MINERVAHAS ALREADY WEIGHEDanchor, using the high tide to widen the distance between her keel and certain obstructions near the Harbor’s entrance. Daniel is to be rowed out to join her in a pilot’s boat. Godfrey, who is half asleep, kisses his old Dad dutifully and watches his departure like a dream-that’s good, as he can tailor the memory later to suit his changing demands-like a suit of clothes modified every six months to fit a growing frame. Wait Still stands by Faith’s side, and Daniel can’t help thinking they make a lovely couple. Enoch, that home-wrecker, remains on the end of the wharf, guiltily apart, his silver hair glowing like white fire in the full moon-light.
A dozen slaves pull mightily at the oars, forcing Daniel to sit down, lest the boat shoot out from under his feet and leave him floundering in the Harbor. Actually he does not sit as much as sprawl and get lucky. From shore it probably looks like a pratfall, but he knows that this ungainly moment will be edited from The Story that will one day live in the memories of the American Waterhouses. The Story is in excellent hands. Mrs. Goose has come along to watch and memorize, and she has a creepy knack for that kind of thing, and Enoch is staying, too, partly to look after the physical residue of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, but also partly to look after The Story and see that it’s shaped and told to Daniel’s advantage.
Daniel weeps.
The sounds of his sniffling and heaving drown out nearly everything else, but he becomes aware of some low, strange music: the slaves have begun to sing. A rowing-song? No, that would have a lumbering, yo-ho-ho sort of rhythm, and this is much more complicated, with beats in the wrong places. It must be an Africk tune, because they have meddled with some of the notes, made them flatter than they should be. And yet it’s weirdly Irish at the same time. There is no shortage of Irish slaves in the West Indies, where these men first fell under the whip, so that might explain it. It is (musicological speculations aside) an entirely sad song, and Daniel knows why: by climbing aboard this boat and breaking down in sobs, he has reminded each one of these Africans of the day when he was taken, in chains, off the coast of Guinea, and loaded aboard a tall ship.
Within a few minutes they are out of view of the Boston wharves, but still surrounded by land: the many islets, rocks, and bony tentacles of Boston Harbor. Their progress is watched by dead men hanging in rusty gibbets. When pirates are put to death, it is because they have been out on the high seas violating Admiralty law, whose jurisdiction extends only to the high-tide mark. The implacable logic of the Law dictates that pirate-gallows must, therefore, be erected in the intertidal zone, and that pirate-corpses must be washed three times by the tide before they are cut down. Of course mere death is too good for pirates, and so the sentence normally calls for their corpses to be gibbeted in locked iron cages so that they can never be cut down and given a Christian burial.
New England seems to have at least as many pirates as honest seamen. But here, as in so many other matters, Providence has smiled upon Massachusetts, for Boston Harbor is choked with small islands that are washed by high tides, providing vast resources of pirate-hanging and -gibbeting real estate. Nearly all of it has been put to use. During the daytime, the gibbets are obscured by clouds of hungry birds. But it’s the middle of the night, the birds are in Boston and Charlestown, slumbering in their nests of plaited pirate-hair. The tide is high, the tops of the reefs submerged, the supports rising directly out of the waves. And so as the singing slaves row Daniel out on what he assumes will be his last voyage, scores of dessicated and skeletonized pirates, suspended in midair above the moonlit sea, watch him go by, as a ceremonial honor-guard.
It takes better than an hour to catch Minerva, just clearing the Spectacle Island shallows. Her hull is barrel-shaped and curves out above them. A pilot’s ladder is deployed. The ascent isn’t easy. Universal gravitation is not his only opponent. Rising waves, sneaking in from the North Atlantic, bounce him off the hull. Infuriatingly, the climb brings back all manner of Puritanical dogma he’s done his best to forget-the ladder becomes Jacob’s, the boat of sweaty black slaves Earth, the Ship Heaven, the sailors in the moonlit rigging Angels, the captain none other than Drake himself, ascended these many years, exhorting him to climb faster.
Daniel leaves America, becoming part of that country’s stock of memories-the composted manure from which it’s sending out fresh green shoots. The Old World reaches down to draw him in: a couple of lascars, their flesh and breath suffused with saffron, asaf?tida, and cardamom, lean over the rail, snare his cold pale hands in their warm black ones, and haul him in like a fish. A roller slides under the hull at the same moment-they fall back to the deck in an orgiastic tangle. The lascars spring up and busy themselves drawing up his equipage on ropes. Compared to the little boat with the creaking and splashing of its oars and the grunting of the slaves, Minerva moves with the silence of a well-trimmed ship, signifying (or so he hopes) her harmony with the forces and fields of nature. Those Atlantic rollers make the deck beneath him accelerate gently up and down, effortlessly moving his body-it’s like lying on a mother’s bosom as she breathes. So Daniel lies there spreadeagled for a while, staring up at the stars-white geometric points on a slate, gridded by shadows of rigging, an explanatory network of catenary curves and Euclidean sections, like one of those geometric proofs out of Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
An Ideot may be taught by Custom to Write and Read, yet no Man can be taught Genius.
-Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708
DANIEL HAD GONE OUTfor a time in the evening, and met with Roger Comstock at a tavern, and witnessed to him, and tried to bring him to Jesus. This had failed. Daniel returned to his chamber to find the cat up on the table with its face planted in Isaac’s dinner. Isaac was seated a few inches away. He had shoved a darning-needle several inches into his eyeball.
Daniel screamed from deep down in his gut. The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac’s meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. Isaac did not flinch, which was probably a good thing. Daniel’s scream had no other effects on business as usual at Trinity College-those who weren’t too impaired to hear it probably assumed it was a wench playing hard-to-get.
“In my dissections of animals’ eyes at Grantham, I often marveled at their perfect sphericity, which, in bodies that were otherwise irregular grab-bags of bones, tubes, skeins and guts, seemed to mark them out as apart from all the other organs. As if the Creator had made those orbs in the very image of the heavenly spheres, signifying that one should receive light from the other,” Isaac mused aloud. “Naturally, I wondered whether an eye that was not spherical would work as well. There are practical as well as theologic reasons for spherical eyes: one, so that they can swivel in their sockets.” There was some tension in his voice-the discomfort must have been appalling. Tears streamed down and spattered on the table like the exhaust from a water-clock-the only time Daniel ever saw Isaac weep. “Another practical reason is simply that the eyeball is pressurized from within by the aqueous humour.”
“My God, you’re not bleeding the humour from your eyeball-?”
“Look more carefully!” Isaac snapped. “Observe-don’t imagine.”
“I can’t bear it.”
“The needle is not piercing anything-the orb is perfectly intact. Come and see!”
Daniel approached, one hand clamped over his mouth as if he were abducting himself-he did not want to vomit on the open Waste-Book where Isaac was taking notes with his free hand. Upon a closer look he saw that Isaac had inserted the darning-needle not into the eyeball itself but into the lubricated bearing where the orb rotated in its socket-he must’ve simply pulled his lower eyelid way down and probed between it and the eyeball until he’d found a way in. “The needle is blunt-it is perfectly harmless,” Isaac grunted. “If I could trouble you for a few minutes’ assistance?”