by Graeme Davis
“‘Oh, Lordy massy!’ says Bob, ‘we’re sent for,—all on us,—there’s been two on ’em: both on ’em went right by me!’
“Wal, Tom, he hed his own thoughts; but he was bound to get to the bottom of things, anyway. Ef ’twas the devil, well and good—he wanted to know it. Tom jest wanted to hev the matter settled one way or t’other: so he got Bob sort o’ stroked down, and made him tell what he saw.
“Bob, he stood to it that he was a-standin’ right for’ard, a-leanin’ on the windlass, and kind o’ hummin’ a tune, when he looked down, and see a sort o’ queer light in the fog; and he went and took a look over the bows, when up came a man’s head in a sort of sou’wester, and then a pair of hands, and catched at the bob-stay; and then the hull figger of a man riz right out o’ the water, and clim up on the martingale till he could reach the jib-stay with his hands, and then he swung himself right up onto the bowsprit, and stepped aboard, and went past Bob, right aft, and down into the cabin. And he hadn’t more’n got down, afore he turned round, and there was another comin’ in over the bowsprit, and he went by him, and down below: so there was two on ’em, jest as Tom had seen in the cabin.
“Tom he studied on it a spell, and finally says he, ‘Bob, let you and me keep this ’ere to ourselves, and see ef it’ll come again. Ef it don’t, well and good: ef it does—why, we’ll see about it.’
“But Tom he told Cap’n Witherspoon, and the Cap’n he agreed to keep an eye out the next night. But there warn’t nothing said to the rest o’ the men.
“Wal, the next night they put Bill Bridges on the watch. The fog had lifted, and they had a fair wind, and was going on steady. The men all turned in, and went fast asleep, except Cap’n Witherspoon, Tom, and Bob Coffin. Wal, sure enough, ’twixt twelve and one o’clock, the same thing came over, only there war four men ’stead o’ two. They come in jes’ so over the bowsprit, and they looked neither to right nor left, but dim down stairs, and sot down, and crouched and shivered over the stove jist like the others. Wal, Bill Bridges, he came tearin’ down like a wild-cat, frightened half out o’ his wits, screechin’ ‘Lord, have mercy! we’re all goin’ to the devil!’ And then they all vanished.
“‘Now, Cap’n, what’s to be done?’ says Tom. ‘Ef these ’ere fellows is to take passage, we can’t do nothin’ with the boys: that’s clear.’
“Wal, so it turned out; for, come next night, there was six on ’em come in, and the story got round, and the boys was all on eend. There wa’n’t no doin’ nothin’ with ’em. Ye see, it’s allers jest so. Not but what dead folks is jest as ’spectable as they was afore they’s dead. These might’a’ been as good fellers as any aboard; but it’s human natur’. The minute a feller’s dead, why, you sort o’ don’t know ’bout him; and it’s kind o’ skeery hevin’ on him round; and so ’twan’t no wonder the boys didn’t feel as if they could go on with the vy’ge, ef these ’ere fellers was all to take passage. Come to look, too, there war consid’able of a leak stove in the vessel; and the boys, they all stood to it, ef they went farther, that they’d all go to the bottom. For, ye see, once the story got a-goin’, every one on ’em saw a new thing every night. One on ’em saw the bait-mill a-grindin’, without no hands to grind it; and another saw fellers up aloft, workin’ in the sails. Wal, the fact war, they jest had to put about,—run back to Castine.
“Wal, the owners, they hushed up things the best they could; and they put the vessel on the stocks, and worked her over, and put a new coat o’ paint on her, and called her The Betsey Ann; and she went a good vy’ge to the Banks, and brought home the biggest fare o’ fish that had been for a long time; and she’s made good vy’ges ever since; and that jest proves what I’ve been a-saying,—that there’s nothin’ to drive out ghosts like fresh paint.”
*A kind of porridge made with grains (usually ground corn in the United States) in water or milk. Best known today for giving its name to the famous theatrical club at Harvard University.
KENTUCKY’S GHOST
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
1869
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward challenged many things in the years immediately after the Civil War. An early feminist, she advocated clothing reform for women, questioned traditional views of a woman’s role in marriage and the family, and even took aim at traditional Christian views of the afterlife in her 1868 novel The Gates Ajar. She married a man seventeen years her junior, urged women to burn their corsets, and wrote about female ministers, physicians, and artists. She herself became the first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University. Late in life, she also became a vocal opponent of vivisection.
Her fifty-seven volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays reflected her beliefs, challenging the standard attitude that a woman’s place was in the home. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the leading abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson both admired her work. She was published in Harper’s Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines, as well as in book form. Her baptismal name was Mary Gray Phelps, after a close friend of her mother’s, but she wrote under her mother’s name of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Rather confusingly for present-day literary scholars, her mother wrote the celebrated Kitty Brown series—said to be the first book series specifically for girls—under the pseudonym of H. Trusta.
“Kentucky’s Ghost” was first published in The Atlantic Monthly’s November 1868 issue, and reappeared in the 1869 collection Men, Women, and Ghosts. It is unexpected in two ways. First, it contains little or none of the social agendas that underpin most of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s other work; and second, it is a tale of the sea, a literary subgenre that was—and remains—even more heavily male-dominated than all the others. In telling the tale of a mother’s love, Phelps conveys the atmosphere and language of the sea as strongly as any male author—and gives us a very satisfying ghost story into the bargain.
True? Every syllable.
That was a very fair yarn of yours, Tom Brown, very fair for a landsman, but I’ll bet you a doughnut I can beat it; and all on the square, too, as I say,—which is more, if I don’t mistake, than you could take oath to. Not to say that I never stretched my yarn a little on the fo’castle in my younger days, like the rest of ’em; but what with living under roofs so long past, and a call from the parson regular in strawberry time, and having to do the flogging consequent on the inakkeracies of statement follering on the growing up of six boys, a man learns to trim his words a little, Tom, and no mistake. It’s very much as it is with the talk of the sea growing strange to you from hearing nothing but lubbers who don’t know a mizzen-mast from a church-steeple.
It was somewhere about twenty years ago last October, if I recollect fair, that we were laying in for that particular trip to Madagascar. I’ve done that little voyage to Madagascar when the sea was like so much burning oil, and the sky like so much burning brass, and the fo’castle as nigh a hell as ever fo’castle was in a calm; I’ve done it when we came sneaking into port with nigh about every spar gone and pumps going night and day; and I’ve done it with a drunken captain on starvation rations,—duff that a dog on land wouldn’t have touched and two teaspoonfuls of water to the day,—but someways or other, of all the times we headed for the East Shore I don’t seem to remember any quite as distinct as this.
We cleared from Long Wharf in the ship Madonna,—which they tell me means, My Lady, and a pretty name it was; it was apt to give me that gentle kind of feeling when I spoke it, which is surprising when you consider what a dull old hull she was, never logging over ten knots, and uncertain at that. It may have been because of Moll’s coming down once in a while in the days that we lay at dock, bringing the boy with her, and sitting up on deck in a little white apron, knitting. She was a very good-looking woman, was my wife, in those days, and I felt proud of her,—natural, with the lads looking on.
“Molly,” I used to say, sometimes,—“Molly Madonna!”
“Nonsense!” says she, giving a clack to her needles,—pleased enough though, I warr
ant you, and turning a very pretty pink about the cheeks for a four-years’ wife. Seeing as how she was always a lady to me, and a true one, and a gentle, though she wasn’t much at manners or book-learning, and though I never gave her a silk gown in her life, she was quite content, you see, and so was I.
I used to speak my thought about the name sometimes, when the lads weren’t particularly noisy, but they laughed at me mostly. I was rough enough and bad enough in those days; as rough as the rest, and as bad as the rest, I suppose, but yet I seemed to have my notions a little different from the others. “Jake’s poetry,” they called ’em.
We were loading for the East Shore trade, as I said, didn’t I? There isn’t much of the genuine, old-fashioned trade left in these days, except the whiskey branch, which will be brisk, I take it, till the Malagasy carry the prohibitory law by a large majority in both houses. We had a little whiskey in the hold, I remember, that trip, with a good stock of knives, red flannel, handsaws, nails, and cotton. We were hoping to be at home again within the year. We were well provisioned, and Dodd,—he was the cook,—Dodd made about as fair coffee as you’re likely to find in the galley of a trader. As for our officers, when I say the less said of them the better, it ain’t so much that I mean to be disrespectful as that I mean to put it tenderly. Officers in the merchant service, especially if it happens to be the African service, are brutal men quite as often as they ain’t (at least, that’s my experience; and when some of your great ship-owners argue the case with me,—as I’m free to say they have done before now,—I say, “That’s my experience, sir,” which is all I’ve got to say);—brutal men, and about as fit for their positions as if they’d been imported for the purpose a little indirect from Davy Jones’s Locker. Though they do say that the flogging is pretty much done away with in these days, which makes a difference.
Sometimes on a sunshiny afternoon, when the muddy water showed a little muddier than usual, on account of the clouds being the color of silver, and all the air the color of gold, when the oily barrels were knocking about on the wharves, and the smells were strong from the fish-houses, and the men shouted and the mates swore, and our baby ran about deck a-play with everybody (he was a cunning little chap with red stockings and bare knees, and the lads took quite a shine to him), “Jake,” his mother would say, with a little sigh,—low, so that the captain never heard,—“think if it was him gone away for a year in company the like of that!”
Then she would drop her shining needles, and call the little fellow back sharp, and catch him up into her arms.
Go into the keeping-room there, Tom, and ask her all about it. Bless you! she remembers those days at dock better than I do. She could tell you to this hour the color of my shirt, and how long my hair was, and what I ate, and how I looked, and what I said. I didn’t generally swear so thick when she was about.
Well; we weighed, along the last of the month, in pretty good spirits. The Madonna was as stanch and seaworthy as any eight-hundred-tonner in the harbor, if she was clumsy; we turned in, some sixteen of us or thereabouts, into the fo’castle,—a jolly set, mostly old messmates, and well content with one another; and the breeze was stiff from the west, with a fair sky.
The night before we were off, Molly and I took a walk upon the wharves after supper. I carried the baby. A boy, sitting on some boxes, pulled my sleeve as we went by, and asked me, pointing to the Madonna, if I would tell him the name of the ship.
“Find out for yourself,” said I, not over-pleased to be interrupted.
“Don’t be cross to him,” says Molly. The baby threw a kiss at the boy, and Molly smiled at him through the dark. I don’t suppose I should ever have remembered the lubber from that day to this, except that I liked the looks of Molly smiling at him through the dark.
My wife and I said good-by the next morning in a little sheltered place among the lumber on the wharf; she was one of your women who never like to do their crying before folks.
She climbed on the pile of lumber and sat down, a little flushed and quivery, to watch us off. I remember seeing her there with the baby till we were well down the channel. I remember noticing the bay as it grew cleaner, and thinking that I would break off swearing; and I remember cursing Bob Smart like a pirate within an hour.
The breeze held steadier than we’d looked for, and we’d made a good offing and discharged the pilot by nightfall. Mr. Whitmarsh—he was the mate—was aft with the captain. The boys were singing a little; the smell of the coffee was coming up, hot and home-like, from the galley. I was up in the maintop, I forget what for, when all at once there came a cry and a shout; and, when I touched deck, I saw a crowd around the fore-hatch.
“What’s all this noise for?” says Mr. Whitmarsh, coming up and scowling.
“A stow-away, sir! A boy stowed away!” said Bob, catching the officer’s tone quick enough. Bob always tested the wind well, when a storm was brewing. He jerked the poor fellow out of the hold, and pushed him along to the mate’s feet.
I say “poor fellow,” and you’d never wonder why if you’d seen as much of stowing away as I have.
I’d as lief see a son of mine in a Carolina slave-gang as to see him lead the life of a stow-away. What with the officers from feeling that they’ve been taken in, and the men, who catch their cue from their superiors, and the spite of the lawful boy who hired in the proper way, he don’t have what you may call a tender time.
This chap was a little fellow, slight for his years, which might have been fifteen, I take it. He was palish, with a jerk of thin hair on his forehead. He was hungry, and homesick, and frightened. He looked about on all our faces, and then he cowered a little, and lay still just as Bob had thrown him.
“We—ell,” says Whitmarsh, very slow, “if you don’t repent your bargain before you go ashore, my fine fellow,—me, if I’m mate of the Madonna! and take that for your pains!”
Upon that he kicks the poor little lubber from quarter-deck to bowsprit, or nearly, and goes down to his supper. The men laugh a little, then they whistle a little, then they finish their song quite gay and well acquainted, with the coffee steaming away in the galley. Nobody has a word for the boy,—bless you, no!
I’ll venture he wouldn’t have had a mouthful that night if it had not been for me; and I can’t say as I should have bothered myself about him, if it had not come across me sudden, while he sat there rubbing his eyes quite violent, with his face to the west’ard (the sun was setting reddish), that I had seen the lad before; then I remembered walking on the wharves, and him on the box, and Molly saying softly that I was cross to him.
Seeing that my wife had smiled at him, and my baby thrown a kiss at him, it went against me, you see, not to look after the little rascal a bit that night.
“But you’ve got no business here, you know,” said I; “nobody wants you.”
“I wish I was ashore!” said he,—“I wish I was ashore!”
With that he begins to rub his eyes so very violent that I stopped. There was good stuff in him too; for he choked and winked at me, and did it all up, about the sun on the water and a cold in the head, as well as I could myself just about.
I don’t know whether it was on account of being taken a little notice of that night, but the lad always kind of hung about me afterwards; chased me round with his eyes in a way he had, and did odd jobs for me without the asking.
One night before the first week was out, he hauled alongside of me on the windlass. I was trying a new pipe (and a very good one, too), so I didn’t give him much notice for a while.
“You did this job up shrewd, Kent,” said I, by and by; “how did you steer in?”—for it did not often happen that the Madonna got fairly out of port with a boy unbeknown in her hold.
“Watch was drunk; I crawled down ahind the whiskey. It was hot, you bet, and dark. I lay and thought how hungry I was,” says he.
“Friends at home?” says I.
Upon that he gives me a nod, very short, and gets up and walks off whistling.
&n
bsp; The first Sunday out that chap didn’t know any more what to do with himself than a lobster just put on to boil. Sunday’s cleaning day at sea, you know. The lads washed up, and sat round, little knots of them, mending their trousers. Bob got out his cards. Me and a few mates took it comfortable under the to’gallant fo’castle (I being on watch below), reeling off the stiffest yarns we had in tow. Kent looked on at euchre awhile, then listened to us awhile, then walked about uneasy.
By and by says Bob, “Look over there,—spry!” and there was Kent, sitting curled away in a heap under the stern of the long-boat. He had a book. Bob crawls behind and snatches it up, unbeknown, out of his hands; then he falls to laughing as if he would strangle, and gives the book a toss to me. It was a bit of Testament, black and old. There was writing on the yellow leaf, this way:—
“Kentucky Hodge,
from his Affecshunate mother
who prays, For you evry day, Amen,”
The boy turned first red, then white, and straightened up quite sudden, but he never said a word, only sat down again and let us laugh it out. I’ve lost my reckoning if he ever heard the last of it. He told me one day how he came by the name, but I forget exactly. Something about an old fellow—uncle, I believe—as died in Kentucky, and the name was moniment-like, you see. He used to seem cut up a bit about it at first, for the lads took to it famously; but he got used to it in a week or two, and, seeing as they meant him no unkindness, took it quite cheery.
