Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [46]
It was getting dark as we towed the whale back to the ship. We were shaky and dumb, but a growing euphoria coloured the horror. First whale of the season, she was ours. We were the boys.
Not the captain’s boat, not Mr. Rainey’s. Ours, Second Mate Comeragh’s. It was bad for Simon though. Back on deck everyone started congratulating him, thinking that as boat steerer he must have been the one to have taken the whale. And he had to tell them how he hadn’t been up to it and Mr. Comeragh had had to take over. Me and Tim though, we were laughing now. Dan came and clapped us on the shoulder, very serious. “That was good,” he said. “Good. Kept your heads.” We’d kept our heads. We’d come through. They tied her to starboard with her head facing the stern.
Knowing I was safe, a certain wildness came over me now. Here I was back on the dear old Lysander with my good fellows, alive. It was getting dark and the fires had already been lit under the try pots. Rainey and Comeragh stood on the cutting stage and set about hooking her near the fin. The windlass was set to and she was peeled like an apple, slowly, turning and turning like a pig on a spit, till the blanket strip, wide as a double bed and long as to the top of a house, hung dripping blood from the rigging. Yan and Gabriel swarmed up and hacked it off, and we dropped it down to Henry Cash and Martin Hannah waiting in the blubber room below. And when another and another and another strip had left her and gone below, she was a monstrosity, a creamy gleaming grub of a thing clinging to the side of our ship in the dark, with her great head still intact, smiling. But they cut it off at last, and we hauled it up with the block and tackle and there it lay on our deck, a terrible thing two men long.
Dag Aarnasson, who had done all this before, went up on top with a knife and cut a hole in the top big enough for us to dip our buckets in. There was a single moment when everything lurched and a cloud came over my eyes, but I hung onto a rope and gritted my teeth and held on tight till things cleared, and then I made a vow that I would get through this without disgrace, and took up my bucket. If you have never scooped the oil from a sperm whale’s head with a bucket, you will not appreciate the strength it takes. There are hundreds and hundreds of gallons of oil in a sperm whale’s head. It is thick and white and the more you scoop, the gloopier and heavier and more spunk-like it gets. It’s like trying to empty a bottomless well, and it breaks your poor fucking back, which by this time has gone beyond simple pain. And when at last it’s nearly empty, someone has to go down inside the head and get the dregs. Skip did this, impassive, whistling as he worked, while the rest of us set to chopping. Wraiths, we lurched upon the slippery deck. Felix Duggan got sick, ran aside and vomited, stood groaning with his hands on his knees, water drooling from his big, pink lower lip. The mates upon the cutting stage worried away at the wormy innards, looking for ambergris, which ladies wear upon their wrists and in the valleys between their breasts. Piled about the deck were great heaps of hacked flesh that bled and shone and gave off a sweet stink that made my guts clench with a kind of perverted hunger. The try pots boiled and heaved and were skimmed constantly of an evil scum, which rose to the surface and was thrown into the fires beneath to spit and crackle and belch forth a thick black smoke with a charnel house stink. Firelight shone on the boards, awash with oil and blood.
We chopped and chopped. Again and again our knives grew blunt and we honed them and set to again, wiping sweat from our dripping brows. Blubber’s tough. We cut and heaved, passed our hunks to Sam and Yan and Dan and Gabriel, who, singing and smiling like women in a kitchen, sliced again like skilful butchers till the strips they called Bible