by Lori Baker
Land, Captain! To the south, sir!
There it is, after all those weeks, the sought-after object, land: purple, wavering slightly, miragelike, insubstantial as smoke, seeming, like smoke, to float just above the water, rather than to rest upon or arise from it.
But they are becalmed. Stuck, in the Trough of Leo’s Despair.
• • •
Best not make too much of this, nobody’s mood controls the weather, not really.
• • •
A cheer rises up from around the ship, there is a sudden flurry of activity, trunks being packed, scientific instruments readied, gear stowed or unstowed (depending), piglets chased into their pen, breeches laundered, hair combed, faces washed, gloves buttoned, for the first time in seven-odd weeks.
It’s a long time to float like a smut in a saucer. Grime builds up, a certain amount of filth that may be ignored while at sea, but must be removed before progressing onto land. Even onto such a land as Punta Yalkubul is likely to be.
There is a shimmer of anticipatory dread, thinking about that. Quickly buried, though, as the decks are scraped with holystone: scoured once, twice, three times, and the barnacles chipped off the hull, in preparation for a landing.
• • •
But they will not be landing. The sails will hang slack throughout this very hot day, and through an entire sultry night as well. Nonetheless, optimism runs high. It isn’t until the end of a second day that the truth of the matter is suspected; and even then it doesn’t win wide acceptance. The gloom isn’t widespread until the end of the fourth day.
Hugh Blackstone, of course, is the exception. He’s been scowling consistently since he uttered that oath.
• • •
Then begins the murmur. That’s when, on the fourth day.
It arises, first, in the lower parts of the Narcissus, those areas which, lying under water, are perpetually dark—beneath the cabins and the workrooms, beneath the space where the men hang their hammocks and stow their trunks, down beneath, where supplies are kept: the casks of water, the biscuit, the salt beef and cornmeal, the bread and the raisins, the peas and molasses, the sacks of dried apples and of rice, of potatoes, cocoa, tea, the barrels of pickles, butter, beer and onions—and lower yet, down below the ballast, in the bilges, where the pumps are manned continuously, day and night (though night from day cannot be distinguished there, and the lantern burns all the time).
That is where the murmur begins. Indistinctly, at first.
At least, on the fourth day it is indistinct. Also on the fifth day, as the sails hang slack, and the viscous, blue-green membrane of the sea clings around the ship, determined to hold her fast. Things are said—indistinct things—in the hold, in the berths, in the cabins; in the companionway, in the galley, in the saloon; on the forecastle, amidships, and astern; up in the rigging, in the crow’s nest, on the mainmast; around the mizzen, and over the boom.
My mother’s name is being mentioned. The eel, too. Bad luck is mentioned, as is ill omen, mermaid’s curse, the mop over the side, the bucket likewise, the tossed stone, the ginger-haired man, the wrong foot forward, the three gulls flying, the mysterious whistle, the trimmed beard, the pared nail, the parson’s collar, the flag through the ladder, the dog at the tackle.
What my father hears he’s never sure he’s heard correctly.
Someone’s got the cat under the basket.
What? What?
It’s nothing, a whisper around a hatchway. When he looks at them they avert their eyes.
The cat’s under the basket all right.
Someone’s put it there, for sure.
But what does it mean?
• • •
Him with that ginger hair. And her.
It’s her that brought the beast out of the sea. But he’s bad, too. That hair’s a sign, for them as has eyes to see it.
You bet it is.
Launch with the devil, sail with the devil, that’s what they say. Ginger hair’s the devil’s hair.
• • •
They cross themselves, duck furtively along the passages. They know my father’s heard them, but they don’t want to meet his glance.
• • •
And that sea, indifferent as a cat, smiling its noncommittal cat’s smile, barely flicking its cat’s paw in the pitch of a wave: it lies like a cat, languorously, stretching itself without effort in the unbearable heat of the afternoons, through the starlit torpor of the nights; with land just there on the horizon, teasingly beyond reach, insubstantial as smoke. It will make no effort on their behalf, that indolent, smiling sea.
• • •
A cormorant, black as pitch, flies above the bows: the men cross themselves; from somewhere down deep the murmur rises—
• • •
At last Hugh Blackstone must say what it means. The men believe the ship’s been cursed—a sea witch has stolen their wind. They blame you, Miss Girard. A woman on board is bad luck, in their eyes. If anything goes wrong she’s bound to be blamed. They’re a superstitious lot, these sailors—and stupid besides. Toss a pebble overboard and they believe it’ll drag the whole ship down with it. It makes no sense. There’s no logic in it. But once they get these ideas, they never let ’em go.
• • •
The explanation itself falls like a stone. There is nothing to do but wait.
• • •
My father bears up poorly in the heat. Eventually he concedes to remove his dark jacket and yellow waistcoat, to appear on deck in his shirtsleeves. But he keeps faith with his formerly proper, formerly starched collar and cuffs, he will not remove these, though they wilt sadly around his neck and wrists in the overwhelming humidity. He would not want her to see him without them—such a sweating, suffering fool. She does nothing but laugh at this, he in cuffs and collar, stifling in a tropical heat that demands, above all else, a sacrificial progress toward gleaming nakedness.
A progress that she makes gladly, and much to his unease.
• • •
Then, too, the sailors affect him. He dislikes being in close proximity to their superstitions, which, after all, are so similar to his own. I imagine him staring at the lifeless sails when nobody else is looking, muttering Black black bear-away, don’t come down by here-away! or some other savage nonsense, as if this might lift the curse. Hours and hours he spends, perched on the taffrail as the Narcissus lists, first one way, then the other. What is he doing? Brooding upon the traitorous stillness of the sea. Muttering his incantations.
Dark shapes move beneath those waters. He comes away from the taffrail hollow eyed, subdued. Who knows what he is thinking.
• • •
But then who knows what any of them may be thinking—floating there, under the weight of the unrelenting sunlight, with land, the merest puff of it—a sliver, a rind, a crust, a peeling like the skin off an orange—stretched out, completely unobtainable, on the far, purpling horizon.
It is a weight in itself, an internal weight, this land that can be seen but not touched, which itself seems not to touch the waves, buoyed above them, rather, by some peculiar alchemy of water and light.
There’s an equation for that.
• • •
It floats but does not wander, is tight upon its tether, always there, to the south. Tantalizingly.
But it is not for them. Water is for them. Plenty of that. Water and murmur. Water and murmur and malaise.
• • •
It’s inevitable, I suppose, that arguments should begin, under circumstances like these. Have I mentioned that my grandfather, Felix Girard, is of a choleric temperament?
Ginger hair is the devil’s hair. Or so they say.
He is a man addicted to movement, forced now to be still. In tedious times he remembers his old operating theater in l’Hôtel-Dieu, misses it, that hated place, the gleaming sharps, even the sickly, sweet smell, this, too, is a memory. The Saint Jerome Ward, there beneath the shadow of the cathedral. The dutiful Si
sters of Bon Secours with their sallow horse-faces, their bound-up hair, their disapproving looks. All that dingy linen.
He flexes his hands, feels the old longing. To cut. Me next, doctor. Help me. Three, four, six to a bed they were in that filthy place. They bled them into buckets on the floor. Most could not be helped. He cut, regardless.
Sister—the blade!
He has strong decisive hands, my grandfather. Butcher’s hands. Now idle.
Well. It’s hard on everyone.
• • •
If he could cut anything in the current circumstances I think it would be John McIntyre he’d cut. Excise him like a tumor from the otherwise healthy flesh of this expedition. The hatred between them is of long standing, based in professional jealousy. Each having something means neither can have all. This, of course, is unforgivable. And McIntyre is Harry Ellis’s appointment here. A functionary of the museum. Hence: a snitch, a rat, a spy. He with that greasy monocle of his. And the clipped, arrogant I see.
This is a real irritation.
They bicker together, in the long, hot waste of the days. I wish I could say they didn’t mean it. But they do.
What are they arguing about? Classification of the Psittaciformes of British Guiana, in particular the Guianian sun parrot, John McIntyre’s particular discovery. My grandfather, it seems, has found McIntyre’s monograph unconvincing.
Admit it, McIntyre—you have never seen the thing! And why? Because it does not exist! Come, come now, confess! You identify this bird by the cry only, is it not so? By the characteristic mee-hoo! mee-hoo! Why, it is not a bird at all, it is a cat; and a domestic cat at that, that came to Guiana in an Englishwoman’s stocking! Of course you have never seen it—admit it, McIntyre, come clean!
He is very serious, my grandfather, not just serious, he’s livid; his face is as red as his hair, he is shouting, he is laughing, I wish he did not have this side to his character but he does and now he must show it.
And McIntyre, too, is furious, he must, of course, strike back, this he does by questioning the origin and accuracy of certain passages in my grandfather’s book, Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak.
• • •
One passage that I particularly enjoy is in question, the one that describes a particular sandstone formation in the desert, southeast of Dalanzadgad, at Bayan Ovoo. My grandfather writes that the rock there had been peculiarly deformed by the wind, coming to resemble, over vast eons of time, the traveling sledge of the legendary Altan Khan; upon close examination there may be discerned, carved upon the rock, whether by human hand or divine, the words “By the will of the Eternal Blue Heaven” (Köke Möngke Tngri). This object is worshipped by the local peoples, who leave upon it each evening offerings of food, coins, bells, sheepskins, walking sticks, even empty bottles of usquebaugh.
My mother always liked that passage, too, because my grandfather was in Bain Dzak when she was born, and used to read aloud to her from this book, when she was a child, as if, in this way, to explain his absence, of which her mother, Marie-Louise Girard, used bitterly to complain.
• • •
But John McIntyre holds that there is no such object. It’s lies, all lies, a fabric of fatuous fibs. You are a fraud, sir; you have never been to Bayan Ovoo, to Dalanzadgad, or to Bain Dzak—why, if you’ve been a step farther east than Chicksand Street, I’ll eat my hat!
• • •
Why must they do it? Are they not hot enough? Now everyone’s dinner is ruined, and then my mother’s performance of the “Der Vogelfänger” aria is interrupted, my grandfather punctuating the amusing refrain, “der Vogelfänger bin ich ja, Stets lustig, tra la la!,” with his imitation of the characteristic but disputed mee-hoo! mee-hoo! of the Guianian sun parrot, to everyone’s dismay. Now the concert is over; and McIntyre, monocle blazing with fury, has stomped off somewhere—and all the time there’s that ocean, that implacable, winking object, duplicitous in delft blue; and land, Punta Yalkubul, there to the south, resembling, sometimes, a wisp of fog, pearly grey in color, at other times a ribbon that has fallen loose from my mother’s hair, deeply violet, reclining—
And my father, nervously rubbing the heel of his right hand against his left wrist, poor sweating fool, the sailors make him uneasy. They are doing something peculiar down below; they are making faces at him behind his back—
Malaise and murmur, murmur and malaise.
And water. Never a shortage of that.
• • •
Something has to happen eventually. They can’t go on like this forever, all this floating, it has to end sometime.
• • •
Maybe now.
Harry Owen, unable to sleep, rises at 3:00 A.M.; sees, by the light of a gibbous moon, as he stands on deck with his cigar, Punta Yalkubul on the horizon, dense, blue grey as smoke, slightly lighter, in color, than either sea or sky; sees it from starboard, instead of the usual larboard; thinks it looks nearer than before; then, disoriented, thinks that he is dreaming, or else that they have drifted, though there is no wind by which to account for this, and hardly any waves. A dream then. A dream wind has moved them. Who dreamed it, this wind? He has, Harry Owen has; Leo Dell’oro has; Clotilde has; they have done it, all of them, together, it is a collective dream, a collective sigh, a wished-for exhalation. This is satisfactory. Now Harry Owen can sleep. Morning, though, reveals him to have been mistaken: this is no dream; nor have they moved. A thick bank of cloud has drawn up, and approaches the Narcissus from the north. This is what Harry Owen saw, and mistook for land. It was gathering, even then; gathering, while they dreamed. Hugh Blackstone, tight-lipped, regards this object through his glass, then begins shouting, Haul the jib! Take in the fore! Furl the mizzen topgallant! Clew up the main topgallant! Suddenly the Narcissus awakes from its torpor, the men spring up into the rigging. Certainly something will happen now.
But no.
Now it is still, with a stillness unlike any they have known before, a stillness so utter and so complete that the sound of my mother dropping a single hairpin as she completes her morning toilet could carry throughout the entire ship—a stillness of men and nature both, as if somebody, pulling a celestial plug somewhere, has suddenly let all the murmur in the world run out a drain.
Hugh Blackstone, unpleasant over breakfast, will only say Now we will have some weather—
Who knows what this might mean. Only that it is eerily still, that the bank of cloud grows closer, mounts the horizon, a great, grey-green fist of a cloud, shot through at the top with vivid green bursts of light. Here it is, hanging over them like judgment; but beneath the cloud is stillness, dead calm, a tepid sea, no wind, the air hot and sweet and rotten. It is unhealthy air; but breathe it they must, and so they do, cautiously, in shallow gasps, through handkerchiefs if possible. It is crackling, that air—saturated. And they are saturated. The electricity enters them upward, through the timbers of the ship, downward, through that air, the heaviness of which makes everything difficult, walking, speaking, raising to the lips a fork or a cup of tea; better to paddle through it, that would seem natural. Except that nothing is natural, least of all they, crackling with the static of the cloud.
Surely, now it will happen.
Instead they eat lunch.
Now it is coming. There is a spark, a flash of monocle, John McIntyre has begun again upon Felix Girard, calling him fraud, fake, charlatan, swindler. This over an unfortunate fish stew. The entire expedition is a fraud—a trick to bilk money out of Harry Ellis—there was no intention of ever arriving in Punta Yalkubul—him at the helm is in on it, too—all of you together—crooks—cheats—thieves—confidence tricksters—! McIntyre pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket, begins waving it around, a tiny, square ghost, brilliant white and incorporeal in the sickly grey-green light. Here it is, a letter from your partner in crime, Arthur Petrook, laying out the entire scheme!
Now my grandfather, always fiery, turns brick red, the veins in his temples bulge as he cries out f
iercely, It is lies, all lies! I will show you, McIntyre, you scoundrel! I will show you, you rotten arse-kisser! You monster! You deformed abortion of a man! I will show you what is real science and what is bluff! Just wait!
Yes, this is it: now it has happened. They are all appalled now, my mother near tears, my father shrunk down in his corner, Harry Owen dabbing nervously with a piece of bread, Linus Starling hunching and ducking over his fish stew. And yet at the same time nothing has happened, this they are made to know by an outcry on deck, where something else is happening, something altogether bigger.
• • •
The great fist on the horizon has taken everything into its grasp. That is what has happened. The constriction has begun, the sky dark as ash, though with an eerie cast of yellow, all hands standing silent and staring—
(So lost are they who emerge from the saloon that they do not know where to look, what to see, looking therefore and seeing nothing but the pale, upturned faces until the mate takes pity on their confusion and points—)
—up into the rigging, where a dazzling, white-green light is sparking and spitting along the main topgallant masthead; bouncing down then onto the topgallant yard, twirling, it’s like a top, if tops were made of fire, then down, further down it goes, bouncing onto the flying jib boom end, such a dance, a flamenco I believe, before it disappears for a moment—just a moment, leaving in its wake a black afterglow, a momentary blindness, before it reappears again, assuming a playful posture just above my father’s head, his face is lit with it, lit green—
(Now they see it, even he sees it now, my father, Leo Dell’oro, as down it comes—)
—down, further down, onto his chest, onto that once-starched shirtfront that he refuses to take off, oh, how it sizzles there, it sings, it pops and hisses, it cavorts, such a performance, with his chest for a stage; a jig it dances, a clog dance, as the sky above and sea below turn blacker than black, and then with a crash it all splits open, the fist tightens and the flood comes down just as, with a soft sound, a sigh, a gentle letting out of air, Leo Dell’oro’s legs fold up neatly beneath him, and he falls, too.