Pete Hamill - Forever

“It appears that if God wouldn’t give her what she wanted,” Mr. Partridge said, “that is, reunion with her children—then she’d take it herself. May God forgive her, poor injured soul.”

The Rev. Clifford didn’t preside at his wife’s watery burial. Captain Thompson assumed the duty. They placed the shroud on a greased plank, and the captain read from a Bible. Then the plank was lifted at one end and tipped over the side, and the packed shroud disappeared in the motionless sea. Clifford didn’t watch it go. He was staring at the silent sky.

The rations were shorter now. The captain (or the company that had hired him) had laid in enough food and water for eight weeks at sea. But the voyage of the Fury had been slowed by the storm, pushed out of its path through the ocean and pushed back in time, and now in the Doldrums they didn’t know how long the voyage would last or how it would end. Not even the captain knew. They could be there forever. The pigs not washed overboard had now been eaten. The peas had run out. The chocolate was gone. The slabs of salt meat first became smaller and then vanished. Days passed. Nights passed. Early in the voyage, each meal was three potatoes and two sea biscuits. Now it was two potatoes and one sea biscuit. Water casks rattled emptily around the deck at night. Cormac almost never saw the Rev. Clifford, but from behind his door, his wounded voice kept up an endless punishing conversation with the invisible. Prayers and laments, the rhythms of a baffled love. For his wife. For God. Rejected by both.

Sometimes, to rid himself of Clifford’s unseen presence, Cormac read Swift or Pope in the half dark of the cabin floor. Searching for words he might whisper to the wind. Or the sea gods. Mr. Partridge slipped into and out of fever. He mumbled, or ranted, and Cormac thought that perhaps he’d gone mad. Or was always mad and had simply disguised his madness with a civilized mask. The older man mumbled: Face it now, milord. Face your death. Face Africa.

During the days when they were becalmed, Cormac went around without jacket or shirt, following the example of the crew, with his money pouch tied across his groin. Each day, he sipped his rationed water and brought what he could to the Africans. Small portions. Not enough for anyone. Just what he could cadge, or hoard, or steal. On each visit, Kongo looked at him and nodded and spoke the young white man’s name. Cormac’s beard began to grow. Wispy and scraggly at first, like pubic hair, then more full, shaping a rich black mask. Three times a day, emigrants were brought on deck to bathe in sea-water. Most were naked men and small children, and their bones had begun to push forward, pressing from within against blotched, yellowing skin. The women were too shy to wash naked in front of strangers, and of course the women began to die more quickly. Sometimes in the evenings, the smothering silence was broken by a fiddler, Mr. Makem from Armagh, but slowly, after days and days, his music became more mournful. A lament. An acceptance of death. From belowdecks Cormac heard less weeping and fewer groans and almost no prayers.

The figurehead of the Fury was an angel, nameless, carved by some forgotten boatwright, and someone in the crew whispered that they needed that angel now, that they desperately needed a guardian angel, and Mr. Clark growled that what they needed was a fecking wind. One night, while Mr. Partridge dozed and mumbled and whispered in conversation with himself, Cormac walked out on deck. The air was thick and still, and the ship seemed to be anchored to the bottom. He stared down at the carved angel on the prow.

The head turned to look at him.

It was Tomora.

She smiled at him, her black skin glistening in the moonlight. He reached for her, wanting to touch her flesh, caress her breasts, to whisper to her in the hot sea air. But when he touched her ebony face, she turned back to pale painted wood.

Tomora.

Later, he saw her in many of his dozing hours. Above him. Below him. Beside him. Her dark body glistening with sweat, his vision made up of fragments actually glimpsed in the darkness of the slave deck and brought together by his own feverish longings. On his visits below, bringing scraps of bread and drops of water, Tomora looked at him from the darkness, flanked by the men, her eyes still refusing any expression of gratitude. In fever, she took him to her dark interior.

Did he see the things he thought he saw in the days that followed? Perhaps not. Perhaps they were only part of the fever that had touched all of them, made intense and vivid by the hard blue sheen of the cloudless sky. They seemed as real as the masts and the decks and the rigging. As Cormac gazed at the sea one still morning, a figure erupted, part woman, part fish, then submerged, then rose again, breaking from the surface. Triumphantly rising. Teasingly rising. Her breasts were pale sea blue. Her dark, wet, golden hair was streaming. Each leg was covered with silvery scales and ended with the twin tails of a fish. A mermaid. Or a dolphin. Una sirena. O una delfina. Cormac thought the vision was his alone, an invented creature leaping from cool water to calm his blistered mind. But there soon were other men at the rail, gazing slack-jawed at the sea or speaking softly, personally, to the sea creature and not to one another. Voices full of need. Wanting to believe. Until she burst again from the sea, rising high, sea-cold breasts glistening, a smile sea-chilly, hair wet and whipping the air. She turned like a marlin. Spread her scaled legs to allow one glimpse of the place between. Golden-haired. Salmon-colored. She smiled in a pitying way. And then dove hard into the sea, leaving behind only an immense stillness.

The men looked at one another, uneasy, afraid to be labeled fools or idiots. They knew they had seen her. Knew what had appeared before their eyes. But they said nothing. They were like witnesses to something wondrous or shameful, unable to admit what they had seen. In the cabin Cormac said nothing to Mr. Partridge, who was engulfed in his own visions.

More people died. They buried seven tiny children on one windless morning, tipping them into the sea as if they were bags of onions. They gave the sea one old man and four young women. Then they buried in the still water two men who were Cormac’s age. All emigrants. And then one of the crew was found facedown on deck, and they sent his body after the others to the bottom.

The next day, after assuring himself that Mr. Partridge still lived, after forcing pulpy potato past his cracked lips, Cormac descended to the slave deck. The stench from the emigrant deck was thicker now than air, touchable, chewable, a substance, some fine compost of sweat and shit and decaying flesh. He struggled to keep from vomiting, helped by the fact that he had so little in his stomach to vomit. Then he heard the voice of Kongo calling desperately in his language, his voice cutting through the fevered wailing and mumbling of the emigrants between them. Cor-mac. Cor-mac. When he saw Cormac, he gestured wildly, pointing at Tomora, who was lying on the planked floor against the bulkhead. Her body was covered to her chin with rough cloth. Her eyes were open. But she was not moving.

They prepared to bury Tomora. The captain didn’t want the crew to see her nakedness and ordered up some last piece of canvas to serve as a shroud. Cormac helped Kongo raise her body for the sail maker to make his coarse sheath. Her flesh was still warm. The captain said sadly that Kongo and three other Africans could accompany her body to the deck, to say their private farewells. Four men. No more. They protested in their own language. The captain held up four fingers and then made a slashing gesture that said: No more .