The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online Page A

every sail. Certain changes had been taking place aboard which I had barely noticed, but the becalming of the ship brought my attention back to it. Gratings had replaced the solid hatches over the holds. A huge cauldron had appeared in Curry’s galley, and one morning I found John Cooley working intently on an object which, though I’d never seen one before, made me shiver.
    It was a whip with nine knotted cords. As I approached, he began to fasten the cords to a handle. I didn’t want to look at it. But I couldn’t keep my eyes from it. Cooley looked up. Our eyes met. He laughed.
    I turned away and discovered Spark staring at me from the helm. Cooley laughed again. A sail flapped somewhere nearby. Spark’s frozen glare never wavered. The sun seemed impaled by the mizzenmast. I felt hot and cold. Then Purvis slouched by, calling over his shoulder, “Jessie, I’ll put a hitch in your arm if you don’t get below and catch up with the rats! They’re about to overtake us, boy.”
    The moment passed. When I glanced back at Spark, he was saying something to the helmsman, and Cooley was getting to his feet. Just before I dropped down into the hold, I saw Cooley flick the whip and nod to himself.
    The ship was going nowhere under a sky that darkened into a windless night and lightened into a day so motionless, so empty, we were like a plate poised on the edge of a pit without bottom. The Captain and the Mate roamed the deck, their eyes on the sky, and the seamen quarreled.
    They quarreled from morning until night and in the middle of the night. Benjamin Stout lost his smile when he found his sea chest emptied, and all its contents strewn about, his razor and strop, his knife and fork, his sheath knife and the fid he used for splicing, and his small seaman’s Bible, its pages damp as though it’d been dipped in brine.
    During those days, a fever seemed to pass among us, leaving everyone weak yet restless. Stout accused Purvis of emptying out his sea chest. He seemed to think it the worst of a list of crimes of which he accused Purvis. Purvis swore and threw his ham fists in the air. The others added fuel to the fire, inciting them both to what end I don’t know. I stayed out of our quarters as often as I could and once slept on the deck where Spark, finding me huddled near the bow, gave me a terrible kick that sent me rolling.
    It was that dawn when the light was the color of the sea itself, and I could hardly make out the line of the horizon, that I saw a figure, its head wrapped in cloth so I couldn’t recognize it, moving furtively on all fours toward the aft section. Although I was afraid Nick Spark would return, I was so curious about the creeping man that I stayed where I was.
    I searched the deck with my eyes but either the Mate had evaporated or gone to his quarters. If Gardere and Seth Smith, who passed within a foot of where I was crouched near the ship’s small boat, had seen the creeper, they didn’t, apparently, care to investigate.
    Not five minutes later, along the same route, like a sightless worm that must go by smell, the creeper returned. But this time, it crawled along on only three limbs for one hand was held up, its begrimed fingers holding a beautiful white egg which, in that dim light, was as luminous as a tiny moon rising between deck and rail.
    The air was damp and sea-soaked, and I breathed it in as though it were a draught of fresh water. But no sooner did I imagine what it would be like to drink up a whole pond than I skittered away from the thought. Our water ration had been cut. The longer it would take to reach our destination, the less we would have. God knows my family was poor! But there wasn’t an end to anything. We’d always had something to eat and drink. For the first time in my life, I could, if I put my mind to it, see to the end of a thing needed for life to go on. We lived off what our ship could carry, but the ship drank