The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online

squall, while the sea groaned about us, bearing upon its heaving back great forks of lightning, I wished most desperately to be off this ship, to be anywhere but on it. A kind of breathlessness shut my throat. I thought I was choking to death. It was Purvis who picked me up and shook me as I began to sob with terror. He hit me about the shoulders. If I didn’t stop, he shouted, he’d have me up in the shrouds where I’d get more than air in my lungs.
    That night, I lay in my hammock, a sorry thing soaked through to its bones. All the hatches had been closed against the rain. The smell of wet wool stuffed my nostrils, the pickled cabbage I had had for my midday meal seemed to have reformed itself in my stomach, and finally the thick mumble of complaint from Sharkey and Isaac Porter, who were always arguing, drove me up on deck.
    The rain had abated. We were moving like an arrow, like a sky ship, among the points of light which were stars.
    I knew it must be Purvis on the watch, for while I was idly counting stars, a great wad of vile brown stuff flew by my ear as he expelled his gob of chewing tobacco over the side. I ducked and heard a dark chuckle, its human familiarity overcoming the sound of the speaking ship, the creaking masts, the great thunk and slap of the sails, the breathing sea.
    Perhaps the night and the sea leads a person to thoughts of his life. It did me. I thought about how the only grown people I had really known up to now were women—I wouldn’t count the parson, who was a stick notched with pious sayings, or the doctor at Charity Hospital who treated my sister with tonics and ointments—and here there were no females save the Captain’s hens. I had not known that among men there were such differences. That thought led me to wonder why I didn’t like Benjamin Stout. I surprised myself. I hadn’t known till that second that liking mattered—what had mattered before was how I was treated. And Stout treated me kindly, showing me things the rest of the crew wouldn’t have troubled themselves with, getting me extra helpings of rice and beef while Curry had his back turned, steaming away his brains over his cook stove.
    But it was Purvis whom I was eager to see when I awoke in the morning, Purvis, with his horrible coarse jokes, his bawling and cursing, Purvis, whom I trusted.
    The Captain had settled on the name Bollweevil, and I winced when I heard him call it out. Some of the crew had taken it up but when they used it, I turned my back. The Captain was still cheerful; I listened to him sing out his commands while the wind held fair. I learned some of the words of his song but had great difficulty connecting them up with the lengths of canvas to which they applied. Purvis said a sailor must know every sheet and brail and halyard so that on the darkest night he wouldn’t make an error which could cost the life of the ship and the crew. I especially liked the words, skysail and moonsail, and turned them over in my mouth as though I was licking honey. But the sailing of the ship was something so far beyond my powers of understanding that I didn’t trouble my mind about it. Although I found most of the crew rough men who were often cruel, I could not help but admire the fearless way they swarmed up the ratlines and hung over the yards as sure of their perch as birds on a limb.
    As for the Mate, Nicholas Spark, against whom Stout had warned me, I had little to do with him. He kept to the Captain’s side like a shadow. He had a brooding look on his face, and when he spoke, his voice sizzled like a hot poker plunged into water.
    We had been at sea now for nearly three weeks when one morning after the deck had been holystoned, the wind dropped entirely. No one appeared surprised except me. But then I knew nothing of the sky and how to read its signs.
    For several days, The Moonlight made little progress, and that little because of a brief fierce blow that strained