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By Root 895 0

a tree, lifted and blown away like a twig by the wind. Up on the listing quarterdeck they were hanging on to the last two whaleboats. That’s not enough, I thought. Dag was there with Tim, grappling with rope, Rainey with blood running down his head, the captain with his face sagging and his eyes bleak, shouting: “Aft! Aft!” into the wind. Simon was cutting the lashing off the other boat. There was a water cask and a musket and a quadrant in theirs, a bundle of hardtack and a tub of boat nails in ours. Henry Cash in soaking shirt and breeches emerged from the aft companionway, as if from a flooded underground cave, pushing Joe Harper’s toolbox up in front of him, shaking water from his eyes. Gabriel jumped down from the rail and grabbed his arms to haul him out, but Henry was for going back down. You could see him drawing in the air to last another minute or so, pushing back the flat, dark hair from his forehead and blinking hard. He looked very young suddenly.

Someone still screamed. Who?

“Mr. Cash!” Rainey bellowed through the din. “Come aft now, that’s enough!” and the Captain still calling:

“Aft! All hands aft!”

“Where’s Sam?” Rainey jumped down into the water. “Is Skipton up?”

“Aye, sir,” said Gabriel.

“Sam!” yelled Rainey. “Sam Proffit!”

Yan, wild eyed, came running with the compasses from the binnacle and flung them in our boat.

“Cash!” roared the mate and captain together.

I saw the boys falling and stumbling aft along the tilted line of the larboard deck: Skip, freed from the irons, thank God, to take his chances with the rest of us; Abel Roper and Martin Hannah; Felix and Billy; Joe Harper still with Simon’s fiddle in his hand. John Copper waded in the flotsam of cookhouse debris and dead rats that nudged the quarterdeck like a school of curious fish. Who was it, screaming still? Who was it? The cookhouse wall burst. Barrels rolled out on the surge and went floating joyfully away to freedom or bowling down the deck to send everyone a-scatter and knock Joe’s legs from under him, so that the poor fiddle went flying once more and Joe turned a watery somersault over the barrel and landed crash on his face on top of the water. Henry said something to Gabriel and went under once more.

“Cash!” Mr. Rainey bawled into the wildness. A mad, staring, bloodied man.

“Keep by the boat, boys,” Dan told us.

With a crack like nothing more than a broken stick, the mizzenmast snapped near the bottom and fell across the drowned hatch. Gabriel, barefoot, fell upon the mast and began hauling and straining at it. First he tried to lift it, then he tried to roll it, but it wouldn’t budge. Big Martin Hannah, vaguely smiling still, threw in all his weight, and Skip jumped in to help him, but nothing was moving that mast and Henry was never coming up again. The sea lapped over the transom, poured up the deck and swirled about the submerged companionways, and a collossal shift took place in the heart of the ship as three or four hundred barrels of oil moved as one with a sound like the end of all days. Sound: the sea, the wild wind, the voices of our crew as the brittle, wooden speck we lived on rolled over like the slippery pole at the fair, and the sky flew up as the swingboat soared.

But it never came down again.

The spars cut water. The boats bounded eagerly. “We’re going down!” John Copper screamed from below, kicking out, swimming. Tim grabbed me, his arms round my shoulders. Wilson Pride fished an axe from the floating soup and hacked at spars, expressionless. Gabriel waded for the fiddle. Dan pushed us about. The whole world broke open.

Parts of the ship went dancing away. Henry Cash was under the water. Henry Cash was dead. Gabriel crying, wading for Simon’s fiddle.

Tim held on to me, his eyes shining with a horrified, slightly gleeful excitement. Mr. Rainey clouted me on the back of the head. “In the boat,” he said. I seemed to move slowly as if I was in a dream. There I was going out again, dimming down like a trimmed lamp. Not here, here but absent. Turn away, Jaf. Turn aside and watch. Save me from gut fear. Uncreep