The Pacific and Other Stories (37 page)

E
VERY MORNING
on his way to the customs house he passed a bookseller on a side street far from the crowds on the avenues and yet, even accounting for that, mysteriously inactive. Many stores manage somehow, day after day, to exist without customers, and so did this one. He had never seen anyone in it, not even once, although he himself had discovered there a copy of
Typee
, pushed back in the shadows, low on the geography shelf, damaged, spine out. Of all his books, this was the one that represented him least, and there it had stood for at least four years, and might stay forever.

In the window of this strange shop sometimes attended to by a heronlike balding man whose resentment of everything was flawlessly communicated
even when all one could see of him was his back, was the
Bird’s Eye View of the City of New York.
A highly detailed, hand-colored lithograph ten years out of date, it showed New York from aloft, gripped in the frenzy of commerce. Despite problems of perspective that made an unsuspecting horse near the Brooklyn Navy Yard as big as a five-story building, it was majestic overall. One could see at a glance why, with a great engine such as New York supplying the armies with shot, shell, ships, and men, the Union could only have prevailed in the War of Rebellion.

Ships swarmed at the docks, anchored in the rivers, moved out to sea, and came into the harbor. The plumes of white sail or steam that identified them for what they were, were matched in signaling power by billows of smoke from factory chimneys, running full out with the wind. And like the engraving itself, fading in the sun year after year, the clouds dispersed and went pale, their substance fleeting even as their motion was frozen.

On the way to the customs house every morning, quiet and inconsolable, he stopped before the fading lithograph to peer into the muted streets of Brooklyn. There, sometimes, on a winter morning, he had turned the corner on a prospect both empty and long, its buildings stolid and patient in the cold air and pale sunshine. With everyone at work or inside by the fire, these houses were as quiet as headstones.

O
NE MORNING
in the middle of September, after weeks of unrelenting rain and a hurricane, the air now sun-filled and clear to perfection, the deputy inspector of customs went down to Whitehall to retrieve an envelope of manifests, and then headed up West Street to the Gansevoort Docks. Anyone who must report to work and stay for a required time is bound to love an errand that for half a morning leads him through the free city that in those hours he normally cannot know, and his pace will be slow and his step deliberate, for everything he sees is a gift.

West Street and the docks were crowded with the rush of passengers and freight for boats departing that morning for New Orleans, Savannah, Baltimore, and Boston, almost every one a steamer and almost all capable of sail. The forests of mast, spar, and rope were like a single line of rain-darkened
trees on an Appalachian ridge. Sometimes white captions bloomed from ships that had backed out to set sail in midriver, and when the boilers of steamers were lit, clouds of coal smoke distressed the air like an artist’s charcoal.

West Street, though very wide, was packed with drays, horsecars, coaches, and immense wagons. People labored under bundles and carried crates on their shoulders. On the sidewalk that ran along a front of four- and five-story brick emporia and offices, well dressed women, bearded carters, foreign sailors, and men in top hats moved intently, booking tickets, buying things, having breakfast, visiting clerks, never ceasing, never stopping.

The North River—that is, the Hudson—was almost in flood, fuller than he had ever seen it, flowing south with the tide and now swelled with the outpourings of a dozen rivers and a thousand streams carrying off the rains of the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, the Berkshires, and the Adirondacks. By the time this immense volume of waters ploughed past Manhattan, it nearly lapped over the edges of the piers, it lifted the ships high at their docks, and it went by so rapidly and with such force as to suggest a mountain torrent. Some ships, unable to dock, stayed out in the river, anchor chains taut, anchors by no means certainly fixed. But this was the crest, and the sun seemed to guarantee that the river would rise no higher and flow no faster.

T
HE
G
ANSEVOORT
D
OCKS
were neither ordered nor neat, nor, in the daytime, ever quiet. The deputy inspector strode through aisles made by bales, crates, and stacks of lumber, and smelled the cacao and coffee of Africa and Central America, the tea of Ceylon, the cotton of Egypt, the cedars of British Columbia. Into stolid, orderly, Christian New York had come the crews of a legion of small ships—Fijians, Angolans, Portuguese, Samoans, Russians, Cockneys, Arabs, and Goans. Some were tattooed and in costumes that—even if no more outlandish than hoop skirts and corsets—had about them the breath of cannibalism. But none of this was new to him, as he was quite used to such things, having decades before left cold, white, and austere Albany
to sail into the South Sea. Like other ex-sailors, he was not rattled by a man with a few bones in his nose.

After closing the door to the glassed-in office, and as the noise of the dock receded, he found himself in the midst of a dispute, which, when it would ebb, was a conversation.

“Pulling it up and loading it on a wagon … I don’t know. Can’t we just hold off?”

“She’s been anchored for two days. How long must she wait?”

“What about borrowing the dory upstream?”

“They need it more than we do.”

The deputy inspector of customs asked, “What ship is it?”

“The
Antrim
, a mile upriver. Bartleby should go. He’s young, he can row against even this current.”

“Tell him what Bartleby said,” bid the other man. The deputy inspector waited to hear.

“Though it was a simple statement, his words were offensive to me. I could mark them down as insubordination, but they were conditional, and I don’t know how to take them. He said. … I shall not repeat what he said, but he says he doesn’t want to.”

The deputy inspector nodded. “Sometimes a boy of that age gets it into his head that he just doesn’t want to do what you want him to do. I think it may be that, very early on, as if the lens of time were distorted, he can see way over the fence, as if he’s lived his life near to the end, in a kind of clairvoyance.” They stared at him, wondering what he had said. Then a steamer blew its whistle. “Don’t ask him again. I’ll do it.”

“You’ll do what?”

“Row upstream to the
Antrim
, inspect the cargo, collect the duty, and glide back.”

“What makes you think you’ll live long enough, at your age, to row against this flow all the way to the
Antrim
?”

“A mile?”

“With the speed of the current, it would be the equivalent of ten, with a furious pace, unrelieved.”

“I know that.”

“You won’t get two hundred yards.”

They knew the deputy inspector had come by his job through some minor interference in the White House. They knew that he had written books. They knew that he had been a sailor, a whaler, and a farmer. They also knew that he was too old to push a mile against the North River when the North River was as desperately south-seeking and voluminous as it was then. It would be, they thought, his comeuppance for not accepting bribes, as they did, and for a maddening presumption of superiority, unconfirmed by position, that irritated them daily and beyond toleration.

“Just make sure,” one of them said, “that you don’t get swept out the Narrows. There are inns where you can stay on Staten Island, or Rio de Janeiro.” Whatever a guffaw might be, they followed with it.

E
VEN COMPROMISED
by the forest of pilings that held up the piers, the massive flow of water was so great that the dory, tied up on the lee, stretched its moorings like bowstrings. His hands were soft, and he hadn’t rowed hard in decades. The last time he had ploughed or hayed, or used a shovel, was long before. Where would he find his strength, or protection for his hands? What if his heart were not able?

His first task was to avoid being thrown against the pier a hundred yards south. As soon as the painter was let go, the dory rushed for destruction, and he had to row desperately not to be shot across the gap. Unless one rows every day, at the beginning of a row the oars must be swept slowly, to establish a rhythm that will keep the stroke smooth and efficient and allow the blades to dip into the stream without fighting or chopping it. It is as if the water is organized or has a soul, for when it senses respect in the proper rhythm, the timing, and the consideration of the stroke, it seems—contrary to physical law—to help the rower along.

He had learned this in whale boats in the South Sea, the Central Pacific, and in the Atlantic from Greenland to Cape Horn. He had seen the inexplicable liveliness of the water itself, which answers in response to recognition and is kind in return for the apprehension of its grace.

But between the piers, fighting the north-to-south current as he tried to
exit west from the slot, his stroke was choppy and arrhythmic, slapping the water, badly balanced, slipping without power, exhausting him almost before he had started.

“Shall we throw you a rope?” he was asked.

In between breaths, he yelled, “No, ye shall not.”

He would row straight west, and then, hard on the port oar, point north again to the pier, where his colleagues stood taking their ease, and rise on a course that resembled a saw tooth, a line of sharks’ fins, or the depiction of waves in a musicale. And thus he propelled himself into open water.

While turning north he was swept south of the south pier, but then he found a clear course, north by slightly northwest, that would take him up to the
Antrim
, resting in midstream a mile away and impatient for inspection.

Though his stroke had yet to engage the aid of the river itself, it was smoother, and if it had not actually found the required rhythm at least it seemed to be seeking it. The sun had long before risen above the slate roofs and rigging-tangled masts along the west shore of Manhattan, and it shone hot in the blue, twirling as it ascended.

Releasing the oars, he shed his jacket so quickly that a shiny brass button was violently severed from the midcoat and flew like a honeybee over the gunwales before it dropped into the water and disappeared forever. The button, until that very moment a perfect little sun in color, shape, and reflection, now made its way into oblivion. But the other buttons on the coat of blue wool still gleamed in the light, and there was nothing else to do but row.

Row he did, his shirt darkening first in patches, then entirely, and then becoming as soaked as if he had been in a heavy rain. His breathing, though anything but easy, had settled down, as had his heart, and if not he would have died. His stroke was slowly conforming to the wishes of the water, the boat slowly making headway north, cutting against the current with increasing steadiness and balance.

As he moved into the equilibrium of old, that as a young man he had known so often and so effortlessly on warm and distant seas, he did not even notice the blistering of his hands, the breaking, and the blood, cherry red against the varnished yellow oars, flowing in straight lines down the shafts.

Now he was chasing whales once again, with everything ahead, with
time as vast as the Pacific, horizonless, infinitely rich, and in his favor. Now he was more vulnerable, for the sake of his wife and children, than ever was any wife or child. Now his parents lived, and he had not watched them at their last. Now he was free to fight and communicate with the current and that which ran beneath, and thus to know and feel it, without doubt or the necessity of faith. Now his stroke was smooth, life in full flood, the city in motion, the sun rising, the river running.

A
RRIVING AT THE
A
NTRIM
, he shipped oars and briefly glided to the foot of the gangway, where a Malay sailor gaffed the boat and tied it fast. “I’ll be up,” the deputy inspector said, “as soon as I can put on my jacket.” Realizing that the Malay sailor could not understand, he pointed up and then to the jacket splayed across the stern seat of the boat.

When he was alone, he removed his shirt and held it in the wind and sun, a wind that, like the current, had not been in his favor. Soon he himself was dry, and even the shirt, which he held in his hands like a bullfighter’s cape, followed suit. At first in lighter patches, and then in whole areas of white, and then, after how many minutes he did not know, the shirt was dry in his hands and stiff with salt.

Though properly attired when he came on deck except for the missing button, he was the color of a hot rose. As his blood carried the heat of his body to the air, and his muscles ached as they had not in years, he felt accomplished and young.

And with the rush of blood he was alert to the world, his powers of perception working at the highest speed, which seemed to make everything go slowly. He felt his heart beating strongly and evenly, slowing gradually, having carried him forth and served him well, and not in danger of failing. Most pleasant was the heat that raced to his face, the scarlet that would remain for half an hour, signifying both what he had done and his capacity to do more.

“What have we got?” he asked the captain, an Englishman who, the deputy inspector thought, would mercifully offer him no bribes unless he did so only because he thought the custom of the country would require it. The deputy inspector wanted to show him that the custom of the country
did not, that America was as upright, and more so, than England—even if the custom of the country, to the deputy inspector’s great regret, was changing very rapidly.

“Fifteen hundred bales of china from the factory at Hankow.”

“Are they uniform?”

“Absolutely, as you shall see.”

“Let’s open some.” They descended into the hold, which smelled like willow: the stays of the bales were willow that had been cut in the summer. “You’re bound for Albany.”