Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  Davidson flinched.

  The surgeon clicked his tongue in fraternal sympathy. ‘Just another moment or two like a good man. I believe we’ve got the enemy in our sights.’

  One of the steel instruments was so cold that its touch made him shudder. For a while afterwards there was no sensation but the heat of the lamp on his prickling skin; the doctor’s fingertips probing his scrotum and perineum. Then a glitter of pain sparkled through his loins and lower gut, a tremor that trembled his thighs.

  ‘Mm. Thought so.’ Monkton rose to his feet, wincing with the effort. ‘Little parasitical chap. Mild enough sort of infection; nothing more. Painful old nuisance but he’s easily vanquished. See a bit of him always in close confinement situations. Prisons. Barracks. Things like that.’ He paused and snuffled. ‘Workhouses.’

  ‘Can you say how I might have got it?’

  He looked into Davidson’s eyes for a moment.

  ‘Perhaps you might have some idea yourself, sir.’

  Lord Queensgrove felt hot. He gave a shrug. ‘No.’

  The physician nodded. He crossed to a basin-stand and began carefully washing his hands and wrists. ‘Clothing or towel not properly laundered. Privy seat maybe. Can be worsened by chafing of the thighs or the undergarments. But a good hot bath will set you right. Don’t use soap, just very hot water. Just as hot as you can bear it. Have your wife ask that pretty serving girl of yours to get a good handful of garlic from the galley and lob that in too.’ He gave an amiable smile. ‘You’ll smell like a Frenchman but it won’t last long.’

  The ship rolled gently and righted itself slowly, causing the lantern on the ceiling to sway on its hinge. Shadows danced around the airless room.

  ‘Oh and probably best to abstain from anything too demanding for a fortnight or two. Maritally and so forth.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Monkton lowered his voice and spoke in an oddly rueful way. ‘These little things can be passed to the ladies. And with the ladies, of course, it’s that much more difficult. The old plumbing, you see. It’s not as available.’

  ‘Just so.’

  Davidson pulled up his britches and began fastening the buttons on his shirt. A creak of complaint came up from the floorboards, as though the wood itself was somehow suffering. Now he noticed that the surgeon seemed to be staring at him. He was smiling again, but not with his eyes.

  ‘Who’s that pretty little fellow? On your abdomen there.’

  ‘Oh that.’ He glanced downwards. ‘Just a pimple of some kind.’

  ‘Sore chap, is he?’

  ‘No no. I had forgotten about it, actually. I get them now and again.’

  ‘May as well take a squint at him now you’re here. Can you undo the shirt a little more?’

  ‘I assure you it’s nothing.’

  ‘All the same. Now you’re here. Might be prudent.’

  There was an insistence in his voice that was hard to gainsay. Lord Queensgrove opened his shirt and stood with his behind resting against the chairback. The surgeon dragged over the stool and sat down in front of him.

  ‘God blast it,’ he muttered. ‘Tedious dark in here.’

  ‘Can I assist in some way?’

  ‘Maybe you’d hold the lamp, like a stout fellow? Would you mind awfully?’

  Davidson took it and held it at the level of his waist, the pungency of oil ascending to his nostrils. The surgeon was using his fingertips now, softly stretching the skin around the crusted little blister. He was close enough for the patient to feel warm breath on his navel and the thought occurred to Davidson of the extraordinary intimacies permitted to doctors. He was asked to hold still and did as he was asked. Monkton reached out and hauled over his beaten-up valise; pulled out a magnifying glass and a ream of gauze.

  For several minutes he said nothing as the examination continued. When he spoke again his voice was calm. ‘You’ve not had any other lesions? Rashes? Nothing like that?’

  ‘A few years ago, maybe. Inheritance, I’m afraid.’

  The surgeon glanced up with a quizzical expression.

  ‘Pineapple skin,’ Davidson said. ‘My late father suffered from the same complaint. Of course he spent many yean at sea. Usually put it down to the lack of fruit in the rations.’

  ‘Ever had lesions on your palms or the soles of your feet?’

  ‘Now you mention it, yes. But a good many years ago.’

  ‘How many years?’

  ‘Five or six, I suppose. They cleared themselves up.’

  ‘Ever get sore throats? Spells of dizziness and such?’

  ‘Now and again.’

  ‘Eyesight fine, is it?’

  Davidson gave an abrupt laugh. ‘I’ve been told I need spectacles. Usually by my good lady wife. I’m afraid it’s another little matter I’ve tended to neglect.’

  Monkton smiled. ‘Bless ’em, the ladies do tend to go at us, don’t they?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘But we like them all the same, the bothersome old termagents.’

  He rose and rinsed his hands at the basin again, drying them carefully on a new shred of gauze. When he had finished he held the rag in the lamp-flame with a pair of tongs until it burned completely away. His carefulness disturbed Davidson. Why so careful?

  ‘There is a kind of lotion for the blistering,’ Davidson said. ‘My father used it sometimes. Smithsonite, I think it was called. Pinkish in colour.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Zinc and ferric oxide.’

  ‘That’s the one. Damned if I didn’t forget to bring any along with me like a fool. Perhaps you might have some in your bag of tricks.’

  The surgeon turned and looked at him seriously. ‘Lord Queensgrove, I’m going to need my sister’s assistance just to make a few notes and do a small test. It’s almost certainly nothing but I should like to be positive. Now I assure you there’s no need at all for modesty. She’s a person of the utmost discretion and very well trained.’

  Davidson felt a bead of sweat trickling down his thigh. ‘All right.’

  Monkton quickly left the room.

  Lord Queensgrove heard the sound of men running on the deck. He crossed to the wall, to the dark-glassed mirror. In the top right-hand corner of its mahogany frame a newspaper cutting had been inserted. Details of the coming opera season in New York. The American Premiere of Signor Verdi’s Masterpiece. Gently he raised the hem of his shirt. A slightly elevated mole about the size of a sixpence. He touched it with his fingertips, then with his thumb. It had a sandpaperish feel but it didn’t hurt.

  A boisterous cheer sounded from outside on the deck. He went to the porthole and looked out into the blackness. In the distance, a tiny red light could be seen. Halifax Lighthouse. The coast of Nova Scotia.

  The surgeon and his sister entered now. Monkton had a grave and harassed look. ‘I need you to undress yourself completely and come in here.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘There’s nothing at all to worry about,’ Mrs Darlington said peacefully. ‘Just follow when you’re ready. Everything is all right.’

  They went through into what Davidson could see was a small bunkroom. Quickly he undressed and followed them in, bringing his clothes and shoes. The room was very cold; it smelt faintly of pine sap. The boards felt sticky against his bare feet. The surgeon was pulling the blankets from the bed, hanging a lantern from a hook in the beams. ‘Would you lie down like a good man. We won’t be long.’

  Monkton stood on one side of the bunk, his sister on the other. They began examining him closely, every inch of his skin. His chest and groin. His armpits and thighs. Behind his ears. His navel and scalp. Under his tongue. Around his gums. An instrument was produced to hold open his nostrils; a candle was lit so his nasal passages could be scrutinised. Sometimes the physician would utter a word and his sister would write it down in his notebook. Outside on the deck, men were singing a shanty. The surgeon made a one-fingered spiralling gesture, indicating that Davidson was to roll on his front.
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br />   ‘That’s the style, My Lord. Now try to relax completely.’

  He felt their hands exploring his back; his wire-tense shoulders, his legs and feet, between his toes, between his buttocks. As though looking down on the scene from above, he imagined he could see his own body now: the lowered heads of his whispering examiners, their darting hands like playful birds.

  There were prayerlike murmurs in the tiny cabin; words Lord Queensgrove did not understand: Phthisis. Urticaria. Desquamation. Febrilis. The whispering had a lulling, soporific effect and he was so very tired that he began to drift into sleep. The heft of the ship floated him downward; towards his mother. And then he was intensely aware of the heaviness of his frame; the bunk supporting his wearied body. The sea calmed a little. His pain calmed. And he realised, then, that no one was touching him. When he opened his eyes, the surgeon was gone.

  Mrs Darlington said gently: ‘You can dress yourself now, Lord Queensgrove. Thank you.’

  Davidson rose from the berth and did as he was bidden. Suddenly he felt wrung out, completely exhausted. He had an urge to be away from the surgeon’s quarters, to walk on the deck and feel the brine-cold air. To look at the golden lights of land.

  He entered the sitting room in shirt-sleeves and briskly said: ‘You’ll let me know what I owe you, Monkton, will you?’

  But the surgeon did not seem to be listening to his patient. He had crossed to the table on which stood a globe and was spinning the latter in an absent-minded way. The sailors sang. The globe whirred. It came to rest with his fingertips resting on Africa.

  ‘Willie?’ said his sister. ‘His Lordship is talking to you.’

  Monkton turned. His face was white.

  ‘Lord Queensgrove,’ he said quietly. ‘You have syphilis.’

  Michael, I am in first rate health. I was never better in my life. This Rocky Mountain air agrees with me first rate. I have everything that would tend to make life comfortable. But still at night when I lay in bed, my mind wanders off across the continent and over the Atlantic to the hills of Cratloe. In spite of all I can never forget home, as every Irishman in a foreign land can never forget the land he was raised in. But alas ! I am far away from them old haunts.

  Letter from Sergeant Maurice H. Woulfe in Wyoming to his brother in County Limerick

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  THE BORDER

  TREATING OF SEVERAL CONVERSATIONS WHICH TOOK PLACE IN THE VERY EARLY MORNING OF THURSDAY 2 DECEMBER; THAT BEING THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE VOYAGE. (THESE ACCOUNTS NEVER PUBLISHED IN PREVIOUS EDITIONS.)

  Starboard Near the Bow

  — About 1.15 a.m. —

  ‘You’re watching the stars, Mr Mulvey.’

  ‘Sir. It’s yourself. Good-night, sir. God bless you.’

  ‘See anything interesting up there?’

  ‘Nothin at all, sir. Just thinkin about home.’

  ‘May I join you for a moment?’

  ‘I’d be honoured an you did, sir.’

  Dixon came closer and stood beside the killer. The two of them leaned on the rail of the gunwale, like a couple of companions in a low saloon.

  ‘Ardnagreevagh, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ard na gCraobhach, we call it. Or the old people do.’

  ‘Little place, is it?’

  ‘Scantlin of a place, sir. Up near Renvyle. Walk through it so you would and never know you were afterbeen there.’

  ‘I’ve been into Connemara but not up that far north. They tell me the scenery is beautiful there.’

  ‘Ah, there’s – not much there now, sir. It was beautiful once.’

  ‘Before the Famine?’

  ‘Long before that, sir. Before my own time.’ He drew his collar closed against the squalling wind. ‘So they say anyway. The older people. But again you sift all the stories you woulden really know. Half it’s probably affectation.’

  ‘Smoke?’

  ‘It’s kind of you, sir, but I woulden want to be deprivin Your Honour when you’ve so few left.’

  Dixon began to realise something strange about his associate. He was making his accent more Irish than it was. Talking like an actor in a music-hall sketch.

  ‘I have more in my cabin. Be my guest if you like.’

  ‘It’s dacent of you, sir. I’m obliged to Your Honour.’

  The Ghost accepted a cheroot from Dixon’s silver case and bent his head to accept the light. His touch on Dixon’s cupped hands was surprisingly soft and the glow from the match made his face seem clownish. Drawing hard, the smoke went into his eyes and he began to cough fitfully. It was as though he was someone who did not smoke but had accepted the cheroot purely because it had been offered. Up so close, he seemed even smaller and more fragile. Sometimes his breathing became a belligerent wheeze. He reeked of the cold and of old shoes.

  For a while the two men stood together at the rail saying nothing. Dixon was thinking about life without Laura Markham, the words that might be used when the farewell came. She had told him her decision earlier in the day: whatever had happened between them was over. They would part at New York and not meet again. His letters were returned, and a number of small tokens. No, a friendship would not be possible. It was disingenuous, if not dishonest, to pretend that it might be. He was not to try persuading her; the resolution was unchangeable. Merridith had made it clear that he would never give her a divorce. Absolutely never: it was beyond his imagining. The bed was made; now she would have to lie in it. And she would lie, as she had been lying for years. But sometimes you had to live in a lie. No matter what else, the man was her husband.

  The strangeness of the stars was his other thought now: the way ordinary things become mysterious late at night. Some people discerned in them proof of a Creator; an impetus which piloted the Earth through the illuminated nullity, and which always would, until it annihilated even that nothingness. While others saw no evidence for anything in their arrangement: a celestial clutter which was beautiful, certainly, but on to which no pattern or purpose should be projected, and for which the word ‘arrangement’ would therefore not suffice. The stars had not been arranged by any force but hazard, and by those who stared up at them like gaping monkeys from the lonely star they called the Earth. This is what Grantley Dixon had come to believe: that the monkeys’ descendants had looked at God’s droppings and decided to call them stars. It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre.

  And he wondered if one day the monkeys might learn to fly, if they might construct ships which would sail around the planets as the one he was standing on at the present moment had sailed around the seas. He supposed that would happen. It was probably unavoidable. They would gawk out their portholes and scratch themselves in wonderment and give each other chimpish grunts of congratulation. And all of it would be seen as something to celebrate.

  Grace Toussaint, the elderly Yoruba who had helped to raise him on his grandfather’s plantation, had often told him what she felt to be the most consequential secret of life: that all of our trials are caused by restlessness, the refusal to accept the fact that limitations exist. She was the most tender person Dixon had known in Louisiana, a place where people could be ardent as the merciless sun, but on this contention she was ardent herself. Dixon’s grandfather, a Jew, a hater of slavery, had argued with her frequently about the point. A man that knew the whispered malignity of neighbours, he had crossed the borders many times: to Mississippi, east Texas, into southern Arkansas. There he would purchase the most broken of slaves and take them back to Louisiana. He would walk his tended meadows as the sun raised the crops and calculate how many could be saved this year. A good field was ten slaves, a bad one maybe two. Every precious harvest of his fifty thousand acres was sold for the purpose of redeeming the stolen.

  Mississippi was a Hell for the black man, he told his grandchild; and if Louisiana was far from Paradise, at least it was not quite Hell. The Code Napoléon had seen to th
at. He had purchased Grace Toussaint and her blinded tortured brother in order to restore a version of their liberty; had argued with her frequently about something called free will. He would say that to be human was to accept nothing of proscription, to live only by the boundaries of what your conscience dictated. But Grace Toussaint had not agreed. It was easy to make grand statements from the vantage ground of wealth. Had she remained all her life in the country of her birth she might even be making them herself, she told her purchaser; for her people had once been royalty there.

  The arguments were strange. Dixon did not understand them. One night as a boy, he had paused in the hallway, by the half-opened door of his grandfather’s study, and eavesdropped on the quarrel that was raging inside: ‘You think God has any colour? You really think that, Grace? Jesus Christ was probably a Negro, Grace! His skin was the colour of tobacco, Grace!’ And she had answered bitterly that if the old man truly thought as much, he was the sorriest fool that ever saw Louisiana: for Christ was as lily-white as all the powerful.

  She used to take Dixon walking on summer mornings, along the drive of yuccas and beeches that led down to the pasturage; past the whitewashed shanties of the upperside meadow and then through the misty heat of the tobacco fields. Sweet the warm air with the aroma of watered leaves; thick with the clatter of crickets. Her brother, whose name was Jean Toussaint, though he was known among the farm boys as ‘Handsome John’, would sometimes walk behind them with the aid of a stick. He didn’t care for company most of the time. In the mornings he didn’t care for it, ever.

  Despite his great age he was a powerfully strong man, with enormous hands, bulging veins in his temples, his skin the colour of antique gold. He would often pluck a tune from the battered two-dollar guitar he carried on his long, straight back, like a dusty knight in a storybook hefting a shield; but Dixon had never heard him sing or even speak. One day he asked his grandfather why this was so. Dixon was twelve years old at that time, and was told that when Jean Toussaint had been half that age his tongue was cut out as a punishment by his master, a Mississippi son of an Irish bitch who deserved to burn for eternity. That Jean Toussaint was not Handsome John’s real name; that Grace Toussaint was not Grace Toussaint’s name; that even their names had been stolen away from them when they themselves had been stolen from Africa. It was the instant in Dixon’s childhood when everything had changed. More than the realisation that his parents had died. More than the moment when the police came to tell him that there had been an accident at his home, a terrible accident; that his house was burnt and his parents were dead and that now he would have to leave New Haven and live with his grandfather down in Evangeline. It had lodged in him like a bullet that could never be dug out.