Forever (14 page)
T
he captain’s name was James Thompson. Tall, with a gimpy right
leg. Face fleshy, his long nose veined from weather or whiskey or both, his mouth held in a tight slash. He had kind eyes, brown and liquid. The captain found time to explain his charts and instruments to Cormac, and how the prevailing Atlantic winds blew from west to east. All ships bound for America in these cold months were forced to sail south into warmer waters, where their sails could take the winds at an angle. Even this route had its perils. On the ninth day out, when they were hit by a roaring, terrifying two-day gale, Captain Thompson was in full command, sharing the deck with his sailors. When they ran into the region of windless calm called the Doldrums, he wore a worried look and tried to be just in doling out the shrinking rations. As the Irish began to die, he was dignified as he presided over their burials in the ocean sea.
The old died first, and then some taut, frail women, and at least six infants. Cormac soon stopped counting. He nursed Mr. Partridge through the delirium of fever, and each day took his uneaten food and a jug of water to the Africans on the bottom deck. They never said thanks. They never spoke at all. On one of those furtive trips, while a fiddle played from the deck above his head, he saw at last in the light of his lantern the face of the African princess, who, he later learned, was named Tomora. She had gleaming ebony skin, black wiry hair, high cheekbones, full lips. She glanced at him with contempt and then vanished behind a blanket that hung from the low ceiling like a wall.
That night, another African stepped forward: tall, bare-waisted, with powerful shoulders and a hard body. Cormac pushed a loaf of bread through the grillwork that formed their jail. The African took it, his eyes wary.
Cormac pointed at himself and said his true name:
Cormac
. Then:
Cor-mac
. Then more slowly.
Cor. Mac.
The African gazed at him for a long moment and then shifted his eyes to the bread, then back to Cormac. His eyes glittered with lantern light as he passed the bread behind him. The woman said something else. The African scrutinized Cormac’s face and eyes. Then he nodded.
“Cor-mac,” he said.
The young white man smiled and nodded yes.
The African pointed at his own chest.
“Kon-go,” he said.
“Hello, Kon-go.”
“Hel-lo, Cor-mac,” the African said without smiling.
Cormac tossed him a small salute and went back to the ladder leading to the sky.
O
ne night during the second smothering week of the calm, Cormac
awoke to a long, deep scream. Mr. Partridge tumbled in the dark to the floor as Cormac jerked open the door. There was the minister, Andrew Clifford, bent to the side in agony, and beyond him in the cabin was his wife. She was hanging from a beam, a scarf knotted tightly around her broken neck. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. Clifford sobbed and lifted her at the thighs, as if to ease her out of the noose, sobbing,
“God forgive me, God forgive me, oh my Martha. God forgive me.”
Mr. Blifil arrived, officious and annoyed, bringing a lantern, making marks in a book, and then, with Martha Clifford laid out upon a cot, her neck dark purple, the captain appeared in the cabin door. His face was drained, his eyes red from too many days struggling with the sea and the vanished wind. He gazed at Martha Clifford, shook his head sadly, whispered some condolence to her husband, and went back to commanding his immobilized ship.
Four hours later, in the first light of morning, Martha Clifford was sewn into a canvas shroud and buried at sea. At the edge of the small crowd, Mr. Clark whispered to Cormac about the minister’s wife. She and her husband had lost all four of their children during the famine in Armagh (or so the minister had told him). She was desolated by the loss, mute for weeks, and her husband believed that in America they could begin all over again, in a land blessed by God and free from famine, free from memory. She came with him reluctantly, wanting to remain in Ireland near the bodies of her children. Clifford forced her to leave. Each night on the
Fury,
in turbulent seas or prolonged calm, she called for her children, as if demanding the reunion of death. The captain, on his solitary midnight watches, heard her more clearly than Cormac or Mr. Partridge. She had chosen to hang herself while her husband was far forward, ministering to feverish sailors.
“It appears that if God wouldn’t give her what she wanted,” Mr. Partridge said, “that is, reunion with her children—then she’d take it herself. May God forgive her, poor injured soul.”
The Rev. Clifford didn’t preside at his wife’s watery burial. Captain Thompson assumed the duty. They placed the shroud on a greased plank, and the captain read from a Bible. Then the plank was lifted at one end and tipped over the side, and the packed shroud disappeared in the motionless sea. Clifford didn’t watch it go. He was staring at the silent sky.
T
he rations were shorter now. The captain (or the company that had
hired him) had laid in enough food and water for eight weeks at sea. But the voyage of the
Fury
had been slowed by the storm, pushed out of its path through the ocean and pushed back in time, and now in the Doldrums they didn’t know how long the voyage would last or how it would end. Not even the captain knew. They could be there forever. The pigs not washed overboard had now been eaten. The peas had run out. The chocolate was gone. The slabs of salt meat first became smaller and then vanished. Days passed. Nights passed. Early in the voyage, each meal was three potatoes and two sea biscuits. Now it was two potatoes and one sea biscuit. Water casks rattled emptily around the deck at night. Cormac almost never saw the Rev. Clifford, but from behind his door, his wounded voice kept up an endless punishing conversation with the invisible. Prayers and laments, the rhythms of a baffled love. For his wife. For God. Rejected by both.
Sometimes, to rid himself of Clifford’s unseen presence, Cormac read Swift or Pope in the half dark of the cabin floor. Searching for words he might whisper to the wind. Or the sea gods. Mr. Partridge slipped into and out of fever. He mumbled, or ranted, and Cormac thought that perhaps he’d gone mad. Or was always mad and had simply disguised his madness with a civilized mask. The older man mumbled:
Face it now, milord. Face your death. Face Africa.
During the days when they were becalmed, Cormac went around without jacket or shirt, following the example of the crew, with his money pouch tied across his groin. Each day, he sipped his rationed water and brought what he could to the Africans. Small portions. Not enough for anyone. Just what he could cadge, or hoard, or steal. On each visit, Kongo looked at him and nodded and spoke the young white man’s name. Cormac’s beard began to grow. Wispy and scraggly at first, like pubic hair, then more full, shaping a rich black mask. Three times a day, emigrants were brought on deck to bathe in sea-water. Most were naked men and small children, and their bones had begun to push forward, pressing from within against blotched, yellowing skin. The women were too shy to wash naked in front of strangers, and of course the women began to die more quickly. Sometimes in the evenings, the smothering silence was broken by a fiddler, Mr. Makem from Armagh, but slowly, after days and days, his music became more mournful. A lament. An acceptance of death. From belowdecks Cormac heard less weeping and fewer groans and almost no prayers.
The figurehead of the
Fury
was an angel, nameless, carved by some forgotten boatwright, and someone in the crew whispered that they needed that angel now, that they desperately needed a guardian angel, and Mr. Clark growled that what they needed was a fecking wind. One night, while Mr. Partridge dozed and mumbled and whispered in conversation with himself, Cormac walked out on deck. The air was thick and still, and the ship seemed to be anchored to the bottom. He stared down at the carved angel on the prow.
The head turned to look at him.
It was Tomora.
She smiled at him, her black skin glistening in the moonlight. He reached for her, wanting to touch her flesh, caress her breasts, to whisper to her in the hot sea air. But when he touched her ebony face, she turned back to pale painted wood.
Tomora.
Later, he saw her in many of his dozing hours. Above him. Below him. Beside him. Her dark body glistening with sweat, his vision made up of fragments actually glimpsed in the darkness of the slave deck and brought together by his own feverish longings. On his visits below, bringing scraps of bread and drops of water, Tomora looked at him from the darkness, flanked by the men, her eyes still refusing any expression of gratitude. In fever, she took him to her dark interior.
D
id he see the things he thought he saw in the days that followed?
Perhaps not. Perhaps they were only part of the fever that had touched all of them, made intense and vivid by the hard blue sheen of the cloudless sky. They seemed as real as the masts and the decks and the rigging. As Cormac gazed at the sea one still morning, a figure erupted, part woman, part fish, then submerged, then rose again, breaking from the surface. Triumphantly rising. Teasingly rising. Her breasts were pale sea blue. Her dark, wet, golden hair was streaming. Each leg was covered with silvery scales and ended with the twin tails of a fish. A mermaid. Or a dolphin. Una sirena. O una delfina. Cormac thought the vision was his alone, an invented creature leaping from cool water to calm his blistered mind. But there soon were other men at the rail, gazing slack-jawed at the sea or speaking softly, personally, to the sea creature and not to one another. Voices full of need. Wanting to believe. Until she burst again from the sea, rising high, sea-cold breasts glistening, a smile sea-chilly, hair wet and whipping the air. She turned like a marlin. Spread her scaled legs to allow one glimpse of the place between. Golden-haired. Salmon-colored. She smiled in a pitying way. And then dove hard into the sea, leaving behind only an immense stillness.
The men looked at one another, uneasy, afraid to be labeled fools or idiots. They knew they had seen her. Knew what had appeared before their eyes. But they said nothing. They were like witnesses to something wondrous or shameful, unable to admit what they had seen. In the cabin Cormac said nothing to Mr. Partridge, who was engulfed in his own visions.
More people died. They buried seven tiny children on one windless morning, tipping them into the sea as if they were bags of onions. They gave the sea one old man and four young women. Then they buried in the still water two men who were Cormac’s age. All emigrants. And then one of the crew was found facedown on deck, and they sent his body after the others to the bottom.
The next day, after assuring himself that Mr. Partridge still lived, after forcing pulpy potato past his cracked lips, Cormac descended to the slave deck. The stench from the emigrant deck was thicker now than air, touchable, chewable, a substance, some fine compost of sweat and shit and decaying flesh. He struggled to keep from vomiting, helped by the fact that he had so little in his stomach to vomit. Then he heard the voice of Kongo calling desperately in his language, his voice cutting through the fevered wailing and mumbling of the emigrants between them. Cor-mac. Cor-mac. When he saw Cormac, he gestured wildly, pointing at Tomora, who was lying on the planked floor against the bulkhead. Her body was covered to her chin with rough cloth. Her eyes were open. But she was not moving.
T
hey prepared to bury Tomora. The captain didn’t want the crew to
see her nakedness and ordered up some last piece of canvas to serve as a shroud. Cormac helped Kongo raise her body for the sail maker to make his coarse sheath. Her flesh was still warm. The captain said sadly that Kongo and three other Africans could accompany her body to the deck, to say their private farewells. Four men. No more. They protested in their own language. The captain held up four fingers and then made a slashing gesture that said:
No more
.
In the bright, sultry haze of the main deck, Kongo and the three others looked even angrier than they did in their dark cage on the bottom deck. The crew gazed silently at the Africans as they stretched their bony bodies for the first time in many weeks. But the white men didn’t come forward to join the ceremony. Cormac seethed with a mixture of rage and a jumbled emotion he could not name. Thinking: Tomora, you are so beautiful. Thinking: And now you’ll be dropped into the sea far from home on a voyage that you did not want to take. Thinking: A voyage forced upon you by men with swords or guns or whips or branding irons. Thinking: By men like the Earl of Warren. From a world that allowed one group of human beings to own another group of human beings.
When Kongo bent with the other Africans to lift the lumpy shroud, Cormac stepped forward and took a corner. Kongo threw him a suspicious look but didn’t shove him away. Together, four Africans and an Irishman, they carried Tomora’s shrouded body to the plank. They laid her flat. Her shrouded feet faced the immobile sea.
The captain, holding his Bible, uttered words in English, the same words they had heard uttered over other bodies, and then nodded to Kongo. The African began speaking in his
click-clock
ing language. Short bursts of words that snapped like whips. The other Africans bowed their heads. Kongo’s deep voice was grave and strong. He finished and nodded at the captain.
Finally the lumpy shroud was slipped over the side. They all stared at the motionless sea that had now swallowed Tomora, the princess from Africa. A full minute went by in silence. And then, a hundred yards away, something small and black burst from the sea. A bird. Fluttering its wings. And then rising into the sky, making a turn, and heading finally toward the west. A raven.
They all seemed to exhale at once.
A breeze stirred.
A sail flapped lazily. And then another. And then one sail made a sharp, cracking, explosive sound.
The captain spun on the deck, shouting orders, exuberant, released, alive, and the men began climbing into the rigging. The captain peered through his spyglass at the point where last he had seen the raven. They were under way. To America.
