We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [55]
No. It was simply O'Connor.
Even without his dog and his gun, he seemed invincible. What terrified them most was whatever went on inside that scarred, pumpkin-like head of his. They could never confess that openly, though. After all, they were seventeen against one. They sat in silence, some of them staring at the table, others at the bulkhead.
It was Albert who broke the silence. "Anyway, isn't it wrong to kill another human being?"
They stared at him as though the idea had never crossed their minds. And perhaps in some cases it hadn't. They knew very little about one another's past, but they also knew that anything could happen in port or out at sea. A man's drowning wasn't always an accident—and O'Connor may not have been the only unpunished killer on board the Emma C. Leithfield.
"Would Giovanni have wanted to be avenged like that?" Albert continued.
"I don't care what Giovanni would have wanted," said the Welsh seaman Rhys Llewellyn, surveying the hairy hands folded in his lap. The first mate had given him a bruise on one cheek—and it was a greeting he dreamt of returning. "I'm speaking for myself," he added, looking around the group. "But I'm thinking about us too. It's him or us. It's not revenge. It's survival."
The others muttered their approval.
"Giovanni didn't want to pull the knife," Isaiah said. "I saw him put it down again."
His voice was hesitant, and we could hear him breathing between the words. He was only fourteen, and it took courage to speak up in a gathering of men who were senior to him in rank and age. "Do you remember that he said he was a knife thrower and not a murderer? Are we murderers?"
"Shut up, you black dog!" retorted the Welshman.
"No, I won't!" The words erupted unexpectedly. Isaiah had found his courage now. He'd spoken out, and the damage was done. "I get beaten by him just like you. So I've got a right to speak. And I don't think we should kill him."
"The boy's right," Albert said. "We don't want to become like him. He's just waiting for us to become as desperate as Giovanni and pull a knife on him, because that's the game he plays. It's what he wants. Do you think he's stupid? At this very moment he's probably hoping that we're plotting to kill him because then he's got us. Do we really want to be like him?"
They mumbled and looked down again. Undoubtedly some of them did want to be like O'Connor. But they never could be. They'd have to find other ways of matching his power.
"I think I know how we can win, but it'll take patience," Albert said. And he laid out his plan.
At first they didn't understand what he meant.
"It can't be done" was the universal message—uttered in almost as many languages as there were men. No matter where they came from, none of the sailors had ever seen justice dealt in the way Albert proposed. The idea wasn't just unfamiliar; it flew in the face of all experience.
"But this is America," Albert kept repeating.
"It's not America, it's a ship," they said. "And a ship has its own rules."
But Albert dug in his heels and refused to back down. Every time he refuted one of their objections, they saw his certainty grow. And every time he spoke, he finished with the same question: "Does anybody else have a better idea?"
No one did, apart from killing O'Connor—and in their hearts they knew they couldn't. They didn't have the courage, either individually or together.
So what was that strange, indefinable imperative that finally made them change their minds and agree to Albert's proposal? Might it be conscience? It was. But it was so mixed up with other things, like fear, and deviousness, and caution, and the clannishness of men in a pack, that in the end no one particular urge could be singled out. "So to simplify it, we'll just call it conscience," Albert always said when he told the story later.
They'd sailed for eight months with O'Connor by the time they called at St. Iago in the West Indies to load sugar for New York. There'd been no shortage of opportunities to jump ship, but