Journeys to Six Lands

Abstract

1 Out of droning Bayonne at five, sun silhouetting a Buddha on the city's one shrine. We had fashioned a mast for our hull from a stout pine that we felled and lopped in the dark, amid much blasphemy. By lantern light we saw what some nimble climber had long ago carved in its fork, "I before he except after she"-weird words leading to argument over what they might portend. Once the mast was stepped and braced with stays, we raised our sails with halyards we had braided out of rawhide. There is a tear in the leech of our mainsail. We glided down the river between zones of industrial waste. Only a few indifferent gulls watched us leave. It is after all a poor, deserted place. Tiers of mussels ringed the pilings of abandoned wharves in the lowering tide. There is an inexplicable tear in the leech of the mainsail. We were bound for home-a home that we had forgotten or never seen. 2 Standing away north from the coast, the wind sitting east-northeast, a harsh quarter-we could do nothing but drive, scudding away as we bore against it, mast sloping, bow dipping. We had no true officers but encouraged each other to stand to the tackle, stretch on the oars, contract the luffing sails, everything a struggle, with the sea swirling and hawling inboard, in a shrilling of stays and halyards. We forgot the new old world we longed for. We had taken a priest named Dory on board; he now passed among us, intoning the opening words of the fifty-first psalm and raising crossed sticks over each of us as he did so in a kind of infernal blessing. Such a handsome man, young, light-hearted, not a drowning mark on him, master of men and of women, too! He was to enrapture all our loveliest in turn. Even now, in those endragoned seas, he took Dominique into the dark below the leaking cabin decking. At one moment the waves rose from such a depth I saw the floor of the sea: lobsters five feet long and scurrying crabs with glowing eyes. Later, the sky seemed boundless, full of fierce stars. 3 We drifted into a stinking fog, thick with what felt like soot. The killersqualls had passed on-one man and a boy washed overboard. The mainsail was tattered; half the snap hooks on the jib would not close; all our circuits were broken. The sails for now were of no use anyway: not a breath of wind. We worked hard at our oars though with heavy hearts, like men going to execution. (It seems our sweat made the ladies hot-it was Gloria's impatient turn with Dory today.) The water felt thick with ooze, with something like clay. We dreaded running aground in the dark. Next to the steersman, whose face gleamed white by his lamp, a woman sat holding a frond wetted with vinegar, to slap him in case he nodded off. I looked up once and there stood the cook in his greasy girdle, not a sign of care on his filthy-bearded face as he shucked a bucket of mussels, tossing shells over our heads into the sad water. The place and time of our embarcation were already beyond any wish to remember them. 4 Was there a droning in the fog? The smell had gotten worse. Afraid that the splashed water was toxic, some rowers wore soul-and-body lashings in spite of the heat. We came among quiet, turgid eddies and a sudden voluminous cloud of night-flying white moths: land nearby? "In that case" someone said, "it must be the land beyond the sun." A pier emerged from the darkness, protruding from an acre of barren ground. At its tip three figures were imploring to be taken on board. Dory and Faith, his day's companion, helped each over the gunwale with a finger entwined in his hair. As we moved off, rowing still (first our propellors had fouled, now the throttle cable stuck), we felt a solid thing hindering our progress. Someone recognized the body of our lost boy. When we leaned over to recover him, the cook, nibbling a dish of goose lungs as he spoke, said flatly that he would not have him aboard. He picked up an abandoned oar and pushed him under, easy enough with his garments so heavy with the drink. …