Coffins (18 page)

“Then why risk it?” I asked, with an involuntary glance at the enormous seas piling up behind us.

My small friend shrugged. “What else can I do? If I were a full-made man I'd be a general. I'd raise an army, invade the slave states, and send the oppressors to hell. I'd do so gladly and without hesitation—doubt me not! But even if the righteous win the coming war, and we must, I fear that race hatred will prevail.”

I did not doubt that were it possible, Jebediah would indeed become a smaller Napoleon laying waste to the land of cotton. But his despair for the future of these particular refugees, and of all the colored race, was something I'd never heard before, for all his ranting upon the subject. This was a new darkness within, born of the family disaster, and in the belief that his very existence was a curse upon his kin.

I found this new Jebediah disturbing, and longed for the return of my jolly, if excitable, old friend. Was he still there beneath the shadows, or had tragedy altered him irrevocably?

Events would soon render the answer moot, for we were both about to be changed forever, and led into a darkness that made the starless sky above seem cheery by comparison.

8. When Lightning Speaks

As it happened,
Raven
made the small port of Yarmouth in fourteen hours, a run never before achieved by the schooner in the full depth of winter, according to its crew. Not a shroud parted, nor was any sail torn, and the bilge remained as dry as an autumn leaf, as if some power of Providence had puffed the favorable winds and kept us safe.

We were met at a certain wharf by agents of the local abolitionist society, who had arranged transportation and shelter for the refugees. Although, as one Abner Simms confided, they hadn't anticipated the arrival of quite so many of the black souls. “Our little Nigger Town has become somewhat overcrowded,” he told me. “Not so many as we'd hoped have elected to depart for Africa.”

“You call the encampment Nigger Town?” I asked him pointedly.

“No possible offense intended,” the glum little man assured me. “That's the local name, it has no other, being a temporary accommodation.” His none-too-clean fingers thrummed upon his wet blubberous lips, and he seemed intent upon studying his own dung-stained boots rather than the faces of the refugees, who were being helped into crude, horse-drawn wagons.

“And what is this about sailing for Africa?” I demanded.

“Liberia, of course. The slave colony. I should say the colony founded by former slaves, with the help of enlightened white men. We had assumed, those of us who sacrificed so much to welcome the poor nigger folk, that most if not all would continue on to Liberia, where they might be more naturally comfortable.”

I was appalled by this statement. The idea of returning former slaves to the pestilence and anarchy of the African colony was a cruel phantasm lately supported by the slave owners themselves, who feared an ever-increasing population of free Negroes circulating among those who were still bound by chattel laws. The New England abolitionists understood this ruse perfectly well, but the intelligence had not penetrated the thick, self-satisfied skull of Mr. Abner Simms, of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and nothing I could say or do made any impression upon the man. His small mind had all the dexterity of a tidewater mussel, clinging to his original purpose, and he would not be shed.

Jebediah, seeing my temper rise, cautioned me not to offend Mr. Simms, or his other more well-intentioned minions, who believed themselves to be doing God's work, and therefore deserving of God's praise. “We leave this place within the hour,” he reminded me. “These others must stay, and they must get along with Simms and his ilk.”

Thus chastened, I returned to
Raven
and spoke no more with the charitable white gentleman who condescended to aid runaway slaves. In hopes, apparently, they would keep running until they vanished from the earth. But my original conviction had been etched more deeply by the experience: if slavery had a solution its name was not Africa. Consider: none of the refugees I'd spoken to had any firsthand knowledge of that troubled continent. All were native to America, born on her soil, and all too often bled for her soil. Their proper home was therefore no more Africa than mine was England.

And so
Raven
departed Yarmouth lighter by twenty-eight souls. As we passed out of the harbor, the winter sun slipped wanly below the horizon, leaving the seas dark and glassy, but open before us, and not nearly so steep. By then the wind had shifted to its more common bearing, fitful and cold from the northeast, which would serve us well for the passage to White Harbor. With things so unsettled at home, the Coffin brothers were both anxious to return, and Tom cracked on as much canvas as he judged the masts could stand. Then, exhausted from his long watch at the helm, the young captain turned the wheel over to this first mate and retired below, leaving orders that he be roused if anything should go wrong.

“Not that it will,” he assured us gruffly, his icicle-blue eyes puffy from lack of sleep. “This little ship practically sails herself, that's how sweet she is.”

Sleep, what a splendid idea. With the passengers departed
Raven
had room to spare, and I found myself a narrow, empty bunk that smelled not too strongly of its previous inhabitant (a sailor by the tar-touched scent of him) and “racked out.” I slipped away almost instantly, and dreamed of a cargo hold full of dark faces, all of them beseeching me to do something, I knew not what. Scurrying about a nightmare ship that seemed confused with the Coffin house, I searched frantically for some object, I knew not what exactly, only that I would recognize it when I found it. Gradually I became aware of an evil presence in the house/ship, an invisible something that seeped into the atmosphere, draining away what little light there was, until I was completely blind. At which point a cold hand touched my face and I sat up screaming, and bumped my head on the slats of the bunk above.

“Calm yourself, Davis!”

“What? What?”

“I thought you should know,” said Jebediah. “We are becalmed. Tom has set out the whaleboat.”

My little friend sounded worried, but it seemed to me that while an excess of wind might be dangerous, the reverse was simply inconvenient, for it would delay our return to White Harbor. Upon reaching the deck I discovered that my landlubberly assumption was mistaken.

“We have a hundred fathoms under our keel,” Tom Coffin explained. He was standing in the bows of the schooner, directing the oarsmen in the whaleboat, who were attempting to tow
Raven
by strength of oar. “Hundred fathom is too deep to anchor—we haven't the rode. And yet a tidal current is setting us north. A very strong current. Too damned strong! Never seen the like in these parts.” He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Ahoy the whaleboat! Put your backs into it, men! Pull for your life! Pull! Pull!”

While his brother was busy exhorting the oarsmen, and setting canvas for whatever breath of wind he might find, Jeb explained that an unusually strong tidal current was carrying the schooner directly toward a notoriously dangerous reef. By last reckoning the reef was somewhat less than a mile distant, and with the strange tide sweeping
Raven
northward at something like three knots, we would be upon the rocks in less than an hour. Fortunately the oarsmen were making progress. The idea was not so much to fight the powerful current—quite impossible—but to veer on a heading that would clear the rocks.

“I believe we shall just clear it,” Tom declared, staring hopefully up at the slack sails. “My luck will hold,” he said with a fierce promise. “It must hold, even if the anchors will not.”

My own sense was that misfortune had been brought upon us by all this talk of the seafaring good fortune peculiar to the Coffins. If there ever had been such a thing, surely it had been dissolved by the fog. A dense, nose-wetting fog had arisen during the night, shrinking our world to a circumference that barely extended as far as the whaleboat, whose ever-thrusting bow threatened to dissolve in the heavy mist. Unlike the rogue current, there was nothing strange about pea soup fog in the Gulf of Maine. But even a novice like me understood that dense fog made accurate navigation difficult if not impossible—no stars, fixed points, or landmarks to reference—and Tom's calculations had to be made by what he called “dead reckoning,” which seemed an unfortunate phrase, considering our situation.

I offered my services as an oarsman, but Tom politely declined. “These boys have rowed together for years. A new apple would upset the cart.”

“I see,” I said. “Is there anything at all I can do?”

“All that can be done, is being done,” the young captain said resolutely. “Wind! Bring me some wind, dammit!”

At that very moment—
crack!
—a sharp explosion of thunder made us all jump, and then laugh nervously at the coincidence. But though thunder began to rumble, and the pale fog pulsed weakly with the flash of distant lightning, the wind would not stir. We remained becalmed, in thrall to the ravenous current.

“Wind!” cried Tom Coffin, shaking his fist into the damp, still air. “Damn the lightning, give me wind! Wind from any point of the compass and I'll take my chances!”

But the wind would not rise, and we continued to be drawn inexorably toward the reef, which Jeb described to me as a series of small, unpopulated stone islands connected by a veritable tooth line of jutting rocks and perilous ledges. It was a hazard well known to all mariners, and the course we'd set from Yarmouth should have cleared it by fifty miles. And yet while the captain slept an unanticipated current had arisen, an invisible force undetected because the stars had been obscured.

“There is only one possible explanation,” Jeb said hoarsely. “Some evil force is at work upon us.”

In the light of the storm lantern his eyes had a flat, unfocused sheen and his flesh was bloodless and pale. Rather than try to argue some sense into him—it being no rare thing that a ship encounter peril at sea—I bade him lie down so that I might count his pulse. A touch told me all I needed to know—his blood pounded like a steam hammer. “You are overstimulated,” I cautioned him. “This is perfectly understandable, given our situation, but you must calm yourself or I can't answer for your heart.”

Jebediah stared at me, unheeding. Or really it seemed as if he stared through me, to another person or place. “Would that I might die,” he whispered. “Be a true friend, Davis, and kill me.”

“Hush. You're talking nonsense. Brother Tom is as skilled a mariner as ever sailed the seas. Trust in him, he will save us. If worst comes to worst, we'll abandon ship and take to the whaleboat.”

Indeed, that very course of action had been suggested by Tom Coffin himself, should
Raven
ground upon the reef. We were, he said, no more than thirty miles from the coast and the whaleboat was sound enough to carry all of us safely to shore, if it came to that.

Until then he would do everything within his power to save the schooner. With all sails slack and the oarsmen making little or no headway, he ordered the anchors let go, and all of the rode played out. The hope was that one or more of the anchors would snag bottom before the ship did, but it was a desperate attempt, and it failed. With the current dragging us so fast, the anchors were unable to reach bottom, or skipped along if they did, shivering the ship timbers but failing to slow our inevitable collision.

“Wind!” Tom Coffin roared in frustration. “Give me wind!”

“Too late,” Jebediah muttered, from where he'd slumped on the deck. “Whatever will be was long ago ordained.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” I said, affecting a cheerfulness I did not feel. “There is no such thing as Fate. Fate is a Calvinist conceit. Remember what our friend Emerson has taught us. We make our own way, dear Jeb, and your brother will save us yet, even if he fails to save the ship.”

In the end our progress toward destruction was curiously slow. Three knots is no faster than a brisk stroll. But let a man stroll briskly into a brick wall and he won't come away unbroken. As we closed upon the reef, oily swells rose through the fog, rocking
Raven
and making her slack halyards shudder and her spars creak and moan most piteously. Tom Coffin ordered the oarsmen to leave off towing—it was quite useless—and stand by for collision. At the first touch of keel on rock we were to all fling ourselves over the side and be recovered by the whaleboat, which could be rowed to safety even if it couldn't save the ship.

That was the plan. It was not to be. Before the keel touched at our placid, strolling pace, the lightning spoke.

Raven
was, in that moment before it happened, alive with electricity. My hair rose high above my head. The shrouds and halyards seemed to be coated with a luminous green moss that sparkled and pulsated like something alive. I saw my own fingernails glowing eerily. No doubt my own face was as cadaverous as Jebediah's, as if the flesh had become translucent, revealing the skull within.

“Look! In the shrouds!” one of the crewmen screamed, his voice breaking in panic.

A strange luminescent form had taken shape at the cross-tree spar of the main mast, forty feet above the deck. The glow became recognizable: a translucent man-shape made of cold fire, writhing in the shrouds, as if alive. Alive or dying.

“God help us,” someone moaned. “That's a hung man, look at 'im kick. A hung man in the throes of death!”

It was true, the glowing, crackling thing seemed to shudder and kick the way a hanged man kicks. My rational mind assured that it was not a man, or the shape of a man, but some weird electrical or atmospheric effect grounded between mast and shrouds. A variant, perhaps, of the Saint Elmo's fire that had been terrifying ignorant sailors for centuries. That's what my rational mind said. But all my human instincts told me to shrink in horror from the palpable evil that charged the very air with the stink of ozone—or was it sulfur?