Wake up! I say, crouching over him.
John opened his eyes slow, staring up into my face—
Egn? he says.
Then, after a breath—
Boy, like you see diab!
Papee, I say.
Egn?
Papee!
Finally John sat up. He shuffled round on all fours, both of us kneeling together over my father. Lying there on his back with the moon spilling down so bright we could see him clear as day. The dull reflection in Papee’s eyes. Wide, wide open. But both his pupils were turned back so only the whites showed.
Except they weren’t white a-tall. They were yellow. Purple veins crawling all through. Like two bright yellow marbles, pupil-less, snagged up in they little purple nets. Papee’s face covered over in a hundred tiny drops of sweat. Beaded-up. His teeth clenched tight-tight together.
I reached to feel for his pulse—searching at the side of his bullmoose-neck for the thick protruding vein there—my two fingertips probing, pressing. Except I’d never done this thing before in all my life. I didn’t even know what-the-arse I was meant to be feeling for.
And in any case Papee’s pulse was racing so fast, it had turned into something solid. Unfeelable. Uncountable. Or no pulse a-tall. His skin so hot it stung my fingers.
John steupsed. He shoved me out the way—rough—reaching to grasp hold of both Papee’s shoulders in the grips of his strong hands. Shaking him. Rattling Papee against the unpinned boards of the deck beneath us. Like stones in a tin bucket, rattling right the way up my own spinebones.
Finally Papee gasped, sucking in a short breath. Followed by a single long exhalation. His teeth slowly unclenching, lips flapping loose, spray of sweat flickering off—a soft nimbus, floating over Papee’s mouth beneath the moon.
But he didn’t wake up. Not now. Not yet. His eyes didn’t turn round inside they sockets not-for-nothing neither.
I turned to John—
Look, I say.
I grasped hold of the sweated-up strip of canvas. Pulling it away from the lower part of Papee’s thighs—
Look! I say again, the only word I can think of, only word I can shape my tongue round.
I nodded my chin down at him.
Beneath Papee’s pale drawers—on the pale, moonlit canvas—he was lying atop a puddle of shite.
Only it was too black to be shite. Proper shite.
Last Letter from Mr. Etzler to All Members of the Tropical Emigration Society
The Morning Star, No. 31, 12 March 1846
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I write to you with a heavy heart. A battered soul, shunned by mine own people, slandered against by those same persons who hastened to call me prophet, genius, patron saint of all who labour and toil. They hound me to the quick, brute ruffians in the shape of honest men. My crown is metaphoric, yet its thorns prick as true. My blood floweth as red! For if—as a certain ASSASSIN EDITOR who proclaims to speak for the MAJORITY has put it down in our own fair Star—‘the Society now wishes to sever all ties with the likes of Mr. Etzler,’ then my answer to you, Mr. Powell, is this: Let it be so! Let me cease from this moment forward to rent the hairs from this white head, and wish you Godspeed along your way, and beg leave and liberty to do the same. Fear not, gentle people, I shall not trouble you again.
What a heinous crime it was in me to renounce all profits for myself, whilst offering at the same time to TEACH, free of charge, those willing to LISTEN and LEARN, affording thereby the means to live a life of leisure, accompanied by every pleasure and luxury known to humankind. How wrong of me to place all of this within your easy grasp! What a terrible sin to offer for every £10 share of your investment in our TES an acre of your own private land, 1/2 to be cultivated within the first year by my Satellite GRATIS, with all the best foodstuffs plus the requisite houses to live in—1/2 of those profits to be devoted to the shareholders for your own purposes as you saw fit, the other 1/2 dedicated according to my and the Co.’s directions. This celebrated union to be above all labour forever, beyond any care or unpleasant preoccupation for its physical wants: one hour’s easy gardening per day, or not, to be accompanied by song and music, with utmost cleanliness, simplicity, and elegance in dress. Your passions to consist of cheerful, inoffensive conversation—lecturing, reading, innocent amusements. All tending to a contemplation of the means by which to increase the wellbeing of our kind, individually and universally, every day a feast of pleasure and utility! To make of you and your children and your children’s children TRUE princes and princesses. A new tribe of humanity, reigning in dominion over the earth!
Be not afeared, my children, for no one shall make such an offer to you again. Since no one but myself is capable of offering and fulfilling such a promise.
Are you not ready, then, to lift the stone to stone that ‘execrable tyrant’—as the butcher editor of our Star has named me—that ‘diabolical dictator’ who proposed to perform all of this tedious business himself, and leave to YOU all the benefits? How unpardonable in him to have the WILL to execute his plan without suffering any others—no more slaves but insensible machines of iron and wood!—whilst pledging at the same time the patent rights for my own machines as SECURITY in the same undertaking? Did I not constitute the organ of TES myself to be the sole paymaster for my own inventions, all things to be the profit of said shareholders? Did I not declare myself to be content with the mere crumbs that might remain, after all expenses were defrayed according to my plan? I do not want to TOUCH the other monies, nor would I soil my hands in the fingering of them! So I am at complete remiss to discover how I could contrive to enrich myself by embezzlement, swindle, or any unfair means—so accused by that perfidious editor of our little Star.
And yet, to have been shackled hand-and-foot to the likes of a Capt Taylor and a Mr. Carr! Who against my every plea and instruction hastened to purchase at all hazards for £1000 of your dear money, 100 or 150 acres of useless undeveloped woodland, with a large mangrove swamp in their midst detrimental to health and life. Then, against all my advices, to the complete disorder and utter mischief of his OWN petty contrivances, Mr. Carr (his colleague, the Capt Taylor, having suffered already the consequences of his own selfish behaviour!) proceeded to take to Chaguabarriga a shipload of your pioneers, with tender children and women amongst them, before they knew whither they were going, and where they remain still—shipwrecked, lost, utterly destitute. And not only that: to have stolen my Satellite! Pilfered most vilely from under my own eyes, only to take with them to this miserable place! (I charge Mr. Carr above all others in this vicious crime.) And yet the villainous Powell has the audacity to call ME a thief! The stolen machine is with them still, for all eyes to bear witness—and to what utility? for what purpose? lacking my expertise to set the Satellite to work? My dear people, who can save them? Who can help Chaguabarriga now? Their lives are surely doomed!
For even as I write this letter, my pen is interrupted by the melancholy news just delivered by a certain Capt M’Cullum, a surveyor in the employment of the Colonial Government here, whose vessel happened to touch at Chaguabarriga Bay but a few days ago: the death and burial of Mr. Whitechurch, one of our most prominent and cherished members! His bereaved wife and niece, who remained behind in the safety of this port, are shattered out of all perceptions. Their only means of fleeing such shocking and devastating news is to return to friends and relatives in England at the first opportunity. Our humble Mr. Whitechurch may be the first (barring Capt T. who is of little consequence here), but I assure you he will not be the last! Others will surely follow, many others—women and children too—ere they quit this unhealthy place! You may mark my words in that.
I can stand by no longer and watch it happen. My conscience cannot bear it—though I am perfectly faultless in the undertaking, since you have as ample written proof my own chastisements of this enterprise at Chaguabarriga from the outset. For this very reason, as you know yourselves, I hastened to Venezuela to explore and investig
ate the possibilities of a Main Grant there. In that also I fulfilled my promise, and so much more. Wherein the accusations then of an executioner editor—‘Mr. Etzler was sent out from London to obtain for the TES a tract of 70,000 acres of government land, and he failed to do so.’ Did I not find at Baranjas, close to the capital town of Caracas, an estate called Santa Magdelena, to be had at little or trifling cost to our Society? a tract of the most fertile farmland known to exist in this hemisphere, unmeasured, but said to exceed 70,000 fanegas? Nearly TEN TIMES the original amount proposed and promised by me according to the bylaws of our TES. But all of our funds having been heedlessly thrown away on Chaguabarriga, I had no recourse but to apply to you for more. And even with that money not forthcoming, I offered to purchase the estate MYSELF by my own means, plus what little I had remaining from the sale of Mr. Rake’s cutlery, with the invitation to you to join me under the auspices of a newly RECONSTITUTED Society (see my manifesto!), but since you chose willfully not to hear and answer my plea, with not a farthing sent, not a scrap thrown before a dog, I was once more to infernal desperation forced to abandon my plan! all my dreams dashed! cast once more upon barren ground!
And now, cursed and despised for all my efforts, shunned for time ever after by the very Society for which I laboured to conceive and give birth, what course have I but to turn my back? I am poor, penniless, alone. I can do nothing here in Trinidad. Nor would I wish to associate myself any longer with the inhabitants of this place—the wealthy white Englishmen and Frenchmen, I mean!—for they are most profound in their stupidity, a closed-minded, racist bunch—ignorant, childish, brutish as boors. Our TGE&SWR is ruined, that enterprise for which Mr. Stollmeyer and myself were sent out to this island, and would have installed here. Parties of the rival railroad have made certain our destruction and loss for their own gain, we have been declared bankrupt, and I must perforce leave Mr. Stollmeyer behind to pick up the broken pieces, before he can come and join me.
To speak nothing of the blatant misrepresentation and backbiting accounts given of the sea trial of our Naval Automaton! To expand out of all conceivable recognition a minor technical complication of our Connecting Apparatus—a mere glitch!—whereby the power exerted upon the submerged stationary platform would be transferred to our wave machinery, so simply remedied! so easily fixed with a few minor adjustments! So much ado about nothing! For which ignorant fool, my dear Ladies and Gentlemen, would demand perfection of an UNTRIED machine? Wherefore then the trial in the first place? And yet to have strangled with brutish grasp and the stroke of a murderous pen the hopes of so novel an invention! A machine that would surely have revolutionised the concept of ocean travel forever! (In this I charge not only Powell but the idiot publishers of such rubbish as passes for periodicals on this backwards place!) Those editors and Mr. Powell have written as if they had the power of the old SPANISH INQUISITION behind them—they would outdo any inquisition that ever existed! The damage has been done, never to be undone. All those enthusiastic shareholders of our TTC have run away, their purses shut, tails between their legs—that Co. declared bankrupt too, dissolved away into nothing.
But out of the ashes a new phoenix arises: READ MY MANIFESTO! For it has appeared in its entirety in the two preceding numbers of the Star (nos. 28 & 29), and the assassin editor (TP) would not dare touch a WORD of its pain and simple truth! According to my manifesto, a new TES shall be reconstituted in the United States, where I go now to secure and perfect my inventions. There I will search to see if people can yet be found (I mean intelligent people) to combine together for the greater salvation of themselves and all our race (I mean the human race)—from ignorance, stupidity, slavery, and their faithful companions of misery and degradation, moral and physical—a union of rational beings on the basis of well-ascertained facts with common dictates and prudence. For my own part I want only free men, and no slaves of labour, unteachable of higher things than slave-business, slave-virtue, and slave-wisdom or cunning—therefore my manifesto! My plan was and is of strictest economy, with circumspection and SCIENCE. In the Harmony Society of Pennsylvania I have a few friends yet (they are familiar with me and my writings, they have examined the plans of my Satellite, they eagerly await my arrival). And I have a friend still in Mr. Roebling. And in Mr. Rex. They shall assist me. We shall yet see glorious things. I am myself again. That the Society once fettered me, and spoiled the easiest plan ever conceived of for the wellbeing of humanity—but all of this is only suspended.
Future correspondence, prepaid, will reach me in care of my lawyer, S.S. Rex, Esq, Philadelphia.
—J.A. Etzler
15
An Ancient Arawak Trace
For the first few nights following Papee’s seizure he didn’t exhibit no signs of the fever a-tall. Nothing. Nothing John nor me could detect anyway, and Papee seemed all but oblivious heself. Understand, the symptoms of this sickness only revealed theyself after. That much we’d learnt from Mr. Whitechurch and Mr. Craddock. By the time anybody saw the telltale signs—the jaundiced skin and eyes, bouts of fever followed by cold sweats, the blood-infused vomits and diarrhoea—by the time anybody recognised any of that, the victims theyself were already beyond remedy. What-ever-the-arse that might be.
During those days Papee seemed stronger than ever. More bull-minded. Hardened in he tenacity to refurbish the old schooner and make her seaworthy again. Like if that first episode hadn’t even happened. Like John and me had dreamt it up. Because even the frightful colouring of Papee’s skin and eyes had faded by the following morning. Washed away clean.
A relief, I suppose, to the extent that neither John nor me never said nothing about it. Not to each other and certainly not to Papee. Don’t say nothing and it won’t be true. And when Mr. Wood arrived in Mr. Carr’s dinghy on the fifth morning following Papee’s attack—reporting that the fever was spreading like bushfire amongst the pioneers at the Prescott Estate—we assured him all of us were fine—
Healthy n’ happy as a basket o’ hog plums, Mr. Carr says.
A much-distressed Mr. Wood stood before us on the beach. His eyeballs sunk deep inside they sockets, like marbles shoved into a clump of clay. Asking Mr. Carr for his little box of homeopathic pills. Pleading with him. Only hope, Mr. Wood claimed, to save his wife and daughters. All four of whom were suffering something dreadful with this disease. Till Captain Maynard came in a fortnight’s time to transport the lot of them to the government hospital in Port-Spain. Because it wasn’t only his wife and girls. Mr. and Mrs. Hemmingway were ill too. And young Billy Sharp—that poor lad couldn’t scarcely raise his head up off the pillow!
Mr. Carr handed over he box. Straightway. Without a flinch. Instructing Mr. Wood as to the complete which-what-where-why of them: coolants & spleen-ventilators & blood-thinners & anticoagulants. Mr. Carr handed over the last of his acetylsalicylic acid too. Those final few thimblefuls of white powder shaking at the bottom of his little brown glassbottle. And even when Mr. Wood suggested leaving half the powder back, a handful of the pills, a select few—just in case, God forbid, this bloody fever should strike at one of you lads!—Mr. Carr shook his head. No-no. Wouldn’t be necessary.
Even Papee refused—
Our lot’s good-as-gold, he says. It’s Mrs. Wood n’ your daughters in need of those med’cines!
We hurried to shove him off in Mr. Carr’s dinghy, wading him off the beach a few yards into the dim morning chop. Mr. Wood setting out rowing back to his wife and daughters, little box of vials rattling atop his lap. Four of us waving good-bye.
___________________
During those days we laboured over the schooner harder than ever. Papee hardest of us all. Twelve hours at a stretch some days, breaking off only to eat. To catch a cooling seabath. Papee’s pile of timbers disappearing steady before our eyes, the ones that remained after that bonfire. Son, I watched them go with a mixture of longing and fear. Because half of me wanted those boards to be done with—at least then we could hold-up. We could stop to
catch we breath. The other half feeling a kinda comfort in our endless, mindless toil. The circularity of it. To such extent that I began to picture the three of us and our schooner standing at the centre of a swirling cosmos. The sea a vast lukewarm soup swimming round us. We were its motion—we’d established it & we maintained it & we would usher in its end—the termination of which had me geegeeree as oblivion itself: the finish of Papee’s woodpile.
Where we’d get more boards from he never suggested. He didn’t need to. Because somehow, soon as we neared the bottom, that blasted woodpile started regrowing itself. Every time we took off a board. Every time we turned we backs to it! Because the more of those worm-eaten rotted-out planks we ripped from the bottom of that hull—coming off in our hands like pulverizing-pasteboard, like layers of compressed-sackcloth disintegrating between our fingers—the more boards we pulled from that woodpile and dragged over beside Papee, the bigger it grew. Papee fitting in the replacement boards as precise as a jigsaw puzzle, a patchwork quilt. Skills he’d learnt during his years on the Isle of Wight.
Son, the more of those boards we used up the more we found.
The patch of white sand beneath the hull became carpeted over with woodcurls half-a-foot thick. Crunching beneath our bare feet like leaves in autumn. Wafting back-and-forth & rattling together & spiraling round in little eddies when the sea breeze blew. Papee’s hands and my hands covered over with blisters. Till they became raw, unrecognisable, misshapen things. Bulbous. Beef-red. The whites of John’s palms turning whiter. More transparent—a pair of medusas sucking the life out of the shaver’s knobs.
___________________
We’d hardly fallen asleep that night when John and me were shaken awake by Papee’s coughing. Hawking. Both of us sitting up together. Papee lying atop the canvas mattress belly-down, his face turned away—rasping, over and over.
As Flies to Whatless Boys Page 25