Next day Mrs. McGiverin, the captain’s wife from the Restigouche, moored on the Dom Pedro jetty, rowed out to visit. She wore a great blue peaked hat, which she said kept the sun off her face in these lower latitudes and saved her from showing her age. Which she then instantly told Thea was forty-eight.
She had a wealth of theories and superstitions and advice. No children on board now, but she had raised four sons at sea, all now in New England; none in the ocean business. “They had their fill!” Mrs. McGiverin shouted up to the skylight, and Francis looked in from above to salute her smartly.
Speaking confidentially, but still in a perfectly penetrating voice, she listed closer to Thea. “I hear you lost your stewardess to Easthaven, but you are better off without a complainer in the saloon. I won’t have ’em myself, another woman on board ship is a nuisance. I run a tight ship, you ask Captain McGiverin! No second-guessing, altered orders, oh I thought you wanted—none of that for me. Fair’s fair, and I suppose the steward was useful, but good riddance is what I say.”
Kay said it too, but she said it under her breath. Because—and here was the sting of it—as soon as Mrs. McGiverin began slagging Lena Hubbard, Kay was forced to see Lena’s side of it. How she ought not to have kicked her, no matter what; and how she could not go on indulging in tempers. Could not ever again lash out.
From the corner of her eye she saw that Thea was watching her face, which was most likely scowling dreadfully. She smoothed it out and asked Mrs. McGiverin if she would like to see her sampler, which made Thea flush and smile.
There! It was easy enough to be civilized.
As the Morning Light was making ready to leave port, a ship out of Halifax arrived, bringing mail from Yarmouth which included a letter for Thea from Aunty Bob. She read it out loud at breakfast, exclaiming as she read.
You will be sad to hear that Lydia has suffered a small stroke, not anything to worry you on the other side of the world! but it has slowed her down a trifle. Her mouth drags on one side, but she is still able to plauge poor Olive
“Her spelling is worse every year,” said Thea, aside.
and make all and sundry dance to her bidding. Queenie and I go out to Orchard House once or twice a week to give the girl a rest; last week she had hystericks and cried on my bosom, ‘Now I may never leave Mother!’ Am afraid you will have some trouble reading this. Love to all and Francis and to poor Kay, I hope she has—
‘Well, none of that is important.’ Thea folded the letter and ran up to ask if Francis would let her write quickly in answer before they sailed, to send her sympathy back to Aunt Lydia, with some over for Aunty Bob and Queen and of course poor long-suffering Olive.
The emptiness of ocean, after port.
Along the forties on a still night, the stars bent near the earth.
It was too bright for sleep just yet, and only eight o’clock. Warm and safe by Thea’s purple-indigo skirts, Kay leaned on the taffrail, looking into the heavens and the long-spreading veil of the Milky Way. When you stare deep into the dark, the sense of up and down dissolves—everything is out, out, outward.
Mr. Brimner paused in his nightly circumambulation.
“Infinity,” Kay said. “What is it? What comes after infinite?”
Thea moved, turning slightly away from the glory. “Oh—it is all God’s love, I think—expanding, transcending.”
Going off his watch, Mr. Wright offered to bring up his old telescope, to show them “the wonders of astronomy, et cetera . . .” and went below to rustle it out.
Mr. Brimner took up a portion of rail beside Kay, because really it was impossible not to stop and stare. “What is the boundary of the universe?” he asked, perhaps not speaking to her. But went on, after a moment, “In an old Hindu tale the earth rests on the back of elephants. Who stand upon a great tortoise.”
Thea said, “What absurdities people once believed!”
“William James tells of an old lady in America who told him that story, as gospel. To enlighten her, after the Socratic method, he asked, and what does this turtle stand on? Another turtle, said the old lady. And on what does that turtle stand? A bigger turtle! But my dear lady, James asked, what holds up that turtle? Oh it’s no use, Doctor, said the lady, waggling a finger at him: It’s turtles all the way down.”
Half-listening, Kay looked up into the reaches of blackness stretching out on either side, on every side, into never a border, no end to it, because what could be outside? There is no outside—everything is here, revealed, the deepness shining to tell us.
8
A Change of Heading
Mr. Brimner gave Kay back her notebook one afternoon after checking her declensions of the aorist, with one finger stuck in an earlier page, which he then opened to.
She had forgotten to tear out those pages about Annie. “I do not wish to discuss it any further,” she said. Giving him such a look, so that he would never refer to the story again. Because if Thea heard, or Francis, they would know Kay could not be trusted. She had been very stupid to write it down at all.
Mr. Brimner nodded, closed the book and left it beside her on the table. He did not ever push against one the way some people did.
A true storm overtook the Morning Light as she crept along the forties below Australia, reaching for New Zealand. The first real storm of the voyage—more like a prairie blizzard than the thunderstorms they’d weathered so far. All hands on deck; Jiacheng the cook was pressed into service and worked his full rotation with the rest, binding his braid round his neck so it would not be caught in a rope twist.
Early in the forenoon of the first day, the wind increased until the mainsail must be furled or be torn to pieces—or have the ship over. After Arthur Wetmore tore open his leg on a marlinspike, even Mr. Brimner was called up to help haul rope. Kay watched, tucked in close by the lifeboat, as ten men struggled high above with the furling, and a dozen below kept haul on the ropes. The men above were like ants strung out on a laundry line, so small and helpless against the whipping of the wind.
At last they had the great sail furled; then the ropes had to be made fast. Mr. Best’s shouts were thrown back into his mouth, but the men knew their work and stood firm to it. When all was tight, they shimmied one by one along the spar, back to the mainmast and down, down, safe except for new howling of the frustrated wind. Kay scarpered below before Francis could catch her up on deck.
As the gale worsened that night, Francis not only ordered them to keep to their bunks, he said they must be strapped in. Thea worried that Kay would be lonely and afraid, so he strapped both together into their bed, his and Thea’s. Kay did not want to go in with Thea—it was babyish, and beside Thea she could not do the things she did at night to make herself sleep. And she was afraid that she might have a nightmare and make Thea angry.
If she did, the storm overrode the dream. No other sounds could match it. They spent twelve hours in the full grip of wind and wave, clutching one another when the pitch and yaw was at its worst, talking a little (or trying to), drowsing from sheer nervous strain and waking, with a startled groping for each other, at some fresh banging shriek or paroxysm of the ship.
During the blizzard last winter in Blade Lake, Kay had shivered alone over a stoneware hot water bottle, wearing all her warmest things, huddling in the bedclothes for two days while Thea came and went and ice grew like ferns on the windowpanes. But this shuddering seaquake was stranger and longer, and far louder than the whining ghost-wind around the school. The frantic bucking of the Morning Light in massive seas was sometimes dreadfully frightening, and the constant creak and groan of wood made one worry that the boards would pop apart and spill them all into the ocean to drown.
At one lull, a momentary silence, Kay woke in semi-darkness. Beside her Thea lay at the far extent of the strap, her back curled into the side of the curving wooden wall, weeping silently. She must be thinking about her little baby. Kay touched her closed eyelids, stroking the fine skin as gently as her fingers would move, un
til Thea took one arm from the blanket-trap to stroke Kay’s cheek in turn. In a while they slept again. They had turned into animals, sleeping to heal themselves from fear.
No food came, since Jiacheng was on deck; Francis had left a tin of biscuits and a cask of water near. Sick from the pounding motion of the hull, Thea could not eat, but she drank a little when Kay carefully poured out half a metal cup, only spilling a very little. Once or twice they struggled up to sit on the chamber pot, clutching at the bed rail and snatching the lid back on as quick as could be.
One of those times, as Kay clambered back over to the far side of the bed, Thea opened her eyes in the semi-darkness of the storm light and said, “I am pleased to see how hard you are working with Mr. Brimner. He says you make marvellous progress.”
Kay felt her face heating. “I do not work hard enough,” she said.
“Well, I dare say, but you have a natural cleverness for languages and learning. You take after Father in that way.” She meant that Kay did not have to work to understand things, as other people did; as Thea did herself. It was a way of criticizing someone, in fact, for being facile and lazy.
“I think you are more like Father than I,” Kay said, at first meaning to wound Thea back, but finding it was true. “You worked with him, and he talked to you and admired your skill, and when he was ill, you ran the school—you were as good at it as he was.” And Thea had Father’s spiritual insight too, which Kay knew herself to lack.
“If you put the same effort into your other studies, you could perhaps go to normal school one day—not that I believe you would enjoy teaching.”
Kay did not think so either. “I will not be a teacher,” she said. “Perhaps I will paint . . .” But that was childish boasting; she had no skill, she was of no use in this world at all.
“You certainly lack the patience to teach.”
“Well, what am I to do, then?” There was some pleasure to this, to Thea’s attention on her future, even if it was a sore-tooth kind of pleasurable pain.
“Perhaps you will marry, one day. Or find some other calling. You need only submit to God’s will, but you are too fond of your own ideas,” Thea said. “It is not a bad thing to feel so certain about one’s own opinions, I suppose.”
“Mary submitted. She said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
“Well, you will not be asked to be the mother of God,” Thea said, in the dry way that meant she thought Kay ridiculous.
A strong awareness of her own hugeness, her possibility, rose up in Kay, contrary to Thea’s damping. “There could be some other task, that someone might one day have to do?”
Thea turned away from Kay to lie facing the door, no longer willing to discuss nonsense. But she left her warm feet behind her so that Kay’s could still be warmed.
The door opened and Francis came in to check on them, as he had from time to time when he could be spared.
Kay lay quiet, breathing as if asleep. Behind a tangle of eyelashes, she watched him bend to kiss Thea. It was so strange to see Thea lift her face to meet his mouth. That happy yielding to her husband, even in the midst of the storm. As if they had always been together—as if all the years Kay had had Thea to herself at Blade Lake were a story, or a lie.
It went on and on, twenty hours, thirty . . . nearly forty hours before the storm spent itself and spat them out the other side. Thea stayed the whole of the storm obediently in bed, but after thirty hours Kay found it physically excruciating to be swaddled all the time, and convinced her sister that she must creep quickly back to her own bunk, just for her Greek book, or begin screaming.
Each step across the bare and battened-down saloon was dangerous. The passengers—all she and Thea could ever be—had been ordered to stay below, but how could anyone notice? It was six o’clock and would be dark again soon; she must find some brief respite in the air.
In her cabin, Kay dressed and put on her mackintosh. She climbed slowly up the companionway, gripping the handrail hard, stretching her neck to reconnoitre before she stepped up on deck. It was not so bad, not anymore. It was cold but not raining, and the motion was only the predictable rhythmic rolling of heavy seas. She pulled the mackintosh tighter about her neck and slipped around the port side, out of the mate’s eye.
The water was black, except where it wept or ached into dull gunmetal grey. Holding tight, Kay leaned against the rail, hip bones crushed into the wood until it hurt. Everything hurt all the time anyway, her head, her throat. Her insides, those wormy guts, and the bottom of her back.
Thea was wrong about her being so clever. She was too stupid to learn Greek. All she could do was read music and make her fingers go in a certain way at a certain time on the piano. It did not even sound good, only correct—nothing like the beauty of Thea’s own playing. And now the piano was out of tune, along with everything else.
There must be something I can do well, some work I can do, Kay thought, desperate in this darkness and storm about the course of her life. Well, but why must there? God had no use for her, no reason that she was good, or anything, or any thing.
On a sighing subsidence, the cloud that had wept over them parted and the moon shone through, a thin, bright, painful light, showing you the path across the sea. Which you could never walk on, or you would drown. A swell came again, and the wind rose into a shrieking roar, racing over the water to dive into the reefed mainsail and the tiny storm jib. Kay grabbed at the rail, her knees bending to take the roll. It was fresh!
As the ship plunged back into the trough of the wave, her feet came off the deck, and she was for a moment airborne—her fingers closing round the railing more fiercely and her heart lifting like her body.
Never mind misery. She laughed to be there, after the places she had been before. The scrubby prairie had not confined her, nor the hills and the mountains, beautiful as they were too—and these waves were more than mountains.
The ship’s heading changed, making the deck tilt again under her feet, as Francis and Mr. Wright set the wheel to lessen the force of this new blow.
A screeling voice cut through the water and wind. “Catch your death!” Seaton cried, like a seagull shrieking. Kay spied his beaky head peeking from the lifeboat’s tarpaulin.
One finger pointed back to the companionway. “Lubber,” he named her, and she bowed, conceding, and scrambled below.
They made land at Auckland in good time, the storm having blown them ahead of schedule. Francis proposed deputizing Mr. Brimner to take Thea and Kay for an afternoon’s outing to the famously beautiful Nihotupu Falls up by Waitakere while the Morning Light was being unloaded in Auckland harbour. But that proposed jaunt stretched into a longer excursion when Francis was approached on the pier, not an hour after they moored, by a hustling, importunate dentist from Ottawa who was searching for a ship to take kauri logs to New York, and wanted to show off his new tramway. This perilous line carried logs from the forest on a steel-rail track winding around the cliffs to a loading wharf at Whatipu beach. The dentist hoped to convince Francis that kauri logs were worth a stop on his way back from China.
Although doubtful about lumber from a tree he wasn’t certain he could sell, Francis accepted Dr. Raynor’s offer of a conveyance over to Piha, and a pleasure jaunt on the tramway. He was too willing to respond to a stranger’s advances, Thea thought.
Next morning, Dr. Raynor rolled up in a brake, sharp to time. He secured Francis a seat beside him in the front of the brake, where he must listen to the dentist’s unending stories. Sooner him than me, Thea thought, stepping up into the back to compose herself for a jouncing ride. But there was no escaping that penetrating nasal voice. Raynor told Francis that he was determined to bring the local logging industry up to date. He had built a sawmill and, in order to make it a paying proposition, fashioned a tramway from the Piha valley along Karekare beach all the way up to Whatipu, where boats waited to ship the logs to Australia.
Through the heat of the morning, Thea, Kay and Mr. Brimner sat silent, stil
l pale and testy from the rigours of the crossing. The dentist provided an ostentatious picnic lunch, which they stopped to eat at Piha. Thea waved Kay off to walk in the sand, when she had eaten enough sandwiches and was reaching for a third cake. Mr. Brimner sat upright, watching Kay go down the slope of the shore. Taking mercy on him, Thea said in his ear, “Please do go, Mr. Brimner. I’ll explain to Dr. Raynor that I do not like Kay to walk alone.”
He set off gladly, clapping his odd straw topi on his head. Thea lay back in the very comfortable folding chair and un-listened to Dr. Raynor rhapsodizing about the uses to which kauri lumber could be put, and his innovations re efficient distribution. “We gather the logs in gullies in the hills, sluice ’em down to the beach at Piha, load ’em on my train, tockety-tockety round the beach to the wharf—Bob’s your uncle, and my aunt Fanny!”
Although Francis enjoyed him, Thea found the little dentist’s practised sales pitch coarse. While Raynor held forth, she watched Kay and Mr. Brimner stroll out along the beach, faces turned to the sea wind, their footprints making a curving line in the shining wet sand. They were in step, those two. Thea watched them with quiet pleasure. What a very good thing it had been to take the priest on board. God had sent him to relieve her burden.
Then the source of that burden, the loss of her son, sprang back to her mind, as it did from time to time, from day to day, hour to hour. She shut her mouth tight and turned back to Francis and the dentist.
The Voyage of the Morning Light Page 10