Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [14]
“Methinks you protest too much,” said the man in black. “Agriculture there means rice, and rice means what you know it means. What do you make of this, young Pereira?”
“It is unclear to me, sir, but then it could just be the light in this room.”
“This cabin,” the captain corrected me. “Or cabinet. Or, as I sometimes think of it, my womb and my tomb.”
Fortified by many glasses of wine, he sailed into a disquisition on the life of a captain and the nature of the sea, which pleased me, because it did not give the man in black any room for his own speech.
Alas, that creature caught up with me on deck after the meal.
“Well, well, my young fellow,” he said, speaking to my back while I held onto the rail at starboard, watching the dark gap in the low stars in the west where I knew the land must be only a few miles or so across the hissing water. “I never knew, and I watched you, and I listened to you, and I discovered you have manners, you employ utensils with a certain grace, and who taught you this, what keeper? From a parent? Or your owner?”
Standing this close to him I was forced to breathe in the foul odor that surged past his lips and the last thing I wanted was to stay by. However, instead of moving away, something happened that I never could have supposed I had within me and I turned slowly and giving in to a deep impulse that rose up out of the depths of my feelings surprised myself by taking him by the collar—twisting as I spoke.
“Have you ever studied physics, sir?” I heard myself say. “This cloak of yours that wraps you all in darkness, do you know that soaked with sea water it would quickly drag you down to the bottom, and your body would not float to the surface for some days? All it would need is for me to take you like this—” and I grabbed him with my other hand—“and hurl you overboard like a sack of ash…”
“Easy, my beauty,” he said, and I could hear him breathing carefully while still in my grasp. The stench of it I found enormous. “While we are quite different creatures, I am going to make a surmise. And that is that you and I are traveling to Charleston for the same reasons.”
“And what might those be?” I said, tightening my hold on him.
“To study nature,” he said.
“What kind of nature?”
“The nature of the beast,” he said, twisting out of my hold and coming right back to take me by the wrist.
“Away with you!” I gave him a shove and he stumbled back along the planking.
I don’t know what might have happened if a sailor, dressed all in white, had not appeared like a blur out of the shadows and inquired as to our business.
“Arm wrestling,” the man in black said, “mere arm wrestling.”
And with that he faded away into the darkness of the deck.
I stayed there a while, nearly out of breath, wondering what had come over me—and watching the emptiness of the dark, as if in hope some message might flare up that I could read. I saw no lights, and then fatigue and the sea air dragged me below.
For a short while I read by the light of the flickering candle at my bedside, finding a story of Nathaniel Hawthorne that had, when my teacher Halevi had first introduced me to it, pleased me no end. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” the tale of a young New England boy who starts out one day in one world, the old time of the Tories who reigned in our country less than a hundred years ago, and by nighttime has his view of life turned around.
But I could read no further than the scene where the boy first arrives in town…oh, yes, sleep then pressed me onto my bunk where I lay quietly for a few moments, thinking of tardy Miriam and my father and even crooked-eyed Marzy and darling Aunt Isabelle, before sinking into the place of sea-borne dreams. If I had known it was the last time I would ever find this sort of peaceful slumber, I would have slept even deeper than deep.
Chapter Five
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Passages
That stone—the gray face of it, with its three horizontal lines, one vertical—of all the memories of Zainab’s childhood, and of all the shuddering