Centuries of June (7 page)

“Not singing bicycles, singing from the windows.”

“Even better,” Dolly said. “Singing windows. Or maybe it was the house itself that was singing?”

Bachelard would allow such a possibility in his poetics, but only in a metaphorical sense, with a house so imbued with happiness that the windows could be said to sing. He speaks of the archetype of the “happy house” that young children reproduce when asked to take up their crayons and color their idea of home—a square with a peaked roof, two windows and a door that suggest a face, and around the house a tree and flowers, a line of blue at the upper border to indicate the sky, and a sun, often smiling, radiating from its tucked position in the corner. While there is no good reason to dispute the existence of a companion to such an idealized fantasy, say, a singing house, a family place so full of joy that it hums a musical score night and day, I have never seen or heard of such a space. My own childhood, as my father would attest if he is indeed my father, lacked all such song, unless one includes the dirty ditties he would sometimes croon late at night after arriving filled to the lid with drink.

“You have misunderstood me, or perhaps I did not make myself clear. It was like the opening prelude of some fantastic play or movie, and the house itself was the theatre. I was on the lawn marveling at the bicycles’ sudden strange appearance and studying the light reflecting
off the chrome when I heard someone singing from one of the open windows. ‘Vissi d’arte’ from
Tosca
.”

“Verdi?” the old man guessed.

“Not so. A common mistake, but I believe it is Puccini.”

“If you two are going to hide behind the screen of dead white male Eurocentric cultural references, I will take my skullcrusher and leave.”

“Apologies. The actual composer is not as important as the song, and the song itself is not as crucial as the singing. And it only truly gains significance through the hearer.”

The old man enjoyed my gambit, for he nodded vigorously and sprang to life. “A word is not a word until it is heard.”

“A soprano floated out the melody and drew me in note by note.” My audience of two appeared mesmerized by my story, for their jaws gaped and their eyes widened in anticipation. A cool breeze or, rather, an intake of air behind me tickled the short hairs on the back of my neck, and the scar tissue from the earlier hole constricted. Had a window been opened in another room to cause a sudden backdraft?

“Do you trust me?” the old man asked.

A preposterous question. Even when alive, my father earned no such confidence. Trust him? I was not sure that I even believed in his existence at all or, indeed, that he was my father and not some conflation of my imagination. A larger-than-life character from the stage. Come to think of it, my father had hazel eyes, and my inquisitor’s eyes were quite blue.

“Come now, Sonny, no time to dally. If I give you the word, will you follow without reservation, no questions asked?”

“The word?”

“A command, boy-o. When I issue an order, do as I say at once, for your very life may depend upon it.”

Beside him on the edge, Dolly nodded her agreement.

“Yes, I trust you.”

“Good lad. Now, one, two, three … duck!”

I squatted immediately as above my head a projectile creased the air and smashed into the opposite wall. An irregular corona of cracks radiated from the impact against the shower tiles, and anchored deep in the center, a pointy barb of a small harpoon. From the direction whence the weapon had been chucked spewed a fount of the vilest invective. A young woman, hardly more than a girl, swore and cursed like a sailor and stomped her feet in fury. “Whoreson dog, blot, canker! Blast to Hades, I’ve missed.”

Framed in the doorway, she shook with rage, balled her hands to fists, and agitated her head till her dreadlocks clumped and swayed like a custodian’s mop. The bottled anger had nowhere to go, so out it fizzed in tears and spittle. Blood rushed to her face, darkening her complexion against the orange chiffon nightgown that twisted round her lanky frame, and when she stomped, her long legs looked like fence posts being driven into a peaty meadow. Though her frenzy obscured her features, her tantrum reminded me of such a display witnessed long ago. However, I could not place the exact location, time, or person. I turned back to confab with my associates, only to find them inspecting the spear attached to the wall. Dolly thwacked the shaft with her hand, and the vibrations caused a droning bass hum, which confirmed that it was indeed stuck.

“Hither, child,” the old man said. “Come dislodge your harpoon and apologize.”

“A pox o’ your throat,” she hissed. In three long strides, she marched into the full light of the bathroom, and beneath the tempest of her light brown hair, her green eyes darted upon the current occupants. As she walked past me, her upper lip curled into a sneer, and then she braced her foot against the tub, took hold of the weapon, and pulled. Small hills of muscle rose on her biceps, and with a great grunt, she extracted the
double-flued point from the ceramic. The old man reached for the harping iron, and she handed it over without further complaint.

He touched his finger to the prick of the point and pretended it was razor sharp. Although the mere handling of the tip would not draw blood, the weapon looked fearsome in his mitts, and my eyes darted back and forth between the barbs and the barbarous woman who had tossed it headward in my direction. Hiding behind that matted hairdo, she resisted close scrutiny. Another tile, loosened by the impact, fell and shattered on the bottom of the tub.

“You could have hurt someone with this,” he said. “Not a child’s toy to be flinging about willy-nilly. What do you have to say for yourself, maid of the sea? Who or what are you, and why have you attempted to pin my man to the wall with your javelin?”

“Some call me by my Christian name of Jane,” she said. “But I am known by many names, all of which result from my most common surname.”

“Shall we guess?” the old man asked.

“Somers,” Dolly said. “Gates. Newport.”

“Go on, then. None of them fellas. Just take a look, and you’ll guess.”

The old man scratched his chin as he looked her over head to toe. “Tanglehair? Beanpole? Skinbone?”

“Long,” she said. “I am often called Long Jane Long on account of my height.” Raising her heels from the floor and straightening her back. “Though he may know me as Long John Long.”

I confess I had no idea what she meant. I knew no Longs, John or Jane, nor could I determine why a girl would have both male and female names. There was something unforgettable, however, about the way she talked, or should I say the quality of her vernacular, an accent faintly British as if she was trying to hide or reveal her origins. The old
man held on to the harpoon like a bishop’s staff by the cathedral of the tub. Dolly settled in by his side, and I attended next to the toilet.

The tall woman opened the spigot on the sink, closed the stopper, and filled it with a rush of clear water. Dipping a long finger through the surface, she changed the colorless liquid to a briny blue-green and, stirring with a single digit, she created a miniature sea of sorts, waves and whitecaps, spindrift gathering like soapscum at the porcelain edges. We three witnesses peered into this ocean and beheld a miniature vessel, like a ship escaped from a bottle, beating against the swale and foundering in a storm. The old man brimmed with glee and beseeched her to begin the tale. “Go to, go to.”

E
ight weeks out of Woolwich and seven since they left Plymouth Harbor in the glories of an English June, in the year of our Lord 1609, bound for the settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the good ship
Sea Venture
, under the hand of Sir Thomas Gates, Admiral Somers, and Cap’n Newport and bearing the souls of fifty and one hundred men, women, and children, storm-wracked and separated from the other ships of the fleet, found itself in a watery hell. The houricane blew for four days, the clouds spit and lashed and covered both sun and moon in turn. Lightning crackled over the top of the mainmast and raced down the spars, the admiral’s flag on the mizzen stiffened in the constant wind, and the wild and wasteful ocean swelled and made to swallow them. Every jack pumped belowdecks, the oakum seals peppered with holes large and small, till the leaks threatened to let in the whole Atlantic. It were Mr. Frobisher, the ship’s carpenter, who suggested that the seams might be plugged with beef and biscuit, ten thousand weight in all, from the ship’s stores. The common mariners and servants stripped naked in the water so as not to shrink their
blouses from the salt, and only one, Long John Long, the cabin boy to the ship’s pilot, refused to part with a single thread on his back. He was a beautiful lad, fair of face, and all of fourteen years, and not a hair on his cheek.

Master Ravens, the pilot, himself stripped of waistcoat and blouse, called out to his boatswain over the thunder. “Speak to th’ men. Full to’t lest we turtle or split.”

The swain, bald as a coot and red with exhaustion, turned to the crew and gentlemen united in the cause of life. He roared over the tempest. “Yare, ye salty dogs, make haste and heave to.”

No sooner had the command left his lips, all was forgot. The engorged sea spat up a wall of water that like to fall upon their heads, and so it did, washing o’er the starboard rail, and swept the decks bow to aft, filling the
Sea Venture
from the hatches to the spardeck and knocking the helmsman from the wheel. The whipstaff swung like the tail of a dog and when he tried to grab and still it, the helmsman was batted nearly into the pitching waves and by the mercy of Jesu was not rent asunder. The cabin boy upon the deck bent like a crab and scuttled to grab the helm, holding on for dear life, and were it not for that quick action, the ship and all would have sunk to the bottom of the sea.

S
he dipped a finger into the sink and twirled the water, making a whirlpool, and the tiny ship caught in the vortex spun like a top. I began to feel dizzy and wished she would stop.

T
he admiral hisself, she went on, came dripping from the hold, drown’d as a cat and to his knees in the saltwater. Those who had gained their feet gathered round. “We are quenched but not besotted, and if I am to die, I shall not perish below as in a box but under God’s wide skies, in
the company of these valiant mariners and my good friends.” He raised his fist to the thunderclouds. “Blow ye winds and crack, give us your best, and shew ye can best these fine Englishmen.”

Straining against the wheel, Long John Long listened with wonder, thinking the man a bloody fool with his false pride spewing from his mouth like the black blood of a dragon. “Men,” she said under her breath, for the cabin boy was a girl, as surely you have guessed by now. She was on the cusp of the change and bound her wee breasts with a linen strap, but for ere else could easily be mistaken for a boy. “Men and their vanity, as if every jack was a stalwart son of the King. And where was he now? Could James himself still the heavens and escape such a storm?”

That night, the fire came and danced across the waves, leapt upon the deck, and tarried upon the spars, slipping up the rigging not yet torn to shreds. What the Greeks called Castor and Pollux and the French name Saint Elmo’s, and every sailor knows the light foretells the changing of a storm and a shift in fortune. Friday, the sixth day of the storm, the morning revealed their fortunes had turned indeed, and for the worse. Listing to starboard, the
Sea Venture
groaned once and nearly all hope was dead. The captains and pilots clambered to the decks and bellowed orders to unrig the ship and throw o’er everything that threatened to pull them down. Trunks and other luggage were cast into the sea. Hogsheads of oil and cider and butts of small beer were staved and the barrels heaved away, and with a sigh, she lifted and righted.

“Lad, we are near finished.” Ravens clapped a hand on Jane’s back. They stood side by side at the stern, watching a cask of wine bob over the waves. “Cap’n Newport would have us chop down the mainmast, and surely, without sail, we would founder should this wind ever abate.”

Two gentlemen and a lady joined them for a moment’s respite at the rail. They were discussing among themselves how much of the sea
had been pumped through the ship since the storm had begun, with Mr. Strachey arguing forcefully that the crew had quitted at least one hundred tons of water. The morning was nearly spent, and in the fabric of the storm clouds small holes and tears appeared, letting in a weak sun. One of the gentlemen passed an open bottle of spirits down the line, and even Jane drank deeply. This is my final hour, thought she, and I will take my leave of this world and steady on for the next. She cast her eyes upon her fellow passengers, all salt-sick and sore, hungry and thirsty, spent beyond endurance. As in a dream of no end, they had baled and pumped till the ropes and sinews of their arms and legs felt stretched and snapped. Even the crew, seasoned mariners all, wearied of the unending tasks and made ready to shut hope in the hatches and commend their souls to the sea. A pair of ladies sat in the corner and wept, and only Somers remained on watch through the wretched morning. ’Twas well after ten of the clock when the admiral leapt to his feet and cried out, “Land!”