Jack walked a deserted section of beach, the sounds of revelry growing distant. He still could form no really coherent thoughts but felt tears making their way slowly down his cheek.
Something had happened to him in Matanzas that went so deep it affected him in ways he couldn’t begin to understand. The women would be a great comfort, he knew, but not this way. The carefree lust the women showed panicked him for some reason.
Images of his mother, the guardia leering at her breasts, her nakedness purposely exposed to save his life. The irony of it was almost too much. He could swallow fear to face any enemy; but women, they frightened him with their power.
He would later realize it was July 4, 1806. With sunup, the village returned to a semblance of normalcy although in three-quarter time. Most of the Americans were loath to leave their huts. Hungover and satiated, they spent the day recuperating from their good fortune. Quince decided in retrospect to declare a holiday, in respect for American Independence Day. Paul remarked that this sensitivity to republican democracy was indeed remarkable, coming as it did from “royalty.”
13
SIZING UP THE SALVAGE PROBLEM
JACK HAD NO IDEA how long two and a half minutes could be until he watched the minute glass and noted he wasn’t the only man holding his breath and, after a lung-scorching period, was forced to let the air out in a sigh. The men were all staring expectantly at the water beneath them. A native man had been under for three minutes now, having disappeared into the midships hold of the Star, resting precariously on an incline in twenty to twenty-five feet of clear water.
When it seemed as if he must have drowned, there was a hint of movement: a flurry of tiny bubbles preceded a form unhurriedly making its way to the surface. He broke through, took a huge intake of breath, which, Jack noted, was not preceded by exhalation. The man must have let out a huge lungful of air somewhere during the dive.
Paul noted this, too. “They get rid of the stale air slowly on the dive—probably helps reduce the urge to breathe… interesting.” He was deep in concentration, speaking half to Jack and half to himself.
Jack knew that when it came to anything literary or theoretical, it was always worth listening to his friend. Paul was hopeless when it came to engineering and mechanics, but he had been talking about gas laws and physics studies he had read.
“How could that help?” Jack said. “Seems like it would just mean less air for the man’s lungs.”
“It’s not the air that keeps you alive, it’s the oxygen in the air. Once you use it up, the air is toxic and makes your body want to get rid of it, at least that’s what Lavoisier says. Now, in old Priestley’s words, that would be dephlogisticated air—you know, and still combustible… or something like that.”
“Something like that? Why couldn’t you have studied less Shakespeare and more physics?”
“Now, now, it’s doubt that shapes the man. Descartes never said ‘I think therefore I am.’ He said ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore—”
“Oh damn it all.” Jack was in no mood for philosophy. He could taste those gun parts.
The majority of the Star’s survivors and many of the villagers, including the best divers, were back at the islet, pushing the limit of their abilities to see what could be retrieved from the sunken ship.
Many useful items had been brought to the surface, including a few hundred feet of hemp rope, a dozen blocks, several deadeyes, and odd pieces of chain rigging. Some of the oaken timbers themselves were removed with the use of ropes. They had even retrieved an axe, some adzes, and a mystery box. The latter was opened anxiously on shore to reveal a setting for twelve of prime Chinese porcelain.
“Christ, you idiots, look at markings before you risk a man’s life to salvage the makin’s for a bleedin’ tea party,” Quince said.
His lack of appreciation for the table setting notwithstanding, Paul and Quen-Li carefully removed the crate from the other piles of trove and took it to the cook tent.
Shram and Maril, two of the better native divers, had been able to tie the end of a hemp line to a link of chain rigging stowed in the forward hold. Steady working of the line from the surface had managed to dislodge and raise almost a hundred feet of iron links. The line was presently hung up again, but Shram returned to the hold to free it from whatever obstacle had snagged it.
Still, with these considerable accomplishments, the sailors were frustrated that only one kit bag had been found and that it contained only a single pair of barely serviceable boots. The crew’s quarters, with its precious footwear and gun mechanisms, were in about ten fathoms of water and seemed out of reach. The native divers could spear fish at sixty feet for short periods, but expecting them to work at that depth searching through a tangle of unfamiliar gear to find boots and intricate brass firing assemblies was out of the question. Due to the way the wreck lay, the aft hold with the gun barrels was the most accessible. “Full fathom five thy father’s gun barrels lie,” Paul declared. “We needs retrieve them before they suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”
As the natives were excellent breath-hold divers, they might eventually find the barrels, a job much easier than retrieval at the crew’s quarters.
Jack retired to his housing, watching Quen-Li for some time. The cook was expertly working a blade through a filet of fish and had a pot boiling for his latest concoction of island gruel.
“Good day, brother Li. How go the cooking wars?”
“Quite well, Jackie. Quen-Li have some good fixin’s by evening—don’t need no wahine wogs cook for us.”
Jack smiled. Although Quen-Li deferred to native women for preparing meals at the village, he was loath to give in to the island custom when on “Star Islet” where the ship had wrecked. He was the ship’s cook and culinary master of the islet, which was just an extension of the ship in his mind. Quen-Li kept to himself most of the time but responded to Jack’s friendliness and Paul’s irrepressible humor with more openness than he did to any of the others, who saw him simply as a Chinese cook. Jack and Paul treated him as a man who cooked and was Chinese.
“Do you long for home sometimes?” Jack asked, as the knife chunked through breadfruit at mesmerizing speed.
“No, Jackie. I am home. And you?”
The question took Jack by surprise; it was simple enough, but he realized he didn’t know the answer.
“Yes, of course I do… well, in a way…” Jack considered that he wasn’t really sure where home was. There, with the knife still making a rhythmic chuk-chuk in the background, he thought of the Chinaman’s own assessment. “I am home.” It seemed to Jack this Chinese cook wasted no energy in his movement or his words; his mind was as sharp as that blade he wielded with such precision.
Jack spent as much time as he could away from the village, partly for a reason he had trouble acknowledging. Women were readily available on Belaur—unbelievably so. For some reason, however, his flesh did combat with his soul in their presence. His urges were powerful and dominated his dreams, but since the dark happenings in Cuba, he couldn’t even attempt to start sex with a woman. Wyalum, in particular—Maril’s sister—had taken a liking to him, and the push-pull in his soul when she was around tormented him. He desperately wanted to sink into her soft brown flesh. The thought of Wyalum’s tiring of his strange debility and joining other sailors disturbed him deeply, but he could not release himself to nature’s insistent call. He could not even talk of it with Paul. Jack knew his tent-mate was aware of his problem, but it was not something he felt ready to discuss.