The Rope Eater Page 4

  “Which ones?”

  “Reinhold, Ash, and Pago for sure. Maybe Preston. They’ll only sail as far as they have to—soon as they get off the boat, they’re free, so mind your step.” He paused, puffing his pipe. “And whoever’s manning the boiler. He must have come with West. The captain’s a sailor—he wouldn’t use a boiler if he could help it.”

  “Who’s manning the boiler? You mean there’s someone else aboard?”

  “Of course there is,” said Creely irritably. “None of us work on it, do we? Someone’s down there making sure it’s ready to go when we need it.”

  “But we haven’t had to use it yet. Maybe Ash has just made it ready and we’ll be sent down when we get to the ice.”

  “Ash wouldn’t dirty his hands with it. Besides, I heard someone moving around down there when we were repacking the hold. Everyone else was on deck.”

  “So why haven’t we ever seen him? It must be awful to stay down there all the time.”

  “It’s unnatural is what it is. Make a man crazy to stay below by himself all this time.” He glanced into the bowl of his pipe, which had gone out. He grunted, waved it vaguely at me, and went below for more tobacco. I moved into the deckhouse and stared at the brass speaking tube next to the wheel, and then at the aft hatch. I had seen both of them every day since we sailed, but they had seemed inert, just a part of the floor. Now they seemed to hold a sinister ripeness. I moved up to the tube and thought about calling down, but Hume came scowling into the deckhouse and I moved back on deck.

  The doctor, West, and Griffin reappeared an hour later with a yelping, yowling sea of dogs. They dropped a plank and drove them up. The dogs flowed aboard, a torrent of scraggly fur, flickering teeth, and alien eyes. They enveloped the deck, swarmed around the mast, rooted in the piles of rope. They pissed everywhere, snarled and whined, rolled and roiled over one another; fights broke out and subsided, like waves breaking over rocks. They bumped and brushed my legs as I stood on deck, surging with savage energy, flashing a hundred sinister yellow eyes, and red tongues amid broken white teeth. My gorge began to rise as I felt them press in; I imagined them shifting their energies as a mass, bristling and swelling over me, the burning tear of their teeth in my flesh, my ineffectual efforts to rise against them, and the contentment at their full bellies and their swaggering ease.

  From among them Reinhold arose, one wave above the rest. He waded through them swinging a club viciously and they parted before him, howling with pain when he struck. They cowered away and gradually the dog sea subsided. The sickening crack of wood on bone faded to the thump of boot to ribs, and finally the dogs were quiet. As I moved among them cautiously, the metallic taste in my mouth and the sickening weakness of my legs lingered on. Once the clamor subsided, the captain, West, and Dr. Architeuthis came aboard.

  West and the doctor retreated quickly to their cabins. Griffin barked out the order to cast off. We moved to our places, scattering the dogs, and put out again to sea. There was little light in the harbor now except the flashing of the lighthouse on the headland.

  With our preparations largely complete, we had little to do besides sail the ship and clean up after the dogs. They filled us all with an urgent energy, now excited, now snappish. I found it hard to sleep that night, and the next. With the smell of meat seeping from beneath my bunk and the snuffling respiration of the dogs, I felt as if I were in the belly of a huge, rank beast.

  The land, when we sighted it, was still draped in snow. A few drab bushes poked through in places, and dark rocks were laid bare by the battering of waves. The first small floes drifted past us, dirty gray and deeply pitted. West showed himself on the deck more frequently now, though he did not speak to any of the crew. He followed the doctor to analyze the numbers brought in from the instruments and to scan the horizon with his telescope.

  The presence of ice meant a furious new round of measurements and experiments—hauling small blocks up onto the decks, launching fleets of tiny bottles and recording which floated and which sank and at what intervals, with Dr. Architeuthis shouting down the seconds from the deck and noting the results in his blue-bound log. I watched him hanging from the spars, scarf flying out behind, building numbers into currents and patterns, and patterns into paths. It seemed suddenly clear to me that fate is merely possible, that there is one destiny for each of us, but no certainty that we might reach it or be equal to it at the moment we happen to intersect it. But there are a few blazing men who find their destiny right before them—the world rippling back in waves as the days march into focus—and they find themselves equal to it in will and capability and strength. The doctor seemed to be one such man, ascending to a precipice with the world spread submissively below him. I was glad to be near to him, to tag along. As for me, it seemed that my own destiny remained distant—in some other time, or in a far-off city I would never have the fortune to visit—that my own potential would pass in some subsidiary function, some mere utility that I could make of what I would, and I felt lucky to be able to offer it up for Dr. Architeuthis.

  I was put on a shift with Preston, Reinhold, and Hume. Hume stayed at the helm mostly, steering and calling out only when he needed something. His constant presence in the deckhouse gave me no opportunity to find out more about our mysterious fireman. Preston kept to himself. Reinhold and I speculated about the disposal of his certain fortune; I resisted for a time, feeling that my rigidity somehow bolstered the doctor’s rigor and that I was helping by not revealing the secret nothing that I knew. But Reinhold’s easy cheer wore me down, and I joined him in thinking about what was to come. Never are we so inclined to sympathy, to indulgence, to confidences about the odd shapes of our desires as in the low hours before night turns. We become free to dream ourselves into shapes preposterous in the daylight and hidden in more rational hours even from ourselves.

  “Say, Kane,” began Reinhold on one such night as we sat draped with dogs on the foredeck, “I’m thinking about Nebraska when we get back.”

  “What about Nebraska?”

  “You know, a farm, settle in. Find a hearty farming wife to keep me topped up with pies and roasts. Raise rabbits, wheat maybe.”

  “Rabbits?”

  “Sure, can’t miss. Start out with a pair and you’d have more than you could sell in a year. Easier than driving cattle. Don’t need to worry about them stampeding.” He laughed.

  “You’d quit the sea?”

  “Damn the sea,” he said, “and damn the salt. I’d quit it today if I could. I will, once we find the mine.” He fell silent.

  “You scrape along for so many years,” he said, “you just get sick of it. Smell of salt makes me sick. And the damp. Just think of golden wheat and blue sky and the wind soothing you like a cool drink.

  “What about you, Kane? Got a sweetheart to keep in dresses? Or will you be buying up the railroad? Lots of money in the railroads, you know. Use money to make money—that’s how the lazy brains can get so fat. You just need enough to get you started.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do . . . travel around some, I guess.” I became embarrassed as I paused to think. My own dreams were meager and faint—of the world casting up mysteries and me conquering them; the speech that had sent me down to the war had moldered away and left me, and aside from the bright hope of the doctor’s scientific work, I had little. I could not see a way to explain what I felt only dimly myself—about how doing the work I was given might shape my own ambitions, and that I held no vision of my own for how my life might turn out. I fell silent.

  “Have you ever beaten a man to death with your hands?” asked Reinhold, in the same drifty, almost dreamy tone.

  “I—no—never . . .”

  “It’s the oddest feeling,” he continued. “At first you’re just struggling to survive, to keep off the panic. And then something changes—you get a surge of energy and you feel invulnerable, as if there’s nothing he can do to hurt you. You can see him weaken and fade until, pop—he’s just gone, and it�
��s an empty sack of meat under your hands. Takes a long time—longer than you’d think— but you don’t feel it. And there’s a lot of blood.”

  “When did—”

  “Oh, he was a monster,” said Reinhold, with a wave of his hand. “Deserved it, and worse. There’s a lot of men not even worth dirtying your shirt for.”

  He paused, then turned laughing to me.

  “Not to worry, Saint Brendan. I’m a mouse. That was a long time ago.”

  When our watch was over, I felt an air of menace around Reinhold. But he was relentlessly cheery, and easily the strongest man on the ship, with a ready hand for unpleasant work; it was hard not to be happy to see him.

  The glow of the sun lingered near the horizon until nearly midnight, but the hours were colder and the weather worse. A few nights, when it had begun to sleet, I swallowed my fear and burrowed down among the dogs for warmth. They seemed then not so fierce, but most companionable, happy for the added warmth and not bothered about the rest.

  On one of these nights, I had just gotten settled when Hume roused me with a kick to relash the boats. Reinhold moved up next to me in the drizzling darkness and leaned over the railing to watch the water slip past. He had a tiny black hat perched on the back of his head. He began a shanty under his breath and I joined in softly. We moved about the deck as we worked, and the shanty caught, like candles lit from candles, from man to man, each singing softly, a susurration that joined the lap of the waves and the whistle of the wind as we moved into the darkness.

  four

  Four nights later, under the waning moon, Hume sent Reinhold aloft to watch for icebergs. It was the first time I had been alone with Preston, and I felt uneasy. We stood, stiff and slightly formal; I longed to sink down amid the dogs. I watched his restless eyes moving over the water.

  “Say, Preston, so what do you think we’re about? A mine?”

  He turned to me, scanning my face, then shifted back to the water. “That’s what you think, is it, Kane?”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know. I wouldn’t raise any objections if it were.” I smiled lamely.

  “To fill your pockets?” he said, sneering slightly. “And then what? Stuff your gut with candy and wine? Smoke cigars?” He laughed bitterly.

  “Say now, Preston, there’s no cause for scorn. What’s wrong with a full belly? And full pockets, for that matter?”

  He replied sharply: “The others are the same—full pockets, full belly, full house—very admirable. You want to sit and rot out your years in an easy chair, peering over your swollen belly; wander, limping from gout, to your bath, then to your bed with its fancy bedclothes and your fat and stupid wife?”

  I was stung and did not reply; we sat in silence in the cold. I was relieved when Reinhold descended and Preston went aloft.

  The morning following our conversation I was woken up early by the sounds of shouts on the deck. I rolled from my bunk, pulled on my boots, and trailing sawdust, made my way to the deck. We were in a thick white fog and it chilled me. The sea appeared in black patches over the rail and was lost. The sailors were crowded around the foredeck winch. They were gathered around Adney, who knelt over a sodden trunk of the kind that most sailors have: long and low and black, designed to stow beneath a bunk or under a bar stool as the need be. On one end was neat lettering: SEAMAN BROMMER, H.M.S. UNDAUNTED. The chest was badly scraped and soggy, but sound.

  Adney looked at Griffin.

  “Yes, go on then.”

  Adney took a bar and twisted the hasp free from the case. Slowly he opened it. Inside was a neat pile of clothes, carefully folded and packed. Two shirts, a set of fraying woolens, a raincoat, wool socks, a set of polished boots, and the oddments of a sailor’s life—a razor, a mirror, a knife, a tiny book of Psalms, a steel flask. On the inside of the lid was the sepia photograph of a square-faced older couple, their faces set grimly against the onslaught of the photographer. They looked out at us suspiciously from the front of a small cottage, with a line of fencing in the blurred background. A pall fell over us as Adney removed the objects one by one. But for the name on the end, that was my plain and poor store of goods; I didn’t even have a photograph. A wave of sadness coursed through me at this mean memorial, and a shudder at the meagerness of my own. There was, in those neat folds, the tracery of a man’s care and effort, the work of a man’s life, now swallowed by the sea or, more likely, crushed in the ice in that same Undaunted.

  Adney repacked the trunk and we dispersed in silence. I returned to my bunk and stared sleepless at the bunk above. Trailing my hand over the side, I traced the edges of my chest—not even mine, but given to me by the captain—with its anonymous and threadbare clothes, inherited from strangers, its picture-less lid.

  I struggled to think of mines and gold, of my pockets bulging, my stomach bulging, of my boots polished enough to shine. I shuddered and drew myself deeper into my blankets, trying to work myself from melancholy to pity and from there into sleep at last, where I could forget my life of borrowed clothes. The work of the doctor lost some luster in the damp, the columns of numbers trailing off into nothing. The ship slid and slapped through the waves. Close to sleep, I listened to the tramp of feet on the deck and the muffled singing of Pago and Adney in the rigging. My heart thudded dully, keeping me from rest, refusing to release me or warm me, and so I huddled until Hunt called me to my meal and my watch.

  I pulled myself into the galley and sat opposite Reinhold and Creely. Reinhold was deep into his bowl, already eyeing mine as he gulped. Creely said nothing; Reinhold nodded and guzzled.

  On deck, the wind had risen and there was a perceptible swell. The gray of the morning had turned decidedly darker and the fog had thickened into a spitting rain.

  “Looks like a blow, boys,” said Adney cheerfully as he headed below. “Enjoy yourselves! And don’t call me when I’m sleeping.”

  We reported to the deckhouse and were waved off by the captain with barely a word. We moved onto the deck—Reinhold took the first watch aloft, and Creely and I relashed the stores. The dogs huddled glumly in the rain, not even bothering to try to extort something edible from us. My hands chilled rapidly from the spray and I had to stop frequently to warm them inside my coat. After we finished, I returned to the deckhouse to check in with the captain.

  “Looks like a bit of a blow, sir,” I said. “Do you think it’ll be bad?”

  The captain stood silent. I waited, and tried again, a little louder.

  “The wind’s picking up out there, sir. Shall we start reefing?”

  “Blow, blow, all right, look at the swell. This one’s been brewing for a while. Probably come all the way down off the pole.” He paused and strained into the deepening dusk, as if reaching out to the pole to see for himself.

  “Shall we start reefing then, sir?”

  “Reef them, all but the foresail, and keep that in tight.” He turned and shouted into the brass speaking tube that was mounted next to the wheel: “Keep her boiling for now, but low. Hopefully we won’t have to steam at all, but we’ll have to be ready if we do.”

  I looked at it for a moment, startled. Here was our man at the boilers, suddenly made real. The stack had been dormant for so long, and I so busy, that I had forgotten to figure out who he was.

  “And that, Kane, is quite enough!” Griffin was shouting at me and I started. I moved out quickly to the sails, but still puzzled over the engine and its mysterious operator. Creely and I reefed the sails and then he replaced Reinhold aloft.

  “Freezing up there,” said Reinhold. “It’ll be a nasty night. I don’t imagine Adney and them will be getting much rest. I just hope that this storm isn’t driving the ice down on us. I’d hate to hit an iceberg in this mess.” I nodded and peered over the rail.

  “Who’s running the engine?” I asked, pointing to the smoke dissipating into the flat gray sky.

  “I don’t know,” replied Reinhold. “The captain’s got someone below.”

  “Someone who has
never come up on deck?”

  “There’s a lot going on down there that we never see up on the deck, and none of it good. It’s probably some poor half-wit West dragged off the streets. Chained him to the boiler and gives him a candle every other day. That way West doesn’t share more than he has to. I’m sure he’d have monkeys sailing us if he could.”

  “We’re not exactly the royal marines, are we?”

  He looked at me sharply for a moment, then burst out laughing. “You know, I might rather have some monkeys than these stiffs,” he said.

  The Narthex rode the swells heavily, ducking under the lip of each wave and sending water cascading over the deck. Despite her bowl-like shape, she did not stay well up in the water, and seemed to be straining, though the sea was not yet very high. The swell was still long, with the waves only starting to steepen.

  The gray deepened to black and the waves rose. The rain began to fly directly in our faces, as if the ocean and sky were being compressed into a narrower and narrower corridor and the force of the storm were pushed horizontally at us. The rain was pelting us now and thunder was rolling in the distance.

  As the swell steepened and quickened, the wash over the deck became thicker. Each wave split into eddies that licked out into each corner of the deck before dissipating. With each wave, a bundle of dogs would be dislodged and sent skittering across the deck. Reinhold seemed very amused by the prospect of the storm, and not at all discomfited by the wet or cold. He stood in the middle of the deck and let himself tumble, childlike, with the dogs in the water. He delighted in the flickering lightning and roared with the roar of thunder.

  “He’s a nutter to be sure, that one,” shouted Creely in my ear. I nodded, grimacing. The ship had begun to lurch heavily as it swung down the face of the waves. It sped down and plowed into the bottom of the next, before bobbing resolutely to the surface and climbing up the face of it. It was sickening to stop so completely at the base of a wave and see it loom over us. I could feel each pausing before it began to crash; I felt sure we would swamp—the wave holding us just long enough to dump its full weight on us, or, pulling us upward steeply, upend us into the storm-tossed sea. I thought stupidly about the wave progressions, and wondered if the same patterning were true for storms, that they arrived in sequences of predictable variance, and that one in four might be twice as severe, one in 250, one in 5,000, tried to work out the oblique mathematics of catastrophe, and tried not to imagine where we might be in the sequence. I clung to the brass door handle of the deckhouse and tried not to think of icebergs.