White Lotus

by John Hersey

  One evening the wind increased, and the shelves under us began to lurch and heave and plummet. The shallow-draft fisherman was no match for an ocean gale. Rain and salt spray poured through the barred hatches onto the unfortunates under them. Soon half a thousand women were sick to their stomachs. Through the singing of the wind in the rigging, the slatting of gear on the ship, the sloshing of the sea, and the groans, kecking, and weeping of our companions, we could hear a chilling monotone of Mrs. Taussig’s ravings. The stench of our vomit redoubled our nausea.

  The storm continued two days. During it the crew dared not take the slaves above, so on top of our seasickness we were without food, clean air, or water. I was sure I was to die. Occasionally Shaw came partway down the ladder to look at us, and once he brought the yellow physician with him, but that tall, thin creature had scarcely stepped to our level when one of the once rich Episcopalian ladies from Ventura bit him on the ankle, drawing a profusion of blood; his face had already turned a greenish color from our stink, and he stumbled hastily up the steps grunting and pitching like someone in the last stages of drunkenness.

  Then in the night everything seemed to stop but Mrs. Taussig’s stream of talk.

  As soon as it was light we women were taken above, all save Mrs. Taussig. The sun was shining as if through a sky of glass. There was not a sleeper’s breath of wind. The ship was wallowing slowly in great humped swells; the surface of the water was silky slick.

  Yellow sailors rolled several small kegs out onto the deck, and I was among a dozen women detailed to go down in our hold with wooden pails full of acrid malt vinegar from these barrels, and, weak as we were, to give our wretched quarters a cleaning with cloth swabs. Mrs. Taussig lay there the whole time, groaning and mumbling. On deck Shaw showed the women how to scoop up sea water over the rail of the ship in canvas buckets, and they bathed themselves. We had a meal, finally, and we breathed the air, and we thought we were better off.

  But when, after feeding the men, whose chains had again been removed, Kathy Blaw and the Baptists and I were sent below, we found there was a new tense atmosphere on the women’s shelves. I attributed it at first to the long, slow swells, the foul heat of the sun on the shell of the ship, the tart odor of vinegar and stale puke and vestigial fish, and the debilitation of our fellow slaves. I realized what it was:

  Silence.

  I felt I had to summon Shaw. I started up and, crawling over Kathy Blaw and the two Baptists, I climbed the companionway and pounded with my fist on the hatch cover. It was opened; a bearded yellow face leered down on my nudity. I urgently spoke Shaw Funny-One’s name over and over. The face turned, and I heard a roar. Then Shaw was there. I told him that the woman Mrs. Taussig was dead.

  Shaw said, in an offhand tone, as of one hearing an old, old, old story, that the body would be removed the following day, when the women’s hold would be cleared during our airing.

  All that night I lay awake wondering what it would be like, on one of these crowded shelves, to be Mrs. Taussig’s neighbor, who after four days of the doomed woman’s light-headed prating must now lie as close to her silence as I to Kathy Blaw’s nervous warmth. What if Kathy Blaw should die? This sudden thought filled me with homesickness. I wept for my lost mother and father.

  Daylight finally came, but it was many hours, celebrated by us with utter stillness, before we were taken up on deck. Under Shaw’s direction six women on their hands and knees in the low place dragged the corpse, which had stiffened with thighs drawn up and hands clenched between the breasts, across the compartment shelf to the companionway. We saw yellow sailors refuse to touch the body. So it was that women slaves were made to lift Mrs. Taussig’s crouching form out of the hatch, and to carry it to the rail, and to drop it, without a thought for the soul we had heard chanting its endless protests, into the sea.

  Kathy Blaw’s Story

  Like a fire slowly kindling, a formless communal dread began to burn among the female slaves. The ship was shuddering through flat calms. Heat lay on us like a breathing animal. Some of the women who had been under the dripping openings during the storm developed dysentery, which spread rapidly among us, causing, despite daily cleansings, a fetor far more wicked than that of our previous sicknesses. We breathed thereafter a miasma of vinegar and human discharge. When we were taken up for our daily airings some of the small children lay limp against the bulkheads and could not be stirred to take an interest in themselves. Four Lutheran women decided to starve themselves, and no abuse of tongues or thongs could make them eat. Our skins broke out in sores from lying in dampness. Roaches the size of frogs came out from the ship’s crannies and made a festival of our filth. We were afraid of smallpox. But worst of all sufferings was the thought of Mrs. Taussig’s unceremonious dead plunge into the sea.

  In our religious revival since the defeat in the Yellow War, the funeral had in almost every sect become our most important American rite. Life had held scant hope; sweet death had become its goal. I remembered standing at the edge of the large crowd at the cemetery, only a month before, when old Joshua Benton’s coffin, suspended on its slings, hung poised over the mouth of the tunnel (as I thought of it) that led to Paradise—a green garden where the petals of apple blossoms blew like snow the year round, where tigers were pets, and I would be Gay Moya, and soda fountains like the ones in Flagstaff stood in every rose bower. Preacher Honing uttered the final prayers for Joshua Benton, and the crowd was jealously tense. By and large we Methodists took no stock in formality—except at funerals, where each magic step had to be taken with utmost care and exactness. Like other American Protestants, we had turned away from the tradition of using the funeral to assuage the grief and shore up the morality of the survivors; our thoughts were for the dead. Atop Josh Benton’s coffin, to be buried with him for his journey, were his Sunday clothes, the latest copy of The Saturday Evening Post, his wallet with fifty bucks in it, a fifth of his beloved sour-mash whiskey, and a number of other things his daughter, Mrs. Jart, thought he would want along the way…. The watchers by the grave, the six hired mourners that next week, the building of the cairn, the planting of the grave sycamore—none of it was really sad. Yearning, I think, was the village experience in honor of Joshua Benton…. But to be dropped without a single precaution into the seal

  My terror at this possibility for myself, as I thought about these things, reached such a pitch that I felt I must cry out, and at just that moment I heard a moan near me of a woman whose thoughts must have pushed her over the edge into sound, and then another wail far across our cavern, and soon, caught in a fever of common panic like the one our coffle had suffered in the mountains, we were all twittering and caterwauling like madwomen.

  Beside me I began to be conscious of the weird falsetto whine of Kathy Blaw’s tale-telling voice, which rose and dominated the voices around us, until finally all the women in the hold were listening to her words:

  “There was a time when God took no interest in Arizona. Lizards gave birth to birds, and rams mounted women. One day a donkey and a jaguar went to Flagstaff to market. The jaguar had a suitcase in which he had collected all the wisdom of the world except for one last perception, which he thought he might be able to buy in Flagstaff. The donkey wanted to buy a human wife—God, as I say, was busy in the Middle West and could take no time to regularize Arizona. At the market the jaguar had no luck; the perception was not to be found for sale. The donkey bought a nice young woman named Helen. They started home. The jaguar was beginning to find his suitcase heavy. Helen rode the donkey’s back. She wasn’t light, either, being nice and plump, and on the way she fondled one of his long ears and whispered into it, ‘I wish you were a man. If you were a man I would take off my clothes and lie with you all night.’ The donkey, who had never learned to whisper, laid back his head and brayed, ‘He-how? He-how?’—meaning, as the wise jaguar understood, ‘How can I become a male human being?’ The jaguar said, ‘Are you mad, you ass? Men a
re unhappy.’ But Helen cupped the donkey’s ear again and said, ‘You would be a handsome man, and a strong one. I would remove my clothes and lie with you day and night.’ The donkey, filled with torment and delight, raised his nose toward the sky and trumpeted, ‘He-how? He-how?’ An eagle heard him and flew down and said, ‘I have flown long distances, and I know several states where they have God, and everything is orderly and just. Lizards beget lizards, rams mount nanny goats, men and women lie naked beside each other whenever they find it convenient, and dissatisfied donkeys are not saddled with their lots.’ ‘Ha-where? Ha-where?’ the donkey cried. The eagle said, ‘It would be a long trek for you with that fat girl on your back. I will fly there and bring God to Arizona. Go home. I will bring Him to your house.’ The donkey was overjoyed. On the way home Helen said, ‘Jag! Jag! I see a perception in the top of that cottonwood tree.’ ‘Which tree?’ ‘That one.’ The jaguar began to climb it, but he had a hard time, because he was trying to take the suitcase up with him, and when he was halfway up the donkey brayed in such a way that the jaguar understood him to mean: ‘You aren’t wise, you’re a fool, or you’d have had sense enough to leave the suitcase at the foot of the tree.’ One has to look twice at a wise person to see that he is also a fool. The jaguar, realizing the truth of the donkey’s brayings, lost his temper and threw the suitcase to the ground, where it split at the hinges, scattering the wisdom of the world. The donkey went to his home, and there the eagle was waiting for him with God. In his great kindness God arranged for the donkey, after he had made certain promises, to become a handsome, strong man, named Lion. God then went to Ashfork, Parks, Bellemont, Riordan, Flagstaff, and all along Route Sixty-six and told all the people to go to the sycamore tree and get on their hands and knees and gather up what scraps of wisdom they could. This they did. And that night, when Lion was lying with Helen, he asked her, ‘What was that bit of wisdom you saw in the tree?’ Helen said, ‘It was this, my beloved Lion: All the different forms Death takes are just the one Death.’ ”

  Save for the vibration of the ship and the slapping of the sea against its metal flanks, all was now silent in our dark space.

  Our Prayers

  The heat the next morning was like a bad breath in the ship’s maw, and for some reason the women slaves were not taken up for their airing early in the day. When at last, near noon, the hatch was opened and we were released, we saw why there had been a delay.

  We were going to be allowed to mix with the men slaves, who were emerging from their hatch just as we were from ours. The yellow men, our masters, may have sensed, or heard, the utter desperation in our hold the night before, and no doubt the men were despondent, too, and Big Number One must have decided that putting us all together for a short time, shamefully naked though we were, might restore our spirits.

  But we did not move to each other with pleasure. Because of the heat and our sicknesses, our thirst was overwhelming, and perhaps the women thought the men would drink all the water we were rationed, or the other way around. At any rate, there was a rush for the barrels, by both men and women, and a riot followed, in which there was screaming, pushing, and clawing.

  The disturbance was brought to a pause by a yellow man’s shooting a gun into the air.

  In the slaves’ gasp of silence after the gun’s detonation there arose a powerful sound from the throat of a Catholic priest who had been taken aboard at Santa Monica: “ ‘And now I exhort you to be of good cheer: for there shall be no loss of any man’s life among you, but of the ship.’ ” This priest’s name was Father Principo, and he stood now on the hot steel deck with his hands pressed flat one to another, fingers up, his eyes lowered, his cheeks and mouth engraved with a habitual cheerfulness that even our recent days had not erased, a look on his face so sweet and removed that my imagination hastily and respectfully vested him, from a sharp white line of a starched backwards-collar at his jowls, down robes of black overhung with white lacy stuff, to the ankle-high wrinkled soft leather shoes of a dowdy small-town parish-house fussbudget. “ ‘For there stood by me this night the angel of God…’ ” Around him gathered a circle of Catholics. From nowhere altar boys materialized. So vivid, so innocent, so booming was Father Principo’s voice that one could almost hear a tinkling bell, smell incense, see mysterious glints of amber and cerulean stained glass.

  At first a large crowd gathered around the priest and his flock to watch. Then across the way we heard another voice with the open tones of California—that of a Presbyterian minister; a knot of his faithful around him were soon singing: “Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm doth bind the restless wave…” Still another Californian—the soil of that state had been, for religious revival as for vegetables and fruits, far more fertile than ours in Arizona, and among the Californian captives there seemed to be numerous divines—called to his upraised hands all Methodists. And soon about the deck we were gathered in more than a score of clusters of worshippers, some standing with bowed heads, some kneeling (the women’s buttocks trembled and were crimped as their owners shifted their knees on the hot, rough steel plates), some singing, some praying, and one rather exotic Californian sect shouting, jumping, barking, and speaking in tongues: Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Jews, Northern and Southern Baptists, Episcopalians (I heard the good lady who had bitten the physician genteelly trilling: “Let the sea make a noise and all that therein is, Let the floods clap their hands…”), Congregationalists, Mormons, Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, and numerous sects on the near and outer fringes. The yellows thought we were all one, merely white, but we were many. Many voices, that is; the extraordinary thing was that we were of one mind. It was as if the entire force of all our postwar religious revival had culminated in one vengeful hope. Every churchlet on the scorching deck was, in its own vocabulary, calling upon God to bring on this vessel, which had the curious name Tung Yüan (East Garden), some vengeance of His cunning strength, hull-splitting thunder, typhoon winds, underwater rocks, or anything He might use to put us under, under, under.

  A girl from a hysterical Californian evangelical sect near our mumbling Methodist flock, a large awkward creature three or four years older than I, showed signs of becoming possessed. Her neck jarred from side to side, and her fellow sectarians shouted for God to come down and settle on her head. Her naked breasts shook with her straining to receive God, and I could hear the yellow sailors on the superstructure laughing. (I gathered later from Shaw that the yellows thought that, males and females having been brought together after our long separation, we were carrying on some sort of sex rites; he said they were obsessed with speculations about the whites’ sexual practices.) Suddenly the girl jumped up crying with a wild joy, and she tore around the deck as if she were some kind of disrobed heavy-fleshed storm, now holding in her hands delicate cords of shimmering rain, now raging in hurricane leaps.

  This girl’s sincere antics effectively broke up the other services. Eventually she calmed down. We cooks fed the men and women. And I—my chest was hot as the metal underfoot, with happiness—I felt, as I had not in my flash of defiance when Big Number One had snatched my locket, or when I was filled with anger and pity at Mrs. Taussig’s death, or even in that moment when I had put the belaying pin into Gabe’s trembling hands—I felt that something was possible, something could be done, even by one so small, so weak, so bare as I.

  On the Rim of the Night

  But no cloud nesting thunder and steel-riving lightning came to sink the ship that night. We rode a smooth ocean with a favoring breeze for several days. All four of the Lutheran women who had refused food died and were thrown in the sea. A boy eight years old died and was thrown in the sea. A thin Baptist woman died and was thrown in the sea. For those who survived, it seemed as if this state of being that was not a life would last forever. The stench in our shallow compartment was worse every day. We felt as if the sun itself walked on the metal deck so close above us.

  One
night, when I had quite given up the crazy hope I had had that God might answer our multi-sected prayers and come to help us or drown us all, I heard, or thought I heard, a distant guttural mumbling. At once a number of our women murmured to their neighbors. Soon, more distinctly, I heard what was undoubtedly a faraway roll of thunder. At once all five hundred of us were stirring with a tense, buzzing excitement—the first flood of emotion we had felt that had not the slightest tug of fear in it.

  In a few moments the rectangles of the barred air hatches overhead quivered with trembling light, then were dark again. Much later, far away, we heard a new rumble.

  The Methodist women among us struck up “Tossed upon the raging billows,” in hope, I suppose, of encouraging God to come closer with some sort of holocaust. We were carried away with an absurd, delusive happiness.

  Suddenly we heard someone beating with his fists on the bulkhead that divided us from the men’s hold—one of the men unable to contain his joy. Eventually his pounding stopped. Another flash, another growl, another surge of our unrealistic hope. “Tierce though flash the lightnings red…” It was strange: at home in the desert I had feared lightning more than any other threat of nature—I thought of its shriveling lick as a meting out of justice by God; we could hear the thunder echo all along the Chaco Rico Range. Yet now I sang, clapped, almost danced lying down, in the hope that this distant lightning would come to the yellow men’s vessel, strike the bridge, crisp the captain, and somehow cripple the ship.

  There were a few more flashes. Slowly we realized that the storm was passing along the rim of the night and would never come to us.

  The mumbling died away to nothing, and our blind joyfulness crumbled to dampness, stink, sores, stiffness, and tears. We felt, despite our knowledge that our prayers had issued from a distinctly unholy place, that the yellow men might have mysterious powers, which lodged perhaps in their sneers and their derisive laughter, that were greater than the whole constellation of our faiths. We were weak in truth.