by Esi Edugyan
“The Arctic is a very great distance?” I said.
Titch walked some paces, and the light fell differently upon his body, so that he looked now dark against the glaring blue of the sky. “A very great distance, yes.” He coughed. “Father is renowned for his specimen collection, most of which he donates to Montagu House.” I could hear the stifled pride in his voice. “He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, you know, and the recipient of both the Copley Medal and the Bakerian lectureship. High, high honours.”
Titch moved past me, kneeled beside the rubbery cloth. “This canopy we shall attach to that frame over there. From the bottom of the frame we shall hang our gondola, mounted with the navigational wings and oars.”
“And they will keep it in the air.”
“They will give it direction, allow it to steer its course. What will keep it in the air is the gas. The hydrogen.”
I looked at him, curious. He had spoken very little about the hydrogen gas.
Titch was rooting through the light wooden parts of the frame, the rods clicking against each other like knuckles. I fingered the rigid fabric. The cotton had been coated in a thick rubber film, giving it the feel of something once alive, of corpse flesh.
“That is the envelope we shall fill with hydrogen gas. The gas, you see, is of lower molecular weight than the surrounding atmosphere, and that is what will allow for ascendancy.” The skin at the edge of his hairline was purple as a bruise from the constant sun. “Here, look, shall I give you a demonstration? Philip!” he called out.
His cousin turned, raised a hand to shield his eyes.
“Shall I give you a demonstration of the gas?” Titch called.
Mister Philip waved a hand, trudged stolidly back over.
“You must wait over there,” said Titch to his cousin. “And you, Washington, you wait there with him.”
I joined Mister Philip some fifteen paces away, while Titch kneeled beside a large metal canister outfitted with levers.
Mister Philip turned slowly to me, as though it pained him to move in the heat. “Where are the sandwiches, boy?” he said.
“I beg your pardon, sir?” said I.
“The sandwiches. Where did you set them?”
I glanced back, towards where Titch was working with the hydrogen gas chamber. Some five feet from where he kneeled the provisions satchel lay in the dry yellow grass. Looking up at Mister Philip, I found him staring expectantly at me. I glanced at the fields below, the rows of bright cane, hearing the levers clink like a tray of rattling glasses. From this height the trees appeared spindly, like thread on the landscape. We had ascended Corvus Peak several times now, but each climb filled me with wonder all the same. I went at a quick half run towards the satchel, thinking I could collect it and be returned to Mister Philip before Titch was ready to begin his display.
But from behind me came a great whoosh, and I turned towards Titch in surprise, the air exploding suddenly in a glistening swarm, as if a cloud of glass bees had burst forth. Then my face was afire, and I was lifted and thrown back in the shuddering milk-white flash of light, my head striking the ground. A distant roaring filled my ears, a sound as of great wings beating the air.
Then all went silent and dark.
* * *
—
HOW LONG did I remain in darkness? Little felt familiar to me, and I turned on my right side, my ribs aching. My breath was loud in my ears. I felt a cool pressure on my eyes; I could not open them.
Then I heard the sound of feet approaching, a door opening. I turned my face from side to side.
“Is this Dahomey?” I called out softly. “Are we there, Kit?”
There came a long silence.
“Kit?”
“Wash,” said Titch, and I tensed. For a moment I feared I was between worlds, that my death had not been complete and I’d been left suspended and weightless, lost. “How are you feeling?” he continued, and I knew then I was unmistakably still at Faith, all of me, and that I had not died.
The bed buckled, and Titch shifted his weight. He did not talk, merely breathed there in the dark. Then, clearing his throat, he said, “I am afraid there was an unforeseen complication. I had supposed the altitude sufficiently poor in oxygen for a demonstration. I was wrong.” And very softly, in halting language, he told of how he had released the hydrogen into the atmosphere, and how the air began to boil, and then a sharp blast hurled both of us clear. Titch’s frock coat had caught fire, but he had scrambled to his knees and managed to shrug it free in time, suffering but the mildest of burns on his wrists and hands. Then he had looked across, his ears ringing, and seen me. It seems, in my confusion, I had turned to face the very brunt of the explosion.
“Your body,” said he, quietly, “was mercifully unharmed.”
I tried to speak, but paused, alarmed. The skin of my lips felt seamed shut, so that I could not open the right side of my mouth. I raised a tentative hand to my bandaged face.
“You are rather lucky. The explosion might have killed you.”
I said nothing. Swallowing was painful.
“What were you standing so close for? I sent you back to observe with Philip. He was not harmed. You should have been with him. I sent you back, Wash.”
And then I remembered Mister Philip, his desire to eat. I remembered the flash of light, the pain like a sunrise in my skull.
I could feel now a weight on my neck, a strange blunt numbness. When I turned my cheek, I noticed a damp spot on my pillow, pus or blood. I tried to wet my lips. “The sandwiches.”
“What’s that?” he said softly. “What did you say?”
I tried again to moisten my lips; they began to throb. “He asked me to fetch the sandwiches.”
Titch was silent some moments. “I see.”
I stilled my lips, hoping the pain would subside. It did not. With great difficulty, I said, “I want to see. I want to know what is there.”
I heard Titch breathing quietly there above me, considering. “It is too soon. Be patient. Let it heal.”
“Please, Titch.”
He paused. “Wash,” he said softly. “I should not.”
“Please,” I said, my voice breaking.
What did he hear in me then? More silence passed. Finally I felt him bend close and, with his rough fingers, begin to unwind the gauze.
Oh, how painful this was. Such a moment I will never in all my life forget. First the creaking of the pus-encrusted bandage, the catch of it on my raw flesh. Then the final unpeeling, the rush of light and air. My left eye winced at the brightness of the room. But in the right I saw shadows, as if the bandage were only partially shifted.
I could see Titch’s face, lined, sun-browned, his bright eyes creased and old. He gave me a weak smile. “Science has left its mark on you now, Wash. It has claimed you.”
“I would like to see myself, Titch.”
“I will not lie to you. It is a grave change.”
“May I see?”
“You should wait.”
“Titch.”
He hesitated, then went out, returning some minutes later. He held the small mirror some six inches from my face, my image shivering there before me.
What a grotesque creature peered back at me. I raised a hand, and shuddered at the touch of my cheek. It felt like meat. The right side had been partly torn away. I could see into the flesh of my cheek, a strange white patch marbled with pink, like a fatty cut of mutton. Old black scabs edged the wounds, along with fresher ones, clots pale as boiled oatmeal. My right eye was full of blood. I could still see foggily by it, but the pupil looked lunar, bluish white. I saw it and thought of the raw, cursing eye of a duppy.
Titch cleared his throat. “I am told it will continue to heal. I am told it will improve with time.” He took from his pocket a white handkerchief and wiped under my eye.
�
��I am crying?” I asked. I did not even feel it.
“The wound is weeping,” he said gently. “That is all.”
* * *
—
I HAD BEEN WOUNDED many times before, though none were so grievous as this. The last time it had been Big Kit herself who had done it.
It had happened during the cooler months, when her crab-yaws would flare up and she’d be taken off the great gang to toil with us weaker beings on the second gang. We were working the fields together when she accidentally cut me with the tip of her machete. I told her to be mindful.
Her eyes, with their curious orange colour, narrowed. “How that, boy?”
I swallowed. “Your knife, Kit. You clip my leg.”
I remember the strange stillness in her face then. The driver was somewhere to the left of us, crying hoarsely out there. In the dry, hot field, a smell like burning sugar filled the air. Kit was standing with her head cresting the tops of the cane, staring down at me with a calm, wholly possessed expression.
My heart stuttered in my chest.
She took a heavy step forward; suddenly my breath was knocked from me, a vicious pain raged under my ribs. I staggered backwards, gasping, and hit the ground with my ears ringing. I could smell the heat radiating from the soil, tasted blood in my teeth. In the fierce sun I watched the shadows of the women pass over me, calling out to each other. Then, very slowly, I was lifted onto a wooden plank, and I felt myself being carried across the bright fields.
Three cracked ribs. Her kick had been that harsh, that swift. I refused to tell the overseers who had done it, and in this way Kit was spared. But the pain was immense and suffocating, and I was several nights in the hothouse before returning again to our huts.
She avoided my eye as I was led in, my chest still in bandages.
That evening, as I drifted into sleep, there came a touch at my face. I heard soft weeping, and realized with alarm it was Big Kit. She was running a cold palm across my forehead, whispering.
“Oh my son,” I heard her say, over and over again. “My son.”
I understood then that she had not meant to strike me so hard, and that my days away had pained her greatly. I closed my eyes, feeling the coolness of her skin on my brow.
10
THE WEEKS CREPT past. Confined so long to my bed, an old ache rose in the ribs Kit had fractured; I kneaded them. My burnt face began to knot and blacken, and I could see more by my right eye. The pain faded and slowly the dark silhouettes of objects came into view. Titch bade me rest, anguished over his miscalculation, though he did not say it aloud.
While I drifted in and out of sleep in my sickroom, a basin of cool water beside the bed, Titch returned to Corvus Peak, to repair his apparatus. Some evenings he would come to tell me of the progress, relaying to me the careful measurements and construction of the cutter. I turned my face to the wall, listening in silence, not speaking. As I grew stronger, I began to rise and walk to the small library, and there I would take down Titch’s volumes on aquatic life and stare quietly at the illustrations. I sometimes tried to read the words but would falter at their difficulty. Instead, I pored over the lustrous watercolour sketches, the roaring vividness of them. My favourite was a tome on the nudibranch, a kind of mollusc that sheds its shell after the larval stage. They were creatures of wild and varying colours, ethereal and beautiful.
At last, one day I walked out onto the porch, squinting in pain at the blazing sunshine, and peered east towards Corvus Peak. And there I saw the eerie, otherworldly orb of the inflated Cloud-cutter, the long cables holding it fast, the great monstrosity of it hovering there. I turned and went back inside.
I feared my eye would not recover; I feared my face in all its new grotesqueness. But most of all, I feared that I had been burned beyond use, that I had been made a ruined creature.
Titch would not hear of it. He came to me, patient, gentle, and I found his solicitousness so strange that I did not know how to understand it. He told me that I was much improved, that soon I would return to my duties. He said my absence was much felt. He said he had not had a competent sketch in weeks.
I made no answer.
He then broached a question clearly troubling him since he’d first come to me after my accident. “When you first opened your eyes that day”—he hesitated—“you imagined you had died and woken up back in Africa?”
I was silent some moments, then slowly I began to explain of our ancient beliefs, of how a figure killed in captivity would in death be returned to his homelands.
Titch was very still, listening with great attention. When he spoke, it was with much gentleness. “But you were born here, Wash. This is your homeland.”
I told him that Kit had willed to bring me with her, to Dahomey.
He paused. “I did not expect this of you, Wash.”
I said nothing, pained by his disapproving tone.
“That is nonsense, Washington. When we die, there is nothing. Only blackness. Forever and forever.”
Something wrenched in my chest, and I had the panicked feeling of wanting to push everything away. I turned to the wall.
It was a kindness he felt he was offering; he was doing what he thought was a goodness.
* * *
—
MISTER PHILIP WAS another matter. His first sight of my burns turned his face full white. I stood before him in the dark passageway, my knees touching each other, and I felt myself begin to tremble. He shook his head, solemn. “You are an ugly thing now, aren’t you,” he said, but there was no malice in his voice. He looked instead aggrieved, as if the sight of me caused him great emotional pain. “You should not have walked into the proximity when Mister Wilde instructed you otherwise,” he said softly. “When you are told to do something, it is best you do it. It is for your own safety, boy. Though I daresay you will not make such a mistake again.”
“Yes, sir,” said I.
“Very good,” he said, though he was still clearly suffering some disturbance. “Run along with you now.”
I did not know if it was guilt he felt, or some unrelated grief. But being Mister Philip, he soon enough turned his concerns to the cooking. To satisfy his anxieties Titch had one of his brother’s kitchen slaves sent over. The woman who arrived I knew only by name, and though I would catch her glaring at me with a hard kind of pity, when she spoke to me it was curtly and in evident disgust. She was called Esther. She bore a long white scar across her right cheek and over the bridge of her nose like a line of paint.
Mister Philip spat out the first dish she made, a fish soup, kicking back his chair and leaving the room. Her second dish, a breadcrust stuffed with cod and root vegetables, he dropped on the floor in disappointment. Her third dish he pushed rudely from the plate onto the table, and her fourth dish he forced her to sit and taste.
At last Titch would not stand for it. He held out a long, thin arm at Mister Philip, halting him before he rose from the table. “Tomorrow night you shall eat precisely what I eat, cousin. Or I shall send Esther back to Wilde Hall. And then it will be hollandaise every night.”
But in the event, Mister Philip was reprieved. An invitation arrived, to dine with Master Erasmus, who had finally recovered his strength after suffering several long weeks of fever. How disappointed I was to learn of his recovery; how many lives his sudden death might have spared. For I imagined that, whatever new arrangements Titch would have had to make at the plantation, the life would surely have been more merciful. But it was not to be.
The master looked thin, thinner than usual, and paler in the face, dark rings around his eyes. But he seemed in fine spirits, and welcomed his guests with a sharp tongue. I accompanied Titch at his urging, and stood burnt and gruesome behind his chair. But he had instructed me to tend to nothing, to not strain myself. For there were other slaves in attendance, some field hands brought in to serve, and I was reminded a
s I watched them of that night long ago, when Big Kit and I had served here, in this room. There was an older slave, a tall, heavy-set, grey-haired woman I did not know, along with a small boy, and I saw in them a glimpse of how we must have looked. The older slave had suffered some horrific brutality upon her person; the bulb of her right shoulder had been crudely severed off, so that she seemed always to be shrugging. She walked with a lurching gate and kept glancing at me, so that I felt uncomfortable. When my eyes did drift to her, I noticed how careful she was with the child; she would take the heavier dishes and leave him with the easier task, always, just as Kit had tried to do for me. She smiled gravely at me once, when her back was turned to the masters, such a quick flash I was uncertain I’d even seen it. I turned away from her, trying not to remember my Kit.
There was among these slaves a frightened air. I watched their shadows fall across the white tablecloth as they shuffled past, trying to bump neither the table nor each other. A vague scent of sweat and soil came off their skin, the soft green smell of fresh-cut cane. The boy spared no glance at me, the monster, the burnt creature. In the foreground, like a carriage, the masters’ conversation rattled on.
“Have you given any thought to redecorating, cousin?” said Mister Philip, not bothering to lift his face between bites. “There is a fine German proportioning to the room. It would not be difficult.”
The master frowned. “To what end? So the niggers could track their filth through it?”
“You might send for a decorator from London. I know a man, a brilliant eye. Redecorated half of Grosvenor in thirteen months.”
The master gave a long, luscious yawn, and a hank of his cloud-white hair dropped across his brow. “Christopher,” he said, turning to his brother. “I will say, I am shocked to find you still in residence, after all these months. You have the fighting spirit, little brother. You may actually see out the year.”
Mister Philip scraped his plate. “Mussels were a tad overdone, what.”
