Dudley would offer the boy a job in Sydney. His heart was that generous.
Dudley was sailing not only from Falmouth to Sydney, but also out of the working class—with poverty lurking between every job, in every trough, the spirit crying out on the battering, deadly waves—and into the mercantile class.
Thomas Dudley did make it to Australia, the pioneer of plague victims. I wonder if he thought about Richard Parker when the bloody phlegm burst from his nose. Blood, precious fluid, because that’s what they’d been after. And Dudley would have seen the look on the doctor’s face, the face of the living looking at the damned. Dudley recognized that look.
He had seen it in Ned Stephens’s face as he gazed at the pitiful Parker while he did his best to sharpen his knife on the oar housings of the boat. Parker would have been dead within the day but they needed his blood, uncongealed, to slake their thirst. They couldn’t wait for this leisurely wasting—although it seemed to be God’s intention. Did God really intend for Dudley’s children to go to the workhouse, because if he died Phillippa’s meager earnings would not be enough to save them from this fate. Stropping the knife, Dudley watched the horizon and hoped for the blurring that would alert him to a ship, but there was none. Is this how Abraham felt as he prepared his sacrifice? Or maybe… Who was to say that Parker was Isaac and not the lamb sent in his place? Parker was the lamb and with his sacrifice Dudley would save his children from the workhouse.
Rhetoric of a weak mind, yes, but Dudley was starved and his brain, that gorgeous wrinkled mass of reason, was shrunk to a peach pit. He could almost hear it rattling in his skull with the boat’s every rise and fall.
And then his resolve had faltered. “We should draw lots.”
“Draw lots?” Brooks said. “And risk murdering a man? Because surely as I am sitting here, that boy is more in death than life. Save him the suffering and save us others.”
Dudley turned to Stephens. “What are your thoughts?”
“I wish to live,” he said. His voice was a whisper because his tongue had fisted in his mouth.
Dudley too wished to live. Parker was somewhere in the pale. He had been drinking sea water and was now insensible. Was that a bad thing on this hour on this day? The task had fallen to Dudley, because one journey long ago had left him an experienced butcher of pigs.
As Dudley lay dying, he still heard the sounds of that moment, the wash of waves, the stropping of the knife, the rasp of Parker’s breath as his eyes flew open—mostly whites—and held Dudley’s gaze. I am a man, the eyes said. I am a child.
Dudley had related his story to all who cared to listen (solicitors, family members, Parker’s kin) in a candid, frank manner because he believed himself to be innocent of any crime. Innocent people did not hide their actions because—no matter how vile—these were still actions and not transgressions. There was a precedent for his behavior. Was it not the custom of the sea? And in the last few decades there had been other cases much like his: the Nancy, the Euxine, the Essex. And although the survivors of the Peggy had suffered through a trial, had they not been found innocent in the end?
What the case revolved around was the fact that he and his crew did not draw lots. The issue was not that Dudley was a cannibal, but rather that he was not a gambler. Brooks, his crew member, was not involved in the suit. He lied, said that he was curled in the prow of the boat protesting all the while, and that after the vile act, he only drank a little blood. Dudley had been forced to relive the whole horror in the courtroom: the great league-high wave moving through the ocean; the keelwood springing open like a fist laid flat; the menacing snap of the shark’s jaws and crack of the oar across its head; the brief sweetness of the turnips. And Richard Parker.
“He was very low,” Dudley said, addressing the court, but he still remembered the feel of the boy’s hair in his left fist, and the knife handle in his right.
The queen withheld pardon, even when all of England, Parker’s own brother included, forgave him. How could she keep him in Holloway prison while she deliberated at leisure? And what about this cell, this isolation, was better than transportation as a convict? Dudley would have leaped at the chance to make the journey once more—successfully—to Australia, even if manacled. Anything was better than this merciless silence. Somewhere in this prison was his co-conspirator, Stephens, that poor man. He had welcomed Stephens onto his boat because of the man’s sense of humor, his tremendous winking, chuckling, warm presence, the way he delivered all the off-color jokes out of the side of his mouth, the way none of the jokes made sense but how you didn’t realize it until you were already laughing. In the silence of Holloway, Dudley thought he heard Stephens’s low chuckle. He said,
“Regina rhymes with vagina.”
He said, “Tell you what, if the Queen had been in the boat with us, we sure as heaven and hell would not have eaten Parker.”
This had made Dudley smile and he wondered if his madness, these simple soothing conversations, weren’t actually real. If this deep silence made it possible to hear the thoughts of other men.
But the pardon did come through and the cheering crowds returned—the same supportive, multiheaded beast that had been there every step of the trial, cheering him forward through the papers, coughing up their ha’pennies and tuppences for his defense. He was a local hero. Because didn’t everybody love a cannibal? Wasn’t he already half-formed at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum?
Australia did not care if he was “Cannibal Tom.” In Australia you could shake hands with a ship owner only later to learn that his first journey to the new world was in the hold, chained to his other companions. Australia was as forgiving to its transported hoodlums as it was cruel to the natives—blackies out by the pier stumbling around, their veins flowing with gin. These natives, so-called cannibals, who couldn’t catch a slow-moving wombat and make a meal from it, even less a more sophisticated quarry.
I remember asking my mother why she thought this tale fitting—important, even—to tell me. I was ten years old at the time.
“Because he persevered. He survived tremendous odds. He made a new life for himself.” I can still see her stubbing out her cigarette. “Never lose hope,” she added.
I found her reasoning funny. What was I supposed to come away with? That a world where one could escape hanging for cannibalism only to die famously of bubonic plague was a place suffused with hope? Maybe not. But now, when I think of Dudley, I remember that one’s story is never over, never finished, never predictable until one is absolutely dead.
26
The day the bed was delivered, Boris was nowhere to be found. He had tagged the furniture to be moved from the bedroom with yellow Post-its—the Shaker-style bed, the matching nightstands, a modern torchiere—and, most remarkably, the cedar chest that housed thousands of pages of manuscript. He said that he intended to mark his new life with new material, as if I had nothing to do with the new life at all. Ann arrived shortly before the movers, at ten in the morning.
“Where’s Boris?” she said.
“Good morning, Ann.”