Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

The men pushed back, wanting to know how Gideon was made. In the terror and loneliness and pain of going beyond his physical resources down there at the bottom of the world, he found it all too easy to stop thinking of them as men at all. They were nightmare figures in a dream landscape, to be pushed and forced and beaten into submission, and all the time the captain, hollow-eyed and gaunt like the rest of them, brooded over the ship in his grimy green frock coat, a scarf wrapped about his head under his hat. Nothing short of some supernatural power could have kept them hanging about for so many weeks waiting in vain for the galing westerlies to let up and quarter to the east.

  In the fo’c’sle the men were becoming mutinous. Cajoling, threatening, even beating began to have less and less effect. The only thing that got any of them aloft anymore was that they knew that if the ship foundered they would all end in that green-black icy water. Gideon knew, and he was sure that Poulson and Rawling knew as well, though they never spoke of it, that it wouldn’t be long before even the watery death would be preferable to the endless working beyond their strength, and at that moment their ability to function would cease, as would the Beryl Queen.

  Not long after scurvy broke out, Lawson went completely off his head. He lay in his bunk incontinent, crooning to himself with cracked and frost-blackened lips, “Wen-di-go, Wen-di-go.”

  Gideon stood for a moment looking helplessly down at him. It came to him that this would take a fortitude and quality of leadership to accomplish far above the necessary to push the men up the ratlines onto the frozen yards. He looked around to find the men all watching him silently, waiting to see what he would do. The only sound outside of the creaking of the ship as she rolled and floundered about the crests and hollows of the great waves was Lawson’s all but incoherent crooning, “Wen-di-go, Wen-di-go …

  Gideon took a deep breath. “You men are pigs wallowing in your own filth!” he snapped. “The filth of one of you is the filth of all of you. Even on the Calypso we took care of one another.” He gave them no time to digest or reject the attack. “Tewson, Amory, take him out on deck and strip him. Clark, Fowler, take the pallet and blankets and throw them over the side. Turbot, Fenner, get a pail and some soap and scrub up whatever’s left. James, get one of those burst sails from the locker and we’ll wrap him in it when he’s brought back — we can scrub that.” He had craftily begun to substitute “we” for “you,” joining himself in their endeavor. As he suspected, once he had gotten them started, the men with a sense of relief went about their given tasks with willingness.

  Gideon stumbled off watch at four that morning and fell into bed wet and fully dressed as usual, but he wakened long before his four hours were up. Something was different. At last he realized that it was the motion of the ship, which had ceased bucking and was sailing, actually sailing in one direction with the water swishing and gurgling by in a businesslike fashion. He got up and went on deck. It was only a little after six and still dark, but he knew at once the wind had switched, the sea dropped. He saw Poulson standing behind the helmsman, his hands clasped at his back, rising on his toes, his hair glinting silver in the dim light. The helmsman, Matlock, was actually grinning, the stretching of his cracked lips causing a trickle of blood to run down into his beard. The men were coming out of the fo’c’sle, spitting and rubbing their eyes. Even Homer, the cook, appeared. They all stood silently looking at each other in wonder as the ship slid powerfully through the water, all sails set, at last leaving behind the Wendigo and the Jonah and whatever other evil spirits there were down at the bottom of the world.

  It was only later as the still-invisible sun turned the sky to turquoise that they saw swinging from a mizzenmast yardarm the naked body of Lawson. With an oath, Gideon swarmed aloft on the inside of the shrouds and continued up the topmost ratlines, making his way then on the foot-lines out the yardarm to where Lawson’s body was hung by a rope passed under his arms. He was staring wide-eyed in front of him with his mouth gaping open as if about to shout something. Gideon realized that he couldn’t carry him as he had at first intended to do, so he drew his knife, waited for the right moment, and cut the rope. The body seemed to fall very slowly as it barely cleared the rail and fell, still feet first, into the foam along the ship’s side.

  Trembling, Gideon started back down. He heard in his mind Latour’s mouth harp and Lawson’s raucous bad French:

  “Alouette, gentille alouette,

  Alouette, je te plumerai …”

  Poor pretty little skylark, he was thinking as unaccountably his hand slipped on the icy shrouds and he felt himself falling, he who had led the men aloft in these last months with never a slip in winds gusting to sixty miles an hour and ice thick as frosting on the rigging. Like a cat, he tried to turn in the air to get his feet under him, and he partially succeeded, but when he landed, it was in large part on his right hand. As if in a dream he saw as he lay on the deck his smashed hand dangling uselessly from his broken wrist. In the ringing darkness that threatened to smother him, he heard his father’s voice: “Your hands! Dammit, boy, your hands!” He almost laughed aloud at the joke. This wasn’t the couple of fingers his father had been talking about, this was the whole damned shebang.

  Two days later Poulson came to see him as he lay in his bunk, half out with opium. “You know what we’re going to have to do, lad?”

  Gideon shook his head. “Damned if I’ll let you. It’ll heal. You’ll see, it’ll heal all right.”

  Poulson lifted Gideon’s arm, ignoring his half-scream of pain. “Look at it, damn you! Look at that mess and tell me it will heal!”

  Gideon looked and closed his eyes, sickened.

  “I’d have had it off already,” Poulson went on, “but I wanted the pain to get you used to the idea.”

  Gideon still shook his head stubbornly, but by the end of two more days he begged Poulson to do it.

  They laid him on a table in the sail locker and gave him a bottle of rum to suck on. When he seemed sufficiently full of liquor and opium, the captain drew the newly sharpened knife across his lower forearm, and Gideon watched fascinated to see the line of blood spring up behind the blade.

  “Keep that tourniquet tight, dammit!” Poulson exclaimed.

  Gideon bucked on the table as Poulson went on with his gruesome task.

  “Almost over, lad. Homer, where’s that bucket of tar?”

  As Gideon watched in horror, the smell of the tar hot in his nostrils, a bucket of melted black liquid so hot it was still pocked with oily bubbles was brought within his vision as they turned him on his side. Across Gideon’s mind then there flashed like sheet lightning a swift dappling of sunlight before he screamed and fainted.

  Chapter II

  Gideon threaded his way around the rotten timbers and planks that lay about on the nearly frozen ground of the deserted shipyard. The bare-ribbed skeleton of a fishing trawler sat forlornly on the otherwise empty ways. A gull slid down the chill wind mewing and landed on one of the ribs, where it began to preen its wing feathers.

  This was all that was left of the prosperous little shipyard his father had built up from nothing. Gideon had kept the red beard he had grown between latitude 50 and 50 around the Horn, and he absently fingered it now with his left hand, his eyes speculative. Since he had first run away to sea, he had written his mother once or twice a year, but had never received an answer, the only word from her in all that time being the terse announcement of his father’s death beneath a heavy timber that had unaccountably slipped from its rope-and-pulley harness. It was a strange end for a man who had prided himself on not losing so much as a finger in all those years before.

  Except for the vessel that was just started, Gideon’s mother had seen to the finish of all the work in progress and paid the men off. Naturally she assumed that Gideon would have no interest in the yard, and it was only a fluke that it hadn’t yet been sold by the time he arrived home again.

  “Your father worked his heart out for over thirty years,” she said bitterly, “and p
recious little there is to show for it.”

  Gideon went looking for his father’s foreman, Elam, and found him working at Gantner’s. Elam was a big man, six-four in his stocking feet, but those great hands were as delicate as a woman’s when it came to fine work.

  “No sir, Mr. Gideon, I don’t like it here and they know it. I don’t like passing shoddy work and I won’t do it, and that’s why they’ll never make me a foreman. Me, a master shipwright, working under these louts what aren’t fit to shine your father’s boots. But they’re all alike, interested in the almighty dollar and to hell with the quality.” He shook his graying head and spat. “Too bad you wasn’t taken with shipbuilding like your pa.”

  “Ah, but I am, Elam, I am,” Gideon told him. “What would you think of coming back?”

  Elam looked at him for a moment. “Heard you was missing a hand. How d’you mean to work a yard with only one hand?”

  For answer, Gideon reached under his coat and took out a strange contraption that was hooked to his belt. There was a heavy leather sleeve with straps that reached up to his shoulder, and attached to the bottom of it were two hooks held together by a strong spring. Two lines led up through loops on the sleeve and over the outside of his elbow. When he bent his arm, the hooks parted, but as he straightened it, they came together forcefully. He leaned over and easily picked up a wooden plank and hoisted it to his shoulder. When he put it down, he picked up Elam’s hammer and chisel and held the chisel on a scrap of wood with the hooks while he wielded the hammer with his left hand. When he had finished, his initials were carved on the wood. “Good enough?”

  “I’m your man,” was all Elam said.

  More difficult by far was cajoling the money out of his mother to pay Slocum’s lumberyard for wood that he had to have to get started. She was a small woman with bright-blue eyes and long brown hair threaded with gray, braided up into a bun at the back of her neck. She also had a mind of her own.

  “Listen to me, Mama,” he said patiently. “If you keep the money, you’ll force me to ship out once more, and if something else happens to me, you’ll be in the workhouse in no time. With Slocum’s lumber we can start again, only this time I’m going to see to it we make money.”

  “You are, are you? What makes you think you can get rich off the yard when your father couldn’t?”

  “Because I’m going to make people pay, and be glad to pay, for the quality that only we furnish.”

  “Why should they want to pay for quality now when they wouldn’t before?”

  “They wouldn’t pay before because my father never made them, and what people don’t pay for, they don’t value. Come on, Mama, what have we got to lose?”

  She regarded him intently. “Tell me, son, why are you determined all of a sudden to break your heart on the shipbuilding business? I never told you while your father was alive, but I was glad you got out of it. Why aren’t you shipping out again? There’s more than one captain missing an arm or a leg.”

  He looked straight back at her. “I lost my nerve.”

  “And you think this business won’t take nerve? Before the first month’s out, you’ll wish you were sailing the ships again, not trying to build them.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s a different kind of nerve. On the ship, it wasn’t that I was scared for myself, it was that I quit feeling right about ordering the men to do mean, dangerous things just to save a day or run for a record. They know when your heart’s not in it.”

  “Do you think you won’t have to be hard to run a shipyard? Men get hurt in shipyards, too, you know.”

  “I don’t know if I can explain it,” he said slowly. “If a man in a shipyard isn’t pulling his weight, or if he’s making trouble, or if he’s just plain incompetent, you can get rid of him. In a shipyard, you can use pride in their work to get the most out of the men. After all, they’re there because they choose to be. On a ship, though, there’s no way to get rid of troublemakers. The biggest part of every crew were put aboard dead drunk by the crimps, and the rest of them are there because they can’t make a living at anything else. They’re tough, brutal haters, and you have to be tough and brutal and a hater to run them. I don’t want to be like that anymore. I can’t be like that.”

  “What does Sally Comstock say about all this?”

  Oh, Sally, Sally, running through the dappled sun among the birches … “I’ve not been into Evanston since I got back.”

  “I thought not. Hadn’t you better talk to her? If she turns you down, you might not want to stick it out here.” She floured her hands and began to knead the bread dough. “After all, she thought she’d be marrying a man who would one day be a ship’s captain and own the world.”

  “I’m not worried about Sally. I haven’t seen her because I want to have something to offer her. The day the yard gets its first good commission, then I’ll see her.”

  “All right, Gideon, I’ll let you have the money.” She smiled and set the dough aside to rise. “We may as well go down fighting, you and I.”

  “We won’t go down.”

  Gideon made it his business to drink in a different tavern each night between Boston and Huntsville. What he learned was that there was a shortage of yards willing to handle fishing dories. They would build the trawlers fast enough, there was money in that, but they didn’t like fooling with dories.

  “I don’t like asking you to work on dories, Elam, and I’m not even going to be able to pay you properly at first, but I thought maybe you might consider the gamble worthwhile if you and I were in partnership.”

  Elam shook his head. “You know I got no head for business, Gideon, or I wouldn’t have stayed a foreman all these years. I’ve got less head for business even than your pa, and that isn’t saying much.”

  “I don’t need your head for business, Elam, I want your know-how. I only had ten years in the yards and you’ll have had closer to twenty. You leave the business to me.” Elam nodded. “By the way, I know where we can pick up a forge, anvil, everything, really cheap.”

  Gideon looked thoughtful “I talked to Bountiful Warnock the other day — remember Uncle Bounty, worked the smithy over at Price’s yard? Well, he retired last year and now he’s sorry. No one wants him because they’re afraid he’ll retire on them again anytime something doesn’t suit him.”

  Elam supervised the unloading of the Slocum timber wagons while Gideon went to every shipyard from Quincy to Amesbury that built fishing boats. When he returned after four days feeling beaten and weary, he found Elam, Uncle Bounty, and two young apprentices setting up the smithy.

  Elam straightened up and regarded him shrewdly. “I guess I don’t have to ask you how it went,” he said.

  Gideon shook his head. “Most of them already have some two-bit little yard doing the dories for them, and what work! I’d be damned surprised if some of them will even float.”

  “Waal now,” Uncle Bounty offered when they shook hands, “I wouldn’t be too discouraged was I you. Happen you kin get the fishermen hereabouts interested someway, and you’ll have them forcing the yards to use you.”

  “Build a better mousetrap, you mean?” Gideon asked.

  “That’s it, lad. Something that rows better or lasts longer. Don’t know what it’d be, but you might think on it anyways.”

  “Hmm. You may be right.”

  That night he rode to a tavern frequented by Grand Banks fishermen. He stood drinks and got to talking to a couple of youngsters. “You say you’re long-liners,” he prodded them at last. “If you could have a dory that would do anything you wanted it to, what would it do?”

  “I’d want one that you wouldn’t have to worry all the time about stoving in when you’re pulling up to the mother ship in a heavy sea.”

  “What ship are you with?” Gideon asked his informants.

  “The Nellie B out of Gloucester, Maine. She needs her rigging replaced and a new mast and bowsprit. We run into a howler of a gale a week back.”

  “Where’s your capta
in?”

  “That’s him over there, drinking with the local gentry. He’s Daniel Tremont, born and bred in Gloucester. We only came in here because it was closer.”

  Gideon called once more for pints for the two of them, then sauntered over to the table where Tremont and the squire were engaged in a serious conversation.

  “I hope you’ll excuse my interrupting,” he said bluntly, “but I was wondering, Captain Tremont, where you plan to have your boat overhauled.”

  The captain’s long face twisted in a wry grimace. “You have the advantage of me, sir, but I can see you know something of my circumstances. Squire Fram here was suggesting Fowler’s yard.”

  “I can suggest a better one,” Gideon said firmly. “Hand’s yard.”

  “But Enoch Hand’s been dead for months and his yard dismantled and up for sale,” the squire protested. “He didn’t do repairs anyway.”

  “Ah, but the yard is no longer dismantled and up for sale,” Gideon countered, “and we do indeed do repairs.”

  “You bought it?” The squire was interested.

  “No, I didn’t buy it, sir. I am Enoch’s son Gideon. I have Elam back, and we’re going to do good business because we do the best work.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” the squire told Tremont honestly. “Enoch Hand and Elam between them were the best craftsmen this part of the coast, but I know nothing of his boy here.”

  “You will, squire, you will.”

  The squire shrugged, but Tremont said with sudden decision, “All right, young man, I’ll take a chance on you. But you botch this job and I’ll see you never get another.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Hand,” the squire interjected, “where have you been all these years? The only son I ever heard of Enoch’s having was the one run off to sea.”

  “That was me. I’ve spent ten years on the Horn run, and now that I’ve sailed ships, I’m ready to build them.” He held up his hand as the squire started to speak and turned to Tremont. “You won’t be sorry, captain, that I can promise you.”