A World Elsewhere (16 page)

“Hold on, Deacon,” Landish said. When the steward left, the cabin was pitch-dark.

Surely this could not be how they ended, bound to a table in the cabin of a passenger ship, no more in control of their fates than the chairs and tables that were fastened to the floor.

Landish tried to tell what was happening from the sounds he heard. It seemed that a giant saw was slicing through the metal of the hull, rasping, screeching, the rivets of the keel popping one by one.

“DEACON,” Landish shouted. He felt the word in his throat but couldn’t hear it. He wished he could free his arms so he could cover the boy’s ears with his hands. The
Gilbert
would long since have been battered to pieces. Landish waited for the feel of water gushing in, the sudden jolt of cold.

The commotion stopped so suddenly that Landish was convinced the ship had gone under, out of range of the storm-stirred surface of the sea. But he felt the rolling pitch of the waves and realized that the ship was once again contending with nothing but the storm. The sound of the wind and wind-blown sheets of rain returned. Cheers of relief could suddenly be heard from the other cabins, and laughter as if at how foolish their fears had been. Landish had heard such laughter before from sealers who for hours had been riding out a storm below deck in grim silence.

“Deacon?” Landish said.

“It’s pretty dark,” Deacon said. He sounded as out of breath as if he had pitched in with the crew to save the ship.

The steward with the lantern came and helped them release themselves from their ropes.

Deacon hugged Landish around the waist and Landish pressed the boy’s head against his stomach. “That was something, wasn’t it?” he said.

Deacon nodded and closed his eyes, still out of breath. “I thought we were goners,” he said. “I wish we were back in the attic.”

“That was the worst of it. The storm is nearly done.”

“That’s good.” A whisper into his stomach.

“You didn’t get sick. I bet that a lot of people a lot older than you got sick.”

“It makes me hungry when the ship goes up and down. But not sick.”

Deacon, still trying to catch his breath, began to cry.

“Landish … I … want … to … go … home … I’m scared.”

Landish sat on the sofa and took the boy in his arms. Deacon buried his face in the crook of Landish’s arm, his own arms hanging limp.

“Were we almost in the Tomb of Time?” Deacon said.

“No.” Landish held him close. “We didn’t even get hurt, did we?”

“No,” Deacon said through hiccupping sobs as tears ran down his cheeks.

Landish said the Tomb of Time would not be dark and loud. There would be no wind. The snow and rain would fall straight down. Fog would never spoil a summer day. There would be no peril on the sea. The lost would not be
lost
but found and brought back home. No more crosses would mark the empty graves of forever-unrecovered souls like Carson of the
Gilbert
. It would be as warm as a church, but they wouldn’t get kicked out for talking. They wouldn’t have to sing or pretend to pay attention to the priest.

You wouldn’t need to be strapped in to keep from being hurt. It was quiet. No one was scared. No one was mean. You always had enough to eat and drink. No one was ever sick. No one was alone or had to go away. You were reunited with the ones you missed, the ones you thought you’d never see again, the ones you couldn’t remember because they left when you were in the Murk, and the ones who left when you were in the Womb of Time. No one goes away forever. Everyone comes back. No one holds a grudge or has regrets or has cause for using words like “forgiveness” and “revenge.” It is a place of reconciliation absolute.

For whom the swell rolls.

The ship was left in the bobbing rubble of the iceberg, bits of ice the size of barrels in a heaving sea of slush. Deacon and Landish saw sailors dodging chunks of ice that slid back and forth across the deck. They looked out across the sea and Landish said: “Many waters cannot quench it. Nor can it be drowned by floods.”

Deacon asked him what “it” was.

“Love,” Landish said.

It must seem to the boy, more now than in years to come, thought Landish, that we have always been together, that I have not only been at hand since the moment he was born but somehow was the agent of his birth, perhaps even that my life began with his, he being unable to conceive of a time when our lives were not yet joined. So I must not forget what he cannot remember or has never known. I must remember that the odds are always heavily against things being as they are, that it was by the dodging of innumerable alternatives that we came to be together, and it will only be by the dodging of many more that we will stay that way. I am not his father. He is not my son. He is my charge. I am his protector. I must not allow my love of him and his of me to lull me into lapses of remembrance. Things seem to him as they one time seemed to me, but I never had such faith as him. He may never lose it. He may never change no matter what is done to him, no matter what he sees.

Everything that in St. John’s Landish had said was too expensive you merely had to ask for on the ship. Deacon didn’t have to worry that Landish would come home awash with grog and tell him he had spent the rent. Deacon ate as frequently as Landish drank.

“Our respective appetites cannot be slaked,” said Landish as he watched Deacon clean his plate. Beef, pork, veal, lamb, all of it awash with butter, gravy, rich sauces made with cream and eggs, great
heapings of colourful desserts, meals that Landish couldn’t bear the sight of when he was decks awash, disappeared into the boy as if he would not be full until he had consumed at a single sitting the equal of every morsel he had missed since he was born.

Their table was just inside the entrance to the dining room. Landish sat facing the wall to the left of the door. Deacon sat facing the diners. Many people smiled at Deacon, but no one smiled at Landish. Landish knew that the passengers who boarded in St. John’s had told the others who he was and how the boy had come to be his charge. He knew they were speculating on the purpose of their journey to New York.

Van might not have foreseen, though Landish had, the sight that they would make in the dining room and elsewhere in first class, the commotion they would cause just by sitting at a table that was set aside for them, wearing, over their tattered clothes, jackets pressed upon them by the stewards.

Most of the non-Newfoundland passengers were Americans returning home from Europe. One night, Landish got drunk at dinner. He stood and loudly proposed a toast to his sponsor, his and Deacon’s, their benefactor whose last name when he spoke it drew guffaws of disbelief and admonishments that he not further besmirch it by speaking it again, which he was about to do when he felt on his pant leg the tug of Deacon’s hand. So he sat down, but not before assuring his audience that he would report their treatment of him and the boy to the man they seemed to be looking less and less certain he had never met.

It sounded to Deacon as if the diners were murmuring the man’s name all at once, over and over.

Vanderluyden.

The captain spoke to Landish. “The boy does not look healthy. There are boys in steerage who look better. He will be examined by the doctor, or else I will have to send you and the boy below decks and when we make port you will not be allowed to leave the ship.”

“He’s undernourished,” Landish said. “That’s all. That’s why we’re going to New York. And as for making port, I doubt that we ever will as long as
you’re
the skipper. You overlook icebergs but notice little boys.”

“Speak to me again like that and your first-class passage will be voided and you’ll travel in steerage until we reach New York, where you’ll be put on the next boat back to Newfoundland. That may happen anyway, depending on the boy. The doctor will decide.”

Landish told the boy that all the passengers must be examined. “The doctor can examine us together.” He spoke to the doctor, asked him not to let on to the boy that they might wind up in steerage or that they might be sent straight back across the Gulf with chalk marks on their backs to live again in some place like the attic.

The doctor examined both of them.

“The boy is healthy though his belly is as hard and hollow as a gourd. Don’t provoke the captain any further. I’ll mollify the passengers as best I can. Some of them, especially the ones with young children, feel sorry for the boy but not for you. They blame you for the state he’s in. At any rate, I think I can get some proper clothes for both of you, which you’ll wear if you have a grain of sense.”

“We could take our meals in the cabin if you like,” Landish said to Deacon. But the boy shook his head. Landish could see that whatever Deacon might have felt at being snubbed was overthrown by the effect on him of the spectacle that seemed to make him all but unaware of Landish in the dining room except as an obstruction of his view.

Entirely unjudgmental incredulity, amazement, wonder and delight lit up Deacon’s eyes in a way that Landish had last seen on a Christmas morning when, for the first time in his life, the boy bit into a slice of watermelon.

One of the stewards who greeted passengers as they entered the dining room stood just behind Deacon’s chair. The tables nearest theirs were forty feet away. “It’s a very select table we’ve been given,” Landish said.

“All the other ones are bigger,” Deacon said. “How big was King Arthur’s table?”

“About the size of this one,” Landish said. “People were very small back then.”

Snobs who think we’re swabs, thought Landish, who then reminded himself that he had crossed the Gulf eight times in first class. He thought of how easily he might have made things better for the boy if he had simply made them better for himself. If he had pleased his father and skippered the
Gilbert
until the old man died. And then washed his hands of everything but the money he’d have made by then and the money he’d have made when he sold the ship. If he had somehow known of the boy before he made his choice, somehow known that the boy was not long for the Womb of Time but would soon be on his way, that they were already set by fate on paths that soon would merge.

But the boy was unforetold.

“There’s a woman over there who smiles at me every night,” Deacon said. “Maybe if you turn around or sit by me she’ll smile at you.”

Landish said nothing.

“You should sit by me so you can see. And then you won’t be in my way.”

Landish Druken’s wide, affronting back, and wide and wild affronting head of hair, had been turned on everyone for days. He doubted they minded except that he blocked their view of the boy.

On eight crossings he had sat among them and told them he was bound for or coming back from Princeton, and told them who his father was and set out the terms of the bargain they had struck. The famed Captain Druken. The millionaire in seals. Landish had cut a finer figure then. He was better groomed, but his hair and beard, though shorter, could not quite be tamed, so he had what his shipmates seemed to fancy was the acceptably wild look of a man caught between two worlds, theirs and his father’s.

He intrigued them. They listened when he spoke. He told tales of the hunt, but also spoke of Princeton, of poetry and novels that he quoted from. A writer who had a life worth writing books about. Now he fancied that the passengers to whom his back was turned had made those crossings with him years before and were bemused to see what had become of that paradoxical young man, that urbane sealer who had seemed so doubly promising.

But Landish rearranged the table and sat beside the boy. All eyes turned towards them. There was a momentary lull in conversation. Then the diners returned their attention to one another, their voices starting up as if in the wake of some awkwardly delivered toast.

Landish surveyed the room. The tables gleaming like wafers of ice. The pale, perfect clavicles of women in white pearls. The unobtrusive music of the orchestra. The bank of chandeliers that hung in unadmired splendour from the ceiling. The to-and-fro of servants. Their expressionless discretion as they made their rounds with trays upraised on white-gloved hands. The oblivious conviviality and fellowship of wealth.

He felt more jealous and nostalgic than disapproving. He would rejoin them if he could. He would re-enlist and raise the boy among them starting now so that someday he might forget what living in the attic had been like.

“Let’s look at Gen of Eve,” Deacon said.

Landish took the sketch from the carpet bag and displayed it on the floor.

“You can see it better here than in the attic,” Deacon said.

“The room is brighter.”

“Did your mother ever cross the Gulf?”

“She never left the island.”

“Do you like Captain Druken’s hat more than Gen of Eve?”

“No.”

“If the nobleman took Gen of Eve, would you steal her back?”

“It wouldn’t be stealing.”

By the light of the cabin, Landish could see that the sketch was creased in places and in others had begun to fade. When they got to Vanderland, he might ask Van to frame it and cover it in glass if he could not soon afford to have it done himself.