Middle Passage (9 page)

“Poor bastards,” said Cringle, seeing me squeezing my fists and unable to swallow. “Their villages were destroyed by famine.” He banged his large calabash pipe on the Bible he carried, bound in pressed pigskin, to shake loose the dottle. “Ahman-de-Bellah took them without a fight. Their rivers dried up. The drought's lasted a decade, I believe, which means they'll never survive the voyage back, if that's what you're wondering. The skipper won't find three in ten healthy enough to spend two months in the hold. Better,” said he, “to be dead in a ditch than in their shoes.”

“Peter, what's happening on ship?”

“How do you mean?”

“The captain, he gave me a talk I cannot untangle. He asks me to help him—”

The mate shook his head two, three times. “Stay away from him, Rutherford. He's mad”—Cringle touched two fingers to his left temple—“and if you hope to see New Orleans again, the best thing is to separate yourself from Falcon now.” The muscles around his eyes knotted. “He will sink this ship and take us with him. He doesn't
want
to return. Did you know that? That's why he goes to sea. Haven't you noticed how nothing is ever right for him? How even when he jokes, it is a jeering kind of humor? No one knows this, but he's been married thirty years and he still plays with himself. His wife, Molly, a beldam if ever there was one, makes him wash his hands and dingus before they fornicate. She picks her nose when they make love, she's that bored. Little wonder he doesn't want to return to
her.
When she is
angry, I hear, she sews all his clothing together. In their wedding portrait, which I have seen, she is thin enough to be a model for El Greco. Now she's dumpled enough to pose for Peter Paul Rubens. And that's the least of his complaints about life. He is vain. And therefore self-pitying. And vicious, lad. He keeps a list of personal affronts, insults and abuses he's received, or believes he's received, and
dates
them—he reviews them when he's drunk, keeps them alive, and always watches for a man's weaknesses once he's signed on. He knows mine is Tommy, that I cannot stand his treatment of the boy.” Cringle stood pitched forward as if in a stiff wind, a habit he'd formed at sea. “Out there, on the ocean, in Africa, or during some 'adventure,' he hopes something will do for him what he cannot do himself.”

“Then you're saying we won't get home?”

“Not with what he's bringing aboard.”

“The Allmuseri?”

“No,” said Cringle, “the other thing . . .”

“What?”

“I don't know what it is! It has no name. All I know is that it belongs to the Allmuseri and has no business in our world.” He looked away, out toward the distant ships whose dactyloid masts favored a dark stretch of winter trees on the water, then away again. Ever since we'd come ashore he had been twitchy as a squirrel. So tense any clock he came close to ran, by my reckoning, forty seconds faster. “Are you with me and the few of our chaps who stand against him?”

“I guess, I don't know—”

“Decide soon,” he said. “Falcon has friends here, but we will act as soon as we put out to sea.”

Then he was off, called away by Captain Falcon to help in the hellish work of inspecting the cavity-ridden teeth, shaved
skulls, and stippled privates of four men for whom the skipper paid 100 bars each (a bar being worth half a dollar, a pound of powder, or a fathom of ordinary cloth); then the women over twenty-five (Bellah gave Falcon a 25 percent reduction on these); and finally the children who, like trout, had to measure four feet four inches or they would be thrown back into the bush. And Falcon was furious. Ahman-de-Bellah had passed at least one doctored black off on him, an old man medicated with some unknown drug that bloated his skin. He oozed oniony-smelling sweat from powder treatments. When Falcon pressed a finger against his teeth, bubbles of pus oozed from the man's gums. Lemon juice had been swabbed along his body to give it a glossy appearance, but it made no difference. He died, delirious, before Falcon could get his money back. The captain, of course, was no paragon of honesty. The cotton bales he used for barter were hollow at their centers, the whiskey carefully watered down, and the gunpowder was of an inferior stock. Captain Falcon grew edgy, I guess, that this deceit might be discovered, and kept us busy most of the night transferring his cargo from the boats to the ship's belly. In his “rough” log (the one a ship's master edited to produce a more polished book for his employers), which I would see later, he wrote:

 

The skipper's share or “lay” of the profits was a handsome 25 percent of the take. The crew received a pitiful twelve dollars per month, a thing increasingly offensive to most hands when talk of Falcon's mysterious find—loaded last of all onto the ship in a crate big enough to carry a bull elephant, its price omitted from his log—moved, like an electric shock, from one mate to another. Added to which, and perhaps worst of all, our ship's carpenters grumbled of water in the frowzy hold. Once the Allmuseri saw the great ship and the squalid pit that would house them sardined belly-to-buttocks in the orlop, with its dead air and razor-teethed bilge rats, each slave forced to lie spoon-fashion on his left side to relieve the pressure against his heart-after seeing
this,
the Africans panicked. Believe it or not, a barker told us they thought we were barbarians shipping them to America to be eaten. They saw us as savages. In their mythology Europeans had once been members of their tribe—rulers, even, for a time—but fell into what was for these people the blackest of sins. The failure to experience the unity of Being everywhere was the Allmuseri vision of Hell. And that was where we lived: purgatory. That was where we were taking them—into the madness of multiplicity—and the thought of it drove them wild. A one-handed Allmuseri thief attacked Cringle with a belaying pin and was shot by the mate. (I should explain that lopping off a thief's right hand was this tribe's punishment for stealing, because the
Allmuseri ate with their right hands and wiped their arses with their left; by depriving this man of his right hand, they forced him into the indignity of eating and scraping off excrement with the selfsame limb.) A woman pitched her baby overboard into the waters below us. At least two men tried to follow, straining against their chains, and this sudden flurry of resistance brought out the worst in Falcon, if you can imagine that. He beat them until blood came. The male slaves he double-ironed, removing the ladder to the hold and lowering them by ropes so none could climb back up. Women he had sleep in the cabins, young children were jummixed on deck in the longboats beneath sheets of tarpaulin, and if any Negro even looked as if he was thinking of rebellion, that man was to be birched and taught the sting of noose and yardarm.

It was then my hair started going white. Unable to watch, I repaired to sit alone in the cookroom, my head in my hands and back against an oven of such antiquity it was usually hotter on one side than the other, so that Squibb's tipsycakes (so called since he laced them with rum) rose crooked and once they were frosted the top layer would gradually slide off. Clearly, nothing on the
Republic
was as it should be, but it behooves me for the sake of my own character, shabby as this is, to explain how murderous my thoughts became after taking part in the captivity of the Allmuseri. I wondered if the blacks who'd traveled with Balboa and Cortez hated their leaders as much as I did Ebenezer Falcon, if Estéban, the legendary explorer from Morocco, felt as cool toward his companions, three Spanish officers, as I sometimes did toward Cringle, who would never in this life see himself, his own blighted history, in the slaves we intended to sell, or wonder, as I did, how in God's
name I could go on after this? How could I feel whole after seeing it? How could I tell my children of it without placing a curse on them forever? How could I even dare to
have
children in a world so senseless? How could . . .

“Mr. Calhoun?”

“Here, sir.”

“There's one hour till daylight.” Falcon stuck his head into the hatchway. “I've new orders for you.”

I stood, brushing off the seat of my trousers. “Sir?”

“We're about to weigh anchor. You're in charge of feeding the Africans in messes of ten at nine in the morning and four, and give 'em half a pint of water three times a day. Squibb handles the crew as before, but no one is to feed the new cargo, or come near it, except me.”

“No? Might I ask what it
eats?”

“Don't ask,” says he. “Nothin' from your supplies, so you needn't worry.”

That, of course, was a lie.

There was plenty of reason for worry. Captain Falcon revealed to no one the contents of the mysterious crate brought by raft and lowered below by Bogha's servants into a storeroom behind the stemson through a hole cut into the deckbeams, then boarded over. Ere the skipper brought the
Republic
about and headed out to sea, a few of the crew, myself among them, wagered five bob on what his find might be. Squibb claimed it was the Missing Link between man and monkey; Cringle said it was most probably a nearly extinct lizard, maybe intelligent, that would have scholars from Cambridge to Queen's College rewriting natural history; and Meadows, to frighten us all, reported that he had heard someone at the fort say it had fallen from the sky near the Allmuseri villages, which whilom were tucked away in
the bush between Cape Lopez and the Congo River and had been protected by them for centuries. We drew lots to see who would be the first to sneak below while the captain slept and wrench open a plank to peer inside. Tommy O'Toole, the cabin boy, pulled the shortest length of string. He shinnied down a rope reef-knotted round his waist so we could pull him up. After ten minutes Squibb tugged and found the rope broken. We were about to lower
him
when the boy crawled back on deck with only half his mind—or could be it was twice the mind he had had before. His skin was cold, all one bluish color as if he had been baptized in the Deep. His face was blank as a pan. And his words, as his mouth spread and closed like a fish's, were strange: a slabber of Bantu patois, Bushman, Cushitic, and Sudanic tongues, and your guess where he learned them is as good as mine. His eyes glowed like deck lights, less solid orbs of color, if you saw them up close, than splinters of luciferin indigo that, like an emulsion, had caught the camphor of a blaze once before them.

With Cringle's waistcoat shawled over his shoulders for warmth, and holding a horn of rum in his hands, he found a space in his sporadic madness to tell how he'd come within three feet of forcing open a door in the crate after the rope broke but was stopped by the density of air around it, a natural defense of the thing inside, which did not so much occupy a place as it bent space and time around itself like a greatcoat. He could force his bare feet to go no farther. This was just as well, for dark coils of the creature's defecation were everywhere, slithering with insects, worms, and sluglike beings that apparently lived inside its bowels. All at once, the crate rocked gently as something crab-walked from one side of the box to the other, scritching its nails on the walls,
muttering to itself like a devil chained inside a mountain for a thousand years, its voice gently syllabled and honeyed, as sacramental as a siren's, or peradventure its very breathing was a chant so full of love and werelight, vatic lament and Vedic sorrow, that the boy's heart bade him listen more. He slapped his left hand over his mouth, clamped his right hand over the left, and bent down on one knee, this being a brain-rinsing song the boy somehow felt he knew. Down in that lichened chamber, down in this shrunken air scattered with galleywood and bosun's stores, down in a vault swimming with imponderables, he forgot where he was and why he had come: a sea change nicer than any of us knew, he said; and then the creature's lay whistled from his own lips like the sweetest of fluids whelming through his windpipes, and he was inside the luminous darkness of the crate, himself chained now yet somehow unchained from all else, sadly watching young Tommy O'Toole, sensing as if through the lotic skin of a stingray or crab, and they were a single thing: singer, listener, and song, light spilling into light, the boundaries of inside and outside, here and there, today and tomorrow, obliterated as in the penetralia of the densest stars, or at the farthest hem of Heaven.

When he had finished, his eyes ashimmer after peering into the heart of things hidden and his body swaying to music none but he could hear—after this, there was no sound forward and aft except the creaking of rigging loud as a bonfire. “Blimey.” A deck hand ran his fingers through his hair. “It eats people, that's what it eats.” Squibb was tight as usual, trying to stand erect, weaving on both feet, tilting first left, then right. He lifted the cross from his neck and, his eyes closed, kissed it. “Saints preserve us.” A few chaps shivered, and not simply from the wind's chill gnawing
through our coats. All could see the ship's boy would never come about. He was lost to us.