FOG - Chapter 1

They ran like marionettes, arms and legs akimbo, and when the waves caught the sailors their arms jerked out, snatching at the night, and they disappeared without a sound. The rude cold filched her breath. When the waves rushed toward her, foaming and leaping and rumbling across the tilted deck faster than any man could run -- she knew this now – she drew what breath she could and her body clenched. The waves carried their own wicked cold, so cold it burned, but the fizzing blackness they brought was worse, shut away in the darkest loneliness on earth. She believed in God. She prayed for the time between the waves, when the wind screamed and the snow made angry locust clicks but the stars hung peaceful and still. She imagined the stars were angels, waiting.

She supposed she might not die. Father had tied her to the mainmast, carefully folding her arms across her chest. The rope had cut into her, though she no longer felt its bite. She had watched his hands proudly, the beautiful fingers expertly cinching the knots, but there was something different in his face. Mother had believed in God, but father trusted no one, not even God, and when he finished his tying he fell against her and pushed his lips to her ear and told her to keep her secret close and fight for her life, and then he prayed a lie, promising God he would do anything if He gave her safe passage, and asking her to forgive him for what he had done to her. She accepted everything, kissing his eyelids, and when the waves swallowed them she felt his arms about her. Finally a wave smothered them and, as if he didn’t care anymore, he was gone and she almost gave up.     

Far above her the last sailor regarded the red pin prick of lanterns on the shore and loosed his fingers from the icy rigging. He fell like a pinwheel in a faint breeze, and when he struck the Asia’s deck he gave an odd little hop. He was a quick-handed boy, marvelous at jacks, but he lay twisted in an impossible shape, sliding down the deck to join the black waves lumbering to shore.

The great wave rose in the same way her friend had fallen, with queer slowness. It kept rising, gray front streaked with white, until she wondered if she was sinking. She said goodbye to the stars, closing her eyes and squeezing Miss Lolly to her chest.  

The deck shuddered. She was swallowed again in iron cold. She felt herself tipping, the mainmast splintering away, and she was swept easily into the sea, riding for a moment as if on the softest mattress, and then she was spinning, turning over and over, her lungs screaming for air in roaring darkness that never gave way to show the stars.

She wanted to die, but she fought to live because father wished it, and it was possible that God listened to everyone’s prayers, even father’s.

On the beach, Captain Edwin Merton’s agonies were many. His mistake had seen his ship, his crew and his only child into the sea. The wave that deposited him ashore snapped four ribs and a femur. Crawling toward the great cliffs he had felt the separations only as mild burning, cold and shock applying anesthesia.

At the foot of the cliffs, he had lain for a time confused. With all the sensations clamoring for his attention it was difficult to concentrate on any one matter until the angel arrived, holding the reins of the great white horse. The angel dissolved behind the passing curtains of white, so that at first Edwin Merton thought the angel hallucination, but when the angel crouched beside him, the breath behind the brilliant smile was rancid. The knife sliding down his midsection brought a stench equally real, and blood filled his mouth and he turned his cheek to the snowy sand.  

The blade’s deft workings brought him great focus. Yet even as he suffered agonies he had not thought possible, he recognized the justness of his punishment. He shouted agreement, raining oaths upon himself and powers that would see a child to such an end. The angel brushed his cheek tenderly with downy knuckles and spoke encouragement in his ear, lauding him for atoning for his sins, but it was only his daughter’s voice he heard; after a pause, the angel returned to cutting. The angel was an artist, skirting the organs that sustain life, touching the places that chimed. There were partings, tuggings, burstings, sour nausea, regret. Snow caressed his organs. Lifting his head he saw his body’s warmth, a steamy wavering in the dark, not quite a soul.

The punishment was just, but the pain was too great. Captain Merton set his will against the knife. His will was strong, and his raging aided his demise. His end caused the angel a melodious sigh. Applying the knife carefully, the angel removed the organ that mattered. When he finished he buried Captain Edwin Merton with the same precision that had ushered his end.

Hewing to Nature’s course, child outlived parent. Two miles south of Edwin Merton’s grave at the foot of the Cape Cod cliffs, Isabella Merton, spread upon the wooden table in the day house, looked up into the boy’s eyes. The boy had sad eyes, but not so sad that Isabella forgot her own troubles. After all her efforts she was certain.

“I’m going to die,” she said.

Above her the boy kept staring, his mouth making strange motions. She thought of her father and the broken sailor, and her mother with her helpless eyes and phlegmy cough. Nothing could be done. Understanding brought a sleepy comfort.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said. “It can’t be helped.”

She pressed her chin to Miss Lolly’s head, feeling the coarse wood where the hair, flower-petal soft, had torn away. Everything grand, ruined and spoiled.

“Miss Lolly and I were going to be the talk of New York. We were going to ride in a steam elevator. I hate the sea.”

A kettle whistled merrily. She tried to keep thinking about the elevator, but her legs, which had only tingled at first, were warming, not a comfortable warming like the morning sun against your skin, but a fast rising heat as if she had stepped too close to a fire. When the big man drew back the canvas she saw her legs and she knew something terrible was rushing up on her.

The big man had lied to her, though his lies, like his face, had been kind. She and the big man had played a game, pretending they didn’t see the truth. The silent boy didn’t play. She liked the boy for not lying, nearly loved him for the way he looked at her as if they were best friends, but when he reached for Miss Lolly she had to scold him.

When the big man placed the handkerchief, rolled like a sausage, in her mouth, she closed her eyes and bit down hard, and her heart scampered.

There was a creaking, like a wagon wheel starting to turn. The pain was shocking. Almost as quickly, a deadening flowed over her. The black ocean, the fire in her legs, her faithful doll, they drifted away. The wooden table became her hilltop swing. As she rose and fell, the wind tickling her ears, she gazed again beyond the farthest edge of England’s green fields, toward the grandest country in the world, a place where stalwart men and upright ladies dressed in the latest fashions and danced to music played on electric phonographs and rode in steam elevators, up, up, up, beyond the birds. It was sore disappointment to sail across the ocean to find instead an America so loud and foul-mannered. America didn’t deserve her secret. She wasn’t going to change the world. She was just going to die.

When dawn came only the ocean raged, the jagged remains of the Asia dark against the gray November sky.