Dent the cook fell ill and died—all his scrimshaw left behind. Kay fingered the button on her hair bag. She might take it off now, but that seemed cold-hearted, so she endured it. The cook’s ill-fitted body was sewn into a canvas bag made of torn sail and sent overboard after a brief funeral service, which Francis conducted, because he was the captain and it was his duty, although he did ask Mr. Brimner to say a prayer toward the end. Kay shut her eyes as the bag slipped loose of the ship. She waited for the splash, which when it came seemed not very much for a person. Because they were sailing so very slowly, she watched the canvas bag still bobbing on the waves for quite some time before it sank.
After the first dinner cooked by the Hubbards, Thea went down to the galley and put on an apron, saying Hubbard might continue to cook for the crew but she would see to the Aft meals herself, with Lena to help as necessary. Kay followed, to be of some use. The familiar work of lunch making and cake baking sparked useful energy in Thea, so that she was herself again, hair curling against her temples in the close heat and rush. It was laundry day, too; Lena Hubbard did the crew’s sheets in the big boiler in the galley, grumbling and shouting for her husband to help as she wrestled them in and out.
Thea washed their own clothes and the good linens herself. Kay helped, wringing and pulling and taking pillowcases up on deck to flap with a snap into the hot, still air. They strung them on a line run from the wheelhouse to the roundhouse, and then sat for a rest inside the double line of sheets that formed a radiant white hall inside the deck. Thea sent down for another bucket from the boiler and washed Kay’s hair and her own. In the wind and sun they walked the white alley, combing their hair and singing as they used to do in happy times when Kay was only a child. Francis poked his head through the white walls and said, “Hello, mermaids!” when he saw their combs, but Thea sent him packing until their hair was dry and shining in the sun. Then she set a black velvet band about Kay’s forehead and went down to the galley, because supper needed tending and she could not trust Lena not to burn the fowl.
Mr. Brimner was sound asleep in a deck chair on the sunny starboard side. He’d set his straw hat over his face to shield it, but a triangle of pink skin at his throat was coming to red grief. Kay woke him with a light tap on his arm, and when his hat fell askew and one globular eye stared up, she tapped her own throat to show him where the burn was.
“Thank you!” he said. “I am a martyr to the sun, dear Kay. Four months in Eleuthera to harden, yet I am still boiled beef. However shall I function in the South Seas?”
And indeed Kay wondered.
On an afternoon when it was perfectly calm, no wind at all, Thea sat reading in the stern of the ship. Hearing some small sound, she looked out at the sea, and to her surprise saw Francis rowing about, having a fine time all by himself. They had put the boat over so quietly that Thea had not heard the least noise of it. She hallooed, and ugly, kindly Mr. Best ran to put the ladder over for her to climb down and join Francis, who rowed with a will and soon had them far out over the glassy sea.
Looking back, Thea saw Kay wave from the deck. After that, she looked back at the Morning Light frequently, just to be certain it had not sailed off without them. Away from the ship there was nothing. Nothing at all. No wind to carry the ordinary noise of the ship. Out on the water, in a small boat, ears perked by instinct, what one heard was nothing. So still, one might think one were dead.
The sun was warm, but Thea’s bonnet kept her head and face shaded. Francis sent his line whizzing out over the mirror-flat sea to bounce, bounce, touch and dip. He caught three fish that Thea did not know, and promised they would make a fine supper. One was very nasty-looking. They lay in the boards flopping until Francis clunched them on the head with his—that thing, his—marlinspike, was it? She would not ask. She ought to know by now.
While they were out there, a whale blew, not a hundred feet away. If it were to come under this little boat, it would capsize them like a leaf on a pond. Thea told herself that she enjoyed the row very much, but it was not like rowing in the ponds where trees are on all sides. In any direction, look as hard as her eyes would try, the ship was the only thing to see. And the whale.
Two weeks after the Equator, when they still lay in doldrums, angling to catch enough wind to make way, Francis discovered that he had miscalculated their route. He had taken the streams too low in latitude, and they were going to lose time—perhaps as much as two weeks.
He was angry with himself, so angry that Thea retreated from him a little. Even in those limited quarters it was easy to distance oneself from the captain of the ship, since there was always another call on his attention. She had only to employ her natural reserve. On deck she shifted her chair slightly so his glance did not meet her eye, to prevent him striding down to fume again about his error. Her distaste for this extravagant self-reproach was most likely because she did not yet understand how much an untimely delivery would cost them.
She did not want Kay to notice the slight dissent or distance between herself and Francis, and kept it from her by the occasional use of—not outright lying, but prevarication. Francis was kept very busy; and Kay was immersed in Greek with Mr. Brimner, learning as quickly as she might.
Still, the error set them all on edge.
Seaton, whom Kay had rarely seen out of his lifeboat, came to the saloon to show them his model ship, which he had worked on for many years, he said. It was a large model of the John Stuart out of New York in 1881, which Seaton had sailed on in his youth and remembered “every splinter of,” he said.
To Kay it was a miniature version of the Morning Light, but she had the good sense not to say so, knowing that Seaton would be shocked that she could not tell the difference. Perhaps sensing it, he used one long brown talon to point to and name each of the sails: “Above the topsail, the skysail, the flying kites; above the skysail she carries a main moon sail, and above that, consecutively, a cloud-cleaner, a stargazer, a sky-scraper and an angel’s footstool.”
Mr. Brimner’s fancy was caught by that. “Angel’s footstool!” he repeated.
“That latter sheet, however, being set only in dead calms, when the watch on deck were not allowed to cough or sneeze, for fear of carrying it away.”
With that, Seaton carried away his precious model to some below-decks place of safety. His legs were like twisted oak posts, muscle overlying bone, overlaid in turn by a thin skin of ink.
He was the strangest mixture of a person Kay had ever met—hardly human at times, scurrying below decks or vanishing around the side of the wheelhouse, bare shanks covered with ungodly ink-drawings that shimmered and moved over the extraordinary clench of his calves. Mr. Wright told them that Seaton once batted for Australia, and Francis said he believed it.
One calf was mangled by an old wound, and his tattoos were barbaric, but Kay felt perfectly at home with him, perhaps partly because Thea did not. His accent and speech wandered from clear English to mumbling incoherence in many other tongues. He had at times a surprisingly educated turn of speech, was athletic, reserved, even courteous; then in an instant, a fit of boastful grandiosity would hit and he would loudly declaim his superiority to all there present, until Francis snapped, “Seaton!” and he stopped.
At dinner, when Kay asked about the sails, why the Morning Light did not wear moon sails and stargazers and cloud-cleaners, Francis replied shortly, as if insulted: “We do not need the speed. A case oil cargo does not go bad, and excessive risk is not in my nature.”
Thea looked at him: her passionate correspondent of the last decade, whose letters had sustained her through terrible loneliness and pain. Who became, from time to time, this short-tempered, scowling man. She held in her heart the truth of his inner nature. Thought of his mouth, beautiful lips rosy from lovemaking, now invisible in the firm lines of his face. Both things were true.
He tucked his chin in, to soften his shortness. “Case oil is not my preferred cargo, but it will do. I will be easier in my mind once we are
unloaded in Auckland.”
Then he told Mr. Brimner the horrifying story of a ship’s fire he’d witnessed as a lad, the captain’s wife tossing her babies over the ocean to the boat—dear God!—and then jumping herself—and the loss of the ship. All survived, Francis promised, glancing at her.
In fact, there were so many ways to die, Thea thought it might be a relief never to have a child of her own. She’d worried for so long about children dying, sickening and then gone. And poor Mary, dangling limp from the transom window-latch, unable to carry on even for her sister’s sake—how is one supposed to think about that?
Then for four days there was no wind at all. Simply nothing.
The Morning Light sat dead in the water, gently-very-gently rising and falling only on the ocean’s sleeping breath, and the life of the ship carried on at a suspended pace. Nothing happened. Nothing. The watch changed. Nothing happened.
The boards of the deck glowed soft and white with holystone scrubbing, from Mr. Best finding work for the boys to do, and Mr. Cocker the bosun put them through their paces with the ropes until their hands blistered.
Kay’s own skin peeled in the constant sun, onion-paper sheets curling off her forearms as she sat at the table Francis had caused to be set up again on deck, puzzling out a sentence of Pindar.
Thea looked over her shoulder: τί δέ τίς; τί δ'ούτίς; σκιάς ὄναρ ἂνθρωπος. She put a finger on the place, and Kay sounded it out for her: “Ti deh tis; ti d’ ou tis; skias onar anthropos.”
“Yes indeed, a dream of a shadow . . .” Mr. Brimner’s head did not turn to them as he spoke; he continued to stare out over the unmoving sea.
“You might as well have waited for your own ship,” Francis flung back as he stalked on in the obsessive rounds the doldrums induced in him. “We will never get to the Pacific at this rate.”
“What is a person? What is not a person? Man is a dream of a shadow,” Mr. Brimner said, bending to check Kay’s exercise book.
6
The Boston Seaman
The weather blew up finally as they neared the coast of Africa, later than Francis had wished because of the wind, and his error. He’d stopped bemoaning that—to Kay’s relief, because she saw that it was making Thea impatient. It was the same when Father fell into the megrims: for a time Thea would sympathize kindly, as if there was an allotted time for self-pity; then she withdrew in disapproval. Francis seemed to pay no more mind to this withdrawal than Father ever had, yet he did stop. Perhaps the relation of a husband and wife was different from a father and daughter; or perhaps he was too busy to mope.
With the wind came driving rain—three days and nights, and no abating. The saloon, so spacious, now seemed cramped, but there was nowhere else to go save one’s bunk. As they caught their books from sliding off the table once again, Mr. Brimner quoted Homer in rolling accents: “πολυφλοίσβοιο θάλασσης—polyphloisboio thalasses, the loud-roaring sea . . .”
“Ah, well, we have had easy weather until now, my love!” Francis told Thea. He was in good fettle, clapping his hands together as if this was the sort of thing he lived for. Up he went to bellow on deck, he and Mr. Wright vying for volume, louder than the roaring of the waves.
Rain increased, clouds scudding over racing seas until Francis had to shed sail, and they all felt the sudden slackening. After a sullen night the storm broke properly, such heavy going through the troughs and valleys of the waves that they were forced to spend most of that day in their bunks being relentlessly rolled and slammed, until toward evening the wind slackened. Thea and Kay and Mr. Brimner remained pinned down in the weather-buckled saloon, but at least set free of their cabin-prisons.
This general discomfort was complicated by quarrels below decks: one of the crew, a sailor from Boston, had taken grave offence at something a Yarmouth man said and was causing difficulties, turning resentful and quarrelsome to every other man aboard, even to Francis. The man had to be disciplined, and Francis went up after dinner, thunder-browed and curt, to give the order to Mr. Wright.
Kay had a nauseating memory of Father and Mr. Maitland thrashing it out between them which child must be beaten and why—of sitting beneath the dining table watching their black-clothed legs pace about, deciding.
She knew better than to mention this to Thea, but in the overheated saloon, in the strain of the weather, it became burdensome to carry the memory alone, not to be able to discard it by speaking of it.
What Kay was not allowed to talk about, or what could only be talked about in a certain way: the children who had died last winter, and the ones who’d died the time before that. She was not allowed to think or talk about it, Thea had said she must not. Kay did not see how Thea could have stopped the sickness; but if there had not been a school at all, if the children had been with their own families, maybe they would not have become sick, maybe they would not be dead. But—Thea had told her this many times—maybe the children would have starved to death the winter before, without the school to feed them.
On the train travelling to Nova Scotia last spring, when Kay had dreamed again about rows of empty beds and woke up weeping, Thea said they would never speak of it again, that they were leaving all that behind. Her eyes shone with angry tears. “Do not forget, they invited us to Blade Lake,” she said, looking out the window into the dark landscape running by. “They wanted the school, it suited them for their children to be fed and given an education.”
That bitter statement had sounded to Kay like Miss Ramsay talking rather than Thea; and it was not at all what she had seen herself. She did not know who they might be—the children’s parents? But Annie’s mother had not wanted her to go to school.
“The school was doing such good work,” Thea told the dark window. “It was only a bad year. First tuberculosis, and Father’s illness, and then the flu . . .”
Lying in her cabin in the Morning Light, staring at the wooden roof above her head, Kay thought it was not the procession of ailments that had caused all the trouble. It was Mr. Maitland. And Father, yes. A blight of English people bringing bad things west with them. Miss Grace Ramsay, also from England, with an elevated opinion of herself. She knew even better than Father; her father had been master at Saltcoats, a very superior prep school, as she was always telling them.
Kay’s principal worry, although there was some competition among her various fears, had been that Father might marry Miss Ramsay, and she would have a stepmother. Thea had had one, but Thea loved Kay’s mother; Kay hated Miss Ramsay. For her pinched mouth and vengeful nature, for her pinching fingers and the way she brought the belt strap slashing down on even the littlest girls’ hands. For the dainty way she sat with her legs to one side, ankles and wrists carefully crossed, as if she guarded some treasure in her lap.
The only truly bad person Kay knew was Miss Ramsay. Young Mr. Maitland was quiet, but he had dreadful headaches and when he was in the midst of one he could be terribly hard on the boys. Spare the rod, he would say, and then proceed to flail about him. Thinking about it now, Kay saw that he was also a bad person, perhaps worse than Miss Ramsay, for the things she had seen him do.
Bad things were done. Done and done and done. Discipline, dignity, diligence, Father said. Courage, he would add, before he whipped the boys, demanding that they took it well. If any cried out, he was whipped harder, on both hands or on his bare back. Kay saw Benny Twoyoungmen’s back when he ran into the wash house, long lines black-edged, red-edged, frilled skin pale and shrinking between the edges.
She felt her own back shrinking, sitting under the skylight in the saloon, listening to the great howling that had set up above as Mr. Wright brought the quarrelsome sailor up on deck.
Thea got up and used the metal ratchet to close the skylight window more tightly. “Francis has to have the seaman whipped,” she said. “But we do not have to listen.”
“Which one is it?” Kay asked. “What is his name?”
Thea looked at her. “What d
oes it matter? Not one of our boys, someone hired on in Boston. Francis cannot have fighting below decks, you know.”
“But what did he do?”
Thea took the watering pot and attended to the flowers, answering without looking back, as if it was no matter at all. “I told you, he has been fighting with other men. That is not permitted on board ship, it can lead to terrible trouble. It must be—nipped in the bud, you see? Discipline must be maintained.”
From the corner, where he had seemed to be immersed in his book, Mr. Brimner said quite quietly, “The ship is a microcosm, Kay—from which words does that word come?”
“μικρός,” Kay answered automatically, seeing the word in Greek letters. “Tiny. And—κόσμος, cosmos?”
“κόσμος, the world, yes.” He exchanged his long, thin legs, one for the other, the left now resting on top. “κόσμος, everything that is the case. In this world, we develop rules for living with each other, so we can depend on each other. We agree on those rules, generally—although the debate has been going on for centuries as to what civil behaviour may be. In this small world of the ship, if one person tramples over those rules, we all suffer.”
Kay looked at Mr. Brimner, without acquiescing.
As the weather let up, Mr. Brimner took sick, his first bout of seasickness—or perhaps it was a bad pot of Gentleman’s Relish—and was compelled to keep to his cabin. He sent Kay’s Latin book with exercises marked, set two more translations in the First Greek Book and included a note: “Composition has been neglected. You may write me a story—write three or four pages about your best friend. In a fine hand, mind you.”
The exercises were quickly done. Even the Greek set piece; she was not as confident of it as of the Latin, but with liberal use of the vocabularies at the back of the book she felt sure it was close. There remained only the story. Kay filled her pen again, and sharpened her pencils, thinking whether she ought to write about one of the colourless girls who had been invited to tea with her in Yarmouth, whose names had slipped out of her memory along with their faces. And what could she say of Susannah and Sally except They took me to the water . . .?
The Voyage of the Morning Light Page 7
