I cheerfully refuse, p.28
I Cheerfully Refuse, page 28
“We are leaving,” Marcel replied in a steady voice the rain all but covered. “We have to. We always had to. Now is the time.” As he said this, one end of a stacked box gave way. The rain had soaked everything through. A head of cabbage rolled out, and Marcel bent to pick it up. Wiping rainwater off his face he said, “Go ahead now, Mr. Burke, and lay that rifle down.”
Burke hesitated.
Marcel said, “It’s all right. It is. It was always going to be all right.”
And Burke knelt down and lay his rifle on the deck.
Werryck covered his eyes. I didn’t understand yet what was happening, but Werryck did. He saw the future coming more clearly than us all.
Skint shrieked an order, but he was beside the point. He was a dog barking. The remaining guards meekly disarmed. Rifles, sidearms. The pile of munitions they made slipped and clattered in the rain. They regrouped and stood like shriven monks, their slick hoods helping with that impression.
Then Skint lifted his sidearm and fired. I believe he was trying to shoot Burke, but that’s a long shot for a handgun. The guard next to Burke tipped his head and fell.
He fired again and Marcel dropped to his knees. He wavered a moment, tipped forward onto his face. The cabbage rolled away from his open hand.
Skint didn’t shoot a third time. His feet came off the platform—that’s my clearest memory—his hard pointy boots turning frantic. His arms wheeled for balance as I lifted him up. His gun dropped away and I took an elbow or something to the face, but that didn’t matter, didn’t stop what was happening or change by a millimeter where Skint was going. I don’t remember making this decision—I’ve tried, but can’t remember. Maybe I’d made it months before. Maybe that’s why Skint weighed nothing to me—I was used to his stupid weight, having carried it so long. Up he went and over the rail. Harriet later described the appalling sound he made hitting the concrete deck like something dead already. I didn’t hear it. All I heard was a sort of interior creaking noise, then my back started hurting pretty bad.
On deck Tove sprawled toward Marcel. A couple of guards, startled at the wrecked and misshapen pile of Skint, scrambled for the weapons they had shed, but Didier and Harriet and a dozen others broke over them like a wave. Werryck in his misery had left his quarters unarmed. I have since read about every kind of mutiny and rising and prison revolt and few matched ours for speed.
The elevator was busy, so I wound up escorting Werryck down the long metal stairwell to the Shambles. A slow descent. Werryck wore his migraine like sackcloth and barfed a few times on the stairs. Arriving in that bottom space Harriet was already there, unlocking cells, shooing out squelettes in brisk fashion, these pale skeletons ducking about in fear and disbelief while Harriet shoved the guards inside and locked them in. Again I wondered at their docility, their faces of bewilderment and stillness. Werryck had turned so white he was nearly blue. I thrust him into a cell just as Kellan was stepping out.
“What do I do now?” Kellan asked.
I said to Werryck, “Give him your coat.”
It was a woolen peacoat like a naval officer’s. Werryck didn’t want to, but I offered to go in and help him remove it, so he unbuttoned it slowly and let it slide off his shoulders.
Kellan accepted the coat and put it on.
“Go on deck,” I told him.
“What is happening?” Kellan asked. “Rainy, can you tell me what is happening?”
I was still figuring that out.
Details would emerge in time, but even then the shape of things was starting to come clear. Pharma Luca meeting Marcel in the engine room and elsewhere—to whisper, yes, but not to sigh. Who else could’ve supplied Marcel with all the best and latest? And only hours earlier I’d seen him with Tove in the kitchen, serving the guards their dinner. What could make Tove happier than stirring an order of absolute subservience into their beefy gravy?
Moments from that busy night I hoard against the dark.
The instant when Verlyn and I, sent to retrieve anyone still in the wheelhouse stack, stumbled into a little hive of joined rooms. The lock took some fiddling, and when it opened, there crouched Sol beside her roommates, looking ready to tear the face off whoever came in. Indeed a small boy with weasel teeth leapt up hissing. I held him away at the cost of deep forearm scratches while Sol said, “Cut it out, Ferdie. Stop that now.” And to me, “Are we leaving, Rainy? Can we go? Can they come too? Can we take some food?” Ferdie quit clawing my arm at last, and I said yes to everything.
The moment when the Shambles inmates saw—with alarm or dawning joy—the shrinking spectacle of Werryck, descending the food chain bump bump bump to land at all their feet.
Or the scene back on deck with everyone gathered—everyone but Werryck and his futile security force. The rain still fell, the cruiser rumbled and diesel smoke drifted through the cones of light thrown by sodium-vapor lamps across the deck. When Harriet came off the cruiser, she carried a folding ladder. This she opened and climbed in order to speak from a height. She said Marcel was alive and conscious. Being attended to by one of the ship’s doctors. Pressed for details she had none, nor any promises. She said it was time to leave, and the cruiser would accept any who wished to go. Twenty were already aboard but there was room. She couldn’t speak for Canada, but on the cruiser all were welcome. Marcel had said it firmly: whether you lived upstairs or down, none would be refused.
“Let’s go,” said Harriet, yet no one moved.
There was so much fear of leaving. I didn’t see that coming. Everyone had to choose and many didn’t want to. Freed from their cells, the squelettes were in confusion. Depart the ship for a crammed vessel tilting through night weather toward unspecified landfall? No slam dunk apparently. How many people could fit on that boat? If it didn’t sink, what happened when they reached shore? Their reluctance made sense. Some had left that ship before only to be retaken and brutalized. Many cited dead examples of bravery. There was a belief verging on religious that Werryck could still triumph. Half the people on that deck believed he could be in three or four places at once. What if this were a test? What if they left and then he appeared among them on the cruiser, eyes like holes of wrath?
Harriet began to fray. She never wanted to inherit any kind of mantel from Marcel but here she was. She held out her hands. She described their liberation as a jubilee: all slaves freed, all debts forgiven. Like in the Bible! Though from what I’ve read, they talked big about slaves and debts but never followed through. Harriet exhorted, she moved her hands. Urgency swelled around her. Lightning glimmered on the northern rim.
Then Sol clutched my arm. Pointed at a little cohort moving toward the cruiser. They held their heads up. Some couldn’t walk on their own and were assisted by those who could. Forward they went, steady on. They were the twelve. Two or three had blankets round their shoulders, and a few had jackets. Kellan had given Werryck’s peacoat to an older woman, and he himself wore only a bit of poly tarp over the same paper clothing that saw him through the storm. None spoke. They only moved ahead. People parted before them and many were swept up in their wake. They boarded the cruiser via the silver staircase which glowed with rain.
Minutes later every squelette was aboard, every lab rat, every painter and menial and mechanic and drudge. I saw Didier making room for Verlyn at the rail, next to Beezie and Maggie from the Shambles.
This left behind the professionals. Doctors, researchers, assistants. The gray-coat pharma priesthood. It did not occur to me that any of these might throw in with the desperate.
Then Pharma Luca wrung her hands as though to shake off something bad and trotted toward the staircase. Several colleagues followed. A stooped woman of tremulous bearing said that as a physician she was bound to go, to attend those in poor health. Others in her orbit agreed. In this way the cruiser filled far past its safe capacity.
When all who wished had got aboard, a cry went up from those remaining. Their cell phones had been swiftly collected and bagged after two medical aides were interrupted trying to call the mainland for help. This led to a take-no-chances sweep for such devices, and such a pageant of plastic and glass and silicon terabytes flying over the rail I never imagined, the tools of transmission blinking out like so many lit screens tumbling end over end into the swallowing sea. Now that it was clear we meant to leave them without communications, outrage erupted. Harriet did not bargain. You should’ve seen her on that ladder, growing shoulders as we watched. An indignant researcher shouted This is just my job and Harriet said You took the job. She said that choice made this one certain. She said This is what happens.
In the end most of the professionals stayed. They had people on the mainland; they had careers. In their place I would’ve done the same. I can also tell you there were three technicians whose job it was to break the limbs, burn the skin, and pierce the flesh of compliance patients, and these to a man remained rather than share a crowded deck with those they had abused.
“Come on then,” Harriet said to me.
The cruiser rested low in the water. You’ve seen similar images. You know how it looked: a common sight, a vessel pushed down and top-heavy, obscured by its cargo of souls.
And I was glad to go with them, glad to take my chances. Sol and I stood at the top of the stairwell when again she took my elbow.
“Rainy,” she said, pointing across the deck.
She had to show me where to look. Peeking above the opposite rail was the top of a mast, its tiny wind indicator shifting on its axis, pointing north and east.
It was Flower’s mast. The ship was so tall all we could see was its top few feet, shining in the rain.
I asked Harriet for a minute.
It actually didn’t take much more. A rope ladder already hung over the side and Sol and I both climbed down. There was an inch of water in the cabin. While I tried the bilge pump—which still worked—I heard Sol speaking, not to me. “You are ready for this, that’s what I think,” she said. “I never saw anyone more ready. And look at you. So shiny.”
She was talking to the outboard.
It started on the fourth pull.
•
I had only two more things to do—no, three.
Leaving Sol on Flower, I trotted back across the freighter’s deck to where Harriet waited. I told her our plans and asked for Kellan. Word was passed and he climbed to the flybridge and spoke to me over the rail.
I told him about Flower and offered him a place with us.
Right away it was plain he would turn me down. He was shy about it and glad to be asked, but Kellan liked where he was—yes, on a boatload of exiles, with people he trusted who trusted him back. For now, at least, Kellan was in the story he wanted. They’d been through the worst and could see the way out. They would do it together.
“Long live the twelve,” I said.
“Oh God, don’t now,” he said.
I asked Harriet would Marcel be all right. She hugged me so hard I cracked. I don’t remember what else we said. Then she boarded the cruiser, and I went fore and aft and threw off their lines. A shout went up as they drifted away and the big growling engines took hold.
From there I went down to the Shambles. I went to see Griff, who’d made his choice. He’d specifically asked to be lodged with Werryck, imagining his loyalty would be rewarded. I went to ask him to reconsider. Honestly I didn’t want to, but he was Sol’s only family. I said he could still come with us.
“You mean on the cruiser?”
I told him the cruiser had left. He could join us on Flower, though.
And Griff said no. He practically snorted. Said we would die on that tiny boat. Maybe he was auditioning to be the new Skint. I didn’t like his chances.
Buried in his migraine, Werryck rolled his eyes.
Then a voice said, “What about me? Could I reconsider?”
Burke, speaking from the rear of the cell.
“I’d like to go,” Burke said.
“The worse for you,” Griff told him, “the second we get you back.”
“Rainy?” Burke said, coming forward.
He sounded so hopeful I felt a little sick.
I said to Burke, “How long do you think you’ll be this way?”
“What way?” said he.
He was so eager and ready to go I went ahead and let him out. Was it a risk? Maybe, but he looked so normal without rifle and sidearm. He looked like a man with promise.
As we left the Shambles, Burke said, “I might be of use to you, on that boat.”
“Don’t say it unless it’s true.”
“I had a boat much like it, in better days. Put me to work and I’ll do my best.”
When we reached the main deck I left Burke there. There was one more thing to do.
My bass guitar was up in Werryck’s quarters. I took the stairs at a run. His door was ajar, the smell of his headache still in the air. I uncovered a port and looked over the water. The cruiser was visible heading north, into the swells, its railing clogged with people.
Lightning forked at a distance.
I picked up Mr. Fender and helped myself to a book from Werryck’s shelf.
I Cheerfully Refuse.
• a bold round face and a curving tail
WE COASTED AWAY in a moderate swell and only looked back rounding the eastern tip of the island. From a distance the ship appeared as it must’ve a century ago—like a thousand-foot city, its wheelhouse illuminated, rain whipping itself into haloes around the sodium lamps. Then, since Flower’s mainsail was still shredded and useless, we raised the jib, which filled with a strong northeasterly breeze, and Posterity lost its hold on us forever.
Two surprises I remember from that long reach.
First, we were not pursued. We’d left Werryck and the others locked below, but I assumed it wouldn’t take long for someone to scramble up keys or commandeer a cutting torch. By now the old tyrant would be out and blazing for revenge. Of course, pursuing us would’ve made no sense. All the value was aboard the black cruiser, which had gone another direction. Also it was still dark, with rain and hard wind. Yet I couldn’t stop looking back.
Second, Burke was an actual sailor. I asked him to steer when I went forward to free a stuck line, and he said not a word but his ease with the tiller was plain. We moved swiftly on a heading of three hundred degrees by Kellan’s toy compass, a course to reach Jolie.
Sol vanished below, crawled into her bunk, and stayed there until it got light.
I won’t describe the damp day and next night, the shifts at the tiller, the soaked and hungry passage of hours, except to say I began to approach warily the idea that we’d gotten away. The wind continued, there were mountainous clouds behind us but they never caught up. We were not overwhelmed. The second morning I caught the smell of land before dawn. I thought we’d gotten too close to shore, but later realized we’d slipped past the Slate Islands, another near miss in the dark.
Late in the morning we eased into Jolie.
The harbor was still. A maple-leaf flag hung slack from a yardarm; the town lay at rest on its hillside. We tied Flower at the dock and made our way to the Girards’.
Nobody home but the gate was open, so we sat in the garden to rest and get used to the feeling of earth. Sol kept trying to walk and then tipping over like a top out of spin. She was exaggerating but not much. My feet felt made of wood.
We were still wobbly when Evelyn came in through the gate. She was startled for a moment, then beelined for me and wrapped me in her arms.
You forget how it is to have someone be glad you are there.
I said, “Evelyn, here are Sol and Burke.”
She shook their hands. I watched her eyes. Already she was busy with our welfare. She said, “Sleep, soap, or a meal, what would you all like first?”
•
For a while we all stayed with Girard and Evelyn, and if this made their big old house seem small, they never let on. I don’t know how much or how long that dose of compliance affected Burke. Maybe he was always that guileless. But when after ten days he accepted passage in a van heading west, we were sorry to see him go—well, not Sol. Burke may have been on board with us, but she was never on board with Burke. It turned out she’d been watching when he forced the twelve onto that tortuous raft. So had I, of course. But I couldn’t despise Burke; I could’ve been Burke. That’s what I believe. Maybe I still could. What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.
I soon picked up some work. Stevie at the welding shop, who had repaired Flower’s chainplates, was expanding her reach and needed what she called “a back and two arms” for deliveries. Hours were unpredictable but more days than not I drove her bouncy old hybrid east or west along the coastline.
One morning before I walked to the shop, Girard said, “Are you thinking of leaving us too?”
It had occurred to me to find a place of my own. I’d lived upstairs at their house for six weeks, which is way past guest no matter who you are.
Girard then offered me the loft above the garage. It had been used as an apartment decades earlier and was plumbed and electrified. He said it was mine if I cared to clean it up and fix the broken parts.
Sol remained in the house. She barely noticed when I moved out—partly because I only moved sixty feet away and partly because she liked the Girards. One day I went into their upstairs library to browse and Sol was there. She looked overwhelmed, and I recalled how she thought my shelf of seven books on Flower comprised a giant collection.
“Evelyn says there is a school in town, and maybe I should go to it,” she said. “But I don’t know.”
Girard had begun to teach her a little math, and I’d been reading to her most evenings. Already she had favorite stories and would ask for repeat performances. I thought she would adjust to school, but my instinct was not to push. Sol is always apt to revolt or vanish from sight, impulses that have worked well for her.
