Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (9 page)

The barge called, however. My health was perfect, my body the repository of a long life of vigorous exercise, fresh sea air, a simple diet, and I could not remain inactive amid the weary throes of the old vessel; she had to be tended, aided, propped. Unguentine’s mechanical trees could be death-traps. More than once while raking up the gardens I was caught out there by a wind suddenly rising, momentarily seduced by the clatter of the leaves and padded boughs, until the groan of bending metal would tell me something was going to fall, was falling—but which? Which teetering? Where to run? The huge green claw, hairs of metal hissing, would swoop down past me inches away and strike the earth with a rustling bang, whirrings, a tinkle of bells, with a shower of sparks and a puff of smoke shooting out of the stump at the point where it had rusted through. They always made such a mess. Their white stuffing would waft about the garden for days and days, noxious and impotent pollen. Metal branches that I tripped over and got caught up in like barbed wire. Leaves that would not yellow. The odor of rotting mattresses. One by one they fell down over the years. I managed to cover most of them up by sewing together a dozen trunkloads of old clothes and linen, into huge motley muffs which I draped over them like furniture covers, securing them tightly with cords staked into the ground. Thus they stood or lay and seemed to float about the garden, bloated forms marked with the puzzle-pattern of ancient wardrobes, until my plantings of honeysuckle and wistaria would finally cover them, consume what they could of them; if ever.

Things still grew, except trees, except the livestock which died off, fell overboard, waded or swam away. I didn’t mind. It was quieter without them. I had my vegetable patch. Potatoes and yams mainly, a few carrots and greens, a tomato plant or two towards the bow end of the barge, up high on the right in a clear and sunny space with a southern exposure and where, on account of the barge’s list, the trees fell the other way. Water I carried in buckets from the stern pump uphill to my vegetables, tasting it each day to make certain it was still fresh. Most things I ate raw, laying out a tablecloth on the ground on the high side of the vegetable patch, with a basin of water, a sharp knife, a plate, a napkin, and I would sit there a while in silence and look over the short rows and tops of green, then wander amongst my plants to pull up a carrot or pick a tomato, return to my spot and wash them, eat them, perhaps return for more. I took my time. They grew slowly, I had no wish to rush them. With dinner I would watch the sun setting through the twisted struts of the dome, stove in here and there and glassless except where beaded gleams of sunlight indicated a sliver still resisting the winds, and all across the marsh long-legged birds would settle in for the night, vanish in the grass; a mist might begin to rise, and off in the distance the hoarse barkings of seals and sea lions, moments when the surf only sighed, not pounded. Perhaps it was they who drove in those tiny fish like sardines which came close to the barge in shallow water, beneath its silvered surface, and bred there before my very eyes, on and on, swarms that came and went. Cold months I sometimes netted up a few and fried them over the fire in the pilot-house, now galley, now bedroom, now my little house with water lapping at the sill since that day when the hull finally gave out and flooded everything below deck.

I remember the evacuation. It took almost a week. In all those years of solitude it was the one time I raised my voice and called in desperation for Unguentine, to have his help, his guidance, his ingenuity. Otherwise, I scarcely missed him. I wanted to recount to him my adventure in the bilge below the stern deck when I was wandering around down there to see how all the bulkheads and pipes and machines were doing, all that ironwork rusting away, neglected, silent, sealed off for so many years. I was armed with a board on account of my fear of rats and snakes, and happened to thrust the end of it against the hull near the old propeller shaft. It went clear through, to my amazement, and with no more resistance than a pie-crust. Hastily I withdrew it, expecting to be enveloped in a shower of water or a jumbled whirlpool, be pursued or floated up the stairs and shot into the air as the whole barge crumbled into pieces and sank into the mud and water, leaving me adrift in the marsh, alone, muddy, clutching at the last debris of what had been. But no, nothing happened. I bent down and peered through the hole. The light was dim; I could see nothing. Finally I dared reach into it and succeeded in withdrawing a handful of black muck and white roots, whereupon there began to flow a small trickle of dank water. I sensed I was about to have a flood on my hands. Indeed, within minutes it grew into a hardy spout, belching and erectile, its surging spray spotted with a multitude of tiny frogs, fish, the bright leaves of water-cress. I stood on a box, wondered what to do. There were things to be moved upstairs and above deck. Which? Which first? Which second? I ran. Most of the hatchways were rusted and jammed open, and even those I succeeded in closing in the path of the cheerfully babbling stream did no good: the bulkheads were cracked and fissured all over the barge below deck and the water quickly found the way. But still I could not decide. So I simply moved everything I could carry above deck with the intention of sorting it out later up there, down to a few treasured possessions which I would stow in the skiff and on the swimming platform. It was a frenzied week. Laden down with bundles and boxes, dragging trunks and suitcases behind me, I staggered and crawled up those narrow stairs hundreds of times, day and night, with pots and pans and dishware, sacks of potatoes, bedding, small tables, chairs, box upon box of Unguentine’s tools and materials, nautical instruments, ropes, cables; my rugs, my curtains and countless things I knew I could never use but felt compelled to save from those rising waters. And I would have gone on after the water was knee-deep, would even have attempted to learn how to unbolt the cabinets in the galley, dismantle the stove, save an attractive oil-lamp in the old engine-room—had it not been for the rats, flushed out in ever greater numbers from hiding-places I had not known about before, thank God. I gave up, sealed closed the hatchway above the stairs, laid myself down on it and fell immediately into the sleep of utter exhaustion.

I slept perhaps for days. When I awoke and raised my head to find myself surrounded by heaps of household goods and bloated tree tents, a flea-market, a warehouse of damaged goods, a circus in disorder, amid all this unaccountable debris, I could have gone back to sleep and left it at that, finally unaccountable. There had been no beginnings. There would be no end. In this vast rangeland of junk I would awaken now and then, tidy up here and there, make false order, sleep again, wake up anew in another chaos, do my work anew, resume sleep. And when after several weeks it became apparent that the barge had no intention of sinking, or was unable to, was, perhaps, solidly encased in a mud life-preserver a quarter of a mile in diameter, I saw how foolish I had been and realized that the time had come to simplify my life. I had no need of museums, collections, mementoes. So I opened up the hatch to the stairs below deck and into that dark well of sloshing water I threw back all I had dragged upstairs. Grimly at first, calculating my losses, but gradually then with calm, until with joy, until song and liberations, until I filled it all up to the sill and closed the door, shoving the rest into the pond in the cargo hold. I saved only a few kitchen utensils, dishes, some blankets, two changes of clothes and a heavy coat for winter.

Jauntily, suitcase in hand, I walked over to the pilothouse and moved in. It was a small place, nine by six, but ample for my needs. The pilot wheel I succeeded in unscrewing, hung above the window; the other levers and controls I left as they were to drape my clothes over, air the bedding on. A small mattress already lay on a row of footlockers; these I dragged outside and pried open one afternoon: more old clothes, papers, letters I had stored away decades before and which I now shoved overboard with only the briefest of visits from my fingers. There was a small box of photographs all curled up and yellowed, photographs of Unguentine in athletic poses perhaps identical to ones he now held elsewhere—on another barge, with another woman? Of myself embraced by a forgotten landscape, young thing, unknowing, unwise, no doubt peering through time to this moment of being able to gaze back on it all, but still unknowing, unwise, tossing it all over the railing to a shallow splash. They floated on and on, taking days to submerge. Lilies, water faces, friends, family, pets. The mud eventually claimed them. As they silted deeper and deeper in they might fossilize, those faces, to be touched by a germ of life eons hence, to move again, breed again, be photographed again.

Meanwhile years passed. Tired of living under the threat of being brained by a falling strut of the dome, I took an axe to the lower braces and chopped them away at the rate of one a day until after several months, the whole thing gently sagged to earth with a sigh. The wood, being cracked and rotted, was easily broken up into firewood, gave off the rich fragrance of hickory as it burned. I polished the wooden decks once a week, boarded over stretches gnawed away by termites, where water seeped up from the flooded hold. The pilot-house roof leaked in heavy rains; I patched it with sheets of tin salvaged from the shed where I stored the garden tools. I covered the trash in the cargo hold with a foot of earth and planted a few tufts of marsh grass in it. I built a little walkway out of old lumber across to the swimming platform, dug a hole in the mud, lined it with dried grasses and bailed it out again and again until the water finally flowed clear and I could take a daily bath. But now and then I vacationed from it all. I would retire to a quiet spot in the garden and enclose myself in the hammock slung between two mechanical trees that still seemed solid and unrusted in the roots, and hold myself motionless and silent for days and nights on end, breathing no more than a sparrow’s ration of air, and just listen, listen to all the sounds. Sometimes I would no longer hear them, only the timeless silences between. It seemed where I stayed for endless years, but then a moment, a minute, a second would flash into time with all the roar and clatter of subways, the awful din of garbage cans being emptied: my own breathing, my heartbeats. It was still going on somewhere. Deep inside. Deep under. However much I might try to shove aside the business of being on two feet, arms swinging around and chattering to grab at something, tear it apart, put it back together, clean it, store it, eat it. Sometimes I would tip myself from the hammock and drop to the ground and lie flat on my stomach upon a dusty patch of earth where I could trace a miniature landscape in the sand and dry grass, there to journey with a purple sow bug across an empty plain, go home, with only a baggage of dust, flecks, scraps. Sometimes I fell upon a traffic of ants or a cluster of bees drinking from a puddle, or a spider come down to ground for some furtive transaction there, my pet populations, true and ultimate heirs: but would they let me join them? Their peace, the soothing silence of things that were only a few inches away, enough distance, too much even by the impossible span of a hand’s worth, so impossible to bridge, fling oneself across, little gap, to look.

The ailing barge soon would loudly call again; something would topple over, start leaking, jam up; groan, gurgle, suck. Yearly it settled deeper into the mud until it was almost impossible to tell where barge ended and marsh began, it tilted this way, now that, like a great old bird which had got stuck in its own nest far beyond its time and was now pressed in on all sides by generations of restless descendants. The marsh grass grew higher, thicker; there were clumps of bushes like willows. Once I tested the mud beyond the railings with a long pole and found that beneath the shallow pools of water, beneath the sodden islands of rich green, there were several inches of soft mud, then in places a hard, packed surface which extended beyond the reach of my pole, perhaps even as far as the vanished sea. For one day, and I could not be certain which, it had withdrawn from my view; possibly during those sweltering months of drought when my vegetable patch needed watering dawn to dusk and when I had spent whole days doing nothing but throwing the empty bucket over the rail, dipping up a scanty ration of water, carrying it uphill, pouring it into the rows and basins of earth, watching it sink so fast into the crusted dryness. My lettuce bolted, went to seed; also I ran out of carrots. But during that time I remember looking out to sea once with the field-glasses in the hope of sighting a mass of thunderheads peeping over the horizon, for the promise of water, a showerbath in the rain, but seeing none; remarking however that the distant green-and-blue ribbons of sea seemed to be spotted with grassy pads of mud like that which grew around the barge, the sudden absence of surf, the white lines, the bursts of spray. I swore I still heard it from somewhere out there, but with so many years at sea my ears would be forever filled with its reverberations; in similar manner my habit of not gazing beyond the railings of the barge those years, what with the mass of finely etched seascapes already crowding my brain, their lines fixed and precise, symmetrical, needing no corrections, no additions: I pulled them down like blinds while tending the earth and garden, not wanting to lift my head. When I next looked up, climbing even to the high side of the barge to have a better view, the sea was gone. There were only spots of blue here and there in the distance, on all horizons, as if the barge had been transported some recent night to a pampas land, rich and fertile, or to fields of sugar cane. I drew breath in sharply through my nostrils. I knew the smell. I still remembered it. Once while out in the middle of a desolate sea with lukewarm waters, in a strong wind, that scent had torn through me with such speed and violence that I collapsed to the deck and sobbed; now embraced by it on all sides, I strolled down the little hill and into the gardens, noted a few holes in the tree covers, and wondered: what would it be like to live without the presence of the sea?