Middle Passage (20 page)

I did not wish to think of Isadora. I rose, felt the sea fall, then my belly, and sat back down. “Have you no running fix on our position?”

“None. Could be near Martinique or São Miguel, for all the bloody charts tell me. We've strayed off course, left the sea whose ways I know, and come into a rogue sea I know not.”

“Forget the charts, then. The stars—”

“The heavens are all wrong. That's what baffles me. They've not been in the right place since that gale gave us a dusting. We should never have taken on Allmuseri. They're foul-weather Jacks. The world tilted because of it, or someone switched the sky on us. You tell
me
what happened. I'm a simple sailor, Rutherford. All I know is Castor and Pollux aren't where they should be for another thousand years, or maybe where they were when Copernicus was watching the sky.” He gave a sigh. “Maybe it's me . . .”

“Then we are lost?”

He cleared his throat, but nothing came out. Cringle pinched the bridge of his nose to relieve pressure on his eyes, hesitant to answer me now, and as he rested I remembered the tales spun by old tarpots barely able to hobble up and down the wharves in New Orleans, about cursed ships that sailed forever and were damned never to touch shore. All were created by some catastrophe, they said. After a captain poisoned his crew. Or a high-seas riot. Or when the mates slit a master's throat in his sleep. Sometimes she was seen off ports struck by plague. Had we become such a phantom ship? As one throws out a net, I pitched him a question, hoping to break his silence and bring something back:

“Why did you sign on?”

He started. “What?”

“Why did you sign aboard the
Republic?”

“It wasn't my decision.” Now he was rubbing his
forehead. “My father is a very influential man, as people remind me often—a father to be proud of, I suppose. When he was fifteen he came to America from a poor fishing village near Dorset, came in the belly of a steamer, like the blacks, with two shilling and a half crown in his pocket, and in twelve years he turned it into a fortune that'd buy his family's village twice over. And people love him, yes, they do, because he is charitable and helps anyone who started out with nothing, as he did. He holds contempt only for the privileged, but ironically that is precisely what his fortune has produced.” Cringle laughed brokenly, his pipebowl bobbing from his mouth like a buoy. “McGaffin was right. I don't belong here. Like my other appointments, this one was . . . arranged.”

“For what purpose?”

“Not mine, I assure you. If I understand his reasoning, it's because I've made a bad show of everything else. He's arranged many jobs for me, you know. I've been a bookkeeper for his company. Papa's heir secretly despised by the employees who smile because he's the boss's son, then whisper behind his back about how unfair 'tis he's standing in the way of someone who's been there forty years. That sort of thing—do you see?”

I didn't, but I didn't admit it.

“I
tried,
of course; I wanted to prove to him that I could make a go of things on shore, as he did, but men like him or Falcon have always made me feel contrary. Sooner or later I find myself disagreeing with them, or doing something to defy their smugness, or saying, 'No! Your way of doing things is not the
only
way.' Before this I was a clerk, a customs inspector, a higgler, an apprentice to a tailor, then a cabinetmaker, and twice engaged to women he thought
suitable for me and, well . . .” The mate smothered a belch. “None of them panned out. He was disappointed.
I
was disappointed.” He squinted at me. “D'you know what it's like having a father such as this?”

“Hardly.” I tried to laugh to lighten his spirits. “I don't even know who my father
is.
Mine was never there to expect anything of me, or to make me expect much from myself. I
have
no family traditions to maintain. In a way, I have no past, Peter. At least that's how I've often felt. When I look behind me, for my father, there is only emptiness. . . .”

“Then you're luckier—and freer—than you know. You can never make a man like
my
father accept you on your own terms. Nor can you argue other alternatives with him, because material success is a pretty tyrannical proof for one's point of view. Truth is what
works,
pragmatically, in the sphere of commerce. You can't surpass him, because he's done everything, been everywhere before you got there, knows everyone, judges everything in terms of profit and how wide an impression it makes in the world, and hasn't left you any room to
do
anything except join his legion of admirers. And, worst of all, you
must
admire such awesome success as his, even though he feels, of course, that your mother corrupted you too much with books and crafts when you were young—it's always the mother he blames, you know, for spoiling you with poetry, or . . .” He lost track of his thought and rubbed his bladelike nose. “I'm here, Rutherford, because if he can't have a son who's a captain of industry, like himself, or a forceful personality like Falcon—they were old friends—or his favorite aide in his company, one William Jenson by name, who is
really
his son in spirit, I believe, one of those orphans who fashioned himself by his own hand, as my father says he did, and don't even
ask
me to
tell you how it feels to see him grooming this lad, who looked at me with such self-satisfied smirks that I could have strangled him . . . if he can have none of these, then he wants, I suppose, a ship's captain. Should I fail at this, there's nothing else, because I shall
not
go crawling back to work in his company.”

“And you?” I asked. “What do you want?”

“Right now, I want to be left alone.” He laid his head on the table, cradling it in the crook of one arm. “All right? Just for a few moments before the first dogwatch begins . . .”

I urged Cringle to sleep and helped him to his hammock. Across his shoulders, neck, and backside there were boils and chancres, some hard, some softened to the point that pus drained from the sores. The smell of him was terrible. A cheesy odor, which spread thick and palpable on the air when I leaned closer to cover him with a stiff stretch of sailcloth. His gums were infected too, bleeding down his throat, breaking his sleep with a rattling cough, like maybe both his lungs were riddled with holes.

And how did your narrator fare? Little better than the ship's bravos, I confess. Whenever Baleka cried bitterly for her mother and no one could calm her, when Diamelo threatened to beat Squibb because the Falstaffian cook couldn't decipher orders he gave in Allmuseri, or when one of the Africans was too weak to work and fell behind, the first thing I was forced to do was forget my personal cares, my pains, and my hopes before repairing to the deckhouse where the sufferers were sprawled. I placed a hand on each of their foreheads and listened. Though tired and sleepless, I clowned and smiled for the children; I told American jokes that failed miserably in translation. I prayed, like my brother, that all would be well, though I knew the ship was straining at
every seam, making water, that beneath the thrashing waves there was only bottomless death, the extinction of personality, with not a sliver of land on the horizon, and perhaps all would
not
be well, as I told them until I worried the words into meaningless blather, perhaps only disaster lay ahead of us, but the “useful fiction” of this lie got the injured through the night and gave the children reason not to hurl themselves overboard before the first blush of whiskers had a chance to appear on their cheeks. If you had known me in Makanda or New Orleans, you would have known that I doubted whether I truly had anything of value to offer to others. Obviously, my master thought I did not. Once in Illinois when I felt jealous of Jackson's chumminess with him and wanted to get on his good side, I asked, “Sir, what do you think
I
can do for others?” Peering up from under his brow at me, wearing a pair of Ben Franklin wire-frame spectacles, he replied, “Yes, that
is
the question, Rutherford. What
can
you do?” That helped my morale not at all. It made me feel as if everything of value lay outside me. Beyond. It fueled my urge to steal things others were “experiencing.” Believe me, I was a parasite to the core. I poached watches from Chandler's bureau and biscuits from his kitchen; I pirated from Jackson's trousers the change he made selling vegetables from his own garden; I listened to everyone and took notes: I was open, like a hingeless door, to everything. And to comfort the weary on the
Republic
I peered deep into memory and called forth all that had ever given me solace, scraps and rags of language too, for in myself I found nothing I could rightly call Rutherford Calhoun, only pieces and fragments of all the people who had touched me, all the places I had seen, all the homes I had broken into. The “I” that I was, was a mosaic of many countries, a patchwork of
others and objects stretching backward to perhaps the beginning of time. What I felt, seeing this, was indebtedness. What I felt, plainly, was a transmission to those on deck of all I had pilfered, as though I was but a conduit or window through which my pillage and booty of “experience” passed. And momentarily the injured were calmed, not by the lie—they weren't naïve, you know—but by the urgent belief they heard in my voice, and soon enough I came to desperately believe in it myself, for them I believed we would reach home, and even I was more peaceful as I went wearily back to help Cringle at the helm.

Not so with Ngonyama.

“This evil is visited upon us,” he said testily, stepping over his injured tribesmen, giving them water, which we had to ration closely, “for the crewmen we killed.”

“Do you think Diamelo sees it that way?”

He shot me a stare so fierce, like sparks from a blacksmith's forge, that I had to look away. “Who else is there to blame? All well and good for
you
to blink at sin, Rutherford. You're a
Yankee”
. His wide lips curled a little in contempt. “None of us were brought up to
accept
failure, or laugh it off, as you do.” Crabby, he rubbed his chin, then said an English swear word I never dreamed he knew. “I shall never understand you,
Ndugu.
We were forced onto this ship. Why have
you
wandered so far from your home?”

He really meant all that. As will happen with a man of his beliefs, he saw the sickness upon us as a moral plague and held himself responsible for our suffering. The aftermath of the mutiny stopped his spirit cold. Riveted it. Nailed him fast. He had slipped into relativity. He could not move forward, and thus lost ground to Diamelo day by day. (But I must add he kept us alive by not telling Diamelo all he had
learned at the helm.) It all had to do with an old Allmuseri belief (hardly understood by one Westerner in a hundred) that each man outpictured his world from deep within his own heart. A fortnight ago he had thought
murder
and lo! the mutiny was manifest, as if a man's soul was an alchemical cauldron where material events were fashioned from the raw stuff of feelings and ideas. That meant an orthodox Allmuseri, as he was, had to watch himself twenty-five hours a day and police his heart. As within, so it was without. More specifically: What came
out
of us, not what went in, made us clean or unclean. Their notion of “experience,” I learned, held each man utterly responsible for his own happiness or sorrow, for the emptiness of his world or its abundance, even for his dreams and his entire way of seeing, so that an Allmuseri pauper might be rich if his heart was clear, and their kings impoverished if they harbored within themselves hunger, grievances, or hatred, as Ngonyama had done toward the crew, wishing misery and death upon them. All that, it seemed, had flown back upon him like spit hurled at an enemy against the wind. And now Ngonyama grieved less over what lay ahead of us than what lay in the immediate past, this rift, this vast rupture he had caused within himself by permitting the execution of so many.

Never a night passed but I entered the quiet, disheveled fo'c's'le—full of mildewed clothing and rusted weapons covered with fungi—and, standing at the room's center, imagined I heard those murdered tars: McGaffin's snarl; fetching music from Tommy's flute; the yammering of Fletcher and Meadows; and the nerve-jarring
Har! Har!
of forty pirates in a gin-duel. As I struggled to describe every detail of our passage in the captain's log, I longed for the crewmen lost to fill the ship's room again, for our lonely drifting to disappear,
and, as in a dream, delivering me back to Isadora's sitting room, where I would set my teacup clicking down on her candlestand, cross the carpeted floor on my knees, and bury my face in her skirts, begging her to take me in and forgive my idiot blathering about wanting excitement and saying all the beautiful things I'd meant to tell her to balance how I'd hurt her sometimes. Like a wife she would watch me closely to see my reactions to the portraits of women in popular magazines, or on the street, faintly jealous if I stared at them too long, but never showing it, wounded but too proud to let on that I had brought her pain, this woman who, I knew, had paid my bills back home. And it came to me, there in the darkened room, that perhaps Papa was right and there were only two kinds of people in the New World: debtors such as I had been all my days and those who, like Isadora, paid the rent for all the rest. But the dream never doorwayed into her rooms, and the furnishings of the fo'c's'le took on a grim finality or gave me such a feeling of there being nothing beyond these groaning timbers, this endless sea, that I wept shamelessly like a child.

“Ruth'ford,” said Baleka, catching me like this. “Can I get you anythin'?”