“What kind of proof does Brownlee look for?” he asks.
“He wants a witness. Someone who has seen the two of them together.”
Drax rubs the crumbs from his beard, grumbles out a fart, and then reaches into his pocket for his pouch of negro-head tobacco.
“I’ve seen them together,” he says.
The others look at him.
“When?” Sumner says.
“I seen them standing by the deckhouse late one night. McKendrick mooning over the boy, cooing and billing, paddling his neck, trying to give him little kisses. The boy didn’t appear to like it much. ’Bout a week ago that was.”
Cavendish claps his hands together and laughs.
“That should do it,” he says.
“Why didn’t you mention this before?” Sumner asks. “You were there when the captain asked us all what we had seen.”
“Must have slipped my mind,” Drax says. “My wits are not quite so sharply tuned as yours are, Mr. Sumner, I suppose. I’m the forgetful type, see.”
Sumner looks at him, and Drax looks back. He feels easy and qualmless. He knows the surgeon’s kind too well — he will quibble and ask questions all day long, but he will never dare to act. He is a talker and not a doer.
They go along to Brownlee’s cabin, and Drax tells the captain what he saw. Brownlee has McKendrick brought up from the hold in irons and instructs Drax to repeat what he has said word for word in front of the prisoner.
“I saw him laying hands on the dead boy,” he says calmly. “Trying to kiss and cuddle with him. By the deckhouse this was.”
“And why did you not tell me this before now?”
“I didn’t think of it before, but when McKendrick’s name was mentioned as the murderer, then it all came back.”
“That is a fucking lie,” McKendrick says. “I never once touched the boy.”
“I saw what I saw,” Drax says. “And no man can tell me I didn’t.”
He finds the lying comes easy enough, of course. Words are just noises in a certain order, and he can use them any way he wishes. Pigs grunt, ducks quack, and men tell lies: that is how it generally goes.
“And you will swear to this?” Brownlee asks him. “In a court of law?”
“On the Holy Bible,” Drax says. “Yes I will.”
“I will enter your account in the ship’s log then, and have you set your mark on it,” Brownlee says. “It is best to have a written record.”
McKendrick’s previous calmness has dissolved now. His face, pale and narrow, is badged with redness, and he is shaking with rage.
“There is not a word of truth in it,” he says. “Not a word of truth. He is spewing out lies.”
“I have no reason to lie,” Drax says. “Why would I trouble myself with that?”
Brownlee looks to Cavendish.
“Is there bad feeling between these two men?” he asks. “Any reason to consider the story may be false or malicious?”
“None that I have heard of,” Cavendish says.
“Have you two shipped together afore?” Brownlee asks them.
Drax shakes his head.
“I barely know the carpenter,” he says. “But I saw what I saw by the deckhouse. And I am telling it as it was.”
“But I know who you are, Henry Drax,” McKendrick says fiercely back. “I know where you have been and what you have done there.”
Drax sniffs and shakes his head.
“You don’t know nothing about me,” he says.
Brownlee looks to McKendrick.
“If you have some accusation to make, you should make it now,” he says. “If not, I would advise you to close your trap and keep it closed until the magistrate asks you to open it again.”
“I never touched that boy. Boys are not my taste, and whatsoever I done with my fellow men I never had no accusations or complaints concerning that. This man here, the one who is lying about me, who seems set to get me hanged by the neck, has done much worse and more unnatural crimes than I ever done.”
“You’ll dig yourself into a deeper hole with such blabbing,” Cavendish warns him.
“A man can’t get much deeper than fucking dead,” McKendrick says.
“What crimes are you speaking of?” Sumner says.
“Ask him what he done in the Marquesas,” McKendrick says, looking straight at Drax. “Ask him what he et when he was out there.”
“Do you understand him?” Brownlee says. “What is he talking about now?”
“I have passed some time with the South Sea niggers,” Drax explains, “that’s all it is. I have some tattoos they gave me on my back, and a fund of good and profitable stories to show for it, nothing more.”
“What ship were you on?” Brownlee asks him.
“The Dolly, out of New Bedford.”
“Would you take the word of a cannibal against that of an honest and God-fearing white man?” McKendrick shouts. “Will any magistrate in their right mind?”
Drax laughs at this.
“I’m no fucking cannibal,” he says. “Don’t pay no heed to his bollocks.”
Brownlee shakes his head and sniffs.
“I have rarely heard such desperate nonsense,” he says. “Take this shameless piece of shite below and chain him to the mainmast before I lose my fucking temper.”
When McKendrick is gone, Brownlee enters Drax’s account of what he saw into the ship’s log and has him certify it with his mark.
“You will be expected to testify in the court, no doubt, when McKendrick comes to trial,” Brownlee says. “And the log will be shown as evidence also. McKendrick’s lawyer, if he can afford one, will attempt to blacken your name, I ’spect. That is what such vultures generally do. But you will stand up to him, I’m sure.”
“I don’t like to be accused or talked at in that way,” Drax admits. “That don’t please me any.”
“The word of a lone sodomite will carry no great weight, you can be sure of that. You must stand your ground, that’s all.”
Drax nods.
“I’m an honest man,” he says. “I tell only what I saw.”
“Then you have nothing to fear.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The news of McKendrick’s guilt spreads instantly through the ship. Those few who considered themselves friends of the carpenter find it hard to believe he is a murderer, but their doubts are quickly overpowered by the breadth and weight of the more generally held certainty that he must be one. After his second interview with Brownlee, he is kept chained in the forehold, eats alone, and shits and pisses into a bucket, which is emptied daily by a cabin boy. After a week or so of this, his identity as a criminal and a pervert is so secure in the minds of the crew, it is hard to believe he was ever truly one of them. They remember him as separate and strange, and assume that whatever seemed usual about him was only a clever way of covering up those deeper deviancies. Occasionally, one or two men venture into the hold to taunt him or ask him questions about his crime. When they do so, they find him oddly unrepentant, sour, baffled, belligerent, as if he doesn’t yet (not even now) realize the truth of what it is he has done.
Brownlee wants nothing more than to get back to the appointed business of slaughtering whales, but for the next several days they are beset by foul weather — drenching rain and thick fog — which conceals their prey and makes the fishing impossible. Domed and circled by the clamminess and murk, they grind mutely southwards through a loose patchwork of pancake ice and slurry. When the weather finally opens up they have passed Jones Sound and Cape Horsburgh to the west, and are in sight of the entrance to Pond’s Bay. Brownlee is all eagerness to proceed, but the sea ice is abnormally dense for the season and they are forced to delay awhile longer. The Hastings moors alongside them, and so do the Polynia, the Intrepid, and the Northerner. Since there is no work to be done while they are waiting for the wind to change, the captains move freely amongst the five ships, dining in one another’s cabins and passing time in conversation, argument, and reminiscence. Brownlee tells his old stories often and easily: the coal barge, the Percival, everything before. He is not ashamed of what he has been or done: a man makes his mistakes, he tells them, a man suffers as he must suffer, but the readiness is all.