Fishboy Page 11

  The cook paused in his story again as men do when they are recounting how close a life was to becoming lost, and he paused the proper length of time owed to him in his storytelling since the life nearly lost had been his own.

  The cook rolled another cigarette and continued his story.

  We met great floes of ice entering the northern latitudes and posted two lookouts in the bowsprits with lanterns at night, our sails reefed. We were able to sail slowly into a port that was within several days’ journey of my home village. I intended to visit my parents after we had unloaded our miserable cargo and had been paid.

  I did not recognize the old port I had shipped out of as a boy. There were tall buildings in the city, and there were warehouses and landings on the opposite shore of the river where once there had been just forest. A harbor clerk was rowed out to us and we were taxed. It took two days for a slip to become open for us. When I was finally ashore, the streets smelled of exhaust and manure and hot grease.

  My captain was less suspicious of me when we were being paid although he gave me a short share. The black princess had already been put ashore in a trunk. After I was paid I tried to go back aboard to reclaim my sextant but a sentry from the shipping company with a musket held me off at the gangway.

  My earnings would have lasted little longer than a week in the city, so I planned to return home as soon as I could. I took a cheap room near the wharves to rest before beginning my walk home the next day. The cheapest sleeping pit I could find was in the back of a warehouse near the slave quarter. I was sick ashore, still pitching with the roll of the ocean. I think I had a fever. I could not erase the image of the black princess from my mind. There was no heat in the sleeping pit, and I found myself wandering the slave quarter. I went into an auction house where it was warm just as the bidding began.

  I bought a seat in the cheapest section of the house, in the third tier where sailors and peasants and pimps sat, men hoping to buy a field hand or a whore or an apprentice from the affordable sick and diseased lots of slaves paraded through the platforms below us. It was in the third tier that I saw an old mate of mine bidding on a cabin boy for his captain. It was in the third tier that I saw my brother Brune.

  I leaned back on the bench before he could see me. I wanted to look at him, the butcher’s son from my mother. My brother, his armless shirtsleeves pinned to his breast so like wings that in my feverish thoughts I expected talons at his feet. His face was red from years at sea and his scalp was sun-spotted yellow. His scurvy mouth was empty of teeth, and he was howling, keeping the other bidders a width away on the bench. I saw that he was being watched from the aisle by a large purser’s bailiff.

  When my brother caught me looking at him he raged at me. Brother! Brother! You bastard! he said until a large part of the third tier looked at me so that I had to go over to my brother to quiet him. Look what you did to me! he said, spitting froth. You left me, and now look!

  I could not deny what he said. His mates aboard the wreckage had refused to set his broken arms and they had become gangrenous, and had been amputated by the surgeon on the frigate that had rescued them from the water.

  You owe me! shouted my brother into my face.

  Yes, yes, quiet, I told him. The bidding on the auction floor was continuing.

  I recognized a face or two in the first lot to be auctioned off, the lot being the remnants of a mutinous crew that had been in prison so long that the lamplight was too much for their eyes, their skin was broken and yellow, and their legs were rat-bitten. An officer from the admiralty court stepped up and presented the auctioneer with a writ. The men were taken away to be formally recon-scripted into the navy and then hung.

  The second lot were gangs of the black captives we had brought and the bidding from the pit was busy. Often, agents from trading companies bought entire lots of men to send across another ocean. After the lots of gangs were sold, the pit emptied except for men smoking small cigars and traders making out their checks and adding figures on ledgers they balanced on their knees.

  Now the auctioneers brought out the women who would be sold as domestics and whores and wives, and the men below us in the second tier shouted and the auctioneer pounded the table with his gavel. My brother began to scream and froth at the mouth again. He was so loud that I struck him and immediately felt bad for having struck an armless man until some men seated on the benches in front of us turned around and encouraged me to strike him again.

  As the men in the second tier stood to bid I began to recognize some of them as being from my village, and I realized that some of the young men I had known years before had become elders themselves. I wanted to call out to them but I was afraid I would be thought to be making a bid, so I kept my seat.

  I felt ill again. My head burned with fever and the room pitched. I rested my head on my knees. I saw that my sea boots had split at the heels, the first time they had been dry in over a year. I looked over at my brother’s clumsily shod shoes. They were neatly laced and tied, and I wondered who had tied them. I looked to his shirtsleeves and wondered who had pinned them to his breast. My brother was beginning to shout again. The auctioneers had finished with a group of indentured servants who had run off, and were bringing out another lot of women.

  When they brought out the Negress princess the men around me were on their feet at the sight of her. The sight of her even near death made me want to speak words I could not think of. My brother began to rant, but this time only one head from the second tier turned to look at my brother, and I saw that it was our father, our mother’s husband. After sixteen years, my father’s look to me had only one meaning, and that was to strike my brother if he became a bother.

  My former captain, the slaver, stood in the wings and shook his head at the low bids being offered for the princess. Had the black gentleman trader refused delivery because of her apparent illness? The stiffness of her new modern dress seemed to be all that was holding her up. Her beautiful tar skin looked dusted with pumice, and the bidding fell off further when the rumor swept the tiers that she was dying. The captain’s face in the wings was set on a resignation of loss.

  Suddenly my father was standing before me demanding my wages. I gave him a few coins. I felt feverish. My father opened my brother’s pockets and took his paper money. I must have the Negress, my father said. He stood in front of me. Your mother is dead, he said. Give me your money.

  The auction house rolled and pitched and then I felt as if the whole building had stem-struck an iceberg and reeled shuddering from the impact.

  The cook paused to pick his nose. On the fingertip he held close to the lantern I could see what looked like a wing from an insect.

  The next thing I remember, resumed the cook, I was riding in the back of my father’s cart laid alongside the unconscious Negress. For several miles out of the city I saw that the land had been cut over and was empty except for washouts and stumps. A few tall firs stood around a stone cottage here and there but the great woods I remembered as a boy had been cut down and hauled away. Ship’s timbers, for the war, was my father’s only explanation on the long road home, my armless brother sitting beside my father on the seat of the cart, turning around to grin and stare at me and my father’s new bride.

  The first stand of young firs I saw were the ones being bent into a lodge by the elders of my home village. My home village was in ruins, sacked and burned during the war. The elders that were left were digging with all their strength into the hard black mud. It seemed early for Black Night. The ground was still mostly frozen, only a little steam was escaping. Good, good, said the men when they saw my father’s cart draw into the path. They came up to us and helped my father pull his bride off the cart. They played with her fingers and rubbed her hair. They helped my father home and left me to finish digging their trenches in the cool mud. The war had taken the young people from our village and the elders were impatient to be revitalized.

  My brother and I could not take part in Black Night becau
se we had no wives. The elders of the village came down by torchlight to take their mudbaths before entering the fir tree lodge. Our father brought the princess, his bride. She was wrapped in a dark red curtain I remembered used to hang in the front parlor of my mother’s house. The black princess’s fingers were curled at her throat and her eyes were closed as our father rolled her to the mud pit on a handcart.

  In the light of the torches I helped the elders of my village lay in their trenches. I filled in the mud over their bodies with the shovel and smoothed the breathing spaces around their faces. Their bodies were very old. I could not bear to look at some of them.

  After I was done, I was sick with fever and exhaustion. I felt the earth shift beneath my feet. I crawled into the lodge with the smoky fire and the soft sweet floor and fell asleep.

  I woke up before dawn. I could hear scraping and digging in the mud, and the first thing I thought of was wolves. There were no more wolves. They had been killed and their dens broken open by timber cutters and soldiers.

  The mist was light, and in the light I could see my brother. He was kicking the mud away from our father’s new wife.

  I must have her, my brother said. Help me. He could not stand in the coarse mud on one foot and dig with the other. I could see he had already lost a shoe in the mire.

  Help me! my brother said to me. You owe me! he said.

  Stop him! said my father, waking from his sleep. My father’s face opened like a white flower I had seen bloom once on the black slope of a volcanic island. On the island it had just rained for the first time after an eruption, and white flowers with pretty red centers bloomed before my eyes.

  Stop him! said my father.

  Help me! said my brother.

  My father’s shouts were waking the other elders from the village, but they did not feel revitalized. They had lain in the pit too soon in the season and they could not lift themselves up from the cool mud that had hardened in the night.

  Help me, stop him, help me, stop him.

  I remembered standing on the slope of that volcanic island, in just a few wisps of escaping steam, and I remembered watching the white blooms with the red faces the rain had opened. The rain had left sweet sheets of clouds like morning mists that rose up to the rim of the smoking volcano. I felt the heat of the earth through my boots, I felt the earth shift itself over a hot spot sprung up from its core. I watched the white petals of the beautiful flowers bloom and then fade quickly to brown in the heat, their pods of seeds bursting and spilling down the mountainside and into the cracks of the rocks. I smelled nectar and I smelled sulphur. I heard the mountain rumble. I heard my father call my name.

  I opened my eyes and saw my brother crush the white bloom of our father’s face into the mud. I watched my brother stepstone the white blooming faces of our elders, each time letting his weight ease the face deep into the mire. There’s a little nibble from the mailman! said my brother and he drew out a bloody heel. He stepped his way around our blooming faces until the mountainside was quiet, its flowers wilted brown, the flowers’ seed scattered.

  Where is she? my brother demanded of me, slopping around in his muddy work. Where is the Negress? he said.

  My brother had churned the black mire with his barefoot and one-shoe’d trompings so that it would have been impossible to find where the Negress was buried, the way her face blended in the mud.

  Help me! my brother pleaded. You owe me! he said, and I finally said All right, here is your help, and I threw the shovel into the mud beside him. And that is how I wanted to leave my brother, my brother pleading and crying as I began to walk the road back to the port city. I would have left him like that, crying and yet alive, when just as I climbed from the edge of the pit I heard the Negress cough, and my brother heard her cough, and by her cough he found her and began digging the dirt and mud away from her with his foot and clumsy shoe in a way that made me think of a hungry animal scratching at a buried scent of something dead.

  I don’t know if it was that the Negress was young or that we had buried her deeper in the mud than the rest, but sometime during the night her fever had broken, and as we uncovered her nakedness, her eyes opened and were bright and searching, and it was clear that she feared my brother and me as we lifted her from the earth.

  Do me, do me! said my brother and I knew what he meant, he meant it in the way he wanted me to unbuckle his pants like my father unbuckled his pants for him to piss when my brother said Do me! on our journey home. All right, I’ll do you, I said to my brother, and I swung the shovel so that when it struck my brother’s head I felt the force of the blow resonate through the handle I held, as if I had struck a great dull chime.

  It took several blows to my brother’s head until he lay still in the mud. The last of the blows were not so musical. They rang hollow and fìat.

  The hole I dug in the black mud to bury my brother was so deep that at its very bottom hot water began to seep into it like the ocean will seep into holes dug along the seashore. The hole I dug for my brother was steaming when I pushed his body in and shoveled the mud. This was not how I wanted to leave my brother, but it is how I left him, I left him and took the black princess away with me in my father’s wagon.

  We stopped at a roadhouse and the Negress ate everything the innkeeper’s wife put in a bowl before her. Her eyes were less frightened-looking and the way they shone at me I imagined things I would say to her if I could speak her language. She did not like for me to be out of her sight for even a moment, and seemed intent to sleep with me, and that night in her native way she was amorous, and I began to realize that spending the night in the black mud had revitalized her, that being buried in the mud had brought her back from death, and as I fell asleep in the Negress’s arms I had a dream in which I realized my grave mistake.

  The dream was so vivid I roused the innkeeper and paid our bill and bought a fresh horse for the wagon. Before light we were moving again, the dream so sharp that with every image of it that I remembered, I whipped the horse harder.

  In my dream I walked back to my home village, back to the young fir lodge and the Black Night place in the ground. The heat in the earth had pushed the elders’ brown wilted faces to the surface of the mire here and there and that did not surprise me and it did not frighten me. What frightened me, the part of the dream that has kept me moving through my life, was how true and real the next thing I saw was, and the next thing I saw was the open eruption in the middle of the mud, the place where I had buried my brother, a place freshly kicked open from within, the fresh prints of a revitalized bare foot and a clumsily shod shoe leading to the road from which we had escaped.

  The lantern on the galley table began to sputter staccato light on me and the cook and the cook turned the wick down so that the only illumination was the dull boiling flames beneath the fish stew pot. I had lied to the cook when I said there was a rubber-armed man down in the engine room but now that my words were out in the world it almost made it seem real that maybe someone armless was hiding beyond the engine room door. I was frightened by the story the cook was telling and I was tired, too, tired in the way that what he was saying set dream pictures going off in my head, especially since the galley was almost completely darkened.

  The princess and I fled the country, said the cook. For a long time I could not explain to her what we were fleeing from. I could not explain how sometimes there is certainty in dreams. We never actually saw my brother but I could feel when he was close. For several years we avoided port cities where I was certain my brother would seek us.

  We would settle into a place, my princess taking in laundry and me learning to cook, and then I would hear about a man with wooden arms, or plaster arms, or ceramic arms with metal snippers and pincers For fingers.

  My common-law princess wife and I would flee to another place, a place especially away from seafaring cities and from cities roamed by veterans of wars in which men’s limbs were shorn with swords and cannonfire.

  We finally found
a hotel where my wife became the concierge and I became the cook, and we had the last of our five children. I had a photograph of them all that I lost in the landslide. I had been unbothered by my brother for years until I began to realize that I had forgotten what my brother looked like. I had only spent those two days with him as an adult, and his face as I left him, as I remember him, had been disfigured by the shovel.

  One evening a patron at the hotel said that at the last place he stayed he had seen a man with rubber arms. The patron said the man with the rubber arms had been ranting in the streets, saying it was time to confess our sins against our brother. The patron said the man with rubber arms was saying Ye must be born again as I have been born again. I knew in my heart it must have been my brother the man had seen.

  I loaded my children and my wife with what we could carry into a wagon and left our town. Barely had we made several turns on the valley road when the earth shook and we slid into the sea. I lost everyone, I lost everything. I awoke in the ocean tangled in the crown of a floating tree that was thick with bees. You know the rest, said the cook.

  I was not sure if I did know the rest. I had been told stories before by people around my cartonated fire that were meant to frighten me and disturb my sleep, and the way the cook told this one, and the way it was already working on my dreams, I thought maybe the cook was honest and cruel, but I was not sure. I thought that if what he told me was a lie, then he knew I was lying when I said there was a man with rubber arms in the engine room. I figured I would just have to wait and watch the cook watch the engine room door.

  I lay my head down on my folded arms. I dozed off and woke up when the cook snored. I raised my head to look out the porthole and saw the first chalky smear of the sun rising. It was not comfortable sleeping at the galley table. My neck was stiff and my left arm was pins and needles, so that when I sat up my arm hung against me like a dead weight. I tried to twist some feeling back into it when suddenly the cook started up from his sleep. He was on me in a heartbeat with the rusty meat cleaver.