Barkskins (31 page)

“As it has mine. Excuse me, gentlemen. I must retire while my mental abilities are still intact.”

George Pickering and Piet were delighted. If one had to have a mad uncle, Outger was tremendous. They especially liked the mosquito story. It was a new comprehension of insect pests. Who knew if it might not be Genghis Khan plunging his proboscis into one's flesh?

•  •  •

Captain Strik kept a lookout in the crow's nest from dawn until full dark scanning the sea for possible French sails pricking the horizon. There were French ships faster than a laden merchant, and many evenings he stayed on deck, taking his meal standing until some distant speck of white was identified. In the third week of the voyage the weather showed storm signs: swells that the captain called “dogs running before their master,” heavier seas, increasingly overcast sky, and the wind moaning in the rigging. George Pickering strode about the deck sucking in the salty wind, leaning over the rail to stare at the leaping froth. The sailors all had huge misshapen hands and their faces seemed baked by the sun into corroded metal. Since the first day of the voyage he had pestered the crew with questions, particularly Wigglesworth, the heavily muscled ruffian with a beard like a wheat field whom they had seen in the tavern dancing a hornpipe two nights before they embarked. Bernard noticed Wigglesworth tried to dodge George Pickering, who was always asking for a rollicking chantey, not understanding that the songs were tailored to certain kinds of work as hauling at halyards, at the pumps, at stamp and go. Captain Strik frowned at this quizzing of his crew but gnawed his lower lip and said nothing.

Outger daily inspected the lashings holding his invention in place on the deck. “She's sound, she's bound, she can't shift around,” he said. When he said it at the dinner table before launching into another fable, the captain shook his head.

Said Outger/Etdidu, “My old friend Captain Pearfowle of Iceland escaped a severe storm in a singular manner. His ship was off Cape Circumcision's rocky coast when a storm forced them nearer the jagged cliffs. He had fitted out with eighteen huge anchors and nine large barrels, one for himself and each of the eight crewmen. The storm made foundering their likely fate, but he dropped the anchors, pulled the wood stopper in the bilges and took refuge under his barrel as did each of the sailors. The ship sank, and they with it, but in their upended barrels they had enough air to breathe until the storm passed.”

Captain Strik listened to this with a curious expression.
“And then?”
he asked menacingly.

“Why then—they plugged the hole, bailed away and emptied the water out, and continued on their way.”

“
Stilte!
Silence! This is a foc's'le yarn that tests my temper, sir. I'll have no more of these blatherings. Kindly take your dinner in your stateroom for the remainder of the voyage.” He found Outger Duquet a source of irritation and discontent; it was best to dampen his squibs. And he intended to have a word with George Pickering. Outger and George Pickering had greatly reinforced Captain Strik's hatred of passengers.

But if Captain Luther Pearfowle's storm was imaginary, the tempest that caught
Bladwesp
was terrifyingly real. Great seas rose and fell on them with shuddering crashes. The bare masts groaned and the rigging ropes howled. A black monster swelled on the horizon, raced toward them, then sprang on the
Bladwesp
with terrible weight, and the topgallant section of the foremast broke in a tangle of ropes and torn canvas. There was a grinding noise; the ship rolled, listed. As quick as an eel grasping its prey Captain Strik himself ran onto the deck with an ax, slashed the ropes holding down Outger's invention and leapt back. The
Bladwesp
shrugged off the heavy case, which smashed through the rail and sank like the original rock. The ship, relieved of this weight, rose up ripped and leaking but afloat.

For the next two days the ship's carpenters worked on the damaged mast, cutting away the splinters and ruined wood and replacing it with a new top section stored in the hold.

Outger locked himself in his cabin. They could hear him expostulating and excoriating the captain for hours. He emerged the next day haggard and morose, eyes blazing in a sore countenance, his fingers crooked into claws.

Nicolaus, fearing for Captain Strik, tried to calm the situation. “I am truly sorry about your lost invention,” he said.

Outger/Etdidu glared at him with red eyes. “I do not know what you mean. There is no invention. There never was an invention. It was simply a box to pique fools.”

“But the weight!”

“
Steenen.
Stones. New England granite.” And Etdidu turned away.

•  •  •

Captain Strik liked to put on a smart appearance when entering port, and when they were a week away he gave the order to shift sails, a difficult procedure demanding intense concentration and extraordinary effort for two days. George Pickering Duke, his mouth open, watched three men to a yardarm struggling to unbend the old sails from their spars from the topgallants down. One of the men on the yardarm above was Wigglesworth, the hornpipe dancer whom George Pickering admired.

From the deck George Pickering bellowed, “Wigglesworth! Give us a chantey, Wigglesworth!” The sailor twisted his head around at the sound of his name, just as a sudden burst of wind puffed the sail and broke the temporary slender rope yarns securing it. The sail jerked away from Wigglesworth's hand and its convulsive twitch knocked the sailor loose and sent him cartwheeling down.

“Ah, God!” said George Pickering. Wigglesworth clutched, fell, hit a yardarm below and bounced off into the sea. George Pickering rushed to the side. Wigglesworth floated faceup in the center of a spreading wash of blood. Before George Pickering could think what to do two sailors had thrown lines over the side and were down in the water, rigging a bowline around the injured man's chest.

“Haul away!” shouted one of the swimmers. “Haul!”

Captain Strik emerged from his cabin with a threaded needle, a pair of scissors and a swab. He snipped away the bloody hair, wiped Wigglesworth's head, already well rinsed in salt water, and quickly stitched him up. He ordered two sailors to take him to his hammock and keep an eye on him.

“He'll come through. Head hard as a quahog shell. Maybe more confused than usual for a bit. We'll watch how he goes.” He turned to George Pickering, who was watching with great interest.

“You are not to speak to any member of this ship's crew for the duration of the voyage. You would do well to keep out of sight or there might be an accident. The crew regards you as a Jonah.”

“They are just jealous of my friendship with Wigglesworth,” smiled George Pickering.

“It is Wigglesworth would give you the push, Mr. GEORGE PICKERING Duke.”

B
efore they left Boston, Bernard had arranged the hire of a private carriage to take them around Amsterdam as he was not sure if Cornelia and Doortje had a stable and conveyances. Outger had made his own arrangements. A wealthy merchant to whom he had sent crates of sassafras over the years had offered him the use of his berlin, horses and coachman.

It was a bright blue January morning when they came off the
Bladwesp.
Outger's borrowed equipage stood at the end of the wharf. The travelers looked it over. The berlin was an exquisite thing, deep marine-blue enamel, glass windows, the merchant's initials coiling like golden snakes on the doors. The body of the carriage was slung on steel springs, the apex of travel comfort. The coachman's livery was a strong yellow and from a distance, Bernard said the ensemble resembled a blue teapot with a canary sitting on the spout. Outger ordered the
Bladwesp
sailors to load his trunks onto a waiting dray and in minutes the merchant's cream-colored horses bore him away.

Amsterdam had grown so large it shocked Jan, Bernard and Nicolaus, so bustling, its port jammed with ships of every nation, the streets—the streets of their childhood—thick with people speaking twenty tongues. Jan found he could barely understand the street slang, yet it shot tendrils of painful nostalgia through him. The travelers recovered their legs by walking to their inn, then hired a laundress to wash their linen in fresh water. Jan strolled about the streets; Nicolaus bought an old book, Erasmus's
De civilitate morum puerilium,
a book of manners for children, but useful to adults, especially in uncouth New England, where force and boldness defied efforts at politesse. He opened the book and immediately read that wild eyes implied a violent character, and fixed stares were proofs of effrontery. Outger, he reflected, had both wild eyes and a fixed stare, depending on his disposition.

Back at the inn a messenger presented Bernard with a letter from Doortje telling them that in the morning they should go to Piet Roos's old house, which was now Cornelia's home. She, Doortje, was living in their parents' house attended by her servant, Mieke. She would meet them at Cornelia's and wished them Godspeed. She added a postscript: “Outger is here already one day.”

•  •  •

Amsterdam had swollen like a cracker in hot milk, but Bernard remembered the stale odor of the canals, the wet cobbled streets and sky milky with overhead cloud. After so many years in the dark forests at the top of the world, where trees rejected the puny efforts of men, he found pollarded willows ridiculous. He and his adopted brothers had changed very much, the world had changed. He felt he belonged neither here nor there. The next day when he entered his assigned room in Cornelia's house he was pleased to see a half-remembered painting of a hunting scene, a huntsman raising a horn to his lips. This painting stirred some subterranean image of lost familiarity and it was a good omen that it still pleased him.

As for Jan, the return to his homeland affected him deeply—the light, the long, long horizon and the opalescent subtleties of clouds—the clouds!—made him long to toss away his present life, to remain here in the few short years left him, for he was fifty-four. He did not want to see Cornelia or Doortje; he only wanted to gaze at clouds. In their shifting forms and vaporous mutations they seemed uncanny manifestations of what he felt inside his private self.

•  •  •

The next morning they walked to the old Piet Roos house. Inside the entry hall the first thing Jan saw was a painting of horizon and endless sky filled with clouds of unraveling lace, clouds pulling up the dark of the sea into their nether regions. Why had he never seen this painting when he was young? How different his life might have been. But no, had he not been rescued from the
Weeshuis
orphanage he would likely have been apprenticed to some farrier or chimney sweep. But perhaps . . .

Nicolaus, too, was shuddering with recognition, with awakened recollections as ribboned as the shifting light. The bridges delighted him, bridges of many shapes and lengths, of stone and wood, the latter very likely of timbers from the forest properties of Duke & Sons. Arched bridges shaped the diffuse light so correctly he felt a flare of joy. He remembered cold winter ice and sliding along on his shoes under one of those very bridges. On one of his walks he saw the skinny bridge—
Magere Brug
—over the Amstel and he grinned like a fool as he crossed it.

Outger was in residence. He had to be first; he was the real son, and he was gratified when Cornelia said “my own dear boy,” and squeezed his hands in her buttery paws. He sat on the floor with his head leaning against her knee—a pose he had seen in a painting—and poured out his (expurgated) life history in the English colony which he had decided to renounce.

“I might live with Doortje, if you do not have room for me here, dear Mother. I do need several rooms and a very large table for my Work.”

Doortje looked at Outger, then at the plaster cherubs on the ceiling, back again at Outger. Cornelia was slightly alarmed. She began to talk of his childhood ways and of the great changes in the world since he had left. She did not mention Charles Duquet. But as soon as the others arrived she shifted Outger to the fringes of her affection, or so he felt. They all came at once, tall strong men filling the room, everyone pressing forward.

Age and plumpness had ironed out Cornelia. Her quite smooth face and broad nose seemed almost flat and one eye sat noticeably higher than the other. Her brows were invisible and the white-blue eyes seemed they might be sightless. Her thin hair was covered by a finely embroidered linen cap. She wore a grey silk dress and, as the day was chilly, a little cape of marten fur. One by one the sons approached, bent low and kissed her. The grandsons George Pickering Duke and Young Piet came forward in their turn and pecked at her hand. She tried to feel a stir of affection for these young sons of her adopted boys.

Doortje's face had the same sharp features as Charles Duquet's and Outger's, but her body was obese. She wore a dress of fine blue wool. Her small eyes flashed around, taking in every detail of the colonial company, and she showed a slight, almost pitying smile. Bernard thought she looked intelligent and likely was sharp-tempered.

•  •  •

Cornelia had ordered a welcoming dinner and many relatives poured into the house, laughing and smiling, beseeching information on the New World and its rigors. Before they went to table there were drinks and delicacies. Jan had not tasted North Sea herrings since he was a boy—there was nothing better on earth. Bernard was enjoying good
jenever
and smoked eel. At dinner the main dish was
waterzooi,
a rich stew of freshwater fish.

Bernard was interested in some of the cousins. Jaap Akkerman he remembered as a small, black-haired boy picking fleas off a spotted dog. Now he showed a drooping face topped with heavy eyes, the lids like ivory covers on pillboxes. He was involved in some business with eelgrass, once used to procure salt, but now, said Akkerman, a very good material for packing fragile items.