A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  Everything was bright and looked brand new. Like when the snow stopped and the sun came out. Except this was indoors and it wasn’t cold. He saw himself reflected in the walls.

  Side by side in bed beneath the blankets, Landish and Deacon sang: “We’ll sleep and we’ll snore like two Newfoundlanders/We’ll sleep and we’ll snore on bed and pillow/Unless there’s a woman between us two bunkers/And then to his own bed young Deacon must go.”

  “What woman?”

  “She’s hypothetical.”

  “An idea in Just Mist?”

  “Right. But it’s better than antithetical. If she was that, she wouldn’t like me.”

  He watched Deacon absorbing the new word.

  “If you married her, would she be my mother?”

  “Stepmother. One step down from mother. But I’m not getting married.”

  “Not even to her?”

  “There is no her. Hypothetical means I’ve never heard of her and she’s never heard of me. We don’t know each other’s names. She might not exist.”

  “She could fit in the bed between us.”

  “She could. But then we’d have no privacy.”

  “Then she could sleep in the other bed.”

  “I mean her and me, not you and me.”

  Landish sang: “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like two Newfoundlanders/We’ll rant and we’ll roar on bed and pillow/One hand on her bottom and one on her sunkers/It’s straight through her channel to Toslow I’ll go.”

  “I’ll be David and you be Goliath.”

  “All right. I’ll go lieth down.”

  At first, it looked as if they would have an easy crossing of the Gulf. The sea was calm. The air was warm and there was not much fog. No one in first class was sick. Landish put Deacon on his shoulders and went out on the deck when they had it to themselves. It was windy. Deacon scanned the sea for ice while he held his hat in place. Landish thought about the Gilbert and the men whose skipper he could have been, men who even now were on the ice, for the hunt was under way.

  He hoped the weather would hold until they reached New York. But something about the water and the sky and the motion of the ship betokened otherwise. He smelled something of it in what little wind there was. He had wakened the previous night as he used to on the Gilbert when something that was lost even on his father, something in advance of all the instruments and for which there seemed to be no name, told him that far away, in some as yet unknowable direction, some botherance that would swell to provocation had begun.

  Icebergs. Each spring, a strange fleet of white, unmanned, unnamed vessels was launched from Greenland for no purpose but to drift south on the current to the east of Labrador until they ran aground or melted in the warm Gulf Stream below Cape Race, a fleet of ever-shrinking, shape-shifting vessels on its first and only voyage. Some of them, even if they were one-tenth as large as when they started out, made the largest of ships look like pilot boats. They followed an impossible-to-alter course. It was pointless to argue with their assumption that they had the right-of-way. They could not be reasoned with, bullied, reprimanded or confined to port. Even Captain Druken would look up in silence as a tower of ice went gliding past the Gilbert, his one consolation being that the iceberg would be short-lived and would soon pass from existence, uncommemorated, unrecorded. There was no iceberg registry. There was no iceberg lore that some skippers knew better than others. No matter how many you had seen or how much damage you had seen one do, each one seemed anomalous, unprecedented, the first of its kind, the sensible response to which was awe.

  On their ship bound for New York, an iceberg was spotted off to the southeast, ten miles away perhaps. A gale whose effects they could have avoided by continuing southwest was on the rise. Landish was surprised to hear some passengers say that the skipper meant to go as close to the iceberg as he safely could so that those in first class, many of whom had never seen an iceberg, could get a good look at it.

  “I hope he’s taking into account how quickly that thing is coming towards us,” Landish said as he and Deacon joined the others at the rail. Those within earshot dismissively looked Landish up and down and went back to gazing at the iceberg through binoculars.

  “Every two miles we go decreases the distance between us and it by four,” he said. “It’s not as if the iceberg dropped anchor.”

  “I wish that someone would tell that fellow to be quiet,” a woman to his left said loudly.

  “Your husband looks sensibly disinclined to grant your wish,” Landish told her.

  They neared a bank of clouds with shrouds of rain hanging from them. The iceberg loomed up so suddenly beside the ship it seemed to have been carried to them by a single wave. It looked like a gondola towering over them, a spire at each end, between them a deck that Landish guessed was a hundred feet high which meant that the iceberg drew nine hundred feet of water.

  “The captain should start turning away now,” Landish said. But the ship drew closer to the iceberg and sheets of rain swept across the deck as the passengers scattered to their cabins. Landish carried Deacon to their cabin in his arms. Deacon stood on a sofa below an open east-facing porthole and Landish knelt behind him. Landish felt the ship begin to turn, fighting against the sub-swell made by the deep draw of the ice.

  Deacon asked if the Gilbert ever sprang a leak. There were always small leaks in the Gilbert, Landish said, but the ship had never sprung a big one. He had never thought the ship would sink. Deacon asked what was the most scared he ever was and Landish said he wasn’t sure but it was a lot more scared than he was right now.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Landish said. “The skipper knows what to do. Never mind what I said up top. That was just a joke.”

  The ship and the iceberg seemed to be linked, a dual vessel with some underwater mooring strung between them that for now was keeping them a constant distance apart but which might buckle or snap at any moment, allowing the iceberg to be swelled by a wave that would drag it across the ship, dredge through the decks and cleave the hull in half.

  The iceberg tilted like a buoy, gushing water from a puncture in its hull.

  The iceberg was much bigger than the ship—a white mountain that rose up on the waves like a piece of cork, rose up until they couldn’t see the sky, only ice. Other times, when they looked up, all they saw was water, black as slate. Anything on it or in it was nothing when you matched it with the sea, even this iceberg that Landish knew might topple over, tumble down and smash the ship to pieces.

  The iceberg made a rumbling sound. They couldn’t hear anything else, not even the wind. It was like the loudest thunder with no silence in between the claps. They didn’t hear but only felt it when a wave hit the ship.

  A lantern-wielding steward came to their cabin and said that all portholes were to be closed and all passengers confined to quarters. He gave Landish a coil of rope and told him to lash himself and the boy to something he thought would not give way. Landish tied the rope to a table that was fixed to the floor. He and Deacon got beneath the table. Landish sat him between his legs and tied the rope round both of them. He took him in his arms and told him he would not let go.

  “Hold on, Deacon,” Landish said. When the steward left, the cabin was pitch-dark.

  Surely this could not be how they ended, bound to a table in the cabin of a passenger ship, no more in control of their fates than the chairs and tables that were fastened to the floor.

  Landish tried to tell what was happening from the sounds he heard. It seemed that a giant saw was slicing through the metal of the hull, rasping, screeching, the rivets of the keel popping one by one.

  “DEACON,” Landish shouted. He felt the word in his throat but couldn’t hear it. He wished he could free his arms so he could cover the boy’s ears with his hands. The Gilbert would long since have been battered to pieces. Landish waited for the feel of water gushing in, the sudden jolt of cold.

  The commotion stopped so suddenly that Landish was convinced the ship had gone
under, out of range of the storm-stirred surface of the sea. But he felt the rolling pitch of the waves and realized that the ship was once again contending with nothing but the storm. The sound of the wind and wind-blown sheets of rain returned. Cheers of relief could suddenly be heard from the other cabins, and laughter as if at how foolish their fears had been. Landish had heard such laughter before from sealers who for hours had been riding out a storm below deck in grim silence.

  “Deacon?” Landish said.

  “It’s pretty dark,” Deacon said. He sounded as out of breath as if he had pitched in with the crew to save the ship.

  The steward with the lantern came and helped them release themselves from their ropes.

  Deacon hugged Landish around the waist and Landish pressed the boy’s head against his stomach. “That was something, wasn’t it?” he said.

  Deacon nodded and closed his eyes, still out of breath. “I thought we were goners,” he said. “I wish we were back in the attic.”

  “That was the worst of it. The storm is nearly done.”

  “That’s good.” A whisper into his stomach.

  “You didn’t get sick. I bet that a lot of people a lot older than you got sick.”

  “It makes me hungry when the ship goes up and down. But not sick.”

  Deacon, still trying to catch his breath, began to cry.

  “Landish … I … want … to … go … home … I’m scared.”

  Landish sat on the sofa and took the boy in his arms. Deacon buried his face in the crook of Landish’s arm, his own arms hanging limp.

  “Were we almost in the Tomb of Time?” Deacon said.

  “No.” Landish held him close. “We didn’t even get hurt, did we?”

  “No,” Deacon said through hiccupping sobs as tears ran down his cheeks.

  Landish said the Tomb of Time would not be dark and loud. There would be no wind. The snow and rain would fall straight down. Fog would never spoil a summer day. There would be no peril on the sea. The lost would not be lost but found and brought back home. No more crosses would mark the empty graves of forever-unrecovered souls like Carson of the Gilbert. It would be as warm as a church, but they wouldn’t get kicked out for talking. They wouldn’t have to sing or pretend to pay attention to the priest.

  You wouldn’t need to be strapped in to keep from being hurt. It was quiet. No one was scared. No one was mean. You always had enough to eat and drink. No one was ever sick. No one was alone or had to go away. You were reunited with the ones you missed, the ones you thought you’d never see again, the ones you couldn’t remember because they left when you were in the Murk, and the ones who left when you were in the Womb of Time. No one goes away forever. Everyone comes back. No one holds a grudge or has regrets or has cause for using words like “forgiveness” and “revenge.” It is a place of reconciliation absolute.

  For whom the swell rolls.

  The ship was left in the bobbing rubble of the iceberg, bits of ice the size of barrels in a heaving sea of slush. Deacon and Landish saw sailors dodging chunks of ice that slid back and forth across the deck. They looked out across the sea and Landish said: “Many waters cannot quench it. Nor can it be drowned by floods.”

  Deacon asked him what “it” was.

  “Love,” Landish said.

  It must seem to the boy, more now than in years to come, thought Landish, that we have always been together, that I have not only been at hand since the moment he was born but somehow was the agent of his birth, perhaps even that my life began with his, he being unable to conceive of a time when our lives were not yet joined. So I must not forget what he cannot remember or has never known. I must remember that the odds are always heavily against things being as they are, that it was by the dodging of innumerable alternatives that we came to be together, and it will only be by the dodging of many more that we will stay that way. I am not his father. He is not my son. He is my charge. I am his protector. I must not allow my love of him and his of me to lull me into lapses of remembrance. Things seem to him as they one time seemed to me, but I never had such faith as him. He may never lose it. He may never change no matter what is done to him, no matter what he sees.

  Everything that in St. John’s Landish had said was too expensive you merely had to ask for on the ship. Deacon didn’t have to worry that Landish would come home awash with grog and tell him he had spent the rent. Deacon ate as frequently as Landish drank.

  “Our respective appetites cannot be slaked,” said Landish as he watched Deacon clean his plate. Beef, pork, veal, lamb, all of it awash with butter, gravy, rich sauces made with cream and eggs, great heapings of colourful desserts, meals that Landish couldn’t bear the sight of when he was decks awash, disappeared into the boy as if he would not be full until he had consumed at a single sitting the equal of every morsel he had missed since he was born.

  Their table was just inside the entrance to the dining room. Landish sat facing the wall to the left of the door. Deacon sat facing the diners. Many people smiled at Deacon, but no one smiled at Landish. Landish knew that the passengers who boarded in St. John’s had told the others who he was and how the boy had come to be his charge. He knew they were speculating on the purpose of their journey to New York.

  Van might not have foreseen, though Landish had, the sight that they would make in the dining room and elsewhere in first class, the commotion they would cause just by sitting at a table that was set aside for them, wearing, over their tattered clothes, jackets pressed upon them by the stewards.

  Most of the non-Newfoundland passengers were Americans returning home from Europe. One night, Landish got drunk at dinner. He stood and loudly proposed a toast to his sponsor, his and Deacon’s, their benefactor whose last name when he spoke it drew guffaws of disbelief and admonishments that he not further besmirch it by speaking it again, which he was about to do when he felt on his pant leg the tug of Deacon’s hand. So he sat down, but not before assuring his audience that he would report their treatment of him and the boy to the man they seemed to be looking less and less certain he had never met.

  It sounded to Deacon as if the diners were murmuring the man’s name all at once, over and over.

  Vanderluyden.

  The captain spoke to Landish. “The boy does not look healthy. There are boys in steerage who look better. He will be examined by the doctor, or else I will have to send you and the boy below decks and when we make port you will not be allowed to leave the ship.”

  “He’s undernourished,” Landish said. “That’s all. That’s why we’re going to New York. And as for making port, I doubt that we ever will as long as you’re the skipper. You overlook icebergs but notice little boys.”

  “Speak to me again like that and your first-class passage will be voided and you’ll travel in steerage until we reach New York, where you’ll be put on the next boat back to Newfoundland. That may happen anyway, depending on the boy. The doctor will decide.”

  Landish told the boy that all the passengers must be examined. “The doctor can examine us together.” He spoke to the doctor, asked him not to let on to the boy that they might wind up in steerage or that they might be sent straight back across the Gulf with chalk marks on their backs to live again in some place like the attic.

  The doctor examined both of them.

  “The boy is healthy though his belly is as hard and hollow as a gourd. Don’t provoke the captain any further. I’ll mollify the passengers as best I can. Some of them, especially the ones with young children, feel sorry for the boy but not for you. They blame you for the state he’s in. At any rate, I think I can get some proper clothes for both of you, which you’ll wear if you have a grain of sense.”

  “We could take our meals in the cabin if you like,” Landish said to Deacon. But the boy shook his head. Landish could see that whatever Deacon might have felt at being snubbed was overthrown by the effect on him of the spectacle that seemed to make him all but unaware of Landish in the dining room except as an obstruction
of his view.

  Entirely unjudgmental incredulity, amazement, wonder and delight lit up Deacon’s eyes in a way that Landish had last seen on a Christmas morning when, for the first time in his life, the boy bit into a slice of watermelon.

  One of the stewards who greeted passengers as they entered the dining room stood just behind Deacon’s chair. The tables nearest theirs were forty feet away. “It’s a very select table we’ve been given,” Landish said.

  “All the other ones are bigger,” Deacon said. “How big was King Arthur’s table?”

  “About the size of this one,” Landish said. “People were very small back then.”

  Snobs who think we’re swabs, thought Landish, who then reminded himself that he had crossed the Gulf eight times in first class. He thought of how easily he might have made things better for the boy if he had simply made them better for himself. If he had pleased his father and skippered the Gilbert until the old man died. And then washed his hands of everything but the money he’d have made by then and the money he’d have made when he sold the ship. If he had somehow known of the boy before he made his choice, somehow known that the boy was not long for the Womb of Time but would soon be on his way, that they were already set by fate on paths that soon would merge.

  But the boy was unforetold.

  “There’s a woman over there who smiles at me every night,” Deacon said. “Maybe if you turn around or sit by me she’ll smile at you.”

  Landish said nothing.

  “You should sit by me so you can see. And then you won’t be in my way.”

  Landish Druken’s wide, affronting back, and wide and wild affronting head of hair, had been turned on everyone for days. He doubted they minded except that he blocked their view of the boy.

  On eight crossings he had sat among them and told them he was bound for or coming back from Princeton, and told them who his father was and set out the terms of the bargain they had struck. The famed Captain Druken. The millionaire in seals. Landish had cut a finer figure then. He was better groomed, but his hair and beard, though shorter, could not quite be tamed, so he had what his shipmates seemed to fancy was the acceptably wild look of a man caught between two worlds, theirs and his father’s.