A miserable man on a miserable boat. What a formula for misrule! On the high seas, the strange Parisian stood out among his hearty fellows. His spirits were always poor, his mien downcast and low as a whipped dog. His round head was full of the devil’s wickedest thoughts, as anyone could tell from the sly bleak smile that would appear whenever some misfortune befell a shipmate. Nothing to hang a man for, but nothing to praise either. I recall the time nimble Nate passed over the taffrail into nothingness.
Nate had been logging our speed through the blue churn of the world, hoisting up the taffrail log, and paying out the knotted rope. Perhaps a moment’s inattention as Nate caressed the bare wooden bulb of the mermaid’s breast who adorned the stern was what did him in. Perhaps the tossed log jerked, or was caught a second in the rudder and tugged him over when he tried to haul her up. Nate ran on the ship’s rigging like a rat, feet and hands a continual blur. With hands as leather as a sea turtle’s fins (and almost as wide), no part of the ship was beyond his speedy reach. He wrapped his feet in a soft sort a saddle-leather he swore was better than the clogs we were issued, and even better than bare feet, and which he glossed with beeswax on the soles to give him extra grip. In the galley at meal times, or during some midnight revelry, a cold ghostly knocking would come through the battened porthole. Our spines would seize up, conjuring dead men from Davy Jones’ locker crawling over the ship like ants on a corpse. Then one mate would be shamed into screwing open the porthole, and there’d be Nate’s upside-down face, cackling loudly, his eyes wide with delight at having fooled his fellows again.
Death ashore, however grisly, leaves behind some naked totem of the mortal affair, some bent stick for Cerberus to play with, some maudlin evidence for loved ones to obsess over, a dismembered leg or bloody shoe. A thing for the mind to gnaw upon, a partial cadaver or chewed thumb. At sea, in the storm’s raw roar, or during a duty awkwardly pursued, death’s whisper swallows souls into its liquid All–a green engulfing of man’s slender form in the sea’s pewter landscape. Whatever importance man presumes is blandly sucked to dumb impotence, with not even the tart arch of a wishbone left behind to trouble the air’s deaf evanescence.
Without belief
We come to grief;
Yet grieving gives best
Belief its acid test.
Over the side on a length of solid knots, Nate went winningly, his smile about a hand wide. There was neither a clack, a clunk, nor a thump, just a sudden slack in the line, and no more Nate.
And Baudelaire slinking by with that sly grin, calm as a cat.
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