The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (12 page)

The fly, having pawed over every millimeter of the sugar cubes, hoisted itself onto the rim of the bowl. Both men watched as it teetered drunkenly over the table, disappearing with a sudden cessation of its infernal buzzing engine, into the pure white folds of the doctor’s napkin.

Doyle didn’t speak to the American consul again. Henry Garnet stayed in his berth, doubtless reading
The Conquest of Mexico
, and when the ship docked in Monrovia, he was whisked ashore by a pompous delegation dressed in garish nightshirts waiting on the wharf. It was not until the
Mayumba
was steaming determinedly toward Grand Bassam that Miss Fox, finding the doctor listlessly thumbing a back number of
Punch
in the passenger lounge, enlightened him on Mr. Garnet’s true mission in Africa. “He’s a dying man,” she said. “He won’t live a month. He wanted to die on African soil, so his friends got together and secured him the consul post, but it’s all a sham. It’s just to pay the passage and have a place for him to rest when he arrives.”

“But how do you know this?”

“He told me. Of course I knew who he was at once. He was a tireless abolitionist in New York before the war and some say Liberia is his creation. Really, he’s quite a famous man.” Miss Fox drew herself up so that she could gaze down her nose upon the spectacle of the young doctor’s colossal ignorance.

A famous man. A dying man. But how was it possible? He had betrayed no sign of illness. His breathing wasn’t labored, his mind
was clear. His appetite was good. The sclera of his eyes was perhaps tinged with yellow, but Doyle had taken that to be a feature of his race. And as to his fame as an abolitionist—he had shown more interest in Motley than in the struggles of the emancipated American Negro. His chaffing about tourism and imperialism had been more speculative than heartfelt. Or so it had seemed to Dr. Doyle, who had surely not made the trip to Africa to be condescended to by the likes of the self-appointed know-all Miss Fox.

“I really must go and have a look in at the Fairfax boy,” he said, pushing up from his chair and away from the line of Miss Fox’s long nose. “He has a cough and I don’t like the sound of it. I fear his lungs may be affected.”

Onward chugged the
Mayumba
, courting the shore breezes, though these were rare, and so hot they were more like the exhalations of hell. Doyle marveled at the sameness of the view, the breakers, the shore, the bush, and at night the fires, which the captain informed him were set by natives intent on “burning the grass,” to what end he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine. Miss Fox alighted at Grand Bassam, a miserable hole where her father, a stooped, wizened figure dressed all in white with a pith helmet cocked back on his head, eyes the color of water, and the complexion of a Morocco leather chair, awaited her on the flimsy dock. Doyle watched from the deck as she approached her progenitor. He was curious to witness the manner of their greeting. It was a handshake, brief, courteous, the elbows pressed into the sides, and then they turned away from the shore and the intellectual lady followed her father into the jungle.

To live how? To do what? Doyle mopped his brow with his sodden handkerchief. Near an open-air shed perched with its back
to the bush, an anthill of half-naked natives suddenly dispersed, marching in a loose formation toward the stern of the
Mayumba
to receive the cargo already being dropped down by the sailors. Captain Wallace, restless and cantankerous, joined the doctor at the rail. “Fancy doctoring that lot, eh Doyle?” he said, indicating the porters at their work.

Doyle, having looked over but not at the men, who were making a noisy fuss about unloading a pallet of heavy burlap bags, concentrated his attention on a pair of tall, muscular fellows engaged in posturing and angrily baring their teeth. “They look healthy enough,” he observed. “They certainly have white teeth.”

“It’s veterinary work, sir,” the captain crudely attested. “They’re animals and no more. They don’t even know they’re sick until they drop. And they contract all manner of evil from the ground, because they sit on it and sleep on it and even eat it. Every kind of worm and parasite known to man and some as none has heard of is out there. I’ve seen yaws open the flesh of a leg to the bone. And elephantiasis. I don’t suppose you’ve seen what that does to a man. Scrota the size of melons.”

A burst of wild glee broke out from the natives. The two men, who had seemed about to come to blows, leaned into each other, laughing so heartily they plopped down on a pallet, while their coworkers shouted the joke to each other.

“Do you understand them?” Doyle asked the captain, meaning their language.

“There’s nought to understand,” Wallace replied. “Poor, stupid brutes. What in thunder are they laughing about?” And with that he left the doctor and called out to one of the sailors as he approached the loading platform, “Latimer, what are they up to? We’ll never get out of here at this rate.”

Doyle watched the men a while longer, thinking about parasites. He had a treatise on tropical medicine in his berth. He had read in it an article about tiny worms that burrowed into a man, depositing their eggs deep beneath the epidermis. When the eggs hatched, the larvae gnawed their way out. Unthinkable.

His gaze wandered listlessly over the scene. There was a dog lying in the shade of the shed, some mad bird shrieking from the impenetrable bush beyond. Nature here was virulent, producing all manner of venom, not to mention large, carnivorous beasts and people as black as coal. The heat alone, he thought. The poleaxing heat.

A prickling sensation called his attention to his wrist, where he discovered a large mosquito tilted back on its rear legs the better to gorge itself on exotic blood. Case in point, he thought, as he squashed the life out of the insect. He might stroll out to the shed and back, just to have solid ground under his shoes. But between the dock and the shed was only a stretch of unwelcoming, baked, shadeless, dun-colored dirt.

The heat alone, he thought.

“Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin, for few come out, though many go in.”

The first officer delivered this cheerful advice as the
Mayumba
swung listlessly on her anchor chain in the oily brown water off the coast of Lagos.

“And why do few come out?” asked Doyle.

The mate drew closer, lowering his beard toward the doctor’s ear with a confidential air. “Why,” he said. “Presumably.” A pause, a deeper register. “Because they die there.”

The doctor grinned; gazing out at the long swells rolling into the inevitable strip of sand. Another port not fit for human habitation, another infernal pit of hell where black demons fed the flames with bits carved from unwary travelers. A buzzing near his ear provoked him to clap his hand against his head. Was it worth it, he asked himself, this place? Men didn’t last long and women not as long as that. And all to extract palm oil and rubber.

And of course to extend a sorely needed civilizing influence, which might, in a hundred years, beam a few rays of light into this universal moral darkness. The mate wandered away in pursuit of his duty. The doctor patted his pockets, in search of his pipe.

At dinner the remaining passengers were preoccupied with their packing arrangements, as all but two were departing at Lagos. Doyle noted the downcast expression on the habitually resolute face of Mrs. Fairfax, who must surely look upon her destination as a death sentence. Her sickly boys picked at their plates, the younger one taking up his napkin at frequent intervals to cover his mouth while he coughed. His father studied him distantly. The man of God, and his good woman, Doyle thought. What poor luck to be born that man’s son.

Though at least the Reverend Fairfax did, in a manner of speaking, provide for his family. At least he did that.

After the passengers had departed and the blasting sun had set, the ship was quiet and still as the inside of a sleeping whale. In his narrow cabin the doctor sat down at his table to begin an overdue letter to his mother.
Dearest
, he wrote, and put down the pen. What to tell her? That he detested Africa, its heat, its smells, its people, and longed for a breath of cool, fresh air? He gazed at his porthole. It made no difference if it was opened or closed; it was suffocating inside and out. He drew in a slow breath and released it. Hotter going in than out, or so it seemed. An insect’s dizzy buzzing came closer, drifted away, came close again. He picked up his pen.
Here is my carcass stewing like a fowl. Never was there such a pesthole of a place as this, good for nothing but swearing at. I shall not.…
The buzzing came close, sounding oddly fierce, as if the creature had turned up its own volume, but he determined to ignore it. He felt the infinitesimal thud on the nape of his neck, the tentative tickling like loose threads unraveled from a collar, and then the sharp sting. His moist hand had smeared the ink on the page. He set down the pen, slapped his palm across his neck, dragged it free, and glowered at the smashed insect, a black smudge in a streak of bright blood.

The image of the Fairfax boy pushing his fork through the mush he’d made of his dinner, languishing beneath the indifferent eye of his righteous father, recurred in the doctor’s imagination, striking a moody, somber chord, definitely in a minor key. He couldn’t escape the conclusion that the boy was trapped and perhaps doomed by
the single-minded zealotry of a parent who cared more for the souls of benighted savages than the health of his own family. If the boy survived he would certainly have some tales to tell, though he might prefer to close them away, to condemn his childhood as a prisoner to a prison.

Unbidden another image rose. The tall gentleman, rolling over on his side in the gutter, howling gibberish at the jeering boys who pelted him with pebbles, and the lady, fabricating an excuse about the urgent necessity of a conversation with the draper, gently steering her son into a byway; the son who knew his mother had seen the gentleman, and also knew she would never admit it.

And another, the lady again, one hand pressed against the kitchen table, the other covering her mouth, keeping in what she might say, what she must be thinking. Before her, uncapped, cast aside by the desperate, trembling fingers of the gentleman, the empty bottle of furniture varnish. The boy was there, in the doorway, but he didn’t speak, and the lady didn’t know he was there, not then, not to this day. She didn’t know the boy watched her as she buried the bottle in the trash bin, and she couldn’t know that later, when she went out to her ladies’ educational meeting, the boy had fished the bottle out and sat for some moments puzzling over the meaning of it. Until he grasped the meaning of it.

The voice of the captain in conversation with the mate drifted in from the passageway. Doyle crumpled the smeary page, used it to wipe away the mess in his palm, and went out to join his fellow officers in the saloon.

There the drink was gin; the atmosphere was masculine, smoky, and amiable. The talk was all sea tales, some as tall as the mainmast, of survival against impossible odds, dereliction of duty, cannibalism in extremity and as accepted practice, madness on board and on shore, ships cursed, ships derelict, ships on which the crew was found all dead, or all dead save one man, raving at the helm, collisions on dark stormy nights and in strange ports, ships sailed purposely into reefs or shoals in order to defraud insurance companies, ships rammed by enraged whales. At the close of the whale story,
Doyle would have offered his adventure on the ice, in which he had fallen through a hole and saved himself by clinging to the flipper of the seal he’d just clubbed to death, but the occasion didn’t present itself. As the evening wore on, his brain fogged over and he could no longer follow the conversations. A queasy rumor stirred in his gut. He stopped drinking the captain’s gin and switched to tonic water. Something was definitely amiss in the waist, he thought, amusing himself with his pun. He wasn’t feeling entirely seaworthy.

He excused himself from his companions, pleading fatigue, and went out onto the deck for a breath of fetid air. The night was black. The ship rocked gently at anchor in the black water. Even the stars appeared to have been dimmed. Looking up hurt his eyes. His head was throbbing, his throat dry and constricted. No, he was not well. His legs had gone rubbery, and from somewhere in his core a chill commenced, washing up to his face and down his limbs, so fierce and abrupt that his teeth chattered. How curious to be cold in the broiling African night.

He knew what must come next and steadied himself at the rail, then, with decision, pushed off and made his staggering way, clutching the boom, careening into the housing, down the hatch to his berth. He drank water from the pitcher, pulling the sheet off the thin mattress, feeling about the storage space in the bunk for the heavy socks and woolen muffler he’d worn on the trip from Edinburgh to Liverpool; when was that? A world ago. With trembling fingers he pulled on the socks, wrapped the plaid round his neck, crossing the ends over his chest, folded the sheet, pulled it tight across his shoulders, and sat there on his bunk, shivering like a man in a blizzard. His thoughts were disordered, darting from hypothetical diagnosis of his condition, malarial fever being the most likely, to anxiety about the state of his intestinal tract, which had a seismic feel to it, to regret that he hadn’t told the seal story, interspersed with the repeated observation that it was passing strange to be shivering in a broiling cabin, and a vague premonition, distant now but beckoning, like that tall, wan gentleman standing in the corner there, insistently wagging a bony index finger, that he was
entering an entirely different order of consciousness, one that would preclude attendance upon his medical duties. He wasn’t afraid—he was never afraid—but he was helpless. The cadaverous gentleman closed his fingers in a fist, narrowing his watery eyes in a theatrical glare. Something familiar about the fellow, though he clearly wasn’t really there. Doyle rubbed his fists into his eyes, clamped his jaw against the appalling clatter of his teeth. Damn this gentleman, in his woolen vest and frock coat; absurd attire for a specter. He lowered his fists and blinked his eyes at the man, who had the temerity to bare his rotting teeth in a fiendish grin.