A World Elsewhere (15 page)

“This is first class,” said Landish. “Steerage is worst class. And second class is in between. Enjoy first class while you can. They might put us in steerage once we get to where we’re going.”

Landish said the passengers in steerage slept below the waterline. At night, the skylights and hatches and other points of access to the walking decks were shut. There were no portholes because you couldn’t take the risk that they would give way in collisions or in storms.

He saw the look on Deacon’s face. “It won’t be steerage,” he said, “but it might be second class.”

“That’s better than the attic.”

Deacon asked Landish what you would see through an underwater porthole if they did have underwater portholes. Landish said that, in the daytime, especially if it was sunny, you’d see fish and long strands of seaweed floating by like bunting. The sun would shine through the water in shafts like it did through glass. In shallow water, you might see the ocean floor. In a storm, the sand on the ocean floor would be stirred up by the waves like the snow was by the wind. An underwater blizzard.

Deacon asked Landish what you would see at night through an underwater porthole. He said that if the lights were on, you would see your own reflection in the glass, just like they did now when they looked out through their own portholes. Deacon asked what the passengers in steerage would see if there were windows. He imagined: their noses pressed against the glass, hands flanking their faces as, in mimicry of their curiosity, an underwater-dwelling host of look-alikes peered in.

He looked at the boy who, judging by his expression, was imagining something that would keep him up all night. Faces still pressed against the outside glass after all the lights had been turned out and the unsuspecting passengers had gone to bed. The windowless, subsurface confinement of the passengers in steerage after dark, separated only by the hull from water they couldn’t see and would only feel and hear if the hull gave way.

The never-seen-by-human-eyes bottom of the mid-Atlantic had been the habitation of Deacon’s father for ninety days while the boy was in his mother’s womb and more than two thousand since he was born. His father borne about by the same storms that stirred up the sand like clouds of desert dust.

The Gulf was the space between two things. Neither here nor there. A great gap. In this case, the sea. In other cases, empty space. That which engulfs. To be engulfed was to be swallowed up.

“My father was engulfed.”

At first by snow. And then by darkness. By fear. By sleep, deep and warm and treacherous. And finally by water.

“Maybe,” Landish replied.

“Will the boat pass over where my father was engulfed?”

“No, it goes the other way. You know. Jonah was engulfed. It was dark inside the whale. The wolf engulfed Red Riding Hood. But both Jonah and the girl got out.”

Deacon had never seen a bathtub that wasn’t round or made of wood. This tub was like a bed with walls. It made a funny, tinny sound
when he struck it with his hand. “Porcelain,” Landish said. “Like the toilet and the sink.” Landish had to show him how they worked. Cold water came when you turned one tap, hot water when you turned the other. And when he pulled the chain, water rushed into the bowl as if the ship had sprung a leak. Deacon thought the bowl would overflow but smiled up at Landish when the water went back down.

His pillow was so soft and deep it closed around his head, enfolding it completely as a pan of dough would do. He had to exchange it for a cushion.

He had never slept in as cozy a bed as the ones in the cabin—or sat in as cozy a chair as the one that he needed Landish’s help to climb into. He had never seen a chandelier except from the street.

“What’s it like on a sealing ship?”

“You wouldn’t like the
Gilbert. You
wouldn’t want to cross the Gulf on her.”

“Why?”

“It’s a lot like the attic, but worse. These cups and plates and bowls are known as Chinaware. They made such things first in China. The ones we had on the
Gilbert
are known as Everyware.”

Landish told him that on this ship, the men in charge of engines had what were known as “engine ears,” which meant that they were deaf from the noise the engines made. Also there were pursers who made sure that no one’s purse was stolen. There were men called stewards who were in charge of serving stew. And other men called porters who were in charge of serving port. “I’ll give you my stew if you give me your port,” Landish said, but Deacon shook his head.

After they put your port in front of you, Landish told him, they performed what was called the “port bow,” and then you performed it and they went away. Landish demonstrated the port bow, one arm across his stomach. He had Deacon try it. “Lower,” Landish said. Deacon tried again. Landish told him they would practise every day until he got it right.

Landish told Deacon there was another bow that was performed on the observation decks at night. To signal to the other passengers that you had grown bored with looking at the stars, you performed what was known as the “star-bored bow,” then said good night and went downstairs. While doing or acknowledging the star-bored bow, you kept both arms at your sides and, your head upright, bent forward slightly from the waist. They practised the star-bored bow until Landish was satisfied that Deacon understood the subtle difference between the acknowledgement of the bow and the bow itself. The meaning of the former was: As I have yet to reach your degree of boredom with the stars, I will stay up top until I do, but do join me for a drink should we meet again downstairs before lights out.

And, Landish said, there were petty officers, short, unhelpful men who were in charge of petty passengers and their complaints. The chief petty officer, the least helpful and shortest of them all, dealt exclusively with the least gracious and shortest of the passengers.

“It might take you a while to find your sea legs,” Landish told him. “It means to learn how to walk straight even when the ship is going up and down or from side to side. I’ve got mine, but I don’t think I could keep you on my shoulders in bad weather. You never lose your sea legs once you find them.”

Sea legs. He looked at the boy’s legs. As thin at the thighs as in the calves. Two hollow reeds interrupted by two knobby knees. He watched as Deacon tried to find his sea legs. He wobbled and swayed. He took a couple of steps with one hand against the wall like some convalescent infant. He ran towards Landish as if Landish was at the bottom of a hill so steep that to walk down it was impossible. He took dead aim at Landish and dove face first into his arms.

There were two bedrooms in their cabin. Each room and each bed were big enough for both of them, so one bedroom went unused. It simply sat there as unchanging as a photograph from one day to the next.

Deacon thought a bathrobe was a kind of coat. The smallest was too big for him and the biggest one too small for Landish. Deacon wore his anyway. Sometimes it became entangled in his feet and he fell down. Or it trailed on the floor behind him like a bridal gown.

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.