Mr. Eternity (5 page)

Old Dan he were so stiff after years of the sky pressing down that sometimes he were not able to bend at the waist he were all one piece like a hinge rusted together. Still he knew how to sail he knew everything about ships sails winds. We beat down the coast that is what it was called we beat south against the wind Old Dan shouting at us haul this fix this reef this make it fast heave. He were not the captain but the captain did defer to him. Much of the time whenever it were
navigable we was in the canal not the ocean for it had big storms at this season and every season now the weather it were all fucked up. But it were often the same the canal the sea for the sea had come up over the land between them what a mess. Very much of the coast were drowned houses buildings towns what a mess you could not say it enough what a mess.

Now I will tell about the other people in the boat. It were eight of us and a small yacht too all beat up and dirty. You could not sleep nor turn around without there was another man breathing at you and grinning and shouting and pissing over the rails. There was none like me so new to the sea but none like Old Dan so expert. There was Ming Kobe Karl Metta and one other I can’t remember never mind it don’t matter as you will see. The captain owned the boat but he were a true fool with his talk of gold and plastic growing in the sun. It were Old Dan that explained how gold grew underground so how could it matter the conditions of the light. Karl who had some school before his dad went bust Karl said Old Dan were right and now we knew the captain were a idiot. Karl played bawbles with us he were a large man he considered himself expert in all subjects though Old Dan skun him at bawbles as he skun me also. I am not always so lucky said Old Dan once I gambled away a whole island it were Little Salt in the Bahamas.

For my part I simply were thinking of women all the time 24/7 I could hardly sleep. We saw girls sometimes on the banks of the canal they had water jugs rolling hips they laughed at us they pointed it were too much. One night I went ashore I came creeping around. There was shacks some torchlight no girls that I could see or they was all asleep. For my pains I got a shovel in the meat of the ass it were a farmer thinking I were peeping. I were however he were correct. Poor fucker I thought I am a poor fucker. But even though I were getting the shovel in the ass running away crying I did see in the bluffs a community of great houses electronic light like the moon itself gleaming on the heights amazing. I thought when I am a rich man no one will poke my ass with a shovel it will be me does the poking.

Soon the canal was choked. We found a channel to the sea we slid out into the chop whereafter every day on the boat were the same the coast the waves the salty smell such tedium. How could I of thought this were seeing the world you could see more of the world in the bottom of a glass. We had corn mush to eat it were horrible. Old Dan said it used to have so many fish you could scoop them in a hand you could catch them with a hook you didn’t need to eat corn mush. I had never seen him eat food anyway only honey or sugar in a little water. I thought maybe it was his secret of eternal life. Oh no he said it is cause I ate probiotics in the old days have you heard of this. No I said. Probiotics he said is a type of disease eating creatures they live in your stomach but they don’t hurt you they only hurt the diseases they thrive on those things. Interesting I said how do you get them in there. There are many methods he said for example if you eat a old shoe left out in the rain so it has that old shoe smell. Oh I said can you cook it. No he said that would kill the probiotic after all.

Sometimes Old Dan joked with me he thought I were too serious. For instance I had a old plastic figure with me a woman figure. Old Dan said it were a toy for girls he called it my Barbie doll but it were not it were a idol it were the Blessed Virgin. Her hips was exaggerated yes her tits also I admit it but it were a idol I asked it to intervene in time of danger.

Next we come in sight of Norfolk Harbor we was in Hampton Roads. No one but Old Dan had ever been here so far south. However now we saw a terrible thing it were the waves breaking in the middle of the ocean. Even I knew this were strange. What is that I screamed a monster it is a giant squid. Old Dan said coral I think it is coral fancy that. Next he begun to shout commands he were calm but we did not understand him for his commands was very technical. He were shaking his head for the wonder of it a coral reef in Hampton Roads amazing he said then he shouted more commands. Turn right he said just turn right for God’s sake.

It were not coral for all the world’s coral was dead or so I heard later. It were just another sunken bridge however the effect were the same. It
ripped a hole in our boat which glanced off the bridge and sank like a stone in deeper water. I treaded the water I were a good swimmer for I had sometimes dove for salvage in Boston Harbor. Old Dan were floating on his back crying out not again not again saying call me Jonah call me Ishmael. I now saw however that the rest of the men were drown. Old Dan called to me don’t worry young man God will not kill me he preserves me from death I am useful to him as a plaything he will preserve you too stick with me. It seems he had forgot about probiotics and now it were God kept him alive. I said Old Dan you are crazy you are a crazy fucker for all the other men are drown and they had stuck with you too. I swallowed some water I coughed but as the wind come up and I were swallowing water now suddenly a treetrunk come floating past we grabbed on we held to it and it buoyed us up. Old Dan he were saying never fear don’t cry for I were crying with fear. Amazing he said lying upon the log drooling coughing he said you men are always crying but men never used to cry. Then again he said considering this then again before that men did cry. Amazing he said I have lived to see the world change and change back again.

I slept like a shipwrecked mariner on the beach of his salvation, and when I woke next morning in the great house at Babylon I could not recall the name by which I had introduced myself the night before. I should never have remembered but that a house slave, whose name was Polonius, brought me tea in my chambers and addressed me as Master Green. Ah yes, said I to myself, when Polonius had gone, my name is John Green. I laughed at this, and spilt my tea. I am the second son of a rich factor in England, said I, and laughed again, and once again spilt my tea.

This lapse of memory should have recalled to me the danger I was in, for if I were found out as what I was – a free mulatto named Sam – I would be liable to a harsh punishment indeed, and perhaps, for all I knew, miserable servitude. Yet I feared nothing, for I was young and vigorous as the green weeds in a New England springtime, and I thought only how marvelous it was to live as a white man, and be treated as one. Directly upon coming down-stairs I applied to Mr. Galsworthy if he had employment for a person such as myself, for I liked Babylon very well and felt I had distinguished myself last night in smoaking, and in manners. He said dear boy you have come at the right time, for our book-keeper poor Rollins he was
struck down by a thunderbolt
, and reduc’d to a pile of ash.

Thus did I become a book-keeper, knowing nothing of that trade. I had fifty pounds a year and a house all my own, though it was but two rooms at the edge of the morass, & a malarious situation that was indeed. Dr. Dan was now also hired, namely as physician, knowing no more of his own trade than I knew of mine. Thus Mr. Galsworthy had made two hires that morning, and both of them imposters, notwithstanding he went about telling all that he was now at last bringing this plantation up
to the stick with good employees. So great was his happyness he required volatile salts to bring him round for dinner, & in such excitement no one explained the job of book-keeper to me, and I still could not tell you what this job consists in, so therefor I did as always – nothing – and passed my days in peaceful repose.

Who was this Dr. Dan, and where had he come from? He wore a cotton night-cap at all times, saying this protected him from the damp which exhaled from the earth. He said he was as ancient as the Americas, and as many-natured. He said he was a great explorer, and had been once to El Dorado and once to
The Great Southern Land
, where the earth plunged back within itself, and men walkt on their hands, and women gave birth to eyeless homunculi which they raised to infancy in a lubricious fold of skin upon their bellies. I did not believe a word of this, yet among his outrageous stories were the kernels of truth as well, & when I asked why had he come to the Indies, he spoke plausibly enough, saying he had come to cut himself a slice of the sugar boom.

But you must take care to observe what kind of a boom it is, said he,

for a big planter will die of the black vomit [with no help from his physician, he observed with a laugh] and leave his sons only debt, for it is a boom on credit. Nor is a man’s station any obstacle, and a razor-grinder today is a baron tomorrow, and a rat-catcher a member of Parliament. For myself I sailed down on a Bristol trader, and though bound for Jamaica we had the unhappy accident of running off-course in a storm, and foundering in the Bahama sea. I washed ashore on Nassau, where I had not been since I stopped there for water and tortoises in 1492, with the sea captain Christopheros Colombo, on our way to the court of the Great Kahn in Cathay. In Nassau I spent all my money on a suit of cloathes, namely a ruffled shirt, blue broad cloth coat with scarlet cuffs & gold buttons, nicely puff’d breaches, & a wide black hat. It was a suit
Fit to be Buried in
, for I thought I would play the part of a noble-man, and obtain credit enough for some slaves and a few pretty acres. I had also a letter of credit wrote for me by a
shipmate in the impenetrable language of the Finn, & tell me who would challenge such a letter as that? But my true concern was Manners, for this is the mark of the gentle-man that he may pee on his host’s shoes, & the host will believe he is himself committing the outrage. Believe me young man I have sat at the court of King Arthur, and I know beautiful manners. Therefor, I tell you, though I am no dab at your fine sayings, I was going to pee on my host’s shoes.

This rhapsodic speech being done, I asked him what had come of his plan, for as it seemed to me he was not master of a shilling. Yes, said he, I have lost everything, or I should say I ne’er got it, for in the debauched whirl of plantation visits I soon forgot what I was doing. A shame, said I, to which he nodded, laughing and saying, I am a
Doctor
without the tiniest grains and scruples of learning, and when I betray myself I shall be hanged! Even speaking so he was very cheerful, and seemed certain that all would come right in the end.

Dr. Dan and I spent long afternoons in each other’s company, and he told me of many things more, viz. the Popish Cruelties of the Spaniards among whom he had liv’d, & the grate pirate Blackeye, and the many shipwrecks he had endured, five or ten shipwrecks I think, for each day he spoke of a new shipwreck so that it seemed his life had consisted of little else. For me these stories were an entertainment, and I gave them little credence, absorb’d as I was in the thoughts and vanities of youth. Yet Mr. Galsworthy attended to them with the
lidless absorption of a pucker fish
, and soon one of these tales was the cause of a great change that he wrought in the administration of his plantation.

The gentle lady reader will perhaps have her own picture of the West Indian sugar plantation – the waving green cane, the dark faces of the slaves, the heat of the boilers. Babylon was just such a place, and yet not so, for it was Mr. Galsworthy’s fate to have located his plantation upon Little Salt, where the soil was in all truth perfectly salty, as presaged and advertis’d, and from which the slaves could no more coax a bountiful crop than could a curate teach the devil to dance a minuet. Yet
there was another problem that was paramount and supreme, which was that such cane as did grow was often as not food for black ratts, which at that time infested the island. The poor health of the cane, and the vigor of the ratts, gave the place an impoverished aspect, and a visitor from distant lands might have supposed that Mr. Galsworthy was not growing cane at all, but growing food for rats, & husbanding these small creatures, & doing an efficient job of it.

Dr. Dan and I were feasting one day with our employer, who had that morning deliver’d a speech upon rats to slaves and overseers alike, exhorting all to pull together so that we might be delivered from this evil, and explaining that in cooperation we should found a new brotherhood of harmony. It was then that Dr. Dan unburden’d himself of yet another fantastical narrative. He spoke of a great queen he had known, the Queen of America, who lived in the city of Memphis, said he, unless it was called Anakitos, or Manoa. He avow’d he could never remember the names of cities. This one lay in the jungles of Terra Firme, close to the very girdle of the world, where the
Great Orb
rose to that point which lies closest to the sun, and is therefore hottest of all lands save the trackless Zahara and, of course, Arabia deserta. In such places, said he, grow all the world’s great jewels and stones, for they require the hot sun for their growth. Now this queen, Maria Yako was her name, did one day cause a great cloak to be made in her honor, and it was made from no other than ratt leather (this being the detail which had recalled the narrative to his mind), for ratt did constitute the chief food of these Piranha Indians.

Mr. Galsworthy had listened carefully to all of this, & tipping back his claret, & watching all, with eyes like raisins, from above the lip of his glass, he pronounced himself inseminated with a grand
Idea
, and made shift to rise and go to his library, though his legs misgave him & he went down head foremost upon the hard floor. To this I gave a great laugh, and Dr. Dan made an expression of dismay, and Mr. Galsworthy had no reaction at all, having drubbed himself insensible. Yet he shortly revived, and whether he then recalled his grand idea, or whether the force of the blow had expelled that idea from the globous jelly of his
brain and caused a new idea to crystallize there, we shall never know, though we shall forever speculate. In either case, he now smiled and spread his arms, & said with no small amount of pride, Here is my idea, it is this: When God gives you ratts, make ratt leather.