by John Pipkin
The large trunk sat solidly in the corner of the cramped hold, half hidden by the barrels and crates brought on board at every port before they turned westward. The other passengers found it a sturdy source of gossip; with little else to do for weeks at sea, they speculated on what it might contain. Loose bits of straw hung from the lip of the lid, a sign that whatever the trunk contained was valuable enough to have been packed carefully for the voyage. Everything from gold coins to guns to an alchemical apparatus was rumored to occupy the trunk. Those passengers who knew something of the history of the family Hus whispered that the trunk no doubt concealed a stolen treasure or a pair of entwined corpses. Lars told them that the trunk held what he was leaving behind, and no one realized that he meant this quite literally.
When it was too cold or wet or rough to play on deck, Odd-mund and his sister climbed onto the trunk, feet scraping the riveted sides, he reaching the top first and extending a hand to pull Birgit up before she started whining. He was ten and she was younger by two years. Sometimes they pretended they were riding an elegant carriage through the streets of their destination, a city called Boston. At other times they imagined they were sitting in a jeweled chair on the back of a lumbering Indian elephant. Were there wild elephants roaming the green forests of America? Oddmund and Birgit knew they were going to a place where no one would understand them. Neither could remember how they had first learned to speak, but they knew they would have to learn how to do it all over again. As they sat together on the trunk, they sounded out the strange new words, letter by letter, stenciled on the barrels and crates around them: VINO, GUNPOWDER, LINEN, TEA, LAMP OIL. Lars lowered his bulky length into the dim hold at noon each day to check on the trunk, as if he were afraid it might fall through the rotting bulkhead unnoticed. He did not unclasp the lock to look inside. He patted the trunk like a favorite pet, whispering to it, as if to reassure himself and what was inside that they were all still there.
The voyage was no more and no less arduous than other sea crossings: the ship too small to accommodate the number of passengers, too little food, too little water, too much sickness. For some travelers, the Atlantic proved to be their final destination. Death trailed them from the Old World, nipping at their heels, snatching passengers at random, sending their shrouded bodies to the ocean floor. Two weeks from America, a mottled sickness seized Ingrid Hus, just as it had unceremoniously taken hold of others, and slowly squeezed the life from her lungs. Oddmund and Birgit watched the health drain from their mother's cheeks. While their father forced tin cups of rank water between her pale lips, brother and sister mounted their fierce elephant belowdecks to chase away the demon tormenting their mother. After a week-long siege, death released its grip, miraculously returned their mother to them, and seemed, if only for a while, to retreat to the safety of the Old World, where it might prey more easily upon the crowded cities.
When they at last sighted land—the Cape of Cod, it was unbelievably called—Lars had the heavy trunk brought up from the hold. The bold white letters of their grandfather's name, V. HUS, shone like the standard on a flag. It was a struggle to bring it up the narrow ladder, and once it was on deck they left it next to the open hatch. Lars sat on the edge of the trunk near the starboard rail and watched America approach as they cleared the cape and sailed through the waters of Massachusetts Bay. When they could see the clusters of masts and sails marking Boston Harbor in the distance, Lars retrieved the key from his boot and worked at the stubborn lock, barnacled with glittering mushrooms of rust from a month in the salty dampness. Those few passengers who still had energy enough to remain interested gathered around and watched quietly, too tired to remind one another of the wagers made weeks before. Oddmund winced under a shower of flying sparks as a man behind him lit a clay pipe filled with the cheap tobacco that was mostly straw and lint. Each puff sent another cloud of bright orange cinders spilling over the pipe's bowl. Lars checked the horizon again before opening the trunk, as if to make sure that America had not drifted away; he ignored the impatient grunts from curious passengers.
As their father lifted the lid, Oddmund and Birgit stood on their toes to peer inside, and they understood at once why the other passengers hissed. Nothing in there was worth the extra gilders Lars had paid to bring the trunk halfway around the world: a moth-eaten overcoat, a curled pair of boots with peeling soles, a spineless book, a broken clock, a flaking portrait in oil, a spade, papers, curios—junk. The rubbish had been carefully packed in straw like precious trinkets. Lars watched his children's reactions while Ingrid watched America loom measurably larger with each passing minute. Oddmund fingered the curled toe of the boot, furred with mildew. This, their father said, is what we are leaving behind. They had heard him say this before, but they were surprised to hear him speak Norwegian instead of the clumsy American words he insisted they practice during the voyage.
Lars grabbed the boot, and as he lifted it from the trunk the other boot followed, tied to its mate by knotted laces. These belonged to your great-grandfather, he said. He held them in front of Oddmund and Birgit long enough to ensure that the two children registered the significance of the rotted leather, then, swinging his arm like a catapult, he hurled them back over his shoulder and into the ocean. Oddmund heard the twin splashes seconds after the boots disappeared over the rail. Lars did not take his eyes off his children as he reached into the trunk for another object. Your great-grandfather wore those boots on the day of his trial. Thanks be to God he did not live to teach his sons how to help themselves to the contents of other men's pockets.
Oddmund moved closer to the ship's rail, where he could see the waves slapping against the hull. Then Lars lifted the battered oil portrait from the trunk and frowned scornfully; the face on the canvas smiled back with straight, white teeth, and a lower lip pointed like an inverted V. Oddmund watched his father spit on the face and curl his lips in a silent curse. Your uncle, Søren Hus, Lars said. He fled his fate; some say the ocean took him, else he would have suffered a punishment worse than your great-grandfather's. This portrait he tossed like a dinner plate, sending it spinning overboard. Next he retrieved a cracked magnifying glass belonging to a counterfeiting Hus; this, too, Oddmund's father threw over the rail. Oddmund watched a wedge of the broken glass fall from the lens and trace its own path to the water, slicing into the waves like a hard piece of the ocean itself.
A spade came next, with clumps of foreign soil still clinging to the blade. Lars rubbed the grit between his fingers. A smooth stone the size of a knuckle dislodged from the spade and landed at Oddmund's feet. Through good seasons and bad, our family worked the fields. Only by the grace of heaven were we more fortunate than most. But now you are fee to choose your destiny. Lars flung the spade over his shoulder. It entered the water silently and then shot back to the surface, buoyed by its wooden handle. Oddmund bent and picked up the smooth stone, gray with a coppery vein running its length, and slipped it into his pocket. It seemed sad to leave it on the deck after it had tenaciously made the journey halfway around the world.
Overboard went the broken pocket watch of a murderous nephew, a leather satchel belonging to a horse-thieving cousin, a pair of spectacles used by a lock-picking brother-in-law, a bonnet worn by an adulterous aunt, the pewter flask of a debauched great-uncle. Most of what Lars discarded sank immediately, but some of the objects formed a crooked trail of flotsam behind the ship, and from the rail Oddmund could still see the blond knob of the spade, bobbing in slow pursuit.
Then Lars pulled out a flattened roll of parchment, the last item in the trunk; he unrolled it and held it wide between his arms. There were names and dates written by several different hands; the names were scattered around the branches of a crooked tree, which appeared to have grown too expansive for its gnarled, shallow roots. Here and there, some of the names were blotted out; others had been scratched away so that it looked as though a portion of the tree were being attacked by blight. Lars let one end go, and the scroll curled back around
itself by memory, but this he did not throw into the sea. Ingrid took her husband gently by the arm and whispered something to him, but he shook his head; he insisted that he would finish it. We are leaving this behind, he said. We will begin again. He pulled a small tin box from his coat pocket, removed a phosphorus match wrapped safely in a bit of brown paper, struck it against the strip of sandpaper on the box's lid, and touched the flame to the end of the scroll.
Lars held the burning scroll at arm's length. The wind fanned the flames, spread them along the length of the scroll and over Lars's fingertips, and he dropped the scroll into the trunk, where it lit the loose bed of straw. The fire spread quickly, consuming the scroll in a flash. The passengers who had previously lost interest in the trunk's worthless contents returned now, drawn by the expectation that something spectacular was about to happen. Clusters of burning straw took flight, whirling about their heads and up into the sails and the rigging. Oddmund and Birgit laughed and jumped up and down and swatted at the flying bits of fire. Then Oddmund looked up and saw something that didn't seem to fit with his father's plan; a clump of straw must have landed high up in the basket they called the crow's nest, because that was burning now, too, a bright orange ball at the top of the tallest mast. A sailor was climbing up the rigging, lugging a bucket of water, but soon one of the sails caught fire. Lars tried to close the lid of the trunk, but the fire lashed at his arms and lit up his face; burning straw was flying everywhere, dancing across the deck and down into the hold. The captain shouted something in words that were not in the American primer Lars had given his children. Flashes of light from the hatch told them that the fire had found its way below, carried into the cargo hold by the burning straw.
A loud rumbling shook the deck, and then a fiery blast threw Oddmund skyward. One moment he saw his father standing in front of him, feathers of glowing parchment from the burning scroll fluttering about his head, the teetering masts of Boston Harbor visible in the distance. In that same moment, he saw his sister Birgit twirling on her toes and laughing at the spiky flames leaping from the trunk and the sparks swarming over the deck like a frenzied host of fireflies. He was almost certain that he saw his mother raise her eyebrows and cover her mouth in astonishment, and in the very next moment he felt himself take flight, lifted by a hot cloud, chased by blinding white light. As he tumbled into the sky, Oddmund glimpsed the people below him, scurrying over the disintegrating deck of the Sovereign of the Seas like beetles on floating dung. He rose higher, propelled by the force of a second explosion, and he thought that he was going to fly straight up into heaven, that his mother and father and sister would soon be following him into the peaceful blue sky. Then there came a sickening, bottomless feeling in his stomach followed by nothing but cold, wet midnight.
Trusting chance and the tide to cast ashore treasures from Boston Harbor, the scavengers patrolling the wharves were the first to see the bright fist of light smack the flat sky. Boots in hands, pants rolled to knees, the fortune-seekers crouched at the water's edge, assumed Herculean poses beneath the piers, and speculated that the fiery plume on the horizon was the exhalation of some as yet undiscovered leviathan. A halo of gray seagulls fled the exploding light, and at its fringes the clumsy birds twirled and tumbled; moments later the scavengers realized that the birds were people and the leviathan an ordinary ship.
Those working the docks shrugged. Such things were not extraordinary, they said. Ships that looked too large to float, too small to brave the open sea, too heavy, too old, too rotten, too battered—sometimes such ships made the impossible journey across the Atlantic only to smash their hulls on the rocky coast of New England. Within sight of land, ships swollen with cargo and overladen with passengers—ships that had survived pounding waves, vicious storms, drunken captains—shuddered in the presence of the New World and sank beneath the cold waters of Massachusetts Bay, as if that dramatic finale were the reason for their voyage. The scavengers saw these things, walked the beaches looking for survivors, and fought one another over what the ocean no longer wanted.
Most had never seen a vessel explode the way the Sovereign of the Seas did, but they had seen others burst into flames. They had seen sea-soaked timbers catch fire under the ministrations of whale oil, watched sailcloth turn to ash, witnessed the chaos a spark could unleash in an airless hold packed with barrels of gunpowder or dusty bales of cotton. They knew that water, even an ocean of it, was no deterrent when a fire was determined to do its business. They had seen strange tragedies, and they had heard stranger tales of ghostly ships that disappeared and reappeared up and down the coast but never came to port.
Some who saw the end of the Sovereign of the Seas spoke of it as if they had been standing on the doomed ship's deck and could verify the cause. There was mention of an old cannon in the hold, forgotten from the last war with the British; there was talk of a lightning bolt thick as a man's arm splitting the vessel's hull; there was speculation that witchcraft was to blame. Some fishermen claimed to have seen smoke before the explosion, and they surmised that something volatile in the cargo hold must have come into contact with an open flame. There was little else to be said. The fishermen returned to their nets. The newspapers had plenty of other wrecks to report. The bankers who had invested in the ship's cargo wanted only to forget their loss. Scavengers found nothing salvageable among the wreckage that washed ashore later in the day. The only survivor was a ten-year-old Norwegian boy, whom they found sprawled unconscious on the sand amid charred bodies and blackened remnants of sails and masts and decking.
The scavengers carried Oddmund away before the tide could reclaim him. In his pockets they discovered nothing that might tell them who he was, nothing of any value except for a small, smooth stone shot through with a coppery vein. They left the worthless stone with him, thinking it might remind him of his home, his family, his name, in the event that the sea had stolen those memories along with the rest of the cargo.
Oddmund had no recollection of what happened to him once the fiery cloud let him drop. When he finally awoke, he expected things to be as they were before he left his home. He expected to see his mother leaning over him the way she did whenever he shivered with fever, expected to feel the thud of his father's heavy footsteps in the next room, to hear Birgit's chirping laughter, to smell a salty chowder of salmon or yellow peas bubbling in the pot. Instead, the first thing Oddmund saw upon opening his eyes was fire and blood. The blood fell in large red drops from grievous wounds, from a heart swollen and red, immersed in flames but unburned, somehow continuing to beat outside the chest of the soft-smiling man whose unblinking eyes held him in their gaze. The vision terrified him. He had seen the man before, he thought, though never with the burning heart. Oddmund squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of his mother's gentle voice. He tried to wish her face before him. He found the small stone someone had placed under his pillow, and he clutched it tightly in his little fist until his knuckles turned white and his hand felt as though it had become hard as the stone. He drifted away again, but every time he opened his eyes the man was still there; he seemed to be waiting for something, his disembodied heart still bleeding, still burning.
On the fourth day of his convalescence, Oddmund realized that he was looking at a large painting on the opposite wall, and then he remembered one of the man's many names. Oddmund's mother had taught him to memorize prayers to the solemn statue of the Savior in the small church near their home, but if the statue he prayed to had held a burning heart it had been hidden somewhere beneath the thick folds of its marble robe. Oddmund wanted to ask his mother if this was the same gentle God in the stories she read aloud, but he knew that she was not going to come to him. He understood that she and Birgit and his father had gone away. For a while, the painting made him hope that they might have come through the flames without being consumed, burning yet unburned like the miraculous heart. He hoped they might somehow have drifted back home unharmed, even if this meant that he would never see them again. But, no matter
how hard he wished it, he could not convince himself that it was so. The painting, he decided, was a cruel trick, the fanciful strokes of an artist's brush, and after his recent glimpse of heaven on the cloud of hot air Oddmund decided he would prefer to keep his eyes fixed solidly on the earth for as long as he walked upon it.
A woman in a black hood with a stiff white brim spoke to him in a kind voice, gave him gentle commands that he followed without really knowing what the words meant. The scavengers had left him on the steps of the Saint Vincent Female Orphan Asylum. The Catholic Daughters of Charity bandaged the burns on his arms and chest; they set his broken shin. They prayed for him. The nuns fed him salted cod, told him how fortunate he was. In simple English, they said that God had smiled on him. They reminded him that he should be thankful that he had arrived. Eventually, he understood their meaning: Just think how much worse it would be to find oneself orphaned in the Old World, with no hope of reaching the shores of the promised land.
The nuns could not refuse to help a child so terribly injured as Oddmund, but they dared not jeopardize the innocence of their girls by keeping a boy among them at the Purchase Street asylum. Once his fever passed and it was clear that he was beginning to mend, they sent him back out to sea. Oddmund could not communicate the panic he felt as they carried him, swathed in bandages, back to the docks, placed him on board another boat—a small one, with no sails—and began to take him away from the New World where he had only lately arrived. Such a small boat could not possibly survive the ocean, and Oddmund believed that they were only going to row him out to the wreckage, to return him to his family. The journey took an hour, by his reckoning. They docked at an island in Boston Harbor, and they delivered Oddmund to the Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys. He recovered from his injuries and, with the hundred or so other orphans and street Arabs and guttersnipes, he was given a blue uniform and taught how to be a farmer.
