Voyage of Midnight (23 page)

“Thanks,” I said, gasping.

“Ah, think nothing of it. Just save your strength for getting us home again. Got three kids, you know. And another one on the way. Got to get home.”

“Oh, uh—well, congratulations are probably in order, then.” And I ambled off, glad Roach was blind to my guilty countenance.

Owing to the diet and the relentless exercise at the pumps,
twelve of the crew collapsed, stricken with fevers and flux. I confined them to their hammocks. Their illness increased the workload for those who remained.

And although my uncle believed we were each day sailing farther north from the equator, we were, in fact, soon to approach it again from the south. Because the skies were overcast, I didn’t know our precise position; only that if I kept true to our heading, we’d indeed run into Africa, for the continent was impossible to miss. Where exactly we’d land I couldn’t know.

“To a fine windy day!” my uncle said one evening, raising his wine goblet, his hand shaking like an old man’s.

“To a fine windy day,” I echoed, touching my goblet to his.

We both drank, him gulping half the contents, me a sip only. We sat at the captain’s table. Before us lay our wooden platters; upon each were two hard biscuits and a lemon-sized lump of stewed salt pork, tough as shoe leather.

“Probably made near two hundred nautical miles in the past day or so,” Uncle said cheerily. “At this rate, we should arrive in Barbuda in, oh, say, a few days, I should think.” He devoured his biscuit. Among the crumbs, a weevil dropped from my uncle’s mouth to his beard. Its white body wiggled blindly for a few seconds before disappearing into the hair.

“Aye. In just a few days, God willing.” The truth of the matter was, we were still two weeks from land, according to my best approximations. I gnawed off a hunk of pork and exercised my jaw. I planned to tell Uncle that I’d made a slight error in my calculations, and that we’d sailed unknowingly past Barbuda and would therefore head for the next-closest island. This would buy me another few days, at most.

I talked around my pork, not wanting to speak of navigation. “First thing I’m going to do when I arrive in port is take a bath. It’s the simple things in life one misses most when one’s at sea, at
least that’s my experience. As if—as if I’ve had much experience! Ha!” I laughed, hoping I sounded natural, afterward panting for breath. “Mrs. Gallagher used to sprinkle rosemary and thyme in my bathwater. Mind you, I smelled like a herb-roasted chicken, but she believed it a remedy for whatever ailed the skin.”

I jabbered on, sounding more and more like a fool in my own ears. A fool and a liar.

“I wonder what shall happen to me,” Uncle murmured of a sudden.

I stopped mid-sentence. “Uncle?”

“Think on it. I’ve known nothing but the sea. I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t feel the ship rock beneath me, or breathe the salt air. What will happen to me now—now that I’m blind?”

“But surely your sight will return, as did mine. In your right eye anyhow.”

Uncle shook his head. “No. It’s permanent. I know it just as I know the feel of wind upon my face.”

I said nothing, devouring my two biscuits as quickly as Uncle had his, trying not to think of the weevils that now crawled about in my stomach.

Uncle looked at me then. Or at least his right eyeball turned in my direction. The other one dangled out of its socket, attached by a few shriveled and blackened cords. “You’ll tend an old, useless uncle, won’t you, Philip, lad? By the deuce, you’re all I have. My only relation. I’ve money enough to keep us both quite well.”

“Of course,” I lied, feeling as guilty as if I’d stabbed him. What would happen to him I didn’t know. If Oji had his way, he’d eat Uncle’s brains and use his skull for a drinking vessel. “Uncle, now that we’re just a few days from land, perhaps we could allow the slaves some exercise—”

His face hardened. “No.”

“But—”

“We’ve discussed this before. You’re the only one with sight. Are you going to single-handedly prevent a rebellion if these devils have a mind to act against us? It’s especially made dangerous when they can see and we can’t.”

“Then at least allow the women and children to take the air and move round.”

He groped about the table. “Where’s that bottle?”

“Here, let me pour you some more.” I handed him his goblet and prompted him: “Well?”

He drank deeply, belching and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “All right. But they’re to be chained while on deck.” He straightened up in his chair, as if this moment of magnanimity had restored him to his former person. “You’ll remove my left eye. It’s become quite bothersome; I’ve snagged it a couple of times. And I must look decently presentable upon our arrival in port. You’ll do it tonight. And you’ll sew me an eye patch.”

A few moments later, when I opened the cabin door intending to fetch my medical instruments, I saw Billy the Vermin feeling his way down the corridor, moving away from me. And just as Uncle knew he’d never recover his sight, I knew Billy had been on the other side of the cabin door, listening. What that meant I didn’t know, other than that Billy was a snoop and not to be trusted any more than one trusts a maggot with meat.

The women and children were a sorry-looking lot. Eyes blind, and with every bone jutting from their skin, they felt their way to the stern of the vessel, where I oversaw the shackling. It seemed ridiculous to require an eight-year-old child or a twig-thin middle-aged woman to wear a shackle, but my uncle would brook no argument.

Billy struck up a tune on his fiddle. The poor blacks shuffled about, clutching one another for support. Heart aching to see them so afflicted, I shouted in their language that when the moon reached its next fullness, they’d arrive at the shores of their homeland again. That on that day, God willing, they’d be free.

At this announcement, one of the women began to sing. Others joined her, their voices weak at first, then growing stronger until the song filled the ship. From below, the enslaved men’s voices began to sing too. It was a melancholy song, rhythmic, yet I sensed within it strains of hope. And as their voices swelled, Billy’s fiddle fell silent.

“What the devil did you tell them?” Uncle asked me, frowning, his arms crossed.

“That their circumstances would soon change.”

He sighed. “God willing. I’m heartily sick of this.”

“Aye. Me too.”

Four days later, when I told Uncle that I’d made an error in my calculations and we’d missed the island of Barbuda, he laid his head upon the table in his cabin and wept.

Everything and everyone demanded my attention. The ship’s heading. The management of the sails and rigging. Firing up the galley. Appeasing my uncle. Continuing the deception. Seeing to the rotting and diminishing supply of food and water. Caring for the ill—the slaves in the infirmary, and the crew wherever else they lay, in their hammocks or strewn about on the upper deck.

Try as I might, even with Oji’s constant help, the situation decayed. To my dismay, five of the crew and sixteen slaves died overnight of the bloody flux. Seven more of the crew contracted the ailment, including McGuire, bringing the total ill to fourteen, leaving only fifteen of the crew to work the pumps and man the ship. That number diminished yet again when Cookie fell in a
faint as he stood over his cauldrons, whacking his head on his way to the deck. He died the next day. The sailor Uncle chose to replace him burned the rice and beans. Uncle cane-whipped him. The odor of scorched food wormed through the ship’s timbers. I smelled it night and day.

And as at the cotton mill when I was but a wee lad, exhaustion plagued me and I was tormented by a high fever that left me sweating and gasping. In one of my rare moments of rest, I leaned against the bulwarks next to one of the long guns. My body trembled with chills. My tongue was thick, my lips cracked and bleeding.

What’ve I done?
I thought miserably.
We were but one day from land, and I turned about and headed back across the ocean
.

And then, mercifully, Mrs. Gallagher was there, dabbing my forehead with a cool, damp cloth, afterward giving me a spoonful of medicine and squeezing my hand while I choked the liquid down.

“There, there,” she said, her voice sweet as an angel’s. “My little English boy. You did what you had to do.”

T
he child stared sightlessly at me before his eyelids fluttered closed. His breathing slowed and his body relaxed.

“The medicine’s taken effect,” I said, releasing the boy’s hand. “Agim will sleep well now, I should think. And his wrist is healing cleanly.”

“The gods be praised,” said Oji. He sponged the frail black body with seawater, attempting to cool the fire raging in the child. “Fight, little Agim. You are a warrior.”

Each day, following the morning mess, I visited the infirmary. I treated the patients and left instructions for Oji. The incidence of fevers and flux was increasing, and two or three patients lay in each pallet, strewn across the floor in various stages of misery,
eyes clouded and shrunken in their sockets, skin stretched across their skulls as if they were skeletons already.

I was tempted, sorely tempted, to burst into a wretchedness of weeping, to say I was only Philip Arthur Higgins, not God Almighty, and how could I be expected to stem the flow of disease and death? But I clamped my fevered lips shut, ordered my stomach to stop its dreadful demands, rolled up my sleeves, and went to work. If I didn’t do it, who would?

I tried every remedy I knew. Blisters, plasters, pills, baths, ointments, and more. I mixed concoctions of pine pitch, yellow wax, mutton tallow, Peruvian bark, and Spanish fly; of bittersweet, winter evergreen, and jalap.

Try as I might, my patients were dying. They slipped away, one by one or by the handful. On this day, after leaving Agim in Oji’s care, I moved on to the next patient, a tall man, thin as a hat rack, his bony protrusions festering with the familiar sores that resulted from lying upon a hard surface without relief. Would I ever get used to the sight of suffering? I hoped not. Never would I harden my heart as had Master Crump—and Uncle, who viewed human suffering as one might view a mosquito stuck in honey, with little interest and no sympathy, concerned only that the honey was ruined.

“May you receive health,” I said to him in his language.

The man struggled to speak. His mouth bubbled with a bloody froth. “They say—they say you are taking us home. That you have blinded these men so they cannot see their straight path.”

Rubbing his sores with a strong decoction of wormwood, I stammered, “Don’t talk. Only rest.”

“They say you have been sent to us by the gods.” And as if he could see, he touched the brand on my chest with a shaky finger. “This is the sign they gave you.”

I stopped my treatment, blinking at him.

Whereupon he reached out and took both my hands in his. His hands trembled, hot and moist. He stared at me with milky eyes. His breath smelled like rotted meat. “I am Ikeotuonye. It means ‘the strength of one person.’ ” He cried out a word I didn’t know, then said, “I—I give my name to you.” After two more raspy breaths, he quivered once and then relaxed, his arms falling, exhaling for the last time.

The infirmary had grown quiet. I closed his eyelids, aware of the rhythmic sloshing of the water on the other side of the hull, the gentle roll of the
Formidable
, my own labored breathing.

I’ve failed again
.

“Ikeotuonye,” one of the other men whispered. And it was whispered in such a way that it sounded as if he were sitting in the vastness of Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans instead of in a crowded, stench-filled infirmary in the gut of a slave ship.

“Ikeotuonye,” others whispered.

Someone lying on the floor touched my ankle. Another my foot.

“Ikeotuonye.”

And they surrounded me, those that could. Touching me, chanting my African name.

“Ikeotuonye …”

“Ikeotuonye …”

I was digging in my medicine chest, searching for antimony, when Uncle threw open the door to the infirmary.

One look at his reddened face, milky eye glaring, was enough to know that something was frightfully amiss. Behind him stood Billy the Vermin, a smug expression playing upon his normally dull features.

Uncle said, “Billy heard the sound of a baby coming from inside this infirmary.”

I glanced quickly at Oji, who was sitting cross-legged, holding the infant. Oji looked as if he’d been caught committing murder. His blinded eyes widened. He stiffened. The baby squirmed and opened its mouth to protest. Oji clamped his hand over the child’s mouth and whispered in its ear.

“Where is it?” demanded Uncle.

“There’s no infant here,” I said. My words sounded calm, yet my stomach turned topsy-turvy and my pulse pounded up my neck and into my head. I approached Uncle, praying Oji would quickly place the infant in its hiding spot, praying the infant would settle.

Uncle brushed me aside and began to search the infirmary.

None of the patients made a sound, no doubt frightened by this intrusion. But I wished they’d cry, moan, groan, and weep, to cover any noises little Onwuha might make.