Lost Nation (19 page)

It was as if he’d torn some indispensable sustaining muscle. The false clarity of the tavern rum was gone. The girl just a girl, a hard-raised young whore. Perhaps the apt confessor for him but he was not deserving of one, any at all. His broken silence was in fact a final violation, the concluding and irreversible measure of his failing. His silence had been his only memorial, his only true act of contrition. His silence had become his life and his life was nothing but dedication to the memory of desecration. His being was mere acolyte to muteness. Some meager offering of himself before the vast silence of the sea of night that surrounded him, always.

Long years gone he’d considered death by water for himself. And rejected it as a vanity, a clumsy self-serving action, puny and poor in sight of the enormous bile of his soul.

He sat broken watching the water move in darkness, carving its endless course into the earth, over the earth. His faint breath emitting the only discernable mark that he was there at all. It was cold enough so there would be light frost in the morning. He made no move to warm himself, did not even bring his arms up from where they hung lank to wrap his chest. The cold was little enough of what he deserved. He was absolutely free of sentiment or self-pity when he wondered if he would recall the sensation of being cold after his death when he had no expectation but to reside in everlasting fire.

Born Micajah Blood Bolles
forty-seven summers before in New Bedford, the middle name after a never-known grandfather on his mother’s mother’s side. Into a family of ship chandlers that owned their own rope walk and a dozen sail-makers’ lofts. They purchased the raw goods and sold the finished ones and paid only enough for labor to ensure the quality of that work. Along with these staples they could larder a vessel with salt-pork and brined beef, dense ship-biscuit, salt, sugar, tea, meal and flour, live crates of fowl, tobacco for smoking or chewing, rum for the crews and brandies for the captains, firewood or coal for the galley, candles and rope matches. Besides the sails from the lofts and the sheets and shrouds from the rope-walk they produced everything else needed, right down to seaman’s bags and rope hammocks. The only thing they did not own was a forge, preferring to purchase outright finished fittings; forges burned down. They owned sheds on the wharves as well as a block-long warehouse of brick that had offices for clerks and scribes on the upper floor, as well as the main office where Micajah Bolles worked alongside his brother and father, all within the cataract-cloud of his grandfather’s presence—the old man the only one who’d been to sea as a young man and eventual captain until he shipwrecked in the Irish Sea with a load of cotton from South Carolina bound for the English mills and who, saved, returned by passage and vowed to not so much as set foot in a dinghy for an afternoon sail on Apponagansett Bay. He would not even own shares in vessels. Ships foundered, ruined, wrecked, burned. If they made their return they would still require outfitting; if not some new vessel would need the same. He made this living
by the sea, from the sea but not on the sea. It could never take him again. Every year the great autumn storms would whiten his face, as if the sea were pursuing him inland.

Micajah Bolles attended Harvard College at sixteen and married Betsey Marsh two years later and set up house at two blocks situate midway between his parents’ home and hers. The Marsh men whalers of good local reputation and wealthy but the men who sailed under them earned hard their wages and almost to a man would land swearing never to sail under a Marsh again but when the ships were ready to return to the far-northern waters the crews were never difficult to fill—the captains might be severe but the wages and shares premium to the work. And Betsey Marsh loved the sea, loved it not just for the life it provided her and loved it also not just on pretty summer days when the Bay fluttered with the most trifling of breezes, but loved likewise the storms and dark winter days when the harbor-bound ships ran silver with ice on the riggings, loved the summer squall-lines that spurted along the horizon or turned and ran inland, where she would stand on the wharf and watch the falling sheets of rain split by lightning coming over the Bay toward her, thrashing her dark curls against her face, the thrill blood-ripened her cheeks and her eyes wide, their burnished blue like the last piece of summer sky lost within the onslaught of storm, waiting there, leaning into the wind until the very last moment before the rain lashed her, dashing then for cover of the wharf-sheds.

And Micajah Bolles would stand at the upper-story window of his office ahead of those storms and spy her figure out on the wharf, stand there flushed and hot and frightened for her all at once. It was as if Betsey was something created out of a world that was unknown to him. As if they lived in not the same place but two different places overlaid. And part of this excitement was in being able to end the day by returning to his own house where she would be waiting him with supper prepared by the serving girl but overseen by her and she would be as delighted to see him as he was her. And she would sit and listen to the details of his day as if it too, for her, was someplace almost beyond imagination. She was a year younger than he was and although they lived as adults, when the candle lantern was cupped and blown out for the night they were as children together, their nights wild raucous
romps of laughter sleek and slippery as their skins, which seemed to be not two skins but one shared between them. He could sleep four hours a night and work ten hours the next day. And come home not tired but exhilarated.

The only contention seemed so obvious as to be inevitable, as if the two bloodlines swept down neat straight lines for conflict at the sole place available within their world: the sixteen-foot dinghy day sailer that had been her father’s when he was a boy and that Betsey began to sail at such a young age that she claimed never to have been taught; it was something she had always known. She would laugh at his fears, his determination not to go onto the water with her and not once would she consider giving it up. The one time he attempted insistence was after their first child, Sarah Alice, was born but he had no response when Betsey looked at him and said, “Who would teach her to sail, if not me?”

And there were the children, along with the not unexpected problems of child-bearing. Micajah himself had a brother and two sisters he’d never known. After Sarah Alice came a girl Rebecca who lived three days and then a boy child Hazen who survived and after that a miscarriage too late to be hidden from anyone but too young for proper burial and then came the next boy Cooper who thrived and then John who lived seventeen months and died of a fever. After that a period of three years where she did not conceive and they did not talk of this. Then the final child, another girl, was stillborn and without speaking of it they knew she would be their last.

She was born the spring Sarah Alice turned thirteen. Micajah Bolles was thirty-two years old. His grandfather sat each day blind in his office chair turned to the window open summer or winter so he could hear the sounds of the harbor and wharves, the groan of chocks and pulleys, the swarm of gulls, the cries of fishwives and stevedores commingling as if the tongue of the world rose up beside the sea to fall upon his acute hearing and keep it living for him. Other than this he did little and his grandson, his younger grandson, had somehow gained his ear. Years later Blood recalling this would consider that this grandfather had left one life behind and made another of the same materials, the only ones available to him, and perhaps could sense something of this same ability in his younger grandson. What else to explain his preference for Micajah over the older brother, Proctor?

Micajah could look out the window in his grandfather’s office, the one near-always open to the life of the sea and spy the chimney pot of his own house and some afternoons he would pause there, the old man behind him talking, the words, issues, commands, already known to the grandson who felt free to peer out and within himself see the interior of his home, the wife, the children, and he would from time to time catch himself in some near-frightful daze, a spinning fall of the mind—how had he arrived at all this? How had it happened around him? At thirty-two he did not recognize himself in the looking-glass of his shaving stand. Strapping as a youth he’d gained the softness of middle age, his throat pouched beneath his chin, his waist slack but full against the stays of his moleskin breeches. He walked through his days and mostly felt this was the way of all men. Sundays he sifted each word of the sermons and homilies for strength, for the wisdom that might allow him to accept his life as it was. What he could not understand was that while all men struggled thus some few must brand themselves. Out cast.

He feared most a fault, an essential weakness—some ill-forged hinge that one day would give way: that the struggles of the mind were but a child’s fright mask for the primacy of the soul. Where the fullness of a man resided.

This hidden being shamed him most before Betsey. Who had aged and thickened with child-bearing and raising, whose formidable lustrous curls had already fringed with silver but her eyes were the same vault of blue, of pure wet—night promise they’d always been. And who carried her motherhood silent but prideful, who seemed to accept the numbering of days, who seemed to him to understand that all life was thus; quick, abrupt, savory as well as sweet. Who was no longer the fleet young girl she had been and did not seem to wish to be. Or if she did he did not hear of it. Anymore than he broached to her his own tattered youth still squalling within.

Perhaps in the custom of calling each other Mother and Father they had also annulled their true intimacy and assumed portrayals of themselves. He could imagine all too well the look on her if he were to suggest this.

She would still sail the Bay on a bright summer day, often with one or another of the children with her, coming in all of them shimmering
and sunburnt, hair and skin filmed with salt, eyes bold as if gained something of the depth the little dinghy skimmed over. And those times he knew she held her own secret, one he could never know. He did not begrudge her this. His own mystery so vast he thought unknowable, fully, even to himself. A restless soul. He drifted. Silently, as if by chance.

And so, as antidote or disguise or even clearly a step considered but not yet named, he joined fully into the society of men. Politics held little interest but the alehouses and taverns, where all politics began and often ended as well, offered more than rhetoric and self-promotion—there were men like himself seeking respite from the silent insidious dust of each cloying day, ones who would come in and sit silent with their brown bitter ales or rum toddy before them and he could sit and watch the dust slip from them as the level of their drink went down and most times after calling for another they would turn and speak to the man next to them and so step tentative into the day made newly bearable.

There were drunkards and men who could hold their drink and Micajah Bolles knew which of these he was and which he intended to remain.

And all the while, it was not even the company of men he sought. That company only offered the pretext, the deep woods that his single solitary tree might blend within.

The girls were daughters of fishermen or in from the enfolding farmlands and sick of fishguts or the stink of cattle. They came in every stripe and check and for the longest time he would allow no favorite, not only from the determination to keep his heart if not his body pure but also because there were so many of them—as if the Lord God turned out on the face of the earth these lovely creatures not so much for the delight of man as for His own delight in His making—a notion that struck Micajah Bolles with the force of a gale wind. Not that he was reckless or abandoned like other men he witnessed. He would go weeks, sometimes months between girls. Most days and not only Sundays swearing off them completely.

But there were so many and they were so beautiful and Micajah Bolles did not yet understand it was his own delusive heart he was trying to fill. And did not yet own the gauge to fathom the depth of that void. Although the sickness for him was less of infidelity—he believed he held his heart pure to Betsey—but the necessity this prompted; the girls
owned names he forgot even as they removed their clothing, these girls lacked not only names but history or future or anything at all beyond the moment. All he wanted was that moment with them. And it was this above all else—before, during, after—that proved the sickness of himself.

So she was the last thing expected. Called Molly and again he did not ask her details, did not want her history or sad dreams and this girl seemed no different in that she understood this. Even when the inevitable time came lying beside her spent but for the first time desiring to know her, wanting her selfness, every cranny of hope and to salve every wrong. To listen to all she might say. To talk himself. It was this last that stopped him, not able to reveal himself. He had already given her more than he knew was prudent. So he believed.

She had scant lank hair the color of weak sunlight, small feet and hands and long white legs. The first he saw of her was a forearm coming over his shoulder to set a tankard before him, and the fine drift of hair over the perfect swell of muscle from the sharp bone of her wrist toward the point of her elbow was so lovely that he wanted to take it between his teeth. The rest of that night he did not speak to her but watched her. Her face was pleasant, neither round nor sharp featured, her mouth with just enough curve to her lips to draw him, her eyes pale, a color he could never recall, could not in fact, looking at her, name. She was no beauty but was not homely or ill-made, just a girl who passed on the street he would not have looked back at. And yet from that first glance of forearm she was lodged in him as firmly as the fabled heathen arrow. An axe, it might as well have been.

To his surprise she preferred to make her assignations in the morning hours, when the sun was well up but she had not truly roused from the bed in her cheap room. He was the only man she saw and he paid her well enough to ensure this. Twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday mornings he would visit her, on the weekday arriving late at the office claiming he was needed at home and Saturday having to say nothing more to Betsey than just once telling her it was a time he could work undisturbed. And Molly would still be abed waiting him, her hair tangled with sleep and her eyes slow but her breath sweetened from the night by a tin cup of milk. She had small teeth, perfect but for one canine that gaped and jutted a little forward. When her lips shut over
it, it appeared that she was concentrating hard upon some unknown thing. That same mouth would astonish him each time with the ferocity of her appetite, her lips firm and flicking against him at once, the small point of her tongue running the inside of his mouth as if it would run down his throat and into his belly if it could.