Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

We stepped ashore, all uncertain of what this Law might be, and what it might mean to us, men returned from a long voyage on the sea.

At first, it seemed nothing had changed. The inn at the wharf was lighted as ever, the fire still burned on its hearth, the smoke still smudged against the low roll of cloud as it always had, and the landlord welcomed us as he always had. Our gear piled in the corner smelled strongly of the sea, and that, too, was as it always had been, the salt smell suddenly strange among the smells of earth.

And on the next morning, as we rose from the arms of our sweethearts and wives, this, too, was as it had always been. And we asked them, I asked my wife, what this was about the Law. And then there was a change. Her eyes clouded, as though struggling to remember. Her hands smoothed absently a corner of the counterpane, as though in it she sought to read this Law.

“Is it nothing then?” I prompted her. “Is it only a yarn?”

“No,” she said, slow and uncertain, bewildered at her inability to remember. “No, it is not that.” But what the Law might be she could not recall, and I could not guess.

My crew had all dispersed. I caught the last of them, the bosun, as he waited by the depot, shortly after noon. When I questioned him, he told me that the crew had all gone home.

“Gone home?” I said to him. “Their homes are here — what homes they have. And what business have sailors to talk of home ashore? At sea, we talk of home. But ashore, we talk of the sea. That is how it has always been.”

“I know,” said the bosun, fingering a lanyard woven ’round his neck. “But that was before the Law.” His fingers traced the length of the lanyard as if it irritated the skin beneath his chin. I noticed suddenly his beard was gone. His fingers reached the lanyard’s end, and missed the whistle that had hung there.

I collared him. “Back to the ship, me hearty,” I cried, but even I could tell my heart was no longer in it: the boisterous tones fell flat in the dusty street.

“Please, Captain.” The bosun’s eyes were pleading, more for me than for himself. In the street around us, people were staring. In the sunstruck street my sou’wester shone a ridiculous yellow.

In the harbor I found the ship had gone.

AND SO THIS was what the Law must be, I told myself, and felt already the strength of its claim on me. I felt it in the easy acquiescence to the loss of my ship, a ship I had not even had the chance to go down with. At low tide, I prowled the breakwater, but not a mast stuck out above the glassy harbor. A flock of pigeons broke from the steeple, wheeled once above the seaward channel, and I knew then that my ship had gone that way, and I remembered suddenly that none of us, in our eagerness for shore, had bothered to secure her. She had simply drifted out to sea. And this, I knew, must be the Law as well — not the tide, but our forgetting of our duty.

Our old duty, I should say. Keeping watch. Standing to the wheel. Going aloft in all weathers, even when the ice stood so sharp upon the shrouds that our hands bled. I speak, of course, for the crew. And the lookout who had never failed us, never failed in the sight of land, the sight of other shipping, of curiosities — whales, uncharted islands — of the sea: how had he failed to warn us of the Law? How had I failed to steer us clear?

And now I find new duties, here upon the land. I am not captain, of course. I work now among other men, my sou’wester on the shelf of the hall closet in our home. It is a snug home. My wife has tried to keep it as much as possible like a ship, and for this I am grateful, but I find, as the weeks go on, the neighbors’ curiosity makes me self-conscious. I may replace the portholes with proper windows soon, before the winter comes. It will be better to have the light.

And I correspond, of course, with my old crew. This, too, I think, is something of the Law: they wrote, sending in their new addresses. Teofilo, the Portygee, writes from Providence, where he works in dry goods; Sundays he still sings, in a choir. My first mate, in Hartford, has taken up the insurance trade. The cook, of course, is unemployed, but hopeful.

And so they all wrote in. Some sent snapshots of their children, grown astonishingly over the course of our last voyage. Already there are college plans, small triumphs of the rising generation, and already there are sorrows. A collection for Anderson, whose youngest died of fever, makes the rounds. This too, I know, is of the Law.

But what this Law is, and who decreed it, still I do not know. I work all day in city hall, a petty functionary recording deeds, and you would think that here, surrounded by machineries of regulation, recording, order, here the agencies of Law would show themselves. But it is not so simple, and I think this complexity as well, it too is of the Law.

I have made my own investigations. I have collared them in the marmoreal halls of the county courthouse, back there across the parking lot, beside the jail, from which occasionally angry voices rise, occasionally a tattooed hand reaches forth, and once already I have known the tattoo, remembered it when it had pulled upon an oar, and felt the profoundest pity seeing it now, livid on an arm grown pale in confinement, the hand that once pulled yare now a helpless fluttering upon a windowpane. I have buttonholed them, I say, between meetings, trying to ascertain who might be the Law, who might know what clause in it decreed the drifting of my ship.

Here, too, the Law intercedes. I feel it dividing me, cluttering my speech with doubts, with qualifications. Where once I might have roared, “Avast! I’ll split ye, ye beggars,” and all manner of stout nonsense, now I find myself not wanting to press too urgently, not wanting to reveal my ignorance of the Law, but wondering as well, as this city councilman I grip seeks this way and that around me, his eyes rolling like a whale in its flurry as he looks for someone to rescue him: I have wondered if he knows, it anyone knows, just what is going on. I wonder if these lubbers, who were once so content to feed us, drunk us, bed us down and ship us out, to take our cargo, our fish, our rendered blubber and our ambergris, I wonder if they are so content now as they seem, under their Law.

For I cannot but feel it is their Law. I tell myself, angry even as I worry if I go too far with this collared councilman, that this was none of my doing, and then I feel the doubt, I wonder if this Law were not some stowaway on my own ship, a rat that slunk down the first hawser carrying the Law within its fur, but then I tell myself that doubts such as these are just the workings of the Law, a teredo worm upon the stout oak of my heart, but it is too late, the councilman has escaped, in tow with two county attorneys. They depart, promising to meet over lunch next week when I have written up a brief, and I am left holding a starched paper collar in my hands, and no closer to knowing how I might regain my ship.

And this, I know, is not the Law: I want my ship again. I dream of it in the night, dream that I have awakened, thrown back the curtains in the moonlight, flung up the sash, and there, from the second storey of my snug home, which still looks down upon the harbor, the harbor still smooth as glass, there in the moonlight my ship glides in past the breakwater, there on the wharf my crew are all assembled, the townspeople as of old, wives and sweethearts, innkeepers and merchants all waving, all sobbing, all joyous to see us off, and we are joyous, stout, absorbed in our work, running up and down the ratlines, departing on the tide. And there at the channel’s end, as a favoring wind freshens at our stern, our wake begins to boil, the harbormaster’s boat frets against the side, and the pilot, climbing overboard, reaches up to shake my hand. His grip is strong, it pulls me after, and together we fall into no harbormaster’s boat, only into water deep, and cold, and I awake, I have thrown the counterpane aside and lie shivering in a sweat that has cooled upon my skin, chill now in the breeze from the open window, the window which, as I rise to close it, I see looks down on no harbor, but only into my neighbor’s yard. On his roof a windvane in the shape of a whale swings, moodily complaining to the moon. This too I recognize as the workings of the Law.