The Rope Eater Read online

  “Who is West?” I asked.

  “Your boss,” replied Reinhold. “It’s his ship, his trip. Plenty of money, no matter how he came by it.”

  “What does that—”

  Pago cut me off sharply.

  “That’ll do,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that today and tomorrow are more than enough to preoccupy smart young men, and no need to dwell on yesterday.”

  “I was just—”

  “You were just nothing,” he said evenly. “Minding your own business is plenty.”

  The bark returned and landed at the dock. We roused ourselves. After a moment the head of the man from the post office appeared over the edge of the dock. He scrambled up and regarded us with that sharp gaze I had seen on the steps.

  “Right then, boys,” he said, “this is the last one. Let’s load up and be off. Tide’s already turned, so snap to it.”

  We formed a line and loaded the last set of boxes and bags. The ship, which looked strange from a distance, became increasingly bizarre as we approached. The wood seemed to grow darker, as if it swallowed the light; when we drew alongside, it sat lower and heavier in the water. The rigging was very simple, almost crude. Two sets of sails on two masts, with a scarcity of shrouds and stays to bind them; there was a short bowsprit with a thin jib attached. It looked like a child’s drawing of a boat writ large.

  The bow was dominated by a huge windlass wound round with a massive chain. The anchor that hung over the bow was not proportionately gigantic, but it had a single long, curved tine like a fishhook. In addition to two whaleboats of familiar size and proportion, I noticed two boats of odd but not inelegant design hanging from stern davits; they seemed very small, and were curved sharply upward at both ends, with high sides.

  The deck was covered with crates and piles of bags and stray pieces of machinery. Most of the boxes were stowed rapidly and the rest were lashed to the deck. As we worked, the man from the post office conferred quietly with another man.

  “Which one’s West?” I asked Reinhold.

  “Neither. The little man’s the captain, Captain Griffin, and the other’s Dr. Architeuthis. West’s already below. Keeps to himself mostly. You’ll know him when you see him.”

  The doctor was tall and blond; his face was chiseled and flawless, his eyes bright blue; his teeth flashed as he talked. His whole figure radiated energy as he stood over us. It seemed impossible not to admire him.

  After everything was stowed and lashed to the satisfaction of the captain, he gave the order for us to be under way. A second, smaller anchor was hauled up and we pulled out toward the bay.

  The boat moved clumsily as she came around, but quickened with the wind behind us, and we soon moved before a crisp breeze. Despite the odd boat and odd company, it was impossible not to feel my spirits lift as we pulled out into the bay. The sun was bright over high white clouds, and the air was clean and cold. The land began to fall away; the empty horizon beckoned.

  three

  Griffin summoned us to the front of the deckhouse as soon as we had cleared the bay. With no ceremony, he broke us into shifts and set us to work: Reinhold, the butcher, marled meat on the foredeck with Pago. They knelt amid a pile of raw beef; Reinhold hacked free great hunks that Pago salted and spiced, then coiled into a tight bundle and bound with rope. Both Reinhold and Pago were stripped to the waist, despite the chill breeze, and they were drenched with beef juice, both of them massive and powerful with broad shoulders and thick necks. Pago was smaller than Reinhold, but filled with corded muscles, his shoulders thinning to slim hips; he was Portuguese, with ink black hair and coffee-colored skin with a tinge of copper in it. They looked like golems, lumbering monsters formed from the flesh they cut and bound. Reinhold’s huge hands tore effortlessly through the meat, and he kept up a stream of bawdy shanties as he worked. His voice boomed over the deck, infusing all of us with his easy, crude, good cheer.

  Over them flitted Adney, disappearing into the rigging with the bound meat to hang for curing in the sail north. He was the youngest after me, fine boned and fair, his eyes always flickering happily. He had come from a good family and was the only one of us who had gone to college.

  Hume, the mate, and Creely were set the task of cataloguing the stores, calculating the needs of the crew, and repacking the hold accordingly. Hume was a vile little toad of a man—small eyed with pinched features that gathered around thin, pursed lips, his cap wedged tightly onto his bald head. Even his pleasures had the stench of smallness to them. He preferred to work with Creely because he knew he could safely bully the older man.

  Creely had white hair and a straggly white beard that framed a face lined by the accumulation of frustration and doubt—the product of a lifetime of work that had brought neither wealth nor wisdom nor peace. His chest and arms were covered by the oxidized copper green of mariner’s tattoos that the sag of skin had left vague and illegible. He was still strong under that sagging skin, his muscles knotty from years of rough work. He was a man who had worked all his life, not because he loved it, as some men do, nor because he was driven to it by that relentless energy that possesses some men, but because he could not find the means of avoiding it.

  Behind the deckhouse was the carpenter’s shop. The carpenter, Ash, was assisted by Preston, and they made a good pair. Both were silent, aloof men, so the only sound that emerged from that cramped shop was the chuff of the saw and the crump of hammers. Ash was a tall, slope-shouldered man, deep red from the sun, with a bland, cunning face. He found that Preston worked quietly and well, and that suited him. He swiftly disregarded the rest of us, and did not indulge us with politeness or respect. He did his work, and he expected to be disappointed with ours.

  He treated Preston with indifference rather than respect, but Preston raised no objection. In fact, Preston objected to little except gregariousness. He was slight and milk pale, with deep-set eyes edged in red. His hair was black and hung in loose clumps over his forehead. He smiled little, spoke little, demanded nothing, and gave nothing in return except what was demanded from him. He was the only one of all of us who did not speculate about our fortunes.

  Each of us prodded and pried in our small ways, gathered in our clues, measured them against our private hopes. All open facts were dissected, arranged, examined, torn down, and rearranged endlessly. One group, headed by Pago, held fast to the well of whales. Adney held to a gold mine, and I was inclined to believe him. With each retelling, certain ideas carried through and others were lost; ideas fragmented and facts became distorted and open to interpretation; each teller added weight to his particular fancies and so obscured what few facts we had; desire-bred and fancy-fed, great shapes rose over us, at first airy, then suddenly palpable, possible. Every meal, every watch was filled with dreamt shapes, every sleep deferred for the hushed sharing of schemes.

  Preston would watch us from his bunk—not interested but not wholly dismissive either—brooding, silent, his eyes lurking and darting like small fish. But for their activity, he might have joined that legion of faceless men that crowd our acquaintance unmemorably.

  I was a monkey boy—doing whatever mindless work I could be trusted with; I trimmed sails, adjusted rigging, making whatever of the thousand changes the captain felt would help us to move along, and at the same time received my first instructions in the operating of the ship.

  The captain was, above all, a man of process. There were precise steps to be followed in the accomplishment of any task. To skip a step, or to perform it out of its proper order, was to fail, and what’s more, to be directly insubordinate to him. He would lean out of the deckhouse, scowling and shouting, until he could no longer contain himself and had to charge out to be sure that something was being done correctly. Any idle moment was instantly filled with deck cleaning or rope coiling. His eye saw chaos in the least disorder, and sloth in every slowing. Despite our regular work and excellent weather, he seemed ill at ease and irascibl
e.

  Much of his wrath fell, appropriately, on my shoulders. I spent most of the first week retying knots and readjusting rigs. I jumped regularly at the sound of his voice and immediately began to redo whatever it was I was doing. Gradually I learned to tie my knots and run my rigs even, to reef the sails in the wind and coil the ropes. The only area I did not enter was the aft cabins, where the officers and the doctor lived. None of the men went below there except Hunt, to deliver meals. None of us were called to work the boiler, and the smokestack remained dormant as we sailed north.

  Adney remained aloft virtually all the time—ferrying meat, mending stays and sails, and helping to adjust the lines. He moved fearlessly, singing gaily as he worked, and told an endless stream of jokes and stories whenever anyone was in earshot.

  Hunt, the cook, worked below on the stores; he was a small, plump, worried man who appeared not to enjoy the company of sailors. Reinhold would not let a meal pass without bellowing, “Hunt the cook! Roast him over a fire! This meal’s not fit for pigs to eat!” He’d roar as Hunt reddened and scurried back to the galley.

  The first week, we had strong, gusty winds and a few scudding clouds in a swelling springtime sea. We passed from the bay and the traffic of fishermen and traders to the roll of the open ocean.

  As we cleared the coast, my duties shifted. I became the doctor’s assistant, helping him to record data from his many instruments and to execute his experiments. My first task involved measuring and recording wave height and frequency using a set of marks built into the hull of the Narthex, and deducting from them a set of variables for our own speed, the wind speed and direction. After I had been faithfully recording for a week, the doctor explained what he was after:

  “The size of the waves is driven by so many variables that we cannot hope to identify them all: the depth and shape of the bottom, wind, distant storms and earthquakes, and their echoes across the open ocean and around intervening landmasses, and so forth. And yet, by getting information about the base patterns of waves themselves—for they obey common physical laws—it is possible to identify anomalies that may be helpful to us. For example, in a perfect, mathematical world, waves will naturally combine to form larger waves in predictable ways: one in four will be twice the size of the base wave; one in seven, three times; one in two hundred and fifty, four times, and so on. This is why there are single huge waves on calm seas—rogue waves—simply the accumulated energy of many small waves in the correct progression. So we gather the data and map it against our models, and perhaps we will find interesting deviations. It is our baseline that you are establishing.”

  This was both fascinating and terrifying information. I tried to track the progressions in my head, and kept my eyes out for huge waves rising up from the calm seas.

  In addition to the wave work, I helped him rig all manner of spinning gauges and tubes of colored oil, governors, scales, and valves. I scurried to check them in regular rounds so that the doctor could add them to his book. Several times a day, he brought out elaborate instruments from belowdecks, long strings of silver balloons filled with different gadgets that he trailed up behind us like kites, or nets of vials that he lowered into the sea at precise intervals, shouting to me when it was time to retrieve them. Regardless of what numbers I reported, he nodded, recorded them, snapped his book shut, and sped off again. His intensity and rigor drew me, and I felt proud to be the one to support him, believing that the success of our trip depended on the accuracy of those endless strings of numbers. I volunteered whenever I could to take on extra duties—staying up through the night to monitor the nets, or rerigging an anemometer farther out on a spar to get more accurate measures of the wind. He regarded me with an amused suspicion, and though he did not reveal more about his purposes nor allow me into his laboratory, he was pleased that I had taken such an interest.

  The captain took pains to steer us away from other ships. When we did pass close by, he dismissed them with a brusque wave, or if imposed upon by an insistent captain, he offered a few curt words of the barest civility. We outpaced the spring as we sailed, awakening to colder mornings and the sparkle of frost in the rigging.

  As we approached Newfoundland, we were summoned to the deck by the captain. We gathered expectantly, our eagerness spilling over into scuffling and nervous laughter. I shivered in the frosty air while Griffin eyed us imperiously.

  “Right,” he said, “we’ll be landing at St. John’s to take on dogs and a final load of supplies. Mr. West, Dr. Architeuthis, and myself will go ashore. For the rest, you’ll stow the meat and load the crates. You will wait aboard for our return. In the meantime, no idle chatter and no foot ashore. We’ll not be long.”

  Adney, from a perch in the rigging, burst out: “And then, sir?” We all waited.

  Griffin glared at us.

  “You’ll know what you need and when. You have your orders.” He turned and moved to the door of the deckhouse. “We are headed north and, for the execution of that end, have acquired clothing for those that lack.” He pointed to a pile of sacks by the deckhouse. “Hume will distribute it once the meat has been stowed. That is all.” We dispersed quickly, a little disappointed. Still, we had some new information: dogs, which meant we were headed far to the north, and overland. For me, this all but confirmed our goal: it must be a mine.

  We cut down the meat from the rigging and were forced to stow it anywhere we could find belowdecks—under our bunks, between the bulkheads, into every open crack and crevice we could find. Hume made interminable rounds of inspections and then finally begrudged us the sacks of clothing.

  Inside were all manner of ragged coats and sweaters, woolen underwear, pants, socks, odd hats, and unmatched gloves of all descriptions. Mine fit, mostly, but some, Reinhold in particular, were not so lucky. He grumbled as he squeezed into a jacket, then laughed heartily as he split the back open. Hume shot him a look, and challenged the rest of us to mock our new clothes. I got woolens, a hat and peacoat, a set of thick pants, and a huge sweater. My prize was a set of lined boots—scuffed and scarred, but still sound. They were several sizes too big, and I had to stuff the liners with sawdust to get them to fit snugly. It did not occur to me to find it odd that none of the crew except Adney had proper clothes of their own.

  Our ship, clumsy and sluggish as she had been in the swells, was snug and stout, and we were bundled in our mismatched warm clothing. We felt ourselves fired with the secrecy of our mission; there was a fierce playfulness in our work, a brimming over of our energies. Each of us was eager to grapple with whatever the ice brought, each of us eager to measure himself against it, each hungry for his dream-rich rewards.

  We landed at St. John’s after a gray and drizzly day. The town looked as if it were huddling on the shore for warmth. The last of the fishing boats had come in and the docks were covered with the silver gleam of cod. Above the docks, tiny flickers flashed from tiny windows, and the smoke of chimneys rose weakly into the gray sky. We sailed to the south end of the harbor, away from the fishing piers. The dock looked deserted as we approached; we spoke in furtive whispers. Even Griffin held his voice low. On the dock, dark shapes coalesced and came forward to take our lines. Faceless and silent, they moored us and raised a gangplank. As we landed, the doctor and Mr. West emerged from the deckhouse.

  West was a broad, not immensely fat man, round at all the edges as if he were a heap of melting pats of butter. His face was mounted on a foundation of chins that drooped away in all directions, lapping over his collar in the back as well as in front. The face itself was small and shrewd; he had full lips that he held closed beneath a bulbous nose. He paused as he emerged from the deckhouse to survey us for the first time. His eyes, languid behind small spectacles, looked on us as if we were tools that he was appraising for use in some repellent duty. He wore a dark jacket and suit, finely made but not ostentatious. His gloves were lined but not trimmed, utilitarian; he held his arms stiffly at his side, fists clenched. West, the doctor, and Griffin descend
ed; the gangplank was pulled away; they disappeared.

  As we waited by the docks, I sat with Creely, watching the last of the fishermen unload in the dusk, their nets slapping onto the decks.

  “Fishing’s no work for a man,” he said softly.

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean it grinds you down—good on the good days, when the sun is shining and the fish are running, but the rest is a trial. Freezing cold days, nothing in the nets, or sharks tearing them up. You got to go out every day, and every day has got to be good for you to get ahead. But they’re not all good, are they?” He smiled ruefully.

  “That’s what you did? Fished?”

  “Fished, traded, whaled. Broken my back one way and another.”

  “How’d you sign up for this?”

  He eyed me for a moment through the smoke of his pipe, then back at the deserted docks.

  “I’ve been working for the captain right along now. I was working a slaver before the war, and they mutinied off of Haiti. Cut up most of us and left the others in a lifeboat in the Sargasso with nothing. Turned the ship back for Africa. I was the last, when the captain picked me up. He’s a good man.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. The wind dropped to nothing.

  “And the captain’s been working for West?”

  He snorted, then sighed.

  “Captain got himself stuck. We lost a ship—could’ve happened to anyone—and he couldn’t get another commission. We had quite a dry spell and the captain couldn’t seem to pull out of it. Some men just get the stink on them and nobody wants to risk a boat in their hands. He tried a bit of gambling to raise a stake— imagine the captain trying to do that!—just for his wife and children, who were coming into some trouble. Lost to a man who owed West, and here we are.”

  “You and the others were a part of his crew?”

  “I was,” said Creely proudly. “The other men I don’t know. I heard some of them were in prison. West’s brother is a warden. Set up some tests for the men, and those that won got free to come with us.”