘I do not aspire to either.’

  ‘Then I will pray for you.’

  ‘What will you pray? That I should be more muscular?’

  ‘More muscular indeed. But hot in body, sir. More muscular in Spirit. More muscular in Faith.’

  ‘I thank you for your kind concern. But I have walked here simply for the view and not to join your congregation.’ Aymer looked out once again towards the quay. Why hadn’t he been ‘more reticent, more taciturn’? It wasn’t dignified to be caught in debate above an open grave. ‘I thank you, Mr Phipps,’ he said again. ‘I only wish to see what progress they are making on the ship and then I will vacate this lookout and leave you to your holy duties.’

  ‘See if you can spy your African from there and earn yourself a sovereign.’

  ‘What do you say?’

  The preacher explained how Walter Howells had put a sovereign up for anyone who brought the slave back to the ship. ‘Warm or frozen. The reward is just the same. There is to be a party organized to search for him tomorrow morning after we have put the sailor to rest in this grave. We’ll sniff the fellow out.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave the man at liberty?’

  ‘Come, come. We cannot let the man roam free. He is a savage. Dangerous. Unbaptized!’

  ‘You are a Christian, Mr Phipps. You should concern yourself with his emancipation, not his capture.’

  ‘We must first capture the body, Mr Smith, and then we can make amends for that by attending to the emancipation of his soul. Is that not your philosophy? Or have I misapprehended it?’

  ‘Amenders are opposed to slavery. But you are not, it seems.’

  ‘No, sir. Nor are the Scriptures or the saints. I might refer you, sir, to Moses. And to St Jerome, “Born of the Devil, we are black.”’

  The preacher beamed at his two gravediggers. ‘We will dig a grave for him in holy ground if he is found and he is dead. You cannot say my heart is closed to him.’

  ‘Well, he in’t dead, and that’s for sure,’ one of the old men said.

  The second one agreed. ‘He in’t. He’s up to mischief though.’

  Between them they recounted all the evidence that they had heard that morning from their neighbours: the theft of clothes and bedding from the inn, the outsized footsteps in the snow, the wind-like, wolf-like howling in the night, the dismembered cow that had been found by the Americans on the beach at Dry Manston. (‘Ripped apart it was. By human hands. And nothing left excepting hoof and bone.’ ‘Not human hands. Not human, anyway, like us.’)

  ‘I can assure you, gentlemen, that Negroes do not howl at night, nor do they tear up cows like tigers, nor do they have the six-inch remnant of a tail,’ said Aymer, addressing the two gravediggers with what he meant to be a kindly and a patient tone (and an example for the preacher). ‘If they are distinguished from the European then it is by their virtues, not their savagery. It is true that the Negro has great strength and must have if he will toil beneath the blazing sun of Africa. But he also has these further strengths of character, that he is cheerful, loyal and does not harbour grudges for the sorrows and the cruelties of life. I do not speak from theory only. I have met with the man. His name is Otto and I promise you, there is no cause to fear the African …’

  ‘Not when the blackie’s got a pistol in his hand?’

  ‘He does not have a pistol in his hand.’

  ‘Well, that in’t so. He’s broke into Walter Howells’s house and made off with a pistol.’

  ‘I cannot think that that is true …’

  ‘And so it is. Mr Howells’s place is only two spits down the lane from me. I’m locking up my doors at night, until the man’s chained up again …’

  ‘Save a stranger from the sea,’ his friend recited, in his wisest voice. ‘And he’ll prove your enemy. They should’ve let the bugger drown. He in’t worth the sovereign.’

  AYMER HURRIED BACK with Whip to the inn. Again there were no signs of life. He put his warmest clothes on underneath his tarpaulin coat. He filled his pockets with the half-stale breakfast bread that was still on the side table. He wrapped some pilc
hards and some cheese in a napkin. Where should he go? He headed out of Wherrytown on the path that he knew best, the one that met the Cradle Rock. He had an image in his head of Otto sitting on the rock, becoming stone, his blackness camouflaged by sea salt and by lichens the colour of mustard. Aymer’s legs already felt like pease pudding. His heart was beating like a wren’s. He knew his duty now. He knew why he had stayed.

  When Aymer was out of earshot of the town, he started calling ‘Otto! Otto!’ and then ‘Uwip! Uwip!’ but only Whip responded. His trousers and the skirt of his coat were soon muddy from her front paws and his patience with the dog was exhausted. After an energetic, breathtaking half hour of walking at a speed more suited to a horse, Aymer slowed. He stopped calling out for Otto. He stopped expecting a reply. He didn’t even search the countryside for distant, single figures, or giant footprints, or wolf-like cries. He concentrated only on the path. Come what may, he told himself, he’d reach the Rock. And if the African was there? His plan was this: he’d bribe the Bowes to take him in, hide him till the Wednesday dawn, and then bring him – disguised in a dress and bonnet – to the quay at Wherrytown and the safety of the Tar. He’d give Otto a job at Hector Smith & Sons. The plan was not preposterous. He’d dress him well. He’d mould him into shape. Otto would learn to read, write, cypher, be a gentleman, and enjoy the status and emancipation that otherwise could flourish only in his dreams. If he was not at the Cradle Rock? What then? Aymer could do little more than leave the meal of bread and cheese, protected from the gulls by stones. That wasn’t much of a rescue. But at least Aymer wouldn’t have abandoned his freed man for a third cold night entirely without provisions. He must make some amends for the haste and carelessness of emancipating Otto without a scrap of food. Without a hat, a weathercoat or money. He wondered if there were a sign that he could leave, a simple warning that Otto would be hunted down and put back on the Belle unless he ran and ran and ran.

  Of course, there was no sign of anybody at the Cradle Rock, not even fishermen at sea. Something else was odd, too, an absence from the scene. At first Aymer couldn’t say quite what. But then he saw the cabin lockers, the seamen’s chests, the double-barrelled cannon, the ship’s supplies, the stacks of timber partly covered in tarpaulins and left for safekeeping above the tideline amongst the salty foliage of the backshore dunes. There, too, were the cattle from Quebec herded in two gorse-fenced compounds. He remembered. That then was the oddity. The American ship had been removed. The sea was more remote without the Belle, as if now its only urgency was moon and tide. Two days before the Belle had seemed to be a solid fixture on its sandbar. More solid than the Cradle Rock.

  Aymer climbed up to the rounded platform, found the spot that he had shared with Ralph Parkiss on the Sunday, put his back against the granite mass again and pushed. How had it ever moved? Its weight seemed anchored to the coast. A third Ice Age might move it from its pivot stone, but not a man alone, not Aymer, not a thousand Aymers. He might as well have put his back against the door of a great cathedral and hoped to shake the pigeons from its spire.

  He called ‘Otto’. Just once. Whip turned and growled. But no one came to help him with the Rock. He went back up the narrow path onto the headland and sat down on the wooden bench where he had rested with Ralph Parkiss before they’d grappled – together – with the Cradle Rock. Ralph’s initials were freshly carved on the seat, the splintered wood still fleshy brown and free of timber mould. Aymer put the cheese, the bread, the pilchards on the seat where they couldn’t be missed. He covered them with the napkin and weighed the corners down with stones. The walk had made him hungry, and thirsty too. He lifted up the napkin edge and broke off just an elbow of the bread and one small whang of cheese. The gulls came down to watch him eat. It wasn’t yet one o’clock. There was no hurry to return. He took a sharp stone and scratched a careless A.H.S. in the wood. He added Otto’s name beneath. And then he circled Ralph’s carving with a heart, and added Miggy’s initials, M.B., below the deeper, more painstaking R and P.

  He walked down to Dry Manston beach, nosed amongst the loose equipment from the Belle, walked to the water’s edge to see what kelps and carcasses there were, threw scraps of broken timber for the dog. He watched the dunes and the path beyond for anybody passing by. At last he was so cold and thirsty that he found the courage he’d been waiting for. He walked up past the Bowes’ kelping pit, along the track where Miggy had refused to shake his hand, until he reached their cottage yard. He didn’t have to knock at the door. The two Bowe mongrels leaped up on their ropes and barked. Whip’s tail was uncontrolled. The Bowes had returned from pilcharding, it seemed. Thank God for that. The curtain cloth was pulled back and Miggy’s face was pressed against the bottle-glass, her red kerchief refracted in a dozen glassy crescents, her cold face flushed with tears. Aymer raised his hat. He mouthed, ‘Good morning, Miss Bowe.’ She did not move. Her mother opened the door.

  Why had he come? He didn’t know how to explain except to say, rather lamely, ‘I was passing by, and thought I might impose on you.’ Again he had the only chair, but on this Tuesday there wasn’t any warm mahogany to drink, nor any fire, nor any bending flattery of light except the thin, cold, steady light of day which came in through the window and spread its square and chilling carpet on the earth floor. Should he, perhaps, explain he had the influenza and was merely seeking some respite from the weather? Or that he hoped to gain permission to sketch their cottage at some later date? Or tell the truth, that he was looking for the African, the African that in a day would be brought back as a slave? Was that the truth? Had Otto brought him to this door, this dark room? Or was it that he simply liked it there, its smell of fish and half-dried clothes, its lack of ornament, its womanly silence, its calm?

  He watched the women’s silhouettes as they made room for him and cleared some floor space for his legs. They gave him water flavoured with a little mint, and bread with beef. Rosie Bowe sat in the corner on a box. Miggy went beyond the sacking curtain, lay down on the box-bed and soon was talking to herself, like young girls do when they are full of hope and tears. Aymer’s eyes were soon accustomed to the light, and he could see the room more clearly and just pick out on the chimney breast the few embroidered lines from Jeremiah. ‘Weep sore for him that goeth away …’ he began to read out loud, and meant to say something about Otto. But Rosie Bowe interrupted him. ‘Not that!’ she said, and stood to turn the embroidery around, so that the letters were reversed and all the working threads revealed.

  ‘She says she’s going to America.’ Rosie pointed to the bed. ‘She says she’s going to be with that boy Ralph.’

  ‘I am, Ma. Yes, I am.’

  ‘He hasn’t asked you yet?’

  ‘He will, though. He says that’s why he came here. So’s me and him could meet and be together.’

  ‘He din’t choose to come here, girl. He was brought here by the sea.’

  ‘That’s why the sea has brought him, then.’

  ‘You think that husbands get washed in by storms, is that it?’

  ‘I do think that. I do.’ She hadn’t thought it, up till then, in fact – but the image of her Ralph delivered to her in a storm was like a fairytale, and she the princess in her hut. ‘Why should I stay here any more?’ she said. ‘I’m seventeen. There’s Oxy Hobbs, she went away when she was only fifteen, and married since.’

  ‘She’s gone ten miles, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, Mary Dolly, then. She’s gone to London … That in’t ten miles.’

  ‘Gone to be a chambergirl and not to wed, and not gone to America …’

  ‘She don’t have Ralph, though, and I do. If he goes off without me, Ma, I’m going to drown myself from swimming after him.’

  ‘You’re talking wild and silly, Miggy Bowe.’

  ‘I in’t.’

  ‘She in’t, she says.’ She spoke to Aymer Smith. ‘She don’t know what it means, America. She thinks it’s down the coast. She thinks they’ll walk back here on Sundays for
a bite.’

  ‘I know better. Ralph has said.’

  ‘Has Ralph said how you’ll never see your ma again?’

  ‘I’ll send you word.’

  ‘How will you send me word? Who’s taught you how to write since yesterday?’

  ‘You can’t read in any case.’

  ‘So that’s it, then? I might as well be dead to you.’

  ‘Oh, Ma, don’t start.’

  Rosie Bowe sighed loudly, shook her shoulders and her head, stood up, sat down, sighed deeply once again. ‘Well, then …’ she said. She’d have to settle for it, she supposed. She’d never known her daughter so implacable.

  Aymer hadn’t said a word. Had Rosie Bowe expected him to repeat his offer of yesterday, his promise to ‘enhance’ their lives by taking Miggy as his wife, in lieu of kelp? She’d said, ‘My Miggy in’t for you. She’s only but a girl.’ But had she staged this public argument with her daughter so that Aymer could intervene, and count off the seven certain benefits of being Mrs Margaret Smith? He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t try to take this girl from Ralph. She would flourish in America. He had no doubt of it. At last he could admit it to himself – her country face would not transport so well to Aymer’s home. She’d never be a Margaret. Look at the way she sat, her manly breeches and her busy legs. Listen to her breathing through her mouth, and speaking in an accent full of wind and salt. See, in that half light, the narrow tightness of her face, the unsophisticated hair. She wasn’t Katie Norris. He wouldn’t wish to travel to the end of tired with her. She didn’t even have her mother’s virtues, a kind and ready smile, good, open, unembarrassed eyes, a spirit made from weathered oak.