Silence the Dead

by David Crossman

  The sting of the lash was unbearable. Thomas had meant to be strong and silent, but it was as if the blow, clawing across his back, rent holes in the deep reservoir where all his hurt and loss resided. Tears surged spontaneously from his eyes and scalded his cheeks. He screamed at the first blow. And again at the second. But less at the third. Less still at the fourth. By the tenth, he could no longer spare the energy as it took all he had to brace and tense and clamp his teeth on the dagger’s hilt.

  When the whip at last fell to the mate’s side, its leather talons dripping with blood and flecked with strips of skin, Sadie was released and allowed to tend his wounds. She and the sailors untied him, and he collapsed to the deck.

  “Roll ‘im, boys,” said Meservey, as another sailor handed him a bucket of water. The sailors turned him from his side, exposing his back. “Stand aside, miss.”

  “What’re you playin’ at now?” Sadie demanded, looking at the bucket.

  “Playin’ at nothin’,” Meservey replied. “If you want him to live, you’ll stand aside.”

  Sadie hesitated a moment, but standing slowly, drew out of the way.

  The mate emptied the bucket of freezing salt water onto Thomas’s back, immediately reviving him to a crescendo of searing pain. He screamed long and loud. “What was that for!?” Sadie cried, dropping to her knees. She gently leaned over Thomas, cradled his head against her breast and stroked his hair. “‘Ain’t you done enough! You’re killin’ ‘im!”

  Saying nothing, Meservey drew his brandy flask from his vest pocket, unscrewed the cork, took a mournful sip, and emptied the contents on Thomas’s back.

  “Here!” Sadie cried, batting frantically, impotently at the stream that landed on Thomas’s back like liquid fire. “What’re you doin’!?”

  Thomas, overcome by pain, fainted. The mate stopped pouring, corked the flask, and handed Sadie what remained.

  “Get this down ‘im,” he said. He dropped the whip and turned to go.

  Gripped by impulse, Sadie seized the whip. “Let’s see what kind of man you are!” She swung wildly at him from her kneeling position, but Meservey simply stepped back out of reach. The violence of her swing brought the cords flailing back at her, leaving tendrils of blood around her wrist.

  “You be wantin’ a bullwhip for the job you ‘ave in mind, lass.” He held out his hand. “Don’t you think you’d best tend to ‘im? Killin’ me ain’t goin’ to be helpful at the moment. Later on, you c’n wrestle God over who’s to ‘ave the pleasure.”

  Sadie’s hands had reflexively gone to her wrist, and she had dropped the whip. The mate picked it up and tucked it in his belt. “The salt and liquor hurt like hell,” he said. “But they’ll keep rot from settin’ in.”

  For a moment, the bystanders had half expected Sadie to pounce on the mate. Now, as she realized why he had done what he had done, she wilted, her hands falling on Thomas’s head, cradling it against her.

  That evening, with Quiggly’s permission, the Conlans and Sadie clustered in the bow where the deckhouse shielded them from the following wind. The long prow pointed a bony black finger at the western sky and snared the setting sun in its rigging. During the day, the mistress smuggled some ointment to Sadie, who had gently applied it to Thomas’s wounds. It seemed to help. It would have been much better if he’d have taken his shirt off, but he’d insisted she mend it – which she had done as best she could – and he wore it so Katy and Tiffin wouldn’t see. He forbade Sadie to speak of it.

  Between them, with an assist from Meservey, Thomas and Sadie carried the children topside. Sadie had draped their blankets on some rigging and beat the lice out of them as best she could. Then she made them as comfortable as possible on the foredeck. Already they seemed much improved, though Katy was still pathetically weak and ever present was the danger she might relapse at any moment, as so many had. Tiffin hadn’t caught the fever, but dysentery. The worst was over, but he was weak as well, and in that condition, all the more susceptible to the disease that had claimed so many.

  “Funny,” said Sadie, stroking Katy’s head in her lap, “back ‘ome I didn’t give water a thought, y’know? There was always some nearby. But out ‘ere . . . there’s people below right now’d give you a chest of gold, if they ‘ad one, fer a sip frum a dirty cup.”

  “We should pray for rain,” said Tiffin, nearly concealed by his blankets.

  Sadie laughed, but swallowed it – nearly choking herself – when she realized the boy was serious. Thomas and Katy bowed their heads.

  “How many Hail Marys do we say for rain?” Katy asked from the corner of her mouth.

  Sadie watched the procedure with curiosity. She had no personal experience of prayer, or of people who practiced it. They folded their hands and talked aloud as if they really believed there was a God somewhere listening. She looked up at the sky, half expecting to see storm clouds gather. Nothing happened. Even when they concluded the prayer, the sky remained unchanged, if a bit darker.

  “Worth a try,” she said.

  Thomas turned slightly toward her. “Pardon?”

  “Worth a try, I says. That prayin’. Too bad it didn’t work.”

  “Who’s to say it ain’t?”

  “Well . . . where’s the rain? That’s what you was prayin’ fer, wan’t it?”

  “It don’t work that way.”

  Sadie cocked her head.

  “We pray, then we wait to see what God’s answer is,” Thomas explained, as his father had explained to him, and his to him before. “If it rains, or whatever, the answer was ‘yes’. If it don’t, then it’s ‘no.’ ”

  The logic of this sat heavily on Sadie’s brow. “Makes it easy on God, don’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be Him,” said Thomas. “Just think, havin’ to listen to all the prayers of all the people in the world and decide which ones to answer.”

  “Why don’t ‘e jus’ answer ‘em all?”

  “Well, He does, but the answer is just as like to be ‘no’ as ‘yes’.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because that’s faith.”

  “What is?”

  “When your prayer ain’t answered the way you want it to be, that’s when your faith takes over an’ tells you it’s because God knows and you don’t.”

  “Knows what?” said Sadie, really wanting to know.

  “Knows what will happen if He answers ‘yes’.”

  “Well, don’t ‘e already know that?”

  “Of course He does.”

  “Then, why pray? Ain’t that like tryin’ to get ‘im to change ‘is mind, like you know somethin’ ‘e don’t?”

  “Of course not,” said Thomas, who had never examined the foundation beneath his beliefs.

  “Why ain’t it?”

  “Because.”

  They’d come full circle, and Sadie was none the wiser. Still, the theological exchange had generated a lot of thoughts she’d never had before. She considered them for a long time in silence until she was stirred from her reverie by a drop of rain on her forehead. Then another. And another. “Bleedin’ rain!”

  She rounded up Meservey, and they quickly bustled Thomas, who was still bleeding profusely, Tiffin, and Katy out of the weather and spread the news below deck. Within seconds, the hold spewed its human cargo onto the decks, a rag-tag army of the near-dead harvesting the elements with buckets, pails, dishes, cups, waterproof canvas, and anything else that would hold water. The crew fetched every water cask on the ship, emptied its foul contents overboard, and stood them like a regiment of soldiers on deck, open to the sky. The clouds opened up and filled them, and cleaned them, and filled them again. And when everything that could be filled was filled to overflowing, the passengers danced around the decks with their mouths open to catch the rain. And when their bellies were full, they undressed to the limits that individual modesty would allow and washed their clothes in the downpour, and in that condition, be
gan to run and play about the decks amid the phantasms of steam that rose from their flesh and from their breath in the fresh, freezing air.

  Quiggly, who had emerged from his cabin at the first sounds of the tumult and strode purposefully to the rail – prepared to withhold no measure to put down a rebellion – softened visibly at the sight. Children in rags would run and slide, smashing themselves gleefully against the deckhouse. Adults embraced one another and spun in circles letting the cold, fresh tears of heaven purge them of pestilence and hopelessness, inside and out.

  The clouds that had brought the weather slipped quietly astern, drawing a curtain of rain between the ship and the ascending night.

  Wrapping Katy and Tiffin in blankets, Sadie had them strip their clothes. These she held now, in a steamy Godfinger of sunlight on the foredeck, squeezing the water from them and draping them on the rigging to dry. She, and they, and everything around them had been so dirty so long that even the lye from Mrs. Quiggly’s store, as it burned the skin on her hands, felt good. She rinsed their clothes in a puddle on the cabin top.

  “Well, you made a believer outta me, you did.”

  “That was a ‘yes’,” said Thomas, happy that his faith, however ill-formed, had been vindicated.

  “Whyn’t you pray fer an ‘undred quid?” Sadie said, dead serious. “Or a nice eel pie? I could murder an eel pie.”

  Thomas wanted at all costs to avoid another theological interrogation. “That’s not the way it works.”

  “But . . . ”

  He held up his hand in imitation of the Captain, for whom the gesture had been so effective. “I don’t want to talk about it now,” he said. “Let’s just sit here and rest and watch the sky.” Impulsively, he put his arm around her and pulled her close. Her instinct was to draw back. She had been embraced before, embraces with no warmth, no affection, no emotion. But this, she could sense, was different. Thomas’s gesture was a simple act of protection. Of acceptance. With no motive behind it but an intimate sharing of the moment. In an odd way, she knew that Thomas would never want her the way other men wanted her.

  Why did that bother her?

  The Captain made no demands of Thomas for the next two days. During that time, Sadie sparingly applied to his wounds the ointment the mistress had supplied. They spent most of their time in the bows – despite the protestations of the women below deck that the ‘wild air’ would kill them. “Better die out here,” Thomas had said stoically. Sadie and the children agreed. As nobody objected, they set up a make-shift tent which, as long as the wind stayed at their backs, provided sufficient shelter. When the wind was against them, however, no corner offered refuge from its bite. Nevertheless, it was preferable to the perpetual miasma below deck.

  A few days later, Quiggly and his wife were at their evening meal when Thomas burst into the cabin with the mate on his heels.

  “Captain! There’s land off the starboard bow!”

  The mate, his head bowed to avoid contact with the low ceiling, navigated his way between Thomas and the Captain. “I tol’ ‘im that were himpossible, Cap’n, as you’d studied the charts! But ‘e won’t leave off!”

  Quiggly got up, wiped his mouth on a napkin, and went to the chart table, where he studied the course he had drawn. “Meservey’s right,” he said, tossing his napkin across the table in the direction of his wife. “The nearest land to starboard is Sable Island, near fifty mile away.”

  “But I heard the breakers!” Thomas protested.

  “You heard waves,” the Captain corrected. “According to this chart . . . ”

  “And I saw a light . . . ”

  There was only one lighthouse within a hundred and fifty miles, and for those who saw its beacon, it was already too late. The notion was unthinkable. “An’ mermaids an’ monsters into the bargain,” Quiggly said lightly. “Might be it’s Charybdis, boy. You hear the Sireens, did ye?”

  “Now, Josiah,” his wife interposed, “why don’t you take the boy up the bows and show ‘im he’s wrong?”

  Quiggly looked sharply at his wife, whose intervention was clearly not welcome, then to Meservey, and lastly to Thomas. If word got ‘round that he was being bent to the will of a cabin boy . . . Then again, if there was a chance the boy was right . . . He threw his napkin on the table. “Damned nuisance!” he snarled.

  Thomas and the mate fell in behind Quiggly as he made his way out of the cabin, banging his head sharply on the doorjamb as he ducked out, which soured his disposition further. With every other step between the cabin and the forecastle, he swore between his teeth. Thomas couldn’t make out the words, but sensed curses raining down on his head and the collective heads of his ancestors going back some time. He began to wonder if it wasn’t just waves he’d heard after all.

  Arriving on the foredeck, Quiggly gestured for silence. Meservey was the first to react. “He’s right, Cap’n! There’s breakers off to starboard!”

  Quiggly’s face became ashen, for the wind bore worse news. “And to port as well. Mr. Meservey, bring us about!”

  Meservey ran to the port side, staring holes in the fog. “There’s no room, Cap’n! Where are we?”

  “Sable Island.”

  The name of the cursed sand bar, some thirty-five miles long and home to hundreds of shipwrecks, escaped Quiggly’s lips in little more than a whisper, but the ghostly fury of the word seemed to shudder along the length of the Crimea’s keel.

  In many a tavern, in many a sea-side town, Quiggly had laughed long and loud at sailors who had sworn Sable Island wasn’t rooted to the ocean floor, but roamed the foggy reaches of the north Atlantic in search of ships to devour. Now, he began to wonder. Had his reckoning truly been that far off?

  Sable, if that’s what it was, was mostly sand and its shape shifted, sometimes drastically, sculpted at the whimsy of wind and waves of terrifying force. Now, unless his ears were playing tricks on him, it had somehow calved a separate island, one no map would reveal, because it might not have been there a month ago, nor was it likely to survive a month hence. Since there was no room to come about, either to the right or left, they had only one hope: that there was water enough between Sable and its calf to allow the Crimea to pass.

  “We’ll have to drive ‘er through, Meservey. Run up the sail to the last woman’s petticoat, and no time to lose!”

  Chapter Eight

  The mate went immediately about his tasks, barking commands at the crew.

  “How did this happen?” Quiggly asked himself. He turned on his heel and thundered back toward his cabin. Thomas followed, awaiting orders.

  “Well, my love,” said the mistress with a smile as they entered. “Did you sort it out?”

  Quiggly ignored her and went straight to his charts, pulling another lantern from its bracket on the wall. The mistress appealed to Thomas with her eyes, but he only shrugged and made some sign she couldn’t interpret.

  Suddenly, Quiggly stood bolt upright, banging his head on the rafter. He didn’t seem to notice. “It’s a six, not an eight!”

  “What is, dear?” said his wife, becoming alarmed.

  Quiggly banged the map with the back of his fist. “The damned chart. I told the helmsman sixty-eight degrees. It was meant to be sixty-six!”

  Quiggly consulted his pocket watch and another chart. “She’s near high tide. There might be hope.” He turned sharply to Thomas. “Tell Meservey to double the mizzen and run up the big top gallant. I want every square inch of sail we’ve got! Then tell ‘em down below to batten down. Move, boy!”

  Thomas promptly obeyed – wondering how the mate would react to orders relayed by the cabin boy – as Quiggly returned to muttering contemplation of his charts.

  In the background, the mistress quietly secured the small stock of personal treasures and mementoes that had come into her possession in the course of her travels with her husband, as well as the small bag containing the captain's extra spectacles, rule, pencil, and compass. Special care was given to securing the locker c
ontaining the necessities: butter, tobacco, soap, a fine Cheshire cheese, a little keg of sprats, and a regiment of narrow shelves groaning under the weight of sugar jars, preserves, bottled porter, spices, and the other accoutrements of a long voyage. Lastly, a shroud was drawn over Mr. Gladstone, the quaking little yellow apostrophe that was Mrs. Quiggly’s unhappy canary.

  As he set out for the foredeck, Thomas suspected what the Captain was planning to do, in fact, all he could do. The narrow thoroughfare between the islands would have created a giant sluice through which the ocean surged as the tides swept through it, creating momentary maelstroms that sucked in, chewed up, and spat out whatever nautical effluvium chanced within its vortex. Quiggly’s only option, having sailed too far within the deadly embrace of the islands to either come about or turn aside, was to shoot the rapids with all possible speed in hopes the hull and keel would plow through the hidden sand bar, rather than fetch up on it, where the ship would be slowly ground to bits by the perpetual conflict of opposing seas.

  The danger was that the bar, if more rock than sand, would tear gaping holes in the Crimea’s hull or simply stop it in its tracks altogether, or both.

  It was a deadman’s gamble, one with no alternative.

  Meservey – the hub of all activity upon the deck – wasn’t hard to find. Thomas off-loaded the Captain’s instructions and was relieved when they were acknowledged with a grave nod and acted upon without question. “You tell the passengers to brace up,” Meservey commanded in return. “Then you and Slocum get up the sprit with a line and call depth!”

  By the time Thomas and ordinary seaman Slocum pulled themselves onto the bowsprit, carrying between them a heavily-weighted coil of rope that had been knotted every six feet, the ship had entered the narrowest part of the straight and was being carried through upon the back of the surging sea at speeds high enough to strip the barnacles from the hull. Never before had anyone aboard traveled so fast. An inexplicable exhilaration mingled with stark-staring fear to create a strange cocktail of emotions. Even the wind couldn’t keep up. The sails went slack, but the Crimea coursed on in eerie silence, putting more distance under her hull in five minutes than she had in an hour of hard sailing.