The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  “That night, still under constant watch, I was issued a foot-locker and shifted from my stateroom to less comfortable quarters, the crowded habitation of sailors before the mast. It was there—luckily, as the sequel will show—that I made the acquaintance of a smiling, freckled red-bearded seaman by the name of Billy More.

  “He was sitting in the glow of the swaying lamp, on the bunk that stood end to end with mine. For the purpose of keeping them guessing about me, I struck up a conversation.

  “ ‘It’s no work for a butcher’s apprentice,’ I said, ‘sitting up there on the rigging like a dad-blamed seagull.’

  “ ‘Yer a butcher’s apprentice, are ye then?’ he asked with a grin so innocent and friendly I felt threatened a little.

  “ ‘That’s what I was back in Albany,’ I said. ‘Poor Grandma. She’ll wonder what’s become of me. I just left her for a moment, to feed the chickens, ye know—’ I shook my head.

  “He shook his head too and smiled a little sadly, thinking, I suppose, of his own grandmother. That too made me feel a trifle partisan with him and I quickly changed the subject. ‘Strange that we never see the Captain,’ I said. ‘What sort of a man might he be, I wonder?’

  “Oh, ye’ll make his acquaintance pretty soon, like as not. Curious gentleman, our Captain is.’

  “ ‘Curious, is he?’

  “ ‘That he is,’ says Billy More. ‘He’s a highly cultivated man, is old Dirge. Speaks God only knows how many languages.’

  “ ‘Ye don’t say!’ I said.

  “ ‘Ye’ll see for yourself, if we come within hailing of a stranger. Anytime we meet with another whaler and draw up tandem for news and mail, our Captain Dirge talks the stranger’s lingo. It’s point of pride with ‘im. He’s a scholar, ye might say. Got books about history and natural philosophy and Lord knows what-all.’

  “ ‘Well, I declare.’

  “He sat nodding to himself, thoughtful, as if going over what he’d said word by word and giving his approval. He got a troubled look then and started pulling at his fingers, making knuckles pop. ‘Very changeable man, though, is Captain Dirge.’ He nodded some more.

  “ ‘Changeable is he?’

  “ ‘I’ve known him to set after whale like a man with a devil in him. Last time I sailed with him, he’d send no boat in ahead of his own, him riding there high on the gunnels at the stern, and his eyes red as rubies. No pitch of the sea could throw old Dirge nor even draw his attention. Face was like a lantern. That was last time. This time … Well sir, he’s a curious man.’

  “ ‘He’s not so eager this time, eh?’

  “ ‘Not for whale. But then of course, his sickness—’

  “ ‘He’s sickly, ye say?’

  “But Billy More had said all he’d a mind to.

  “I saw only now that in the dimness beyond him Wilkins sat tinkering with the springs and coils of a dismantled clock, listening with both his big monkey’s ears. He was working in almost complete darkness—either the cleverest clock-maker that ever was heard of, thought I, or else a man pretending to be busy as the devil when he ain’t. I thought I knew pretty well which was right. Billy More, seeing Wilkins, had gone pale as a ghost.

  IX

  “I was bound and determined to penetrate the Jerusalem’s mysteries— the singing I’d heard that first night aboard (I’d heard not a whimper from those Negroes since) and, stranger still, that voice I’d heard, or dreamed I’d heard, of a woman. It was a voice that haunted me as once Miranda Flint’s eyes had done—though Heaven knows it was no voice of a girl on the theater circuit, but a true-born lady’s. (I understood the connection well enough, young and inexperienced as I may have been. As once I’d glorified poor commonplace Miranda—transformed her to an angel and sometimes devil in human flesh, till the playbill pictures, as Miranda grew older, made a fool of me—so now, on the basis of a faintly heard voice, I was constructing another unearthly being, a creature no more fit for our common actuality than the crowned Redskin maiden on the Jerusalem’s bow. I knew what I was doing but went on with it, meanwhile telling myself, all sobriety, that even if the lady had a wooden leg, her presence on the ship was a mystery, by crimus, and I was bound, for my safety’s sake, to try and solve it.) I lay in my berth with my eyes not quite closed, listening carefully to the breathing around me and imagining the mystic face behind the voice. I was in love, it seems. A sickness of the blood, a misery of youth: a joy and a grave indignity.

  “When I was confident that all the ship was asleep, except for the watches and, here and there, some restless grumbler, I sat up and crossed in darkness to the passageway. I stepped into it and moved quietly down it, groping sternward toward the trap through which, that first night, I’d seen the blocks. There was no light whatever: It couldn’t have been darker in Jonah’s whale. I came to the angling passage where last time I’d seen that lamp-glow, and I continued to the staterooms and past them until, strange to say, I came to a bulkhead of polished wood that sealed off the passage. I was baffled, torn between hurrying toward the place where I’d heard the voice, on the one hand, and, on the other, hunting further for the trap. I had passed no sign of a ring or lift, no spot of flooring that even faintly suggested the presence of a hatch. As if to prove my good sense, my sanity, I forgot about the voice and got down on hands and knees to listen for the music. The sea was calm, the Jerusalem as quiet as a moss-covered crypt. ‘Strange business indeed!’ I said to myself. ‘If someone had laid new decking, I’d’ve heard the racket of it.’ I toyed again with the thought that perhaps I’d dreamed the whole thing, but I knew it wasn’t so, mere melodrama. (I don’t say stage plays do harm to a man, but it’s my experience, for better or worse, that they put a man in poses he never found in Nature.) The slaves were down there, that was the truth of it; and somewhere on this ship there was also a young lady—perhaps a captive, some beautiful unfortunate princess, say, or … I reined in, none too eager that the night should overhear me. On the doubtful chance that, in my pain and confusion, I’d gotten turned around on my former exploration, I followed the passageway bowsward—though I knew I had not been turned around. (Mere theater again.) I had already satisfied myself that this was indeed not the direction I’d come, that previous night, when my progress forward was checked by an open hatch and murmuring voices. Three men, common seamen I supposed from their speech, were talking in low tones about the Captain. Despite the emotion in all they said— fear and rage, I thought—their tones were so hushed I could catch no more than an occasional phrase, foul oaths, mainly, and once, I thought, the words ‘Avenge him!’ I had no idea who the speakers were, much less how the Captain had harmed the poor devil they were talking of avenging, but I guessed, from the anger in all they said, that I’d be wise to keep clear of them. I backed away from the opening and, rising to my feet in the darkness, hurried back toward the stern.

  “At the companionway I paused and stood waiting for my heart to calm. The hatch above was open, revealing a serene night sky magnificent with stars—the first night sky I’d seen, as it happens, since my travels on the night that they’d hauled me aboard. Only when I saw how the patch of sky moved, yawing gently from port to starboard, then starboard to port, did I realize how accustomed I’d grown to the movement of the ship, how it had become for me a standard of landlike stability. I did not stand long in this reverie, however, but started immediately and silently up toward the deck. When I raised my head in the darkness, a breeze full of forest smells met me—a scent so distinct that I wouldn’t have been much surprised to hear we were navigating the Amazon. But there was no land in sight. When I studied the sky to learn my bearings, I found nothing familiar, no star or planet in its accustomed place. Even the Great Bear had vanished. I could hardly make out, for an instant, the meaning of so strange a change in the normally dependable universe. I did not take long, however, to get my reason back. The wind was icy, and coming straight at us. We must be far below the Equator and bearing south, somewhere west, perhaps, of So
uth America.

  “I was less comforted by these deductions than I ought to have been. For one thing, I could no longer hide from myself the absurdity of my search for a girl I’d never seen, and who perhaps did not exist. For another—unless it’s the same in the end—a queer emotion had begun to trouble me: My distance from all that defined me, so to speak—van Klug’s butchershop, my chalk-dusty schoolroom—filled me all at once with a peculiar fright. A part of me longed to be seen and apprehended and thereby freed of this eerie unrelatedness. In the three crowsnests high above me there was no sign of life. Neither was there movement on the bridge. It was as if the ship were abandoned, plague-struck. I moved very cautiously out onto the deck and along the dark bulkhead toward the aft companionway. It was from somewhere up there, near the Captain’s cabin, that I’d heard her voice. No one saw me, no one interrupted me. I was still determined to pierce the Jerusalem’s mysteries, but the intensity of that conflicting urge grew by leaps and bounds—my perverse desire to be discovered, overthrown.

  “Then came an emotion stranger still. I began to have an uneasy feeling—residue, perhaps, of my reading of Boethius—that my seeming freedom on the still, dark whaler was a grotesque illusion, that sneaking alone through hostile darkness I was watched by indifferent, dusty eyes, a cosmic checker, a being as mechanical as any automaton displayed in the Boston theaters. (I’d seen more than one of them, those mechanical dolls so ingenious at playing the piano or dealing out whist cards or walking back and forth on the stage, nodding their heads and pulling at their whiskers like Wall Street bankers, that you’d swear to heaven there was a man inside them, though some were no bigger than a three-year-old child.) Mad as it may sound, I had to concentrate with all my might to resist the temptation to shout or kick something over and force them to reveal themselves. The unfamiliar constellations above me might have been the heavens as seen from Jupiter. It was that that dizzied me, I told myself—made me populate the ship with a ghostly audience. Adrift in a universe grown wholly unfamiliar, I’d been suddenly ambushed by the dark vastness which suggests to the mind of a healthy man the magnificence of God and of all his Creation but suggested to me, and very powerfully, too, mere pyrotechnic pointlessness. Nor was it any help to keep my mind fixed on the immediate and concrete. When my questions were answered, the answers, I could not help but see, would be trivial and drab. The Captain was a madman, and the ship full of creatures less than human. Such stories are as old as Noah’s Ark. Even so, here I was, poor involuntary fool, stealthily mounting the poop, with no better reason for desisting than I had for proceeding. Such was my anguish, sneaking like a thief toward the object of my desire, a girl I’d never seen. (Ah, the blood, poor blood! Let no man scorn it who’s not felt its dark pounding!)

  “When I reached the poopdeck and the window of the Captain’s cabin, curiously curtained in what appeared to be red velvet, caught together at the sides with ornate golden rings—a mighty strange cabin to be found on a whaler—there came a sound that shattered my speculations and sent them flying to the depths. Before I could even identify the sound—it might have been the roar of a tropical lion, for the blast of terror it exploded in me—some huge black beast came hurtling from the dimness, toppling me at once and tumbling me—the animal clawing and snapping at my shoulders—to the rock-hard deck below. I lay still as a gravestone. I couldn’t have moved or screamed if my life depended on it. The thing’s wild eyes burned into me, its fangs laid bare. I gave a slight, convulsive twitch, and there burst from the creature’s throat a new roar, like the falling thunder of the firmament. Then there was a light on the bridge above me, and a woman’s voice called sharply, “Alastor!” The growling changed—lowered and became less murderous—and an instant later the enormous dog (for dog it was, though the largest I ever beheld on earth) turned from me, gathered, and bounded up the companionway to its mistress. She stood perfectly still, gazing down at me, drowning my spirit in shame. Her presence made my vision of her paltry, ridiculous—a young woman so beautiful in the light of the lantern and the blinking stars that I blinked myself to make sure I was awake. The Captain stood beside her, looking down like a black-bearded toad, in silence. I tried to speak, perhaps beg their forgiveness, but not one word could I bring out. For perhaps a full minute they gazed down at me and never spoke. I couldn’t get my breath, overwhelmed by a blush I had reason to hope might be my last. Then they turned, she leading him as if he were an invalid or a sleepwalker, stiff-legged, off balance—the girl as graceful and indifferent as a goddess— and passed out of my sight. I gasped in air.

  “A familiar voice said, ‘Ye’ll be pryin’ yerself into shackles, me lad. ‘E’s a devil when ‘e’s roused, is Captain Dirge.’ I rolled my head back to look at him, the owner of the voice that had spoken to me that first night, down in the stateroom. He must have been there all the while, out of sight in the shadows. He bent toward me. It was difficult to make out his face against the night, but I saw that his hair streamed wildly out from his temples and ears and fell to his chest like an Indian’s. The hair was snow-white. Another mystery, then! A man his age had as little business on a whaler as did a woman. ‘Ere, lad, take a hand,’ he said gruffly, as if amused by my foolishness, and he stretched a huge-knuckled hand toward me. That, too, sent a tingle of alarm through me. By the way he groped I knew that he was blind.

  “ ‘Who are you?’ I asked, pushing up on my elbows. “Who are all of you? Where the devil are we shipping?’ At the sound of my own grandiose theatrics—questions tinged, in my own ears at least, with dark metaphysical overtones—my fear leaped to new intensity. ‘What ship is this?’ I asked. I spoke louder now, the silence of the ship all around me like the silence of a black-draped hall when a medium begins, and my question self-conscious despite my urgency, as if I were delivering lines long rehearsed. ‘Where does the ship put in? Where can I get off?’

  “ ‘One thing at a time, lad,’ the old man said. He caught hold of my hand and, with surprising strength, raised me to my feet. He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the hatch. I took a step, then held back. He relaxed the pressure urging me forward. After thought, he said, ‘Who I’d be is a lunatic, as ye may have grasped, by the name of Jeremiah, one-time first mate to Captain d’Oyarvido on the good ship Princess that found out the Vanishing Isles of the South Pacific. Who these others might be no man can be certain, except to affirm they’re deadmen, risen saints.’

  “I was suddenly aware we had company all around us, sailors watching through portholes or poking their heads up through hatches.

  “ ‘And one dead woman,’ I said fiercely, determined to make him tell the truth.

  “ ‘Aye, that may be.’

  “ ‘Where will they put me ashore?’ I asked.

  “The old man turned as if to study me. His eyes were as white as two glossy stones. ‘That’s dubious, lad. Very dubious. Look there!’ I looked where he pointed, and for a split second it seemed to me I saw something—absurd or not. (He was blind, after all, and the night was dark.) What Flint had begun in the theater, that sea-going mystic had powerfully improved on. I resisted with all my might, of course. Nevertheless, for days after that I had a curious notion that the ship was being followed by an enormous, pigeon-like bird as white as snow.”

  X

  “Unheard of!” cries the guest. “I declare on my soul, in all my days and in all my travels, I never encountered a yarn more outrageous!”

  The mariner throws him a look of alarm. There’s a chill in the room, and a flutter of bats in the twilight outside the tavern window, over toward the barn. There’s mist on the woods.

  “It ain’t altogether a question of truth against falsehood,” says the angel; but his golden eyes betray confusion. He puffs more furiously than ever at his pipe.

  The mariner is trembling from head to foot, sifting through his wits for some high-sounding justification. “There’s truths and truths,” says he, full of thunder. “If a narrative don’t seem to make much s
ense, mine deeper—that’s the ticket!”

  But the angel is paling, no question about it, and the mariner’s lips are turning blue.

  (Shall I strip myself naked and cry out, shameless, to stone-deaf graveyards and children uncreated, Brothers, Sisters, it was like THIS in our time? Better the cover of my dungeon fiction—no less chilly and remote for its being mere fiction. Better the dealings of a cracked old sailor and his sensible guest, the angel’s benevolent ministries raised up between them like Time and Space or the pages of a book.)

  “A straw for yer levels!” says the guest with a snort like a railroad engine, and he pours more drinks. “Never mind. So the ship had a woman on her!”