The North Water (12 page)

“We can seek witnesses.”

Cavendish snorts at this.

“We are on a whaling ship,” he says.

“You may go now, Joseph,” Brownlee tells him. “If I wish to speak to you again I will send for you.”

The boy leaves the cabin. Cavendish yawns, stretches, and then gets to his feet and follows after.

“I will instruct the men to keep their quarters tidier in future,” he says, looking back facetiously at Sumner, “to avoid any more such accidents.”

“We will move the lad out of the forecastle,” Brownlee assures Sumner when Cavendish is gone. “He can bed down in steerage for a while. It's a displeasing business, but if he refuses to point the finger, then the matter must be dropped now.”

“What if Cavendish himself is the culprit?” Sumner says. “That would explain the boy's silence.”

“Cavendish has a good many faults,” Brownlee says, “but he is certainly not a sodomite.”

“He seemed amused by the situation.”

“He is a prick and a brute, but so are half the men on this bark. If you are seeking persons of gentleness and refinement, Sumner, the Greenland whaling trade is not the place to look for them.”

“I will speak to the other cabin boys,” Sumner suggests. “I will find out what they know about Cavendish and Joseph Hannah and then I will come back to you with my findings.”

“No you will not,” Brownlee answers firmly. “Unless the boy changes his tune the matter will be dropped now. We are here to kill whales, not root out sin.”

“A crime has been committed.”

Brownlee shakes his head. He is becoming irritated by the surgeon's unwarranted persistence.

“One boy has a sore arse. That is all. It is unfortunate, I agree, but he will recover soon enough.”

“His injuries were more severe than that. The rectum was distended, there were signs…”

Brownlee stands up, making no effort now to hide his impatience.

“Whatever particular injuries he may have, it is your job, as surgeon, to treat them, Mr. Sumner,” he says. “And I trust you have the skills and necessaries to do so successfully.”

Sumner looks back at the captain—his heavy brow and fierce gray eyes, his crumpled nose and stubbled, leaden jowls—and decides, after no more than a moment's hesitation, to accede. The boy will live after all. He is right about that.

“If I lack for anything, I will let you know,” he says.

Back in the cabin, he swallows the laudanum and lies back down on his bunk. He is weary from the effort of arguing and soured by his sense of failure. Why would the boy not help himself? What power could the culprit have over him? The questions grab and trouble Sumner, but then, after a minute or two, the opium begins to take effect, and he feels himself sliding back into a soft, warm, familiar state of carelessness. What does it matter, he thinks, if he is surrounded by savages, by moral baboons? The world will continue on as it wants to anyway, as it always has, with or without his approval. The anger and disgust he felt for Cavendish minutes before are like smudges on the far horizon now—ideas, suggestions only, nothing more important or noticeable than that. I will get to everything in its own good time, he thinks vaguely, there's no need to rush or hurry.

*   *   *

Sometime later, there is a knock on his cabin door. It is Drax the harpooner complaining of a gash on his right hand. Sumner, blinking, invites him to come in. Drax, squat and broad-shouldered, his beard dense and reddish, seems to fill the small space almost completely. Sumner, feeling still a little light-headed and imprecise from the laudanum, examines his wound, then wipes it clean with a piece of lint and applies a dressing.

“It's not serious,” Sumner assures him. “Keep that dressing on for a day or so. It will heal quickly after that.”

“Oh, I've had worse,” Drax says. “Much worse than this.”

Drax's barnyard scent, dense and almost edible, dominates the room. He is like a beast at rest in its stall, Sumner thinks. A force of nature temporarily contained and pacified.

“I hear one of the cabin boys was hurt.”

Sumner has finished rolling up the remaining bandage and is returning the scissors and the lint to the medicine chest. The edges of his vision are faintly blurred, and his lips and cheeks feel chill and numb.

“Who told you that?”

“Cavendish did. He said you had your suspicions.”

“They're more than that.”

Drax looks down at his strapped hand, then brings it up to his nose to sniff.

“Joseph Hannah is a well-known liar. You shouldn't believe what he tells you.”

“He hasn't told me anything yet. He won't speak to me. That's the problem. He's too scared.”

“He's feebleminded, that one.”

“How well do you know the boy?”

“I know his father, Frederick Hannah,” Drax says, “and I know his brother, Henry, also.”

“Captain Brownlee has decided the matter is closed anyway. Unless the boy changes his mind, nothing more will be done.”

“So that's the end of it?”

“Probably.”

Drax peers at him carefully.

“Why did you choose to become a surgeon, Mr. Sumner?” he asks. “An Irish fellow like yourself. I'm curious.”

“Because I wished to advance. To rise from my humble origins.”

“You wished to advance, but now here you are on a Yorkshire whaler fretting over cabin boys. I wonder what has happened to all those grand ambitions?”

Sumner closes the medicine chest and locks it. He puts the key in his pocket and glances at himself quickly in the wall mirror. He looks a good deal older than his twenty-seven years. His brow is scored, and his eyes are rimmed and baggy.

“I have simplified them, Mr. Drax,” he says.

Drax grunts with amusement. His lips stretch out into a pantomime version of a grin.

“I do believe I've done the same,” he says. “I do believe I have.”

 

CHAPTER TEN

They cross into the North Water by the last week of June, and near dawn the following day Black strikes their first whale. Sumner, woken from his slumbers by the sounds of shouting and boot heels pounding the deck, follows the progress of the hunt from high up in the crow's nest. He sees the first iron go in and the wounded whale descend. Twenty minutes later, he sees it rise again, closer to the ship but nearly a mile from where it first went down. Black's harpoon, he can see through the spyglass, is still dangling from its broad flank, and blood is sluicing brightly from its leadish skin.

Otto's boat is closest to it now. The oarsmen ship their oars and the steersman sculls them steadily forwards. Otto crouches in the bows with the harpoon's wooden shaft gripped tightly in his fists. With a giant horselike snort, audible from Sumner's perch in the crow's nest, the whale exhales a V-shaped flume of grayish vapor. The boat and crew are temporarily obscured, but when they reappear, Otto is up on his feet and the harpoon is poised above his head—its barb pointing downwards and the shaft forming a black hypotenuse against the sullen sky. The whale's back looks from Sumner's aerie like a sunken island, a grainy volcanic hump of rock peeping from the waves. Otto hurls the iron with all his strength, it sinks in deep, up to the foreganger, and the whale instantly convulses. Its body bends and spasms; the eight-foot flukes of its enormous tail break from the water, then crash back down. Otto's boat is tossed wildly about and the oarsmen are thrown from their seats. The whale descends again but only for a minute. When it rises, the other boats are gathered round ready: Cavendish is there, Black, Drax. Two more harpoons are sunk deep into the whale's black flank, and then they begin with the lances. The whale is still alive, but Sumner can see that it is damaged now beyond repair. The four harpooners pierce and probe. The whale, still hopelessly resisting, blows out a plume of hot vapor mixed with blood and mucus. All around it, the smashed and bloodstained waters boil and foam.

Drax, far below in the hectic midst of the killing, bears down hard on the butt of his lance and whispers out a string of gross endearments.

“Give me one last groan,” he says. “That's it, my darling. One last shudder to help me find the true place. That's it, my sweetheart. One more inch and then we're done.”

He leans in harder, presses, seeking out the vital organs. The lance slides in another foot. A moment later, with a final roar, the whale shoots out a plume of pure heart's blood high into the air and then tilts over lifeless onto its side with its great fin raised like a flag of surrender. The men, empurpled, reeking, drenched in the fish's steaming, expectorated gore, stand up in their flimsy boats and cheer their triumph. Brownlee on the quarterdeck wafts his billycock hat in circles above his head. The men on the deck roar and caper. Sumner, watching it all from above, feels a brief thrill of victory also, a sense of sudden, shared advantage, of obstacles overcome and progress made.

They bore two holes in the tail and secure the dead whale to the bow of Cavendish's boat. They lash the fins together, retrieve and coil the whale lines, and then begin to tow the corpse back to the ship. As they row, they sing. Sumner, descended to the deck, hears their voices coming across the water, tuneful, gruff, carried by the cool damp wind. “Randy Dandy-O” and “Leave Her Johnny.” Three dozen men in unison. He feels again, and almost against his will this time, that he is part of something larger and more powerful than himself, a joint endeavor. Turning away, he notices Joseph Hannah standing by the fore hatch talking happily with the other cabin boys. They are reenacting the recent kill; they are throwing imaginary harpoons, plying imaginary lances. One is Drax, one is Otto, one is Cavendish.

“How are you, Joseph?” he asks him.

The boy looks back at him blankly, as if they have not met before.

“I'm well, sir,” he answers. “Thankee.”

“You must come to my cabin again tonight for your pill,” he reminds him.

The boy nods glumly.

What has the boy told his friends about his injuries? Sumner wonders. Has he made up some story, or do they know the truth? It strikes him that he should question the other boys also. He should examine them too. What if they have suffered in the same way? What if the secret is not Joseph's alone but is something they share amongst them?

“You two,” he says, pointing to the other boys. “After supper you come to my cabin with Joseph. I want to ask you some questions.”

“I am on the watch, sir,” one of them says.

“Then tell the watch commander that the surgeon, Mr. Sumner, has asked to speak to you. He will understand.”

The boy nods. All three of them, he can see, wish he would now leave them alone. The game is still vivid in their minds, and his is the voice of dullness and authority.

“Go back to your pleasures now,” he tells them. “I will see the three of you after supper.”

The whale's right fin is lashed onto the larboard gunwale with its head facing sternwards. Its dead eye, not much larger than a cow's, peers blindly upwards at the shuffling clouds. Strong lines are secured to the nose end and rump, and its belly is heaved a foot or so out of the water by means of a block attached to the mainmast and a rope hooked onto the whale's neck area and brought to tension through the windlass. Brownlee, after measuring the corpse's length with a knotted line, estimates it will yield up ten tons of oil and half a ton or more of whalebone—a value of close to nine hundred pounds at market, if prices hold firm.

“We may yet be rich, Mr. Sumner,” he says with a wink.

After resting and taking a drink, Otto and Black strap iron crampons to their sea boots for grip and climb down onto the whale's belly. They carve out strips of blubber with long-handled knives and chisel off the baleen and the jaws. They cut off the tail and the fins, and then remove the nose and rump tackles and allow the dilapidated purple carcass that remains to sink under its own weight or be eaten by sharks. The flensing takes four hours in all and is accompanied throughout by the stench of grease and blood, and the endless cawing of fulmars and other carrion birds. When it is over—when the blocks of blubber are stowed in the flens-gut, the deck is scoured a dull white, and the knives and spades are rinsed clean and put away—Brownlee orders an extra ration of rum for each sailor. There are cheers from the forecastle at the news, and, only a little later, the sound of a Scottish fiddle and the thump and cry of men dancing jigs.

Neither Joseph Hannah nor his friends appear, as they were bidden, at Sumner's cabin after supper. Sumner wonders whether to search them out in the forecastle, but then decides against it. There is nothing that can't wait until the morning and, in truth, Joseph's simpleton wretchedness is beginning to gall him. The boy is a hopeless case, he thinks: feebleminded, a congenital liar according to Drax, prone no doubt to hereditary disease (both mental and corporeal) of every kind. Evidence suggests he is the victim of a crime, but he will not name his abuser, will not even admit that he has been abused—perhaps he has forgotten who it was, perhaps it was too dark to see, or perhaps he does not think of it as a crime at all but as something else instead? Sumner tries to imagine inhabiting the mind of a boy like that, tries to grasp what it would feel like to see the world through Joseph Hannah's sunken, shifting, squirrel eyes, but the effort seems both absurd and faintly terrifying—like a nightmare of being transformed into a cloud or a tree. He shudders briefly at the thought of such Ovidian transformations, then, with relief, reopens
The Iliad
and reaches into his coat pocket for the small brass key that commands the medicine chest.

The next day, two more whales are killed and flensed. Sumner, since he is otherwise unoccupied, is given a pick haak and a long leather apron. Once the strips of blubber have been hauled on board ship and cut up into foot-square blocks, it is the surgeon's newly appointed task to take the blocks from the foredeck to the hold and pitch them down to the men working below, who will store them in the flens-gut until the time comes for making off. It is dirty and exhausting work. Each block of blubber weighs twenty pounds or more and the ship's deck is soon slick with blood and grease. He slips several times, almost topples into the hold on one occasion but is saved by Otto, and ends the day bruised and aching but with a sense nonetheless of rare satisfaction: the crude, physical pleasure of a task accomplished, of the body tested and proved. He sleeps for once without the aid of laudanum, and in the morning, despite the ungodly stiffness in his shoulders, neck, and arms, breakfasts well on barley porridge and salt fish.