Sumner looks back at the captain — his heavy brow and fierce gray eyes, his crumpled nose and stubbled, leaden jowls — and decides, after no more than a moment’s hesitation, to accede. The boy will live after all. He is right about that.
“If I lack for anything, I will let you know,” he says.
Back in the cabin, he swallows the laudanum and lies back down on his bunk. He is weary from the effort of arguing and soured by his sense of failure. Why would the boy not help himself? What power could the culprit have over him? The questions grab and trouble Sumner, but then, after a minute or two, the opium begins to take effect, and he feels himself sliding back into a soft, warm, familiar state of carelessness. What does it matter, he thinks, if he is surrounded by savages, by moral baboons? The world will continue on as it wants to anyway, as it always has, with or without his approval. The anger and disgust he felt for Cavendish minutes before are like smudges on the far horizon now — ideas, suggestions only, nothing more important or noticeable than that. I will get to everything in its own good time, he thinks vaguely, there’s no need to rush or hurry.
* * *
Sometime later, there is a knock on his cabin door. It is Drax the harpooner complaining of a gash on his right hand. Sumner, blinking, invites him to come in. Drax, squat and broad-shouldered, his beard dense and reddish, seems to fill the small space almost completely. Sumner, feeling still a little light-headed and imprecise from the laudanum, examines his wound, then wipes it clean with a piece of lint and applies a dressing.
“It’s not serious,” Sumner assures him. “Keep that dressing on for a day or so. It will heal quickly after that.”
“Oh, I’ve had worse,” Drax says. “Much worse than this.”
Drax’s barnyard scent, dense and almost edible, dominates the room. He is like a beast at rest in its stall, Sumner thinks. A force of nature temporarily contained and pacified.
“I hear one of the cabin boys was hurt.”
Sumner has finished rolling up the remaining bandage and is returning the scissors and the lint to the medicine chest. The edges of his vision are faintly blurred, and his lips and cheeks feel chill and numb.
“Who told you that?”
“Cavendish did. He said you had your suspicions.”
“They’re more than that.”
Drax looks down at his strapped hand, then brings it up to his nose to sniff.
“Joseph Hannah is a well-known liar. You shouldn’t believe what he tells you.”
“He hasn’t told me anything yet. He won’t speak to me. That’s the problem. He’s too scared.”
“He’s feebleminded, that one.”
“How well do you know the boy?”
“I know his father, Frederick Hannah,” Drax says, “and I know his brother, Henry, also.”
“Captain Brownlee has decided the matter is closed anyway. Unless the boy changes his mind, nothing more will be done.”
“So that’s the end of it?”
“Probably.”
Drax peers at him carefully.
“Why did you choose to become a surgeon, Mr. Sumner?” he asks. “An Irish fellow like yourself. I’m curious.”
“Because I wished to advance. To rise from my humble origins.”
“You wished to advance, but now here you are on a Yorkshire whaler fretting over cabin boys. I wonder what has happened to all those grand ambitions?”
Sumner closes the medicine chest and locks it. He puts the key in his pocket and glances at himself quickly in the wall mirror. He looks a good deal older than his twenty-seven years. His brow is scored, and his eyes are rimmed and baggy.
“I have simplified them, Mr. Drax,” he says.
Drax grunts with amusement. His lips stretch out into a pantomime version of a grin.
“I do believe I’ve done the same,” he says. “I do believe I have.”
CHAPTER TEN
They cross into the North Water by the last week of June, and near dawn the following day Black strikes their first whale. Sumner, woken from his slumbers by the sounds of shouting and boot heels pounding the deck, follows the progress of the hunt from high up in the crow’s nest. He sees the first iron go in and the wounded whale descend. Twenty minutes later, he sees it rise again, closer to the ship but nearly a mile from where it first went down. Black’s harpoon, he can see through the spyglass, is still dangling from its broad flank, and blood is sluicing brightly from its leadish skin.
Otto’s boat is closest to it now. The oarsmen ship their oars and the steersman sculls them steadily forwards. Otto crouches in the bows with the harpoon’s wooden shaft gripped tightly in his fists. With a giant horselike snort, audible from Sumner’s perch in the crow’s nest, the whale exhales a V-shaped flume of grayish vapor. The boat and crew are temporarily obscured, but when they reappear, Otto is up on his feet and the harpoon is poised above his head — its barb pointing downwards and the shaft forming a black hypotenuse against the sullen sky. The whale’s back looks from Sumner’s aerie like a sunken island, a grainy volcanic hump of rock peeping from the waves. Otto hurls the iron with all his strength, it sinks in deep, up to the foreganger, and the whale instantly convulses. Its body bends and spasms; the eight-foot flukes of its enormous tail break from the water, then crash back down. Otto’s boat is tossed wildly about and the oarsmen are thrown from their seats. The whale descends again but only for a minute. When it rises, the other boats are gathered round ready: Cavendish is there, Black, Drax. Two more harpoons are sunk deep into the whale’s black flank, and then they begin with the lances. The whale is still alive, but Sumner can see that it is damaged now beyond repair. The four harpooners pierce and probe. The whale, still hopelessly resisting, blows out a plume of hot vapor mixed with blood and mucus. All around it, the smashed and bloodstained waters boil and foam.
Drax, far below in the hectic midst of the killing, bears down hard on the butt of his lance and whispers out a string of gross endearments.
“Give me one last groan,” he says. “That’s it, my darling. One last shudder to help me find the true place. That’s it, my sweetheart. One more inch and then we’re done.”
He leans in harder, presses, seeking out the vital organs. The lance slides in another foot. A moment later, with a final roar, the whale shoots out a plume of pure heart’s blood high into the air and then tilts over lifeless onto its side with its great fin raised like a flag of surrender. The men, empurpled, reeking, drenched in the fish’s steaming, expectorated gore, stand up in their flimsy boats and cheer their triumph. Brownlee on the quarterdeck wafts his billycock hat in circles above his head. The men on the deck roar and caper. Sumner, watching it all from above, feels a brief thrill of victory also, a sense of sudden, shared advantage, of obstacles overcome and progress made.
They bore two holes in the tail and secure the dead whale to the bow of Cavendish’s boat. They lash the fins together, retrieve and coil the whale lines, and then begin to tow the corpse back to the ship. As they row, they sing. Sumner, descended to the deck, hears their voices coming across the water, tuneful, gruff, carried by the cool damp wind. “Randy Dandy-O” and “Leave Her Johnny.” Three dozen men in unison. He feels again, and almost against his will this time, that he is part of something larger and more powerful than himself, a joint endeavor. Turning away, he notices Joseph Hannah standing by the fore hatch talking happily with the other cabin boys. They are reenacting the recent kill; they are throwing imaginary harpoons, plying imaginary lances. One is Drax, one is Otto, one is Cavendish.
“How are you, Joseph?” he asks him.