The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  “I ate supper hurriedly nevertheless, looking them over from time to time with my wall-eyed glance—an affliction I’ve borne with a tolerable patience since that first dreadful hour I’ve spoken of. They asked me questions, their red, weathered faces twitching like horseskin, their eyes as aglitter as eagles’ eyes. I was tempted to pretend I was going to sea, but thought better of it. I wouldn’t put it past them to shanghai a man, genteel as they might appear. They pried on, as men do— whether pirates or dentists or stone-masons—and I gave them at last, since I had no choice, a crude map of my mizered individuality: I told them of the Jonathan Upchurch farm in Illinois (as it said on the barn that was not yet built) and the seventy-five dollars I’d saved up toward its purchase. The mug was empty. Someone filled it.

  “ ‘It’s a damn sight better’n bein’ et by the whales,’ Pious John called out, and raised his mug to me. He slid his eyes toward the door, then back at me, eyes like a viper’s, but with no ill-will. ‘And better’n the life privateers put up with,’ he added in a whisper, ‘cutting men’s throats for the pay of eternal damnation.’ A muscle in his cheek twitched, a brief, sharp tingle, and he struggled to suppress some painful emotion.

  “As if it were a signal, the whole dandy rout of them looked my way with approval and envy, turning their bright-black-eyed heads toward me, and hefted their mugs toward the rooftree. ‘To southern Illinois!’ they shouted.

  “I drank. They talked strangely, like maniacs, of farming. Most of their fathers had been farmers, they said, but adverse fortune … ‘Once ye’ve turned pirate there’s no turning back,’ Lovalie Will said, his long nose slick with tears. ‘It’s a sickness,’ he confided. ‘A terminal illness of the spirit.’ I was startled by their candor, but I thought I understood it. I’d heard my father speak more than once of the lonely, necessarily secretive life of the buccaneer. They had a code all their own, those universal outcasts living off the world without a soul’s by-yer-leave, and though some were no better than poisonous snakes, there were some that were true-born gentlemen. They draped their arms around each other and me, quoted snatches of verse, and remembered fondly the smell of new hay off Mongolia. The yellow room glowed.

  “Things got queerer and queerer. The room swam, as the saying goes (yet swim it did, sir). I pounded the table with the best of them, arguing hogs. They proposed a trifling game of chance. ‘I’ll have none of it!’ says I, not yet their coney. The whole crowd thanked me. If I’d wanted, I thought, I could have converted the whole blamed pack into Christians. They then proposed some other entertainment, which I didn’t quite catch, though I more or less agreed, all slack-jawed smile, and in an instant all of us were leaving the inn (old whalers’ claws reaching, plucking at my coat) and we were rushing down the middle of the dark street, hooting—I reeling, falling down yet miraculously balancing my mug as a slow-winged gannet balances, asleep on a sailyard, and I roared in the night like Beelzebub with my pirates. Ah, communion!

  “What happened for a span after that has vanished from my mind like smoke. I have a ludicrous image of my mother in her nightgown, a skinny arm stretched like a frantic wing, holding up a lantern at the top of the stairs, her mouth wide and trembling, her thin knees violently banging each other. I believe I spoke tearfully of my love for my father. Then darkness; and then, much later, this:

  “I stood, somewhat dazed and extremely unwell, on the old decayed wharf by the abandoned lumberyard of Pankey & Co., gazing at a sailboat by the name of the Jolly Independent. She had a halfdeck or cuddy and was rigged sloop-fashion. I’ve no idea what her tonnage was, but I imagine she’d hold eight persons without crowding. I’d had an idea I was in southern Illinois, but when I looked out over the midnight ocean the truth burst over my spirit cold as Iceland. The sons of sea-whores had sold me the sailboat! As for my pirates, they were gone, vanished, more at random in the world than I was by seventy-five dollars.

  “I carried on some, I hardly need tell you. Never was a mortal alive more foully swindled! I was persuaded long afterward, by my friend Billy More, that I may have been somewhat a party to the cheat. The mind runs deeper than its schemes, could be. But I knew none of that, that night on the wharf, banging my fists on the planking, performing my tantrum. ‘Trust not, want not,’ my hermit uncle used to say, looking sternly at his pipe, not at me, as if giving plain notice.

  “How long I went on in this childish fashion I’ve no idea, though I can tell you I enjoyed it. I wept like a baby, profoundly conscious of my cruel and total abandonment in a world of ungoded sea and sky, on the shore behind me the bankrupt, fenced-up lumberyard. The one thing missing in my paroxysm of grief was some loving Miranda to observe my suffering and be filled with admiration. It was no doubt that that made me stop and sit up, legs dangling, elbows on knees and chin on fists, and commence to reconsider.

  “The weather was changing, a warmish breeze coming up from southwest, and little by little my stomach seemed to be stabilizing. I looked at the name, laid in gold on the bow, the Jolly Independent, and the irony made me burst out laughing. It was a self-regarding Byronic laugh, soul-tortured and metaphysical, at first. But even as I laughed a change came o’er me. Two things came stealing to my mind at once: the sea-dogs had sold me someone else’s boat, so it was mine and not-mine, like the whole of Creation—that was one of them—and the other was that, gazing out toward the eastern horizon, feeling the motion of the waves and wind, I wanted to be there, with Plato and Plotinus, despite all my sensible talk about southern Illinois. In landlessness alone lies the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God! thought I. Better to perish in that howling infinite than be … something or other. (I forget my phrase.) The boat seemed trying to tell me something, thumping her side on the rough wharf logs. Before I knew it, I’d climbed aboard and was bailing her—she was nearly half-filled. I hoisted the jib and mainsail the way I’d seen others do, and, keeping full, set boldly out to sea.

  “The wind, as I’ve said, was blowing freshly from the southwest. The night was clear and cold, though warmer than earlier. I took the helm—a more difficult matter than I’d expected, but I soon got the hang of it. We flew like a seagull, riding the breast of swells. The mast, sail, and ropes, the bow and bowsprit bobbing like the head of a galloping horse, were as sharp in the moonlight as images in a dream. I sailed in a kind of drunken trance, wildly jubilant, as if I thought I’d been born indestructible. But the waves keep hoisting and heaving at the tiller, and when I glanced down once and got a look at my hand—it was paler than marble—I came sober of a sudden, and my joy edged quickly towards terror. Something had gone wrong. The wind had increased, and I was fast getting out of the lee of the land. Birds wheeled around me—screeching purveyors of lunatic advice. I tried to veer larboard, grabbing ahold of the tiller with both hands. Nothing happened; it felt like a whale had the rudder in his crooked teeth. I went faint, terrified, and suddenly the sea was no longer mystical nor I some floating inviolable spirit but both of us as real as ice-cold spray, fierce jolts, shrill wind, and the thumping, creaking, careening yaw of the sailboat. I felt myself falling, passing out, and then I was scrambling, gasping for air in the bilgewater. I got hold of myself and screamed for help though there wasn’t a mortal in hearing range. I sucked in air and pulled myself back to the tiller arm. It was like a miracle, the strength my terror sent. But even that eerie strength wouldn’t prove much comfort, I knew. A fierce southern wind and a powerful ebb-tide were plunging me straight to destruction. When I looked back over my shoulder the whole of the west had gone black—black as a pit but for the flicker of gulls. A storm was gathering. I had no compass, no provisions, and soon I’d be clean out of sight of the land. My thoughts seemed to rush as the sea rushed past, but, for all their bewildering rapidity, they went nowhere. The boat was moving at a terrible speed, full before the wind, no reef in either jib or mainsail, her bows completely under foam. I have no idea why she didn’t broach to—my hands on the tiller were as influential as two sparrows on a
fence. But the boat kept steady, and gradually, despite my terror, my thoughts grew saner. The wind was increasing. Whenever we rose from a forward plunge, the sea fell combing in over the counter. My hands, my legs, my face, had lost all feeling. Nevertheless, abandoning the tiller, I stumbled to the mainsail and let it go by the run. It flew over the bows and, weighted by water, snapped the mast off short by the board. The accident saved me, for the moment, at least. Riding under the jib alone, I boomed along before the wind, shipping heavy seas but surviving. My heart now pounded as hard as it had at the peak of my terror, but pounded for a different reason: I believed I had a chance. “So I believed—overweening son of Adam, Reverend Dunkel would have said. For just then a terrible scream came down from directly above me—a shriek like the rage of a thousand demons. I twisted, screaming back, and had a fleeting impression of a great black monster, swiftly bearing down from above my head, indifferent, apocalyptic as a falling planet. My hair stood on end, my blood congealed, and I swooned again into the bilgewater.”

  V

  The angel presses his fingertips together. The guest is befuddled.

  “Hah! Damned philosophical,” you’ll say. “Ha ha! The mariner catches his guest by the trembling ear, and Heaven itself attends the two, and what can the mariner think of to tell? Why, nothing! Nothing!—as usual! A cunning tale! A crafty fabulation!”

  But I answer boldly: “Fiddlesticks! There is more to these overblown tunes than you apprehend, sir.” I am scheduled to hang, as so are you, though in my case the terrible hour is certain. (Barring accident.) I will not think of it (tugging my beard in panic, thinking. Tongue out, eyes bulged, swaying in the wind. Better the wind than the corpse that sways to its music! And …)

  These halls are filled with ghosts. Take notice. They pass with unechoing steps outside my door, dragging soundless chains. See how they gape like stranded fish, how the midnight sockets of their eyes stare nowhere, meaningless. I people the darkness with undersea green—transform it to gray, hang spiderwebs. They approach me trembling, as if hungry to speak, but they remember they have nothing to say to me, no fears, no projections. Unmeaning’d, they’re merely there, thinned out to vision; nowhere. Ten thousand thousand generations of hanged criminals. Think of it, Inspector! I strain my wits toward them, my own bleak future. We have nothing in common. Onward forever the dead come, soundless and staring. In me they exist, not “back there in the past” because there is no past, there is nothing in all this universe but the razor’s edge between my memory and imagination, the instant’s perception between things dead, unlimbed forever, and yet to be born … or yet to be borne. My very existence one second ago is banished out of life eternally. Second by second the world falls shut like a comnlid. Does nothing survive but the discipline ghosts have imposed on ghosts—the rock-firm shackles of dead ideas, steel wire on the New Lamb’s testicles? There’s energy for you! There’s man intense!

  “Ha ha,” cries you, “there’s paradox, there’s quagmire!”

  Not so! Let us speak of great works of art, or even foolish ones; brute objects decayed as old mountains, eternal instants.—But time’s too short for that, I agree with you. Tack alee, then, mate, away from the maelstrom, away from the Coal-pocket, upward in all directions, home to Visions!

  “You’re serious!” says you with a look of dismay.

  No no, just play; all play. Sit down.

  (Serious in the manner of a sand castle, or an old woman fashioning a paper rose. Whoever found out reality with sand, old secondhand tissue?

  ’Tissyou, my lord!

  ’Tis who?

  Sh! Sh!)

  The guest now notices the angel’s wings. He looks mildly puzzled. He’s no fool, however. Keeps his own counsel, awaits some clarification.

  “You were speaking of a hoax,” the guest remarks.

  “Ah, that,” says the mariner, with a look both delighted and cunning. “I see yer a rationalist!

  VI

  “She that overran me and picked me up was the whaler Jerusalem bound from Nantucket on a three years’ hunting voyage, and a sorrowfuller ship never sailed on the planet earth. As soon as the jolly-boat was hauled aboard with my half-drowned body, ana the mate had signaled I was still alive, the Captain, assisted by a man with white hair, retired in silence to his cabin.

  “I lay on a berth in a coal dark stateroom trying to sort out the borders of reality, unscrambling dream and recollection. My impression—dream or not (it turned out to be not, in its main particulars)—was of rigging awesomely arching upwards, rat-lined, storm-lit, chalk-white-sailed, lifting tyrannic and overpowering as a turreted castle. The ropework swung like a vast spiderweb of Jacob’s ladders, hung here and there with sou’westered angels of dubious aspect, their skirts flying out like fearful wings, and high above them in the rain-black night the ghostly, pale-glowing battlements ringing the crowsnests. Short-bearded men gazed down at me like judges. ‘He’s coming to,’ says one. Lantern light colored his eyes bright red. He bent down nearer my face. ‘A drunkard.’

  “I rolled my head left. Negroes barebacked as plantation slaves ran knee-deep in deckwash, silently double-lashing longboats down. I managed to bring out my thanks for the rescue—I could pretty well see how much trouble it had been, managed while the ship was still trimming for the storm—and I begged to be taken back to land.

  “ ‘Not likely,’ said one—the second mate. The grave-robber’s humor I heard in his laugh made me struggle in anger and fear to rise up on my elbows and peer into his face. A pain went through me, the sky went spinning, and despite my clenched fists, my holy indignation, I collapsed to the deck again, senseless.

  “When I next came conscious I was down in the stateroom, a whale-oil lamp burning dully above me, swinging, creaking on its chain like a crooning hag. As I turned my head for a look at the man standing over me, the pain was there again, a cat-o’-nine-tails wrapped round my chest. I went motionless, then yelled, less from pain than from anger at my chance captivity, and the man said gruffly, as if with amusement, “Avast! Ye’ve got ribs broke. Lay as ye be!’ He told me the name of the ship and her captain and the nature of their business on the seven seas. I could call back none of it to memory now. I remembered only this: When I asked where the ship would put in, he answered, ‘Heaven if we’re lucky; more likely lower.’ He raised his hand—to the lamp, I suppose, for the stateroom went dark. ‘What d’ye mean?’ I asked him. He answered from the darkness, the voice of a minister discoursing on Hell, or a hanging judge when he talks of Heaven—‘Yer destiny’s set ye a perilous venture, but a far nobler venture than some, it may be. Ye’re landless, landsman, and like to remain so, circling the watery wilderness now till Doomsday.’ The rough sea rumbled in the bulkhead beside me, howling, infinite, like the grumbling of the Devil in his chains. The man went on speaking, or I dreamed he spoke. I imagined him with leathern wings and jagged sharksteeth, telling me lies and taking demonic delight in it. ‘The omens are thundering bad ones, lad—except for, it may be, yer walleyed gaze. Ye’ve jined with a company of deadmen, ye see; deadmen pursuing a deadman down into his grave and, could be, through it. Rest up, I advise ye. There’ll be no more bringing the J’rusalem hard alee!’

  “The ship pitched and rolled like a planet cut loose of gravitational moorings. I lay with my two hands clinging to the berth, and for a long time—some hours—that was all I knew, the slow endless rolling and the pounding of the storm, and below me a crashing like wrecks tumbling over on the ocean floor. But then I was aware of a further sound, an out-of-tune music that seemed to come ringing from the Jerusalem’s beams. It was a sound almost human, I imagined at times; at other times it was animal—the rumble of a tiger—or worse, the growl of atoms. I strained my ears, breathing more lightly than my broken ribs required. I caught a few sounds that were almost words—then scraps of melody, hymnlike. But the hymn was far darker than any Presbyterian hymn I knew: Music charged up like a lightning rod. It died away, sank deep into the storm. I beg
an to believe I’d imagined it. But then—though the storm was as loud as ever, crashing all around me and whistling overhead—I heard it again, like the moaning of spirits, tormented demons so used to flame they transformed it as if automatically to musical wails. The sound was maddening; I’d never heard the like. But there was something far graver than that foreignness about it. The sound was freighted with a kind of accusation, a promise of revenge.

  “Like them, as I imagined them, I learned numbness to pain and, flame or no flame, dropped my feet over the side and climbed up to a sitting position. There I remained for some time, all my weight on my arms. My waist, I learned by feel in the darkness, was tightly wrapped in canvas—old sail. Raising myself by the bulkhead chain (by the bulkhead chain and by will power), I got on my feet and, with hardly a pause, pushed forward toward the passageway. The ship rolled hard, like a thing malevolent and aware of my purpose, but I kept my balance and made it to the passage. I could see a dim lampglow, far to sternward. Though my whole body screamed and I was bathed in sweat, I lunged toward it. Ten feet from the hatch, my destination, the ship lurched again and I went down on the decking. The moment I struck I was unconscious.

  “How long I lay thus I do not know. I awoke with the music all around me, lapping at my pain, and I crawled forward to the light, which came up through a trap. In the hold below me, in a room full of kegs, pumps, chain-cable, and patching timber—a clutter stacked tight as a family attic—some twenty-five big-shouldered black men sat, two or three of them shackled and chained. All the Negroes were young, between sixteen and thirty. I stared at them, more astounded than afraid. Gold-ringed savages singing their eerie, ungodly chants in the swaying lumination of an old brass lamp, their music summoning an answering music as eerie as the noises at a Boston seance—what was I to think? It was a whaling ship—so all signs showed. A whaling ship, yet here in the hold, a Slaver!