John Gardner - The King's Indian - Stories and Tales

“I sighed.

“He too was silent for a time, working, his tongue clamped between his teeth, his hands red and cracking from the cold. ‘You won’t believe it if I tell you,’ he says, with that same easy grin that bunches the muscles of his freckled cheeks, ‘so I’ll tell you.’

“Sunk in gloom, full of unholy suspicions, I felt more dread than excitement, now that I was to learn at last — so I imagined — the secret that had put me off for so long. As I’ve said before, the greatest mysteries grow ordinary if you live with them. Sunrise and sunset, or the suspension of sunrise and sunset near the Poles. But also the day was the objective idea of frozen blue, if such a thing can be; the yardarm above me gleamed with iced varnish, and the frayed knots, gritty with salt and ice, and grained like oak, were solid enough to refute without a word the airiest dreams of Bishop Berkeley.

“ ‘Tell on, if ye’ve a mind to.’

“He told me the story so casually, interspersed with the necessary grunts of his labor and now and then a remark to a bird (he spoke only to the dark, substantial ones; I alone was aware of those others, white as snow), that I hardly considered till after he’d finished it whether or not the things he said were possible according to my own humble scheme of reality.

“Four years ago, he said — the last time the Jerusalem had docked in Nantucket — there was a great commotion from the ship’s owners, two wrinkled old salts long since retired, by the names of Tobias Cook and James T. Horner. Bent and bright-eyed as two owls they were, and as full of antique secrets, judging by their visages. Hardly was the gangplank firmly set before they were aboard and cloistered with the Captain, whispering sometimes, sometimes guffawing, drinking their rum down like buccaneers after a boomer. Soon they emerged, along with the Captain, all three of them looking akilter and bewildered and chock-full of drunken hilarity, as furled and grandiose as gunboat flags; and, without a word to the crew, ashore they steered. It was from innkeepers, fellow whalers, and members of their families that the crew got word. The Jerusalem had been reported gone down six months ago, in a maelstrom in the region of the Vanishing Isles, and reported gone down by not just one ship but three, all trustworthy Americans. All three were familiar with the ship thought lost, swore they’d recognized the men in the longboats, and swore they’d seen clearly not only her name, painted large on the bow, but also the ship’s painted figurehead. There was one thing more, a mystery impossible to fathom and equally impossible to deny: After everything was lost — the low-riding ship and every man of her crew — one memento bobbed up and was hauled aboard the whaler Grampus. It was a painting known by relatives of Captain Dirge to be aboard the Jerusalem. The rescued painting was still in existence — so Billy More claimed — and when compared with the painting still hung, safe and sound, on the Jerusalem, it was found to be squarely identical, except for a rip from the salvager’s grapnel and the damage from its time in the sea.

“ ‘That’s a very strange story to be telling a friend, Billy More,’ says I.

“ ‘So it is,’ he tells me with his cherub smile.

“ ‘Surely you never was fooled by such trifles.’

“Again, as innocent as a babe, he smiles. ‘Ah, but I was, mate, and am to this day. When you come right down to it, I’m a superstitious fool.’

“I laughed. He too laughed. I’d put away, for the time, that nagging fear, and my doubts about Augusta. The day was wide and beatific, with no possibility of evil or ominous mystery in it. Even the diamond glint of icebergs, even the merely philosophical possibility of death had no trace of evil in it: The world was music — white birds around us— a hymn of natural process shading heavenward. ‘But I saw the two paintings, ye see, Jonathan, and I talked with the mate from the Grampus’ crew, only man of the lot who hadn’t set off on another whaling voyage. More important, for the purpose, I sat with our Captain in his big white house, along with first mate Knight and the rest and three gentlemen the Captain brought down from Philadelphia. Scientists they were, or two of them were scientists. The other was a specialist in spiritualist trickery, a master swindler in his own right, some claimed. He’d taken an interest because the picture was of him. Dirge was a great admirer of the man, Dirge being, as ye know, a follower of things praeternatural. It was a picture supposed to have some curious power. It never occurred to me to doubt that the sinking of the Jerusalem had happened exactly as the witnesses said it had, in some way or other, nor did it occur to the others there neither — not after those men from the Society was through. All we ever wondered was how and why.’ He blew on his hands to warm them, then went back to work. He seemed to have talked all he cared to, for the time. But I could hardly leave the matter hanging like that. ‘So you decided, the lot of you, to come down and have a look.’

“He laughed. ‘Not exactly. The Captain and the three from the Society went off to another room and talked. Sometimes they called in one or another of us to question. The rest of us, we joked about the thing, with a shiver of ice now and then along our spines, but no one suggested we search the myst’ry out. We joked and drunk rum and had a bit of hot soup the Captain’s daughter cooked up, and we talked about it all in the Captain’s big house looking down on the Cove till it’s nearly dawn. It was the first time most of us had seen the place. It was lovely, I can tell you. A house to rule an empire from, so enormous you couldn’t get warm in it, yet so crammed with brass and silver and gold it would keep a dead Eskimo sweating for fright of thieves.

“ ‘So dawn came, ye see, and because of the drinking, or Lord knows what, we begun to sink deeper in the weirdness of it. The Captain and the men from the Society came back to the parlor and joined us. Sober as judges, those three men were. We still had the paintings there, the real and whatever ye’d call that other, and that other one seemed to be rotting by the second, like a butterfly sent out of heaven to earth’s heavy air.’

“ ‘Billy More, ye’re a scoundrel and a liar,’ says I.

“ ‘So it sounds,’ says he, and smiles. ‘Well, there was those that declared it was an omen — about half the crew, it was — and swore they’d never put to sea again. I was ready to join with ’em. It was a reasonable theory, the only half-reasonable theory we had. The Captain encouraged us to do as we believed, with a glance at ‘is friends from the Society; and those of the crew that was certain got up and went home.

“ ‘I meant to leave with ’em, but I didn’t — for no reason. The scientists was talking with them of us that stayed, telling all about the Society’s work and how there was people that had a kind of sixth sense, as a man might say, and the Captain’s daughter was one of them. They’d been giving her psychic tests for years. In the right situation — in a place where the kingdoms of day and night interpenetrate, as they put it — it was possible such a person might have perceptions far keener than the ordinary. I was only half listening. It gave me the shudders. I stood undecided by the Captain’s front window, looking down at the harbor, and I got the strange idea the view had changed all at once. It was something like a dream. You know how suggestible a man can be, early in the morning with the mist on the wharves … In a kind of daydream I seemed to remember our ship’s going down. The minute I realize what it is I’m dreaming, the dream evaporates like dew. “Billy More,” says I, “it’s time ye got home to yer Mary, ye drunk!” But I saw the Cove moving. The water was moving like … It’s hard to say. Suppose the whole world was a merry-go-round, slowed down, as slow as the tumble of a nightmare. The land is the center, and the sea — the water off Nantucket — is the platform and horses. The sea’s hard and firm, not like ice but like lead in a smelter’s mold, and there’s objects in it, maybe hulks of ships. The sea moves steady and firm and the land turns with it, like a hub, the sea lead-gray, dead-gray as the sky, the objects in it black, ships soulless and dead, long dead, being ground into nothingness, and above it, birds.…