Forever (13 page)
C
ormac searched for order in the shouting and tumult of the open
deck. Clark directed him in an annoyed way to a man called Blifil. He was the purser. A pale, dusty man with dandruff on the shoulders of his crumpled serge jacket. He explained in a mournful, dubious voice that for a late arrival, there were, hum, only two choices: a cabin berth, which was of course too expensive for the likes of an Irish lad in his teens, and, hum, a plank belowdecks with the indentured Irish. He was shocked when Cormac (or Martin O’Donovan) presented him with three one-pound notes for the cabin berth. “I’ve saved for three years, sir,” Cormac said shyly. “I might as well splurge.” Blifil shrugged, pocketed the money, made a check mark and a scribble in a book, and led Martin O’Donovan to his cabin. It was on the main deck, to the right of a passageway leading to the captain’s quarters, and Blifil said he must share it, hum, with a Mister, hum, Partridge, yes, Partridge, about whom he told Cormac nothing. Blifil opened the door with a key, told him to, hum, guard it with his, hum, life, since there were thieves everywhere, see, and then hurried away in a bent shuffle.
When Cormac entered the gloom of the cabin, a heavy middle-aged man was sleeping deeply on his cot (to the left), fully dressed, one booted leg trailing on the floor. This must be Mr. Partridge. A second cot was to the right. Cormac stared at the sleeping man. His round belly rose and fell slowly, as if tied to the slow roll and fall of the
Fury
. His breath was phlegmy. His hair was thinning. His double chin needed a scrape with a razor. The leg on the floor seemed to be guarding a worn leather bag that was jammed under the cot.
The sight of Partridge (exhausted, collapsed, a huge breathing softness) made Cormac drowsy. He fell upon the empty cot, turned his back to the bulkhead, hugged his few possessions, and, while the ship rocked as gently as an immense cradle, fell into a deep sleep.
He awoke in the dark. Mr. Partridge was gone. In the dim light from a porthole Cormac found an oil lantern on a small table, but he had nothing to light it with. Beside the lantern there was a bowl of water. He sniffed, to be sure it wasn’t urine, then splashed his face. He hid the sword case and his small bag under the cot and went out, locking the door behind him, shoving the key deep into a trouser pocket. He still felt the presence of Ireland, although he could no longer see its shores. From all sides of the open deck there was a hum of conversation, lamps moving and bobbing, men laughing. In the center of the deck stood a kind of caged barnyard holding chickens and pigs, and past it dozens of sailors were smoking from clay pipes, while a few passengers lolled against bulkheads. None were distinguishable; they were simply figures in the darkness. The sea made a swishing sound as the
Fury
cut its path west.
Suddenly they entered a bank of fog. And through the fog Cormac could see the sheer cliffs of a small mountain rising at least three hundred feet out of the sea. It was covered with a golden mesh.
A voice beside him said, “Jesus Christ, what’s that?”
It was his cabinmate, Mr. Partridge, his jaw slack as he stared in awe. Plummy English accent. Intense stance as he gazed at the sea. First Mate Clark appeared at his side, and all three stared at a gold-meshed mountain rising from the sea.
“It’s on no map,” Clark said in a hushed voice. “
They
live inside it.” His voice softened. “You know, the Other People. Sometimes it’s here, and sometimes it’s not….”
The Englishman looked at him, then laughed out loud.
“
What
other people?”
Cormac stepped away from them because he knew what Clark meant. He peered at the gold mesh, the small black sea mountain. High on the summit there was a woman. Completely alone. Waving farewell. When the ship came closer on a hard angle in order to pass to the vast ocean, he could see the woman more clearly.
Mary Morrigan.
Without a sigh he left, to cross the brine,
And traverse Paynim shores, and pass earth’s central line.
—L
ORD
B
YRON
, ��C
HILDE
H
AROLD’S
P
ILGRIMAGE
,” 1812
I
reland had vanished. Cormac and Mr. Partridge were lodged in one
of two cramped cabins built under the raised platform of the poop deck, on the starboard side of the
Fury
. A gloomy passageway separated the cabins and led down six steps to the captain’s own cabin. When his door was open, Cormac could glimpse a polished table and windows opening to the foamy wash behind the
Fury
. A clergyman and his wife occupied the port cabin. Cormac saw them the first day out to sea: he tall and grim, she small and pale. They were dressed in mourning black. The clergyman’s wife soon disappeared into the cabin. The clergyman, whose name was Andrew Clifford, carried meals to her on a small board. Cormac couldn’t tell if she was seasick, or being guarded from the heathen roughness of the crew. Sometimes, late at night, he could hear her weeping.
Mr. Partridge told Cormac (or, as he knew him, Martin O’Donovan) that he was himself a Londoner and that this was his third voyage to New York.
With any luck, I’ll make my fortune this time,
he said.
And if I do, I’ll have to decide. Do I stay and get even richer? Or do I go home to London?
The source of his potential fortune, he explained, was crated and wrapped and buried in the hold: a printing press.
They have something unique in the colony,
he said.
Freedom to print what they want, thanks to this legal case—have you read about it?—this case of John Peter Zenger.
He told Cormac how Zenger, a printer, had been charged by the authorities with using a press to subversive ends, and how he fought the charges in court in 1735, and won.
The problem is they have much to say but too few presses upon which to say those things. I intend to help them speak.
At the moment, he said, there were only two printing presses for eleven thousand people!
Incredible!
He laughed a deep belly-growling laugh.
So it’s missionary work, lad. Bringing the modern world to the barbarians!
His enthusiasm seemed to press against the walls of the cabin. He showed Cormac the books he planned to print in his own New York editions, volumes that would give the barbarians some instruction and pleasure. Like an excited schoolboy (he was at least thirty-five) Partridge rummaged in his cloth bag, dropping items on the bunk, and when Cormac saw the titles of the older man’s books, his heart beat more quickly. There were four by Alexander Pope: his translations of the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad,
his own
Rape of the Lock
and
Dunciad
. Partridge seemed startled when Cormac quoted a few lines from Pope’s poem on Heloise and Abelard. And when he showed the young man his copies of Swift’s
Tale of a Tub
and
Gulliver’s Travels,
Cormac took from his satchel
The Drapier’s Letters,
and Mr. Partridge’s eyes widened and his lower lip trembled.
“Well, at least
you
will not add to the barbarism of New York, lad.”
Then he saw the banknotes folded into Swift’s pages and looked surprised.
“You have a lot of money for a young man,” he said.
“My father died and left it to me,” Cormac said, telling the truth. Or a truth.
Mr. Partridge looked at Cormac in a dubious way and handed back the book with its folded notes.
“How old are you anyway?”
Cormac told him.
“Sixteen? And do you have a trade?”
“I can blacksmith a bit, Mr. Partridge, sir.”
“Well, you can learn to print then too,” he said, his jolliness returning. “Everybody should have more than one trade. I’ve got more than one myself.”
He handed Cormac a copy of John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and a Milton pamphlet called
Areopagitica
. He caressed the pamphlet in a loving way.
“Read that, lad. It’s the best argument ever made for freedom of the press. Perhaps we can personally hand it to this Mister Zenger.”
He talked of Milton and Pope and Swift as if he knew them (and, of course, he knew the best of them) while they walked the decks and ate their meals. His tone was enthusiastic and always personal and very serious. Cormac thought: O Father, I wish you could have met this Englishman.
Hour after hour, when he was not reading or dozing, Mr. Partridge explained what the sailors were doing in the rigging, which they climbed like athletes, and why there were so many objects lashed to the deck. All had to do with the voyage. The rough wooden cage was called the barnyard, with its four segregated pigs and many chickens, and that grave, solemn man peering through the slats was Jeffries, the cook. Other bundles contained provisions for the voyage: kegs of water, salted beef, limes for scurvy. The rest were the luggage of sailors and passengers alike. Mr. Partridge said that among his several trades (barber and knife sharpener, along with printer), he was a tailor, and one of the lashed bundles contained cloth for suits he planned to make in New York, or even during the voyage. He eyed Cormac’s ill-fitting clothes when he said this.
“You’d best get a suit yourself, lad, or they’ll think you’re a fugitive. That thing you’re wearing looks pulled off a dead man. And, yes, we’d better trim your hair before you land.”
Cormac’s nerves trembled then; if Mr. Partridge believed he looked like a fugitive, perhaps some of the ship’s officers would too, and they might wonder about the money he was carrying and hold him for arrival in New York. On general suspicion of felony. He vowed silently to get himself a new suit, quickly cut to fit by Mr. Partridge. But he said nothing, because at this point Mr. Partridge was serving as a guide to the world called Belowdecks.
D
own there, Cormac began to see what he had never seen before.
The crew’s quarters, Mr. Partridge explained, were all in the bow, on the first deck below the main deck. Holding a lantern, he showed Cormac the next deck, and for the first time the young man saw the deck of the emigrants. They lived in four rows of bunks hammered together from rough plank, with no bedding supplied by the ship, jackets serving as pillows, coats as blankets. All slept in their clothes. The only natural light came dripping down from the fore and aft hatchways, but in the orange light of Mr. Partridge’s lantern, faces peered at them in a wide-eyed way. A few old men stared at the deck, blinking, ignoring the light. Strapping young men tried to stretch, smoking from short earth-colored clay pipes, nodding, smiling, or throwing hostile glances at the visitors. Children scampered about, up one aisle, down another. Many women were seasick, their faces ghastly with the loss of control, and the air was stained by a mixture of vomit and shit. On that deck, they were all Irish.
A moment of silence greeted Cormac and Mr. Partridge and was broken by a man crooning in Irish from the shadows, a melody Cormac knew, a melancholy tale of a lover’s journey. Then dozens of them joined in, and someone produced a fiddle and began to play in counterpoint, and all of them were shaking heads about the loveless land that was vanishing behind them and then smiling about the magic land to which they were going. The land ahead, of course, was Tir-na-Nog. The land of eternal youth.
“They have no idea how far it is,” Mr. Partridge whispered. “They think crossing the Atlantic is like crossing the River Shannon. The educated ones know but won’t explain to the others. Afraid of what might happen, I suppose, afraid of despair, or riot. They’re almost all Presbyterians, the educated ones, fleeing the Church of Ireland and its endless bloody cruelties. But the ones singing in Irish, they’re real Irish, out of the hills and the bogs and the hungry towns. Most of them don’t speak English. And they’ve signed on as indentured servants. Poor buggers.”
He explained what an indentured servant was (for Cormac had never heard the words), and how these hungry Irish people, listening to the siren call of America, signed on. They pledged five to seven years of their lives, without pay, without schools, five years of labor for English planters in America, in exchange for their passage. They would be free of heartbreaking Ireland and the terrible hunger. The English were, of course, happy to see them go, particularly the Presbyterians, who were gifted at making trouble. In America, they’d work in the earthly paradise, and when the passage was worked off, they’d be free to live their lives.
“But except for knowing they’ll someday be free, they’re no different from the poor, bloody Africans. They’re owned, lad. D’ye understand me?
Other men own them.
And in America, the men who own them, who have them under contract, those men sell them, just the way they sell the Africans. Although on this ship, the Africans are in even worse shape than the Irish.”
“What Africans?”
“Come.”
With the fiddle playing behind them, and the Irish joining in their sad, hopeful song about Tir-na-Nog, Mr. Partridge moved down still another ladder, with Cormac behind him, descending into the bottom level of the ship. He told Cormac to mind his head, since the space was cramped, only four feet of room. In the lantern light Cormac saw the grillwork of a jail and beyond the timbered grille, the glistening forms of men. Black as coal. Black as midnight. Eyes stared at him and at Mr. Partridge. Eyes yellow in the light. Eyes sullen. Eyes angry. Mr. Partridge raised the lantern, said a polite hello (to no reply), and told Cormac that there were thirteen men in this fetid place, with its smell of swamp (as Cormac remembered the rotting Irish corpses in the river that made Thunder change his course). And there was one woman, he added (citing the captain himself as his authority), a woman who claimed to be a princess. In the far corner of this small prison, there were lumpy shapes covered with rough blankets. Cormac thought: One of them must be the woman.
“It’s a dirty business,” Mr. Partridge said. “But it’s England’s favorite business because it’s so easy. They buy Africans for three pounds from the Arab traders and sell them in New York for fifty pounds. So you’re looking at, what? Seven hundred pounds’ worth of living, breathing merchandise, lad.”
The pieces of living merchandise looked at Cormac, breathing lightly but saying nothing, asking nothing, expressing nothing except some muted, wordless, seething anger. In his mind, Cormac saw the shop on the Belfast quays, the shop of the slave trading company, and the earl’s face, and wondered if these human beings could be his property.
“Let’s get some air, lad,” Mr. Partridge said in a desperate way, holding a handkerchief to his nose.
They retraced their steps to the main deck. A clean wind was blowing, filling the sails, and the swishing sound of the ship was louder as it cleaved through the Atlantic waters. But the clean wind couldn’t scour from Cormac’s mind the images of the Africans and the Irish, jammed on their separate levels below his feet. The words of his father’s letter rose in him:
I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man.
…