Signals of Distress

by Jim Crace

  Palmer Dolly hadn’t run along the path to help them with the Rock. He stayed with the wagons, and he watched. He was superstitious. Cradle Rock could bring good luck, and bad. He wouldn’t risk the bad.

  All ten Americans put their backs against the Rock. They’d see how far and quickly they could move it. ‘And push! Let-her-go. And push! Let-her-go.’ The eighty granite tons were rocking at their own pace. But the sailors didn’t step away to watch. As each decline reversed into ascent they put their hands and shoulders underneath the rock and hastened it. Each time the Rock lifted on its pivot, they looked into the damp and darkness underneath. No one said anything. But they felt stronger than the rock. They could bring it down.

  Four men went back to the wagons and returned with iron bars, and lengths of hardwood. They knocked away the loose stones underneath the Rock on the seaward side. They undermined the earth, so that the Rock could fall and rise a few more inches at its outer edge. They tested it again. It made more noise. Its rise and fall expanded on each push. Again they knocked away more stones and earth. They levered with the iron bars.

  Of course ten men, no matter what they’d drunk, could not send the Cradle Rock crashing into the sea. It was a hundred times their weight. All they could do was displace it from its pivot stone, so that it slipped an inch or two and rested on its seaward base, to rock no more. They put their ten backs against it when it fell, but they might as well have tried to knock a mountain down. ‘And push! And push! And push!’ There was no ‘Let-her-go’. It was a disappointment then. The Rock had beaten them. The Rock had sobered them as well. The sweat was gelid on their foreheads. The air was icy. Their breaths were sugary and high. What could they chew to take the smell of drink away before they got the wagons – and the cattle – back to Wherrytown?

  It was early on the Tuesday morning and still dark, with the sailors nursing headaches and sore backs in their hammocks, when the earth below the repositioned Rock gave way. It could not support the weight. There was an avalanche of stones and earth, which bounced into the sea. The Cradle Rock fell fifteen feet from its platform. It was too big to bounce. It dug into the ground and stopped within two seconds of its fall. Its underside, revealed at last to moonlight, was black and glistening, and barnacled with snails. You couldn’t see it from the path. Its eminence was now declivity. Palmer Dolly, on his last night at home, heard the distant impact of the Rock and trembled in his bed. The Rock was down. The coast would never be the same again. He didn’t care.

  Miggy would have trembled, too, if she had not been dreaming of the sea and how a girl with unkempt hair might flourish in America.

  14. The Last of Wherrytown

  THE NORRISES weren’t the only ones to pack their bags that Tuesday morning and say farewell to Wherrytown. Lotty Kyte was emigrating, too. Her brother Chesney had paid the seventy shillings for her passage, second class, on the Belle. Chesney had been a cabinet-maker before he emigrated with his bag of tools. Now, ‘after just seven years in Canada’, as Lotty explained to everyone she met, he had a wife called Maisie and a factory in Montreal. ‘You can’t take beds and tables with you. Not all the way to Canada. Too far,’ she said as she was led, blindfolded, down to the quay a little after ten. ‘The land of freedom it is. Clear a bit of ground and put a cabin up. That’s all you have to do. But still, for all the freedom in the world, you haven’t got a stick of decent furniture. You can’t sit down, except on logs. You’re sleeping on the floor. What can you do? Speak to my Chesney, of course! He has the furnishings, and you don’t have to pay till harvest time. It’s made him rich in seven years. He sends for me. He tells me, Sister, put your blindfold on and come to Canada.’ She shook the letter and the ticket which she had received from him two months before. ‘He wants his sister by his side, no matter what. To help out with his books. To be a friend for Maisie. A sister can’t refuse. My Chesney’s odd, but he is family, when all is said and done. So I must make this little sacrifice, and blind myself with cloth.’ What, her challenge was, could be more logical, more natural than that?

  They found a wooden box for her to rest on by the quay. They dusted it, and cushioned it with folded sack, and helped her sit. At first the sailors, stowing stores and luggage on the Belle, thought Lotty Kyte was pregnant. The only softness to her long and angular body was her stomach. It seemed distended. But she wasn’t fat from pregnancy. She wore an opium bag, tied round her waist, to ward off seasickness. She had three travel chests and a carpet bag at her feet. Every few minutes she touched them with her toes to check they’d not been stolen. She kept her head bowed and her hand across her blindfold for a while, keeping out the harsh sea light. Then she pulled a knitted scarf from her bag and tied it round her head. The extra darkness seemed to comfort her. She was less frightened, and sat quietly, fingering her ticket and her letter. The Wherrytowners who came to stare at her could see a chin, some bonnet and an inch of hair. They morning’d her. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked. They gave their names and wished her luck in Canada. ‘You don’t need luck in Canada,’ she answered. ‘My brother says.’ They didn’t have to hide their smiles. Now here was something they could tell their grandchildren – the blindfolded emigrant!

  Lotty Kyte, who lived only two parishes from Wherrytown, had never seen the sea, and never would. When she was born, some Madame Haruspex from a travelling fair had warned the family that if Lotty ever saw the sea she’d die, ‘and not by drowning’. So that is how she’d lived her life. She’d stayed inland for thirty-seven years. It wasn’t hard – until, that is, she received the ticket from her brother and she was taken to the quay. And then it wasn’t even hard, just dark and inconvenient and itchy. She’d take off the scarf and her blindfold when she was in the Belle. She didn’t have to go on deck. She didn’t have to press her nose against a porthole. And even if the sea galed up and lashed the porthole glass, she had simply to pull her bonnet down or hide under a blanket. She would sit as quietly as a mouse for six or seven weeks, hugging opium, and then go blindfolded into Canada.

  Aymer Smith, with Whip on a length of rope, had walked down to the quay ahead of the Norrises. He got a short good morning and an even shorter, nervous smile from the preacher, and no reply at all from Walter Howells, who was waiting on his horse at harbour end. Miggy and Rosie Bowe rewarded his greetings with red-eyed, ghostly smiles. He wouldn’t present them with their stipend yet.

  He’d not expected such a crowd, nor so much noise and jollity. He joined the queue of onlookers, and listened to a dozen versions of Lotty Kyte’s life story. Someone, he thought, should tear her blindfold off and let her see salt water. There wouldn’t be a flash of lightning or a heart attack. She wouldn’t choke on it. At worst she’d die of fright. ‘Blind superstition,’ he muttered to himself, but loud enough for Mr Phipps to hear. When he saw Robert and Katie Norris arriving on the quay with George as porter, he walked over and repeated it out loud, ‘Blind superstition, nothing more.’

  ‘What is?’ asked George. ‘What isn’t, too?’ He winked at the Norrises, took the pennies they offered him and said, ‘Here’s better recompense than soap.’

  ‘No, Mr Smith’s soap is very fine,’ said Katie. ‘I still have a cake of it untouched. It will serve me well in Canada, though I suppose they must have soap in Canada as well …’ She smiled at Aymer. ‘And when I use it I will think of you and these amusing days in Wherrytown.’

  Aymer couldn’t find an amusing reply. He wasn’t looking forward to the loss of Katie and his soap to the colonies. At last, to break his silence, he pointed out Lotty Kyte for them, and retold her story. ‘She is your fellow passenger,’ he said, ‘and she is, I might suggest, a parable of sorts, for emigrants. A poet could not better her. She goes blindfolded into the future. She travels with her vision blocked, but her hopes intact. Are not your situations similar, except without the bindings on your eyes?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Smith, will you not simply wish us God’s speed?’ said Katie. She didn’t want to listen to his lecture. S
he wanted to sit quietly on the quay, with Robert’s hand engaged in hers, and feel the solid stone beneath her feet.

  ‘Of course I wish you speed, dear Mrs Norris,’ Aymer said. Her hair was pinned and out of sight. She wore a warm grey cloak with long, loose sleeves. He noted all of it; the rising colour of her face, the laces of her shoes, the ‘Oh’ before she said his name, her frown. ‘And furthermore I wish you every fortune on your arrival there. I would not want you, though, to miss the aptness of the parable.’

  ‘We are not seeking parables in Canada, but three good meals a day, and work and advancement for ourselves,’ replied Robert Norris, diverting Aymer from his wife. ‘We want only to live plainly and wholesomely, and to find a welcome there.’

  ‘There can be no guarantees of those,’ said Aymer. ‘No one can guarantee the heavens in Canada will have more stars …’

  ‘Of course, but …’

  ‘… or that the skies will display a deeper blue, or that the soil of that uncharted wilderness will be as rich as cake, or that you and Mrs Norris will step ashore to a spontaneity of well-being and abundance …’

  ‘We hope, at least, for better than we have.’

  ‘Yes, Hope is guaranteed …’

  ‘Blind superstition, nothing more,’ said George. Katie couldn’t stop her laugh.

  ‘… No, Hope will flourish as you sail further from our shores. Hope is what will greet you when you land. And Hope is blindfolded; her eyes are bound. This is what I mean to say.’ The Norrises were hardly listening. Mr Phipps had joined them and had taken Katie’s hand. He smiled at Aymer once again. What could he mean by it? ‘Yes, this is what I meant to say,’ continued Aymer, hurriedly, attempting to insinuate his shoulder between Katie and the preacher. Whip, made nervous by the tightness of the rope, had the good judgement to growl at Mr Phipps’s shoes. Aymer lowered his voice for Katie Norris: ‘Forgive me for my parables,’ he almost whispered. ‘I wish to speak as plainly as I can. May all your Hopes come true.’

  ‘And yours, of course,’ said Katie Norris, though she couldn’t imagine that a man like him had Hopes of anything. ‘And we will pray for you.’ The preacher beamed at her.

  ‘And I will think of you. From time to time,’ said Aymer.

  ‘You will not pray for our brave pioneers, I hear,’ said Mr Phipps, doing his best to strike a note of irony and not of irritation. ‘But, then, you would not claim to understand how little Hope there is without Prayer.’

  ‘Blind superstition,’ Aymer said. He was surprised that Katie didn’t squander a laugh for him as readily as she had done for George.

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ the preacher said, and arched his eyes. Comically, he thought. ‘So Prayer is superstition? And Hope is blindfolded, is it, Mr Smith? And Canada, I heard you say, a wilderness without a chart? I have better news for our two voyagers by sea.’ Again, a disconcerting smile for Aymer Smith. Then he turned away and fixed his gaze on Katie’s face. When would these men leave her at peace? He said, ‘I have the chart to guide you through the wilderness. The Bible is your chart.’ He took a small Bible with a brass clasp and green leather covers from his coat and handed it to Katie Norris. ‘God’s speed,’ he said, and would have taken her hand again and forced a Christian parable on her. But Alice Yapp had joined them on the quay and Alice Yapp was the one person in the town who silenced him.

  ‘I have a useful gift,’ she said. More useful than a Bible or a bar of soap, she meant. She gave the Norrises a pot of arrowroot for the journey and a stoppered jar: ‘Six-Spoon Syrup. That’s against the seasickness, Mrs Norris.’ She turned and shook the jar to mix the brew. ‘Two teaspoons, essence of ginger. Two dessert spoons, brown brandy. Two tablespoons, strong tea. A pinch of cayenne pepper. Now let old Neptune do his worst. A sip of that and I defy you to be sick.’

  In fact, old Neptune was in a placid mood that day. The sea was welcoming, with just sufficient wind to fatten up the sails. The sailors came ashore for their farewells. George seemed especially popular. He received a dozen slaps across his back, and twice as many ha’pennies for services and favours at the inn. The captain kissed Alice Yapp full on the mouth and bunched her skirts up in his hand. He waved at Walter Howells, who kept his distance from the crowd. He shook Mr Phipps’s hand. He even smiled at Aymer Smith. Then he put his hand out for the dog. Aymer pulled the rope away. ‘No, no.’ This was not expected.

  ‘She is the Belle’s, I think. We can’t abandon her.’

  ‘I cannot let her go.’ How many days had passed, he wondered, since he’d last squared up against the captain, in the snowy lane above the inn, and been accused of theft? (‘Not only do you steal my man, you steal my dog as well.’) This time he wouldn’t hide behind a lie. He’d take the beating if it would rescue Whip. ‘It is not possible,’ he said. ‘No, no.’

  ‘Must I ask half a dozen of my men to take her off you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then let me have my dog. What, would you have us settle here and not go home? We’ll not go home without our property.’

  ‘I’d pay ten shillings for her, happily, or twelve,’ Aymer said. Would Whip abandon him, if he let go of the rope? ‘I beg you, leave her in my hands. She has quite adopted me.’ His voice was calm; his thoughts were not. Would he go home without a single friend? ‘Twenty shillings, sir.’ He’d liberate the dog. He’d snap her chains of slavery. The thought was not preposterous.

  The captain laughed at Aymer’s shillings (‘A ship without a dog?’) and shook his head. He took hold of the rope and snapped it out of Aymer’s hand. Whip didn’t seem to mind. She liked the smell of shoes and legs, it didn’t matter whose. The captain shook George’s hand. A sixpence passed between them. ‘Good man, George. And if you ever want a place at sea …’ The captain put his arm round Mrs Yapp again. ‘Next trip,’ he said. ‘We could be back within the year. Now, let’s aboard.’ He tugged at Whip. Aymer should have snatched the rope and run. At least he should have stooped and rubbed Whip’s head and wept into her hair. Instead he stayed as stiff as pine, between the preacher and the parlourman, and watched the ship’s dog disappear for good.

  They rang one bell to call the crew aboard. Three men were sent to load the passengers’ bags and boxes. Palmer Dolly, ‘unremarked amongst the crowd’, ran forward to lend a hand. He lifted Lotty Kyte’s heaviest box onto his shoulders and carried it on to the Belle. No one challenged him. And no one missed him for a while. He hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. He simply disappeared into the shadows – and the bloodstains – of the orlop deck. He’d have the salvaged cattle for company at first. And then he’d have their straw bedding to himself, until America. Soon the sound of falling lightlines and hoisting canvas filled the air. ‘And pull! Let-her-go.’ The sailors were a team again. The captain was Napoleon. The mooring ropes were loosened, the fenders lifted and the jib sail set to take the port tack out of Wherrytown for the emigrant ports of Fowey and Cork before the weeks in open sea. They rang the final bell, this time for paying passengers to come aboard.

  Aymer would have liked to hug the Norrises, but he could only shake their hands. They walked away towards the Belle, and joined their two fellow voyagers, Lotty Kyte and Miggy, at the bottom of the ship’s gangway where Ralph Parkiss was waiting for his bride. Katie Norris went ahead, keen to get away. Robert Norris took Lotty’s arm and guided her onto the Belle. Her hands were shaking from the dread of it. Her eyes were hot and watering. ‘My brother can supply your furnishings when we arrive,’ she said, just to hear a voice.

  Rosie Bowe had Miggy in her arms. She planted kisses on her neck and face. Her sobs were animal, a seal. She didn’t have the breath to speak. Her throat was aching from the tears and cries she had suppressed all morning, all week. Her eyes were raw. Ralph put his arms around them both and made promises: he and Miggy would find someone to write a letter if Rosie would find someone to read; they would send for her when they were rich; they would name their first daughter Rosie Parkiss; and, come what may, they would
return one day before she died. But Rosie Bowe did not believe in that. She only knew that all the bone and sinew of her life was leaving on the Belle. ‘Be good to her,’ she said to Ralph. She gave her gifts to Miggy in a straw bag: some salted beef, the petticoat her sister had made, a baby shawl, one of the bars of soap that Aymer Smith had left, and the embroidered passage from the cottage wall, ‘Weep sore for him that goeth away …’

  ‘Oh, Ma, don’t fret,’ said Miggy. ‘I’ll end up crying too. And that’s bad luck. That in’t the way to go.’ She put her arm through Ralph’s and took her first step on the Belle. She didn’t look at Rosie Bowe. Her eye was caught by Aymer Smith approaching from the crowd. At last. She’d almost given up on him.

  Aymer ran up to the gangway. He stood between Rosie and her daughter. He took his purse out of his coat. And handed three bright sovereigns to the girl. (‘What’s going on?’ said Alice Yapp out loud. ‘What has old spindleshanks been doing with the girl that’s worth that weight of tin? Now there’s a tale. I’ll find the bottom of it, don’t you worry.’) There wasn’t any time for Aymer to make a speech. Miggy took his money without a word of thanks, though Ralph shook his hand. The captain rang the final bell, to pull the gangway up. And that was that, and nothing much to celebrate.

  The Belle had soon left the perils of the shore. It slowly dropped down-channel against the tide and waited on capricious winds to take it out beyond the harbour boom and between the channel buoys. It idled there, in the offing, for half an hour. The quayside crowd could pick out Lotty Kyte on deck, still blindfolded, and the Norrises. Then the light picked up, and with the light the sea, for light can energize the sea and make the waves more spirited. The wind did not diminish as they feared. It held – and more than held. The ship turned stern to Wherrytown and beat a passage through the bay up to the Finters, those final, storm-racked morsels of the land where there were only cormorants and kelp. Within the hour the Belle of Wilmington had dissolved into the fog-veiled precipices of cloud, and Rosie Bowe, heartbroken on the quay, had nothing left to do but set her face against the wind and walk the six miles home.