Jim Crace - Signals of Distress

‘Hoy, Ralph. Have you come back without your stick?’

‘Any more mare bites to show us, sailor?’

‘Meet the stowaway.’

Ralph saw the empty bottles on the grass. So what? He was drunk himself. A heart was scratched around him. Miggy had been in the cottage with her mother when he arrived. He’d had to play the model son-in-law and talk about his family and his prospects in America. But then they’d walked behind, into the fields, while Rosie baked the bread. And there he’d kissed his Miggy on the mouth.

‘I saw your bit of carving on the bench,’ he said. She didn’t understand. She blushed, and shook her head. But Ralph adored her shyness. He kissed her mouth again. He kissed her tunic, over her breast.

‘Tell me how it’ll be when we get to America. Tell me, Ralph.’ She let him guide her hand onto his trousers. She frowned, more baffled than afraid. She knew it wasn’t right. They held their breath. She rubbed. Was this lovemaking, then? Was this as soft as thistledown?

‘America …’ he said. ‘It’s hard to think of anything to say …’

He didn’t tell the sailors what she’d done. He didn’t need to. They could tell. He was in a restless mood. ‘Come on. Who’ll help me swing the Cradle Rock?’

He got four volunteers. But when the others saw the massive rock in motion, they all got up and ran, as best they could, along the grassy path up to the hollow bowl below the tonsured granite of the Rock. They climbed between the arrowed slabs onto the platform where their comrades stood, watching the Cradle Rock dipping on its pivot stone. They whooped like Indians. It was a giddy sight; the drink, the rapid clouds, the undulating rock. They couldn’t tell what moved and what was still. One sailor wedged an empty brandy bottle underneath. The Rock descended on the glass, and powdered it.

Palmer Dolly hadn’t run along the path to help them with the Rock. He stayed with the wagons, and he watched. He was superstitious. Cradle Rock could bring good luck, and bad. He wouldn’t risk the bad.

All ten Americans put their backs against the Rock. They’d see how far and quickly they could move it. ‘And push! Let-her-go. And push! Let-her-go.’ The eighty granite tons were rocking at their own pace. But the sailors didn’t step away to watch. As each decline reversed into ascent they put their hands and shoulders underneath the rock and hastened it. Each time the Rock lifted on its pivot, they looked into the damp and darkness underneath. No one said anything. But they felt stronger than the rock. They could bring it down.

Four men went back to the wagons and returned with iron bars, and lengths of hardwood. They knocked away the loose stones underneath the Rock on the seaward side. They undermined the earth, so that the Rock could fall and rise a few more inches at its outer edge. They tested it again. It made more noise. Its rise and fall expanded on each push. Again they knocked away more stones and earth. They levered with the iron bars.

Of course ten men, no matter what they’d drunk, could not send the Cradle Rock crashing into the sea. It was a hundred times their weight. All they could do was displace it from its pivot stone, so that it slipped an inch or two and rested on its seaward base, to rock no more. They put their ten backs against it when it fell, but they might as well have tried to knock a mountain down. ‘And push! And push! And push!’ There was no ‘Let-her-go’. It was a disappointment then. The Rock had beaten them. The Rock had sobered them as well. The sweat was gelid on their foreheads. The air was icy. Their breaths were sugary and high. What could they chew to take the smell of drink away before they got the wagons — and the cattle — back to Wherrytown?

It was early on the Tuesday morning and still dark, with the sailors nursing headaches and sore backs in their hammocks, when the earth below the repositioned Rock gave way. It could not support the weight. There was an avalanche of stones and earth, which bounced into the sea. The Cradle Rock fell fifteen feet from its platform. It was too big to bounce. It dug into the ground and stopped within two seconds of its fall. Its underside, revealed at last to moonlight, was black and glistening, and barnacled with snails. You couldn’t see it from the path. Its eminence was now declivity. Palmer Dolly, on his last night at home, heard the distant impact of the Rock and trembled in his bed. The Rock was down. The coast would never be the same again. He didn’t care.

Miggy would have trembled, too, if she had not been dreaming of the sea and how a girl with unkempt hair might flourish in America.

THE NORRISES weren’t the only ones to pack their bags that Tuesday morning and say farewell to Wherrytown. Lotty Kyte was emigrating, too. Her brother Chesney had paid the seventy shillings for her passage, second class, on the Belle . Chesney had been a cabinet-maker before he emigrated with his bag of tools. Now, ‘after just seven years in Canada’, as Lotty explained to everyone she met, he had a wife called Maisie and a factory in Montreal. ‘You can’t take beds and tables with you. Not all the way to Canada. Too far,’ she said as she was led, blindfolded, down to the quay a little after ten. ‘The land of freedom it is. Clear a bit of ground and put a cabin up. That’s all you have to do. But still, for all the freedom in the world, you haven’t got a stick of decent furniture. You can’t sit down, except on logs. You’re sleeping on the floor. What can you do? Speak to my Chesney, of course! He has the furnishings, and you don’t have to pay till harvest time. It’s made him rich in seven years. He sends for me. He tells me, Sister, put your blindfold on and come to Canada.’ She shook the letter and the ticket which she had received from him two months before. ‘He wants his sister by his side, no matter what. To help out with his books. To be a friend for Maisie. A sister can’t refuse. My Chesney’s odd, but he is family, when all is said and done. So I must make this little sacrifice, and blind myself with cloth.’ What, her challenge was, could be more logical, more natural than that?

They found a wooden box for her to rest on by the quay. They dusted it, and cushioned it with folded sack, and helped her sit. At first the sailors, stowing stores and luggage on the Belle , thought Lotty Kyte was pregnant. The only softness to her long and angular body was her stomach. It seemed distended. But she wasn’t fat from pregnancy. She wore an opium bag, tied round her waist, to ward off seasickness. She had three travel chests and a carpet bag at her feet. Every few minutes she touched them with her toes to check they’d not been stolen. She kept her head bowed and her hand across her blindfold for a while, keeping out the harsh sea light. Then she pulled a knitted scarf from her bag and tied it round her head. The extra darkness seemed to comfort her. She was less frightened, and sat quietly, fingering her ticket and her letter. The Wherrytowners who came to stare at her could see a chin, some bonnet and an inch of hair. They morning’d her. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked. They gave their names and wished her luck in Canada. ‘You don’t need luck in Canada,’ she answered. ‘My brother says.’ They didn’t have to hide their smiles. Now here was something they could tell their grandchildren — the blindfolded emigrant!

Lotty Kyte, who lived only two parishes from Wherrytown, had never seen the sea, and never would. When she was born, some Madame Haruspex from a travelling fair had warned the family that if Lotty ever saw the sea she’d die, ‘and not by drowning’. So that is how she’d lived her life. She’d stayed inland for thirty-seven years. It wasn’t hard — until, that is, she received the ticket from her brother and she was taken to the quay. And then it wasn’t even hard, just dark and inconvenient and itchy. She’d take off the scarf and her blindfold when she was in the Belle . She didn’t have to go on deck. She didn’t have to press her nose against a porthole. And even if the sea galed up and lashed the porthole glass, she had simply to pull her bonnet down or hide under a blanket. She would sit as quietly as a mouse for six or seven weeks, hugging opium, and then go blindfolded into Canada.