by John Gardner
“There was some unpleasantness when I reached my bunk. Someone had slit the Negro’s throat from ear to ear, torn the blood-soaked bunk to bits, and scattered what little I had in my foot-locker. There was no one in sight. Sweating, shaking, sick from the blood stench that filled the place and sickened more by my own shameful part in the tragedy, I opened my hiding place in the bulkhead. The books were still there. With violently trembling fingers I lighted the lantern, pulled out the book on top, the volume of poetry. Where the book fell open, I found the poem—
Full teats of milk that cannot cloy
He like a nurse will bring …
The ship seemed to reel. When I reached out to steady myself I touched blood. I reached into the cubby for the second book, but a sound stopped me. Somebody was coming. I thrust the volume of poetry in, closed up the hole, and gulped in air for a blood-curdling scream. ’Murder/ Heaven save us! Murder!’
“Billy More came in blinking like a hoot owl, clutching his marlinspike.
XIX
“Who murdered the black we could not learn. Wilkins, the man I chiefly suspected—insofar as I could organize my reeling wits—could account, with witnesses, for every minute of his time. We dropped the blood-soaked bedding in the sea and soon after it the body. I was in a state, half-crazy. I listened to the Captain’s mumbled prayer like a man in a daze. I wasn’t guilty, not technically—and because of the damage done to my things, not to mention my plainly visible anguish at the poor man’s death—no one suspected I’d had a part in it. Yet I was guilty, Heaven knows. I could remember with shocking clarity the indifference with which I’d popped that poor black devil on the head, reduced him to an object useful to me—helpless as a stone when his killer came. And the memory sent an emotion shogging through my veins that was easily as powerful as the emotion of a lover, though exactly opposite: guilt cold and boundless as damnation. I don’t mean for a minute that I felt some great upsurge of moral principle, a feeling that according to some code, religious or otherwise, I’d acted wrongly; and I don’t mean some ethical matter, either: What I felt was certainly not shame. What I felt, in fact, was the wordless and stark, metaphysical terror of the totally isolated. As casually as I’d popped that black on the head, the man who’d slit his throat could slit mine, and Captain Dirge would indifferently mumble, and the sea would sluggishly part to receive my fat and lean and bone. The men around me, every one of them—so my act declared—could be popped on the head, have their throats slit, and the world would adjust itself. Let the mast come crashing down on us, let the ship submerge into Davy Jones’s Locker; the drifting, tottering universe would never bat an eye. No longer was I one with the wind, the sea, the motion of the ship. No longer were stars gone-out-long-since my ultimate skin. I was an object in a great bumping clutter of objects—every wave, every coil of twine, every nail, my enemy, cold-blooded Massuh. I knew now the madness of my former opinions, freedom arching up through enslavement, redeeming, reaffirming it. “The thralldom of love.” What a lunatic phrase! The man powerless in a hostile land, there’s your ultimate thrall—there’s all of us! For Augusta had lied about writing that poem. Had probably lied about all of them. It was easy to believe that her love for me was equally a lie, as true to her feelings as a smile from Pious John. I felt no confidence, at any rate, that I could go to her, talk about the thing I’d done, this monstrous anguish of meaninglessness, and be sure of a sisterly, all-forgiving kiss that would bring the slain world back to life again. ‘Guilty!’ I thought, and clutched my head in my hands. Guilty all my life, though only now did I see the plain truth of it. Guilty of the same cruel indifference to my mother, because I, being young, had no knowledge yet of the odds against living forever. As stony-hearted as a flimflam man, as disingenuous as a theater magician—I thought suddenly of that lovely little child Miranda Flint, one moment tricking us, cunning as the friendly snake in Eden, and the next moment toppled to the maelstrom of life by a scream from the back of the theater. She’d stared straight at me, screaming, terrified by emptiness. ’Guilty!’ I thought. All poor miserable mankind, guilty! Pitifully tilting up grandiose ikons of the bears they slaughter or the corn they chop, and praying to the ikons in terror and anguish: ‘O Lord, Dread Ruler of Life and Death—’ (Aye, there’s the story of yer obstinate survival of ancient beliefs! Love, sir! The love of man and bear and windblown wheatfields; love and the misery of killers!)
XX
“There was on the Jerusalem a harpooner by the name of, as near as I could get it, Kaskiwah. He was a short, powerfully built Red Indian who never spoke. In his trade he was second only to Ngugi, the black African with the bone in his nose, and like Ngugi, he took pride in his appearance of savagery, never wearing more than a buckskin shirt and trousers, even here off Antarctica, and never oppressing his feet with more than buckskin shoes. Around his throat he wore colored beads drawn up tighter than a noose, and from his right ear hung a feather on a silver ring. A man did not need to talk to him to know he was a kind of heathen saint. His gentle brown eyes looked steadily to sea and never blinked. They would gaze at nothing physical, neither man nor beast. I am willing to swear that never in his life, or at any rate never in recent years, did Kaskiwah experience anger, depression, guilt, or ordinary human delight. When he died, I’m told—died by stepping off into the ocean—he showed on his face not a trace of fear or bitterness. He was not mad, in any ordinary sense: In the prow of a longboat he was as alert as any other harpooner, and his throw was as calm and sure as Jim Ngugi’s. Yet he wasn’t sane, either, in the ordinary sense. He knew where he was, knew all that was happening around him, but he was—in the ordinary sense—indifferent. He was a walking deadman, and on that clear, cold morning just after our burial of the black, I learned why.
“Kaskiwah was sitting on the rail, one foot on the longboat, gazing at the ocean as usual, when, to take my mind off my guilt, my distrust of Augusta, and my fear that terrible events were closing in, I went up to him.
“ ‘Fine day!’ says I, and puts my hand on his shoulder.
“Kaskiwah gazes on.
“ ‘Been two full weeks we been sliding south,’ I continue—a man too desperate to be rebuffed. ‘It’s a mighty strange business.’
“He gazes on.
“I study him a minute, screw my nerve up tight and pass my hand before his eyes. No change.
“ ‘You’re a mighty silent man, Kaskiwah. I imagine you must have a powerful lot to think about.’ I smile to show him he has my respect.
“Still no change.
“I lean toward him, frustrated, annoyed that the Indian denies me the secret of his peace, and I turn my head and follow the direction of his gaze. It comes to me all of a sudden that I know what he’s thinking about; I too had once felt at one with all things living or inanimate. ‘You got a squaw out there somewhere, that’s it,’ I say. Then, on second thought: ‘Or you used to have. Aye! The world’s gone meaningless, a gap between now and the time you rejoin her in the Happy Hunting Ground.’
“No trace of reaction.
“I blunder on, growing louder, tenser. I narrow my eyes, gazing seaward with him, and I say to him: ‘It’s a curious thing, Kaskiwah. We look at each other as furniture, or not at all, us human beings. Not till this moment has it struck me that you too, for all your strange ways and outfit, are a man. A man the same as me, the same as—’ I hunt around the deck. ‘The same as Wilkins there.’ I am startled to think that even Wilkins is human. But I hurry on. ‘A man could waste his life not noticing his fellow man is human. And waste his fellow’s life too, no doubt. It can be a lonely world, this mote in the abyss. We’ve taken too little reflection on that.’
“Without a word, without turning his head, Kaskiwah moved his hand toward mine as if to take it in a silent gesture of friendship. I opened my hand to receive his. He dropped in two mushrooms. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘From the King.’ I wasn’t sure, the next instant, whether he’d spoken or I’d imagined it.
“I loo
ked down at them, suspicious. If ever poisonous mushrooms existed, these looked to be the ones: Black, stiff, shriveled—with curious white specks all over them—they looked like the souls of two burnt-up lizards just recovered from Inferno. I could feel the skin of my face tingling. How could I know that it wasn’t to kill me, silence my idle talk for good, that he handed me those toadstools? I squinted at him. He gazed at the sea. I had seen how calmly, how indifferently, he threw his harpoon at God’s own benthal vicegerent. Why, then, should the slightest flicker discomfit the man as he handed me my doom? Could I be sure it wasn’t him that dispatched my Negro? But even as I was thinking all this, I remembered Rousseau and was ashamed of myself. I was cringing from possibilities higher than my own, and defending cowardice by base, degrading, white-man’s argument. It was civilization—or at any rate, it reasonably might be—that darkened my mind with such wicked thoughts. They were thoughts perhaps foreign to an Indian, a man who knew that men and the land or sea they live on are one, an indivisible being. Men close to Nature killed for a purpose, not for sport, much less from whim. Surely the mushrooms were safe, then, a gift to be treasured! Quickly, before I could lose this happy optimism, this possible avenue of escape from deadly separate-ness, I popped the mushrooms in my mouth and gagged them down. Then, proud of myself, I patted Kaskiwah’s shoulder. ‘We brothers,’ I said.
“We gazed out at the sea in companionable silence.
“As we gaze, a far-off voice calls out, ‘Ahoy!’ I smile, thinking about it, slightly alarmed that my mind is not what it usually is, and I glance at Kaskiwah. He gazes at the sea. ‘Ahoy!’ says the voice. I blink once or twice and peer in the direction of the voice more intently. I notice something troubling the water a hundred yards off, and I lean forward a little, with another quick glance at my comrade, who gazes on. To my surprise, an object comes bubbling up out of the ocean, a thing like a swordfish snout. As I continue to stare, it reveals itself as the bowsprit of a whaling vessel, because up comes the vessel, little by little, forecastle, decks, masts, sails, and all. Remarkable enough, the instant it hits the breeze it’s as dry as a biscuit. ‘Ahoy!’ says the white-bearded man on deck, and waves at me. ‘Ahoy,’ says I, and waves back, still a little perplexed by the general direction of things. With a pair of reins such as coachmen use, he turns the ship towards us, and when he’s twenty foot away, his bow tandem to our stern but his ship sailing comfortably backwards, he says:
“ ‘Even death may prove unreal at last, and stoics be astounded into Heaven.’
“ ‘That’s so,’ I call to him. ‘Upon my soul!’
“He nods, delighted, and waves his cap, then cups his hands by his lips again and calls to me, ‘Man, beast, grass, ‘tis all one: Bearers of crosses—alike they tend, and follow, slowly follow on!’
“ ‘That’s a fact!’ I answer. ‘By crimus, that may well be!’ I feel queerly triumphant.
“He nods and smiles. Then, with a wave, he noses his ship toward the bottom again, and down slow and easy she goes, with the man still waving. The breeze was suddenly filled with music—harps, violins, pianos, pipe-organs—such a concert as never was heard of from Moscow to London. Great white birds came flapping silently out of the south, and for some reason—the music, it may have been—it did not impair their dignity in the least when they dropped shots of excrement, every chunk of it enormous as the White House and vastly more majestic. A pigeon-like thing twice the size of a man came flopping slowly, gently down and closed his crooked pink feet on the rail. Tool, retreat!’ he tells me.
“I closed my eyes. It was all still there. With a cunning that pleased me, I deduced that it must be all in my mind—or, perhaps, in mine and Kaskiwah’s. ‘Kaskiwah,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I’m going to bed.’
“He gazed at the sea.
“I got up, carefully, and made my way toward the forecastle. The enormous pigeon or webless boobie walked beside me, his wing on my arm.
“ ‘Thou teeterest on the rim,’ says he, or something to that effect, and winks his eye.
“When I awakened, days later, Kaskiwah had left us and the world had become itself again. But ever since, I’ve had spells of other-worldliness. They come and go, like other pleasures, and they tell me nothing of any great significance, so far as I can see. They give me a certain comfort, of course. They fill a man’s soul with a healthy, groundless confidence.
“Says Augusta: ‘Why are you looking so strangely at me, Jonathan?’
“ ‘I was thinking about that sailor.’
“She looks worried, suspicious.
“ ‘That sailor with the knife in his neck. You were standing right beside him. How could the fellow who did it reach past you, without—“
“ ‘The knife was thrown.’
“ ‘Ah! Thrown!’
“She looked in alarm at the door leading to the chartroom, where her father and Jeremiah were at chess. ‘It was horrible, Jonathan. Horrible!’
“I nodded thoughtfully.’ ”He’s not the real Captain,” that’s what the sailor was telling me,’ I said. ‘Your father’s behavior was so strange, there on the schooner—so unlike him, I mean—that for a minute I thought—’
“She shot a wild glance at me, and her hand went to her mouth.
“ ‘Tell me the secret, Augusta,’ I said.
“She stood rigid, not breathing, no color in her face, and I caught hold of her hand, snatching it from her lips to make her speak. The sensation went through me like an electric shock: It was the same hand I’d seized in the darkness, from my bunk—small and wet and as cold as ice. ‘Alas, more’s the pity!’ cries the great white bird.
XXI
“We bore on south.
“I wrung my hands, a mournful spectacle, avoiding Augusta, avoiding all thought of the dark implications, till at last Billy More took pity on me.
“ ‘The Captain he’s got a great dream,’ says Billy, clinging like a bat to the crusted rigging. The sky was cloudless and bitterly cold, the sea such a mirror you could barely make out the horizon line. Our breathing made steam, and Billy’s red beard was flecked with ice.
“ ‘Aye,’ says I, too morose to care about encouraging him.
“He smiles like a leprechaun. His bluegreen eyes are so filled with twinkles I’d hardly believe him if he told me and swore on the Bible my name was Upchurch. My nose, when I look down it, is red. He said: ‘ “The fish beyond the whale,” the Captain calls it. But it ain’t no fish; it’s men, Jonathan—or mebby ghosts. He’s lookin’ for his shadow.’
“I mused halfheartedly on the strange remark. He had, Billy More, a peculiar manner of expressing himself; I’d found by experience it was best to lay to and wait him out. He smiled down from his perch above me, his legs clamped tight on the stay from which he worked, leaning out to the yardarm. We’d suffered a good deal of wind damage, the night before. We’d been hitting storms almost nightly of late, and now and then it was touch and go as to whether we’d skirt the icebergs or take up residence with Davy Jones. We were circling around and around in the area of the Vanishing Isles. ‘He ain’t informed you on his business yet, I take it,’ Billy More said.
“I sighed.
“He too was silent for a time, working, his tongue clamped between his teeth, his hands red and cracking from the cold. ‘You won’t believe it if I tell you,’ he says, with that same easy grin that bunches the muscles of his freckled cheeks, ‘so I’ll tell you.’
“Sunk in gloom, full of unholy suspicions, I felt more dread than excitement, now that I was to learn at last—so I imagined—the secret that had put me off for so long. As I’ve said before, the greatest mysteries grow ordinary if you live with them. Sunrise and sunset, or the suspension of sunrise and sunset near the Poles. But also the day was the objective idea of frozen blue, if such a thing can be; the yardarm above me gleamed with iced varnish, and the frayed knots, gritty with salt and ice, and grained like oak, were solid enough to refute without a word the airiest dreams of Bishop Berkeley.
“ ‘Tell on, if ye’ve a mind to.’
“He told me the story so casually, interspersed with the necessary grunts of his labor and now and then a remark to a bird (he spoke only to the dark, substantial ones; I alone was aware of those others, white as snow), that I hardly considered till after he’d finished it whether or not the things he said were possible according to my own humble scheme of reality.
“Four years ago, he said—the last time the Jerusalem had docked in Nantucket—there was a great commotion from the ship’s owners, two wrinkled old salts long since retired, by the names of Tobias Cook and James T. Horner. Bent and bright-eyed as two owls they were, and as full of antique secrets, judging by their visages. Hardly was the gangplank firmly set before they were aboard and cloistered with the Captain, whispering sometimes, sometimes guffawing, drinking their rum down like buccaneers after a boomer. Soon they emerged, along with the Captain, all three of them looking akilter and bewildered and chock-full of drunken hilarity, as furled and grandiose as gunboat flags; and, without a word to the crew, ashore they steered. It was from innkeepers, fellow whalers, and members of their families that the crew got word. The Jerusalem had been reported gone down six months ago, in a maelstrom in the region of the Vanishing Isles, and reported gone down by not just one ship but three, all trustworthy Americans. All three were familiar with the ship thought lost, swore they’d recognized the men in the longboats, and swore they’d seen clearly not only her name, painted large on the bow, but also the ship’s painted figurehead. There was one thing more, a mystery impossible to fathom and equally impossible to deny: After everything was lost—the low-riding ship and every man of her crew—one memento bobbed up and was hauled aboard the whaler Grampus. It was a painting known by relatives of Captain Dirge to be aboard the Jerusalem. The rescued painting was still in existence—so Billy More claimed—and when compared with the painting still hung, safe and sound, on the Jerusalem, it was found to be squarely identical, except for a rip from the salvager’s grapnel and the damage from its time in the sea.
