Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [41]
I turned sideways and threw up all over the dusty earth floor. A great warm flurry of big, dark women flew about me, clucking and soothing and babying. They took me out in the cool night air and held my head. Did I sleep awhile? Did I dream? The scent of roses was strong, I remember, roses or some other flower, something that bloomed at night. The stars were ridiculously bright as if the sky was shouting. I lay like Dan in his gutter, but no little dog came to pee on me. A soft lap cradled me instead, and I turned onto my side and slept. Later there was the room again, and a dance to clapping hands and jangling music, and Dan in there dancing with them, pipe clamped between smiling lips, eyes closed, arms above his head. Later still, a hand led me to a loft, a bed, corn husks in a linen tick that crackled when I moved, the sense of other sleeping bodies warming the low space around me, the dreaming bodies of people and a few cats, from which arose a canopy of somnolence like the faint hum from a wasps’ nest in the eaves.
It was dawn and I was fast asleep when Dan shook me by the arm. We crept below, through the snoring room where we had caroused last night, past the sleeping snout of a black pig asprawl before the quietly ticking fire, past coiled cats and twitching dogs, and hens breast by swelling breast along a stone shelf.
We had hogs on deck. Just walking about. Felix Duggan cursed and shooed them as he tried to sweep up. Silver ribbons ran down the cliffs. I looked back, but already the red roofs were out of sight. Seemed stupid to me, setting off just as it was obvious the weather was on the turn. The clouds were thick and massy, bruised here and there. The waves were noisy, buoyant. Not long after we lost sight of land, the fog came down.
“Do you think we’ll ever see a whale?” I asked Gabriel.
“Not in this, son.”
We were standing at the cookhouse door to get the smell of pork. Wilson Pride was feeding scraps to the dog.
“I never saw it like this,” I said. Gabriel laughed. His sea cap was pulled right down over his face. “This is nothing,” he said.
“I know.”
“Hear you were sick bad last night, son.”
“Yeah.”
“That island stuff. You have to watch it, son. Look at me. Do I have to get drunk all the time? Not me, son. Look at me. You do like I do, son, and you won’t go far wrong.”
“Do you think we’ll ever see a whale at all? Ever at all, even when the fog goes?”
“Oh, we’ll see a whale all right,” he replied confidently. “You’ll get sick to death of whales before this jaunt’s done; you’ll see a whale and you’ll say, ‘Ha, so what, whale, ha.’ ” He gave an exaggerated shrug.
“How many whales have you killed?”
He shrugged again, this time more normally. “Hundreds.”
“How old are you, Gabriel?”
“Thirty-four. Thirty-five,” he said.
“Have you ever killed a whale?” I asked Wilson Pride, who’d gone back to his counter and was pouring water over a block of hardtack so hard it could have cut a diamond.
“Not me,” he replied. Wilson always went barefoot. His feet were very large and flat, the heels startlingly pink, and he was always washing them. You’d see him soaking them on deck in a bowl of seawater.
“Who told you I was sick?” I asked Gabriel.
“Tim,” he said.
Of course.
The sea fooled and niggled.
Tim never got sick. Did I say?
After the Azores we had rough seas. I never saw the flying fish before this time, these swift, shimmering things that skim the waves, rainbows flying from their backs. And birds who never neared land, nobly spanned, fearful of eye, cruel clawed. In their shrill, crack-voiced thousands, they clouded our ship from the Azores to the Cape Verde Islands, faithful in the rain. As for whales, not a puff to be seen. The winds tried their lungs. Proctor sent Gabriel, our best helmsman, to the wheel. We stowed away the studding sails and top gallants in a torrent, and ran before the wind to the Cape Verdes.
They were nothing like the Azores. We anchored somewhere all drenched and bleached out, with great mountains of salt rising up against a