The Law of Dreams Read online

  The salt beef had been soaking in a pail of fresh water. Pouring off the water, he started cutting up the meat and adding it to the stirabout cooking in a kettle on the grate.

  Looking up, he watched a gang of sailors run straight up the ratlines.

  Laramie had finally caught the wind. The companion ships had fallen off, and they had the green sea to themselves.

  Did the sailors hear commands the bos’n and the master were shouting, or did they work through a coordinated feeling of their own, a sense of wind and terror?

  Brighid tossed another handful of herbs into a simmering can. She wasn’t cook-of-the-day, but no one had tried keeping her from the cabooses. They respected, even feared, her powers.

  “What are you cooking there, mother?”

  “Syrup.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “To calm the passions of the womb.”

  Like many old women, she spoke obliquely and seemed to cultivate an air of mystery. She’d sold the Cooles a salve for their boy’s bruises, made with crushed herbs and mutton fat she had from the galley cook.

  He gave the kettle another stir.

  Sailors called the yellow mush slop-and-grindings and said the passengers’ salt beef was monkey’s paws, not fit for Christians to eat. But the crew’s beef came from the same casks and their stirabout — called burgoo — was also made with yellow meal, the only difference being it had molasses in it, and was cooked for them by the black man.

  Floors were decks. Walls were bulkheads. Ropes were sheets, halyards, or lines, depending on function.

  The booby hatch led down to the passenger hold, which the crew called the ’tween deck. Passengers’ cribs were berths. The crew slept in hammocks strung from beams in the fo’c’sle, a dank hole at the front of the ship — before the mast — that was entered by a scuttle.

  Other words and phrases were still mysterious, but he had resolved to learn their meanings by listening and watching, not by asking.

  Men dislike being questioned. They sense you’re trying to rob them of something.

  Looking up, he watched sailors walking out along the yards, treading on footropes they called horses.

  So high the men looked like squirrels. Above them the slender stick of the royal mast at the very peak of the ship, rocking back and forth, scratching the sky.

  Every sailor belonged to port watch or starboard watch, depending on which side of the ship his hammock was slung. While one watch was on deck, the other slept in their hammocks, though both watches were ordered aloft when sails were being set — bending sail — or if the yards needed trimming and bracing.

  Laramie was speeding now, wind singing off her sails. While she had been beating up and down the Welsh coast, he’d overheard passengers complain of her sluggishness, wishing aloud they’d spent the extra money for a Black Ball packet and a racy, easy crossing to New York.

  He’d heard people calling their ship an old Canada cow.

  A wreckage.

  A coffin ship.

  He started a lump of biscuit roasting on the grate, and when the bugs came crawling out, he scraped them off into the coals.

  Brighid tasted the stirabout. He had watched her collecting pennies and tobacco from passengers in exchange for her potions. The sailors paid with oily little herrings called old soldiers.

  “It’s done, man,” she said.

  “Wish we had the potatoes.”

  “You will not see those sweethearts again.”

  Fianna

  WITH THE FOUL ATMOSPHERE in the hold, all the passengers who were strong enough to climb the ladder had come out on deck to eat their supper. Crouching under the bulwarks, trying to stay out of the cutting wind, they spooned stirabout into their mouths.

  He went below with a bowl for Molly but when he tried feeding her, she turned to face the wall. “I won’t have that awful goo.”

  “Come, Moll, only try a little.”

  “No. Go away.”

  She was weeping again.

  Brighid, pushing open the curtain, peered in. “Give her only what she’ll take. Don’t force her.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “It’s only the sea — she’ll come back to you. Here, let me try.”

  Molly accepted a few spoonfuls from the old woman then shut her mouth. A few moments later she was violently sick. While the old woman was cleaning her, he went up on deck to scrub out the kettles, pans, and dishes. Sniffing resiny smoke, he looked up and saw Ormsby on the afterdeck, puffing a cigar.

  Going below again, he found Molly lying with a blackthorn stick by her side.

  “What is this?”

  “What?”

  “This stick in our bed.”

  “She says to sleep with it between us.”

  “Why?” He looked around for the old woman.

  “The fianna used to sleep with their swords, man. Sleep with their swords between them — they’d keep pure that way.”

  Fianna were the soldiers in the old stories, giant-killers.

  “We’re not fianna. I don’t want that pure. I want you.”

  “Only until I am better. I’ll have you then, man. I promise I will.”

  Many Gray Horses

  BY THE FOURTH DAY a few more passengers had found their sea legs, and news flew around the ship that if the winds continued favorable they would be seeing the cliffs of Newfoundland the following morning, and Quebec itself a day or two later.

  Fergus recalled Maguire saying it was forty days across, but when he came below all the passengers well enough to get out of their berths were packing trunks and crates and tying up their baggage with ropes. The Cooles had dragged out their sea chest and were busily packing it. Molly sat on the edge of the berth, holding the blackthorn stick. Brighid was dosing her with a spoonful of black syrup.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “Ugh! Wretched!” She made a sour face. “Tastes like bad milk!”

  The old woman looked at her balefully. “Pennyroyal and horehound, nip and marigolds — poison for a cure.”

  “Cure of what?” he asked.

  “Juice to draw down the blood,” Brighid said.

  Molly gasped and coughed. “Well, that is strong gear, ain’t it? I want to be strong for America.”

  “What you need is smoke. A dove’s stomach, or an ass’s dung, smoking on red coals —”

  “Yes, well, no dove’s stomachs available.” Molly placed a pinch of tobacco in the old woman’s hand. “I hope there is something to this gunk, you old poison cook, not just cat piss and pressed dandelions, like the nasties they sell at fairs. I hope you ain’t going to murder me.”

  “Don’t you say it.” Brighid was offended. “You’ll see, you’ll see.”

  “What does it look like upstairs?” Molly asked him. “Can you smell ground? If we see Newfoundland we’ll see Quebec, won’t we.”

  “Don’t know.”

  “It’s the favorable winds as we’ve had.” Martin Coole looked up from the chest he was lashing with rope. “A lumber boat like this travels fast with only a lightish cargo of people in her hold.”

  Fergus shrugged. He really did not know. Some families had already planted themselves at the foot of the ladder, where they were sitting on their baggage. Everyone wanted to be first ashore in America.

  “Man, tell me I’ll see it, though,” Molly whispered.

  The potion the old woman had dosed her with seemed to be making her ill again. She lay back, clutching the stick with both hands. When he touched her brow, she felt cold.

  “Tell me I shall, Fergus.”

  “You’ll see the other side.”

  “DO YOU suppose we’ll see Newfoundland tomorrow?” Fergus asked the old man, Ormsby.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  Unable to sleep, feeling the stick between them every time he moved, he had come on deck to find the old man leaning at the rail. It was a soft night with thick, damp air. He heard canvas flapping as Laramie wallowed
in a rolling sea.

  “Down below it’s what they say.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “I don’t know —”

  “Well, don’t. We’ve hardly started. We’ve been knocking back and forth looking for our wind. It’s often so. We’re nowhere.”

  They smoked in silence for a while.

  “Tell me of the horse thieves. Tell me how you bought your son.”

  Ormsby looked sideways at him. “Can’t you sleep? Is it so bad below?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  Ormsby drew on his cigar, slowly exhaled the smoke. “The horse thieves were Bloods. One of the Blackfoot-speaking tribes.

  “He — my son — was Crow. The Bloods captured him on a horse-stealing raid down on the Missouri. He was eleven or twelve years old.

  “He was night herd, looking after two or three hundred ponies, buffalo runners belonging to a hunting chief. One night those Bloods came down whooping and firing, killing the other boys, and stealing the herd right out from under him.

  “He was too ashamed to face his own people so he set out after the Bloods. He trailed them to Fort Benton, where he saw his first steamboat. That was summer of the year ’thirty-seven. There were five thousand dead of smallpox at Fort Benton that summer — smallpox came up the Missouri on the steamers, and killed off the grass nations, so that the Americans could start trapping for themselves in the Rocky Mountains.

  “Once he was exposed to the smallpox — he had heard stories, so knew what it was — he realized he could not return to his people without carrying them the plague, so he decided to attack the Bloods, who were still driving north, and steal his ponies back, or die trying.

  “He’d picked up a trade musket at Fort Benton, and a little ammunition. He chose to attack while they were watering at the Milk River. He killed one brave dog and was charging the others, only they shot the horse from under him. He begged them to kill him, but they laughed and said he was too small for a bullet. He would not give them his Crow name, of course, so they called him Many Gray Horses. You’ll find men in that country have many names. The Bloods brought him up to Fort Edmonton and sold him to me for three pounds of lead.”

  “Where’s your country?”

  “Rosses Point, Sligo, but spent my life in the fur trade, in the Athabaska country. Have you heard of it?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “The greatest fur country in the world. I joined the XY Company at fourteen, the Northwest Company at sixteen. Made partner at nineteen. Fought and lost a war against the Baymen, made and lost a number of fortunes, and retired from service of the Hudson’s Bay Company at sixty and went home to Sligo. Here, let me see your hat.”

  Fergus handed it over.

  “Beaver fur felt — that’s what a good hat is made from. Good beaver felt is hard, doesn’t drink up water, and you can always brush it clean. Nothing like it.” Ormsby gave the hat a vigorous brushing with his hand then handed it back. “When I came home I bought a couple of hunters at the sales in Derry and Kildare and set myself up for a gentleman on a place inherited from my father. In my absence it had been badly managed, the agent robbed me blind, and I found the whole operation sinking under debt and bad drains.

  “During all the years upcountry, I’d thought of Sligo as my home — but I found a melancholy life there. I told myself it was the rain. But they say that worn-out Indian traders are the most useless, helpless class of men. When I wasn’t buying girls in Sligo town, I was worrying that one of my tenants was going to shoot me from behind a hedge. The best thing about Irish rain is they cannot in the cabins keep their powder dry.

  “Poor drains and grand horses took most of the capital I had. And I missed the country. I missed the snow. Missed my friends and my women. So last month I went across to London and begged Sir George Simpson himself — the Little Emperor, the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company — for a position, any position, in the trade. I told him I’d build boats at York Factory, go out as an apprentice clerk — anything. He offered the factorship at Fort Chipewyan.

  “I was to sail straight for the Bay in June, on the annual Company ship. Then the Company changed its mind, and now my orders are to take charge of the spring brigade of canoes from Lachine, nine miles above Montreal. The northern brigades want a fresh supply of boatmen, and I’m to lead the Lachiners up the country.

  “Canoes have set out from Lachine for two hundred years; a child could follow the route. It is clear and plain as any road in Ireland. The camps and portages have been in use for centuries. Every rapids is named for drowned men.

  “I don’t say the trade is what it was when I was a youngster. Even the fur ain’t what it was. The men are different too. And when I think of gentlemen wearing silk hats in Dublin and London town! Silk! I suppose steamers and iron rails will one day reach even Rupert’s Land. Before that the Yankees will have grabbed it, as they grabbed the Oregon country, which belonged to the Company. Meanwhile I am to bring my Lachiners as far as the Stone Fort on the Red, sixteen hundred miles or so from Montreal — does this make any sense at all to you, or are you nodding because you’re a sleek, duplicitous ribbonman?”

  “I’m listening, ain’t I? I suppose it makes sense, eventually.”

  “There’s a lot that don’t, never. Life comes running at you, trailing gaudy streamers, and you can’t make them out until it’s too close — are those ribbons, or is that blood? Very little makes sense to me, but I know I like to sit in a canoe, I always have.”

  The High

  AT DAWN FERGUS CLIMBED on deck with Coole, who was very eager to see land. The fires had been lit in the cabooses, and there was no land in sight, just the plate of pewter sea.

  Coole called up to Mr. Blow on the afterdeck, asking when they should see the rock of Newfoundland.

  “Newfoundland? We aren’t even in the western ocean, you fool.”

  HE BROUGHT her food, but she turned away and would not speak.

  “Where is your tongue, Molly?”

  He straddled her on the berth, searching her eyes, the heels of his hands pressing down on her shoulders. Her face, small and white, defiant in its stillness. He had never looked at anyone so closely before.

  “What is wrong with you? Tell me how you’re feeling. What is wrong inside?”

  He couldn’t penetrate. He knew by her eyes that she could hear him, and her willful silence frightened him. Silence made her untouchable.

  “It’s fear of the sea has taken her tongue,” the old woman said, looking in. “See if she’ll take a little taste of food.”

  He sat on the edge of the berth, holding spoon and bowl, while she stared at him. He tried to talk to her, as if nothing had changed. “Good scran today, Moll. I have put an apple in yours. Cut it up in pieces. It’s very good, gives it a taste.”

  She wouldn’t open her mouth.

  “A spell of the sea.” Brighid shrugged. “She’ll come back to you.” She patted Molly’s hand. “You take your time, lovely, and come out when you’re good and ready.”

  “Why can’t she say what it is?”

  “But she can’t speak.” She looked at Fergus. “You know nothing much about women, do you?”

  “I know her.”

  “Well, she has gone away a little while. If you are patient and kind, she’ll come back.”

  HE WATCHED sailors at work high in the rigging. Wishing he could get up there somehow, ride so high. Watching them, he couldn’t help thinking of her. In her sickness she was like a bird he couldn’t reach.

  It looked very wild, up so high, but you’d be able to see like a hawk. He’d overheard sailors saying there was ice on the rigging, but from the deck he couldn’t see any. He’d rather be living up there, in the high, than down below in the hold. All his life he had lived in holes of one sort or another: cabins made of stones and turf; scalpeens made of sticks, shanties, steerage holds. Burrows smelling of earth and bodies.

  He’d rather live where it smelled of the sky.


  Nimrod Blampin was sitting on an overturned bucket, working with a spiky tool, deftly kneading together three strands of line into one.

  “What’s it like up high?” Fergus asked.

  Nimrod glanced at the men aloft. “That ain’t high,” he said scornfully. “They is only bending topgallants. High is the very last wriggle, the tip of the skinny — capping the royal mast.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Fine if you don’t fall. Curious.” The sailor grinned. “There was once a young gentleman — very rich — wished to climb the peak of his father’s ship, an Indiaman, never having been. Said he would cap the mast, and made a wager with another passenger, for fifty pounds. Up he goes, climbing like a spider, until he must work up around the mainsail tops — see? — hanging on by the futtock shrouds.”

  Nimrod pointed up to a circular wooden platform halfway up the mast, supported by iron struts — the futtock shrouds — fixed to the mast.

  “It is a devilish place and yet only halfway to the peak, or less. To get out around the platform you must climb straight out, while hanging upside down, which is a funny feeling, the first time.

  “Well, the young gentleman, he goes the dead cat there, hanging on upside down at the futtocks. Sixty feet above deck. Won’t be coaxed to move another inch. Deadest cat I ever saw.”

  “What happened?”

  “He hung there all night. The watch brought him up a dish of lobscouse and fed him with a spoon, but he couldn’t be persuaded to let go the shrouds. Then a wicked storm came on and he froze solid as iron, then died. And they could not work him off even then, and left him until he was leather. Hands going aloft, they would kiss him on the lips for luck. Two years later, when that Indiaman come into Clarence Dock, he was still seized to the shrouds. The ship riggers finally worked him off by use of tar oil, which softened him nicely.”

  Patches of fog were swirling over the deck. Fergus peered aloft. “Do you suppose I could cap the peak?”

  “No!”

  “I think I might.”

  “You’re a very lubberly fellow.” Nimrod sounded annoyed. “You may start for a lark, but a passenger’s lark won’t carry you far. You would do a dead cat or fall into the sea. Takes a seaman to cap the mast.”