by Ben Jones
I stood near the whispering flames, smoke burning my eyes, feeling the blast of heat on my face. It was the first heat—real heat—I had felt in many months. I sucked it into me, reveled in it, held my hands out to it in worshipful silence until I could feel the pounding ache of blood returning to benumbed fingers, the terrible itch of flooding life in me.
As the fire engulfed the hull and mast, the ice began to crack and hiss in protest; tendrils of white steam rose and twined with the black smoke. The heat was terrific. I retreated to a nearby boulder, itself warm from the flames. My blood ran freely to my frostbitten hands and feet, ran freely through them in agonizing pulses out of my frozen sores, leaking from my boots and staining the stone beneath me. These pains subsided, however, and the blistering heat faded to gentle waves, like the caress of bathwater. I stretched out on the warm rocks, turning my face to the dancing flames, and drifted into sleep.
twenty-two
I awoke to the stab of my heart pulling me again into the dim morning. My clothes and boots were stiff with frozen blood. The return of heat had brought with it the return of hunger; my stomach, long silent, began to churn again. I raised myself and beat my arms against my shoulders. I clambered down to the ice to see what remained of the ship. There was a blackened circle with new ice formed in the center. It was as if it had blasted into heaven as I slept.
I tried to marshal myself to simple survival, that last and most animal of purposes, but even that passed from me. I resolved I had but one path remaining: to find a place suitable for dying. I had passed away from the world of heat to this desolation, where light and darkness have only just been, and imperfectly, divided—water swirled into continents of ice and sliding back into water and up into snow. Yet I felt that it was not here but elsewhere that I was to finish my days, for no other reason than that my merciless heart had refused to cease in my last hour of warmth and comfort. So I plodded onward over the rocks and into the low, flat coastal plains. The land was boggy but still stiff with the frost. The frozen earth jabbed back underfoot, making me stumble from the unexpected texture of it. I scraped together small fires as the evening fell, and huddled under drifts of snow. You want for your heart to break and it doesn’t, for your body to fail and it doesn’t—for the world to end, but, remorseless world without end, the punishing sun arises and winds begin again to blow.
Far away at the edge of a range of hills, the sun glowed below the horizon; above it, the clouds rose in layers, a fierce orange fading to an angry red, a softer purple, then gray, and finally blue-black. Here the land was stunted and scroggy, low shrubs amid the rocks, the ground mossy and soft under my feet. The hills rose in low brown waves, rippling back from the water, hills giving way to broad valleys marked by bumps like boils, filled with murky water. I slept where I fell, cradled in the mosses, and rose as the sun rose. Beneath me bloomed the flowers of the spring, breasting through the snow, and pulling the land from white to brown and green. Slow rivers of meltwater formed and the frost boils became shallow lakes that stretched for corrugated blue miles. The hills rose in gravelly ridges over the tundra, each marking its own horizon until another, farther, rose in the distance.
As I climbed one, I passed jagged windrows of feathers running across the hills, like foam from ancient seas or the fall of angels.
I came down onto a vast plain that emitted the low and rustling roar of a thousand tiny forms in motion. A white bird rose, beating heavily at the air, and then another, a cloud of them, a wave across the plain to the horizon, heaved up and billowed around me in a shower of white feathers as if the earth itself were lifting into heaven. They hung swirling in the air over me and sank back to earth and rose again, like echoes fading. On the ground around me were dozens of nests filled with gray-brown eggs that burned with heat. I fell to my knees and ate eagerly. The birds danced squalling out of reach, but using the rope as a flail, I was able to knock them down, white feathers in my black and bloody hands. I envied them their placid grace in flight, until I knew the tumult of hungers that it cost, till I felt the frantic beating of their hearts.
I was a pilgrim in the end, not chasing miracles, splinters, fragments of bone, but compelled, unreleased, called to witness, and then returned again to my own sunken and sordid self, chasing a spark into the earth, back from the ice and darkness, the drive of men that became the lonely tramp of a man, of a deep night in cold and darkness, and the awakening into a brilliant and endless day, washed in blood and consecrated in a cascade of feathers. Our islands and their treasures flood past in the torrent of our days: we can alight like birds for a moment of panting rest before our hungers drive us out. And so I live on with small hungers in the heavy weight of my body, created and creating, going, for all my days, still.
Acknowledgments
With much appreciation to the following:
For my many rescues and for encouraging the persistence of my follies: my family, Ed and Perdita, Tad, Dan, Karen and all of the Sallicks, Melanie, Nina de Gramont, and Dennis Kennedy.
For the space and time to finish: the fine people of the Vermont Studio Center and the Sabot family.
For his enthusiasm, support, and energy: my agent, Peter Steinberg.
For his care and thought: my editor, Gerry Howard.
My thanks to you all—this would not have happened without you.
Ben Jones
The Rope Eater
Ben Jones majored in English at Yale University and was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was an editor for the Adventure Library, where he edited classic tales of exploration. Jones lives with his family outside of Boston.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2005
Copyright © 2003 by Ben Jones
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations,
places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Jones, Ben, 1968–
The rope eater: a novel / Ben Jones.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 2. Survival after
airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.—Fiction. 3. Military deserters—Fiction.
4. Whaling ships—Fiction. 5. New England—Fiction.
6. Whaling—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3610.O616R67 2003
813’.6—dc21 2002041484
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42926-1
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