“I don’t know, Ben,” says Henry Lee, real quiet. “I don’t know anything anymore.” He said me name, but he weren’t talking to me—maybe to that monkey, maybe to the waves out beyond the seawall. “The one thing I’ve got a good hold on, when I’m with her, it’s like coming home. First time I saw her, it came over me, I’ve been gone a long time, and now I’m home.”
Well, you can’t talk sense to nobody in a state like that, so I wished them luck and left them to it. Aye, and I even danced at the wedding, sweating like a hog in a new silk suit, Chinee silk, and kicking the bride’s shins with every turn. Danced with the mother-in-law too, with her crying on me shoulder the while, how she’d lost her poor angel forever to this soulless brute of an English merchant, which no matter he’d converted, he weren’t no real Catholic, nor never would be. I tried to get her shins, that one, but she were quick, I’ll say that for her.
So there’s Henry Lee and his pretty new missus, and him so happy staying home with her, hosting grand gatherings just for folk to look at her, he weren’t no use for nowt else, save telling me how happy he were. Oh, he still brewed up the salt wine himself—wouldn’t trust me nor no other with the makings—but for the rest of it, I were near enough running the business without him. Took in the orders, paid the accounts, kept the books, supervised the packing and the shipping, every case, every bloody bottle. Even bought us a second ship—found her and bargained for her, paid cash down, all on me own hook. Long way from the Isle of Pines, hey?
Like I say, I didn’t make all the voyages. Weren’t any degree necessary for me to make none on ’em, tell the truth—and besides I were getting on, and coming to like the land more than I ever thought I would. But I never could shake me taste for the Buenos Aires run. I knew some women there, and a few men too… aye, that’s a fine town, Buenos. A man could settle in that town, and I were thinking about it then.
So we’re three days from landfall, and I’m on deck near sunset, taking the air and keeping a lookout for albatrosses. No finer bird than an albatross, you can keep your eagles. A quiet, quiet evening—wide red sky streaked with a bit of green, fine weather tomorrow. You can hear the gulls’ wings, and fish jumping now and then, and the creaking of the strakes, and sometimes even the barrels of salt wine shifting down in the hold. Then I hear footsteps behind me, and I turn and see the bos’un’s mate coming up on deck. Can’t think of his name right now—a short, wide man, looked like a wine barrel himself, but tough as old boots. Monkey Sucker, that’s it, that’s what they called him. Because he liked to drink his rum out of a cocoanut, you see. Never see no one doing that, these days.
He weren’t looking too hearty, old Monkey Sucker. Red eyes and walking funny, for a start, like his legs didn’t belong to him, but I put that down to him nipping at the bung down below. Now I already told you, I never again laid lip to that salt wine from that first day to this, but folk that liked it, why, they’d be waiting on the docks when we landed, ready to unload the cargo themselves right on the spot. And half the crew was the same way, run yourself blind barmy trying to keep them out of the casks. Well, we done the practical, Henry Lee and me: we rigged the hold to keep all but the one barrel under lock and key. That one we left out and easy tapped, and it’d usually last us there and back, wherever we was bound. But this Monkey Sucker… no, he weren’t just drunk, I saw that on second glance. Not drunk. I wish it had been that, for he weren’t a bad sort.
“Mr. Hazeltine,” he says to me. “Well, Mr. Hazeltine.” Kept on saying me name like we’d just met, and he were trying to get a right fix on it. His voice didn’t sound proper, neither, but it kept cracking and bleating—like a boy’s voice when it’s changing, you know. And there were summat bad wrong with his nose and his mouth.
“Monk,” I says back, “you best get your arse below decks before the captain claps eyes on you. You look worse than a poxy bumboy on Sunday morning.” The light’s going fast now, but I can make out that his face is all bad swole up and somehow twisty-like, and there’s three lines like welts on both sides of his neck. He’s got his arms wrapped around himself, holding himself tight, the way you’d think he were about to birth four thousand babies at one go, like some fish do it. And he keeps mumbling me name, over and over, but he’s not looking at me, not once, he’s looking at the rail on the starboard side. Aye, I should have twigged to that straightaway, I know. I didn’t, that’s all.
Suddenly he says, “Water.” Clear as clear, no mistake about it. “Water,” and he points over the side. Excited, bobbing on his toes, like a nipper at Brighton. Third time, “Water,” and at least I were the first to bawl, “Man overboard!” there’s that. In the midst of all the noise and garboil, with everyone tumbling on deck to heave to, and the captain yelling at everyone to lower a boat, with the bos’un crazy trying to lower two, ’acos he and Monkey Sucker was old mates… in the midst of it all, I saw Monkey Sucker in the sea. I saw him, understand? He weren’t splashing around, waving and screaming for help, and he weren’t treading water neither. No, he’s trying to swim, calm as can be—only he’s trying to swim like a fish, laying himself flat in the water and wriggling his legs together, same as if he had a tail, understand? Only he didn’t have no tail, and he sank like that, straight down, straight down. They kept that boat out all night, but they never did find him.
We reported the death to the customs people in Buenos Aires, and I sent word to Henry Lee back in Goa. The captain and the mates kept asking the crew about why Monkey Sucker had done it, scragged himself that way—were it the drink got him? Were it over some dockside bint? Did he owe triple interest on some loan to Silas Barker or Icepick Neddie Frey? Couldn’t get no answer, not one, that made no sense to them, nor to me neither.
Heading home, every barrel gone, hold full of Argentine wheat for ballast, now it’s me turn to chat up the crew, on night watch or in the mess. I go at it like a good ’un, but there’s not a soul can tell me anything I don’t know.
I were first ashore before dawn at Velha Goa—funny to think of that fine Mandovi River all silted up today, whole place left to the snakes and the kites—and if I didn’t run all the way to Henry Lee’s house, may I never piss again. Man at the door to let me in, another man to take me hat and offer me a glass. I didn’t take it.
I bellow for Henry Lee, and here he comes, rushing downstairs in his shirtsleeves, one shoe off and one on. “Ben, what is it? What’s happened? Is it the ship?” Because he never could get used to having two ships of his own—always expected one or t’other to sink or burn, or be taken by the Barbary pirates. I didn’t say nowt, just grabbed him by the arm and hauled him off into the room he calls the library. Shut the door, turn around, look into his frighted blue eyes. “It ain’t the ship, Henry Lee,” I tell him. “It’s the hands.”
“The hands,” he says. “I don’t understand.”
“And it ain’t the hands,” I say, “it’s the buyers. And it ain’t the buyers.” I take a breath, wish God’d put a noggin of rum in me fist right now, but there ain’t no God. “It’s the wine.”
Henry Lee shakes his head. He reaches for a bottle on the sideboard, pours himself a drink. Salt wine, it is—I knock it out of his hand, so it splashes on his fancy rug, and now I’m whispering, because if I shout everything comes apart. “It’s the wine, Henry Lee. You know it, and now I know.”
That about him knowing, that was a guess, and now I’m the one looking away, ’acos of I don’t want to find out I’m right. And because it’s hard to say the bloody words, either way. “The salt wine,” I says. “It frigging well killed a man, this time out, and I’m betting it’s done it before.”
“No,” Henry Lee says. “No, Ben, that’s not possible.” But I look straight back at him, and I know what he’s fighting not to think.
“Maybe he didn’t mean no harm, your Gorblimey,” I go on. “Maybe he’d no notion what his old precious gift would do to human beings. Maybe it depends on how much of it you drink, or how often.” So still in that
fine house, I can hear his Julia Caterina turning in the bed upstairs, murmuring into her pillow. I say, “Old Monkey Sucker, he never could keep away from the cask in the hold, maybe that’s why… why it happened. Maybe if you don’t drink too much.”
“No,” Henry Lee answers me, and his voice is real quiet too. “That wouldn’t make sense, Ben. I drink salt wine every day. A lot of it.”
He’s always got a flask of the creature somewhere about him, true enough, and you won’t see him go too long without his drop. But there’s no sign of any change, not in his face, nor in his skin, nor his teeth—and that last time Monkey Sucker said “water” I could see his teeth had got all sprawled out-like, couldn’t hardly close his mouth. But Henry Lee just went on looking like Henry Lee, except a little bit grayer, a bit wearier, a bit more pulled-down, like, the way quitting the sea will do to you. No merrow borning there, not that I could see.
“Well, then,” says I, “it’s not the amount of wine. But it is the wine. Tell me that’s not so, and I’ll believe you, Henry Lee. I will.”
Because I never knew him lie to me. Might take his time getting around to telling me some things, but he wouldn’t never lie outright. But he just shook his head again, and looked down, and he heaved a sigh sounded more like a death rattle. Says, “It could be. It could be. I don’t know, Ben.”
“You know,” I says. “How long?” He don’t answer, don’t say nowt for a while—he just turns and turns in a little tight circle, this way and that, like a bear at a baiting. Finally he goes on, mumbling now, like he’d as soon I didn’t hear. “The Tagus, last year, that time I took Julia Caterina to Lisbon. A man on the riverbank, he just tumbled… I didn’t get a really good look, I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing, I swear, Ben.” I can’t make no sound. Henry Lee grabs me hands, wrings them between his until they hurt. “Ben, it’s like you said, maybe Gorblimey didn’t know himself—”
I pull me hands free, and for a minute I have to close me eyes, ’acos if I was on a ship I’d be seasick. I hear meself saying, “Maybe he didn’t. But we do. We know now.”
“No, we don’t! It still mightn’t be the wine—it could be any number of things.” He takes a deep, deep breath, plunges on. “Even if—even if that’s so, obviously it’s just a few, a very few, not one in a thousand, if even… I mean, you don’t see it happening everywhere, it’s just—it’s like the way some folk can’t abide shellfish, the way cheese gripes your gut, Ben, every time. It’s got to be so with the salt wine.”
“Even one,” I says. It catches in me throat and comes out a whisper, so I can’t tell if he’s heard. We stand there, looking at each other, like we’re waiting to be introduced. Henry Lee reaches for me hand again, but I step away. Henry Lee starts to say summat, but then he don’t. There’s blood in me mouth, I can taste it.
“I done bad things, Henry Lee,” I says at last. “I know where I’m going when I go, and none to blame but me. I know who’s waiting for me there, too—some nights I see their faces all around the room, plain as I now see you. But in me life I never done nothing, nothing… I got to get out of your house, Henry Lee.”
And I’m for the door, because I can’t look at him no more. He calls after me—once, twice—and I think he’s bound sure to try and drag me back, maybe to gull me into seeing things his way, maybe just not to be alone. But he don’t, and I walk on home along the seafront, a deal slower than I came. And when I get there—it were a plain little house, nobbut the one servant, and him not living in, because I can’t abide folk around me when I rise—when I got there, I drank meself to sleep with me whole stock of good Christian rum. And in the morning I went to see Henry Lee’s lawyer—our lawyer—Portygee-Goan, he were, name of Andres Furtado, near enough—and I started working an old fool name of Ben Hazeltine loose from the salt wine business. It took me some while.
Cost me a few bob, too, I don’t mind saying. We’d made an agreement long back, Henry Lee and me, that if ever I wanted to sell me forty percent, he’d have to buy me out, will-he, nil-he. But I didn’t want no more of that salt wine money—couldn’t swallow the notion, no more than I could have swallowed a single mouthful of the stuff ever again after that second time.
So by and by, all what you call the legalities was taken care of, and there was I, on the beach again, in a manner of speaking. But at least I’d saved a bit—wouldn’t last forever, but leastways I could bide me time finding other work, and not before the mast, neither. Too old to climb the rigging, too used to proper dining to go back to cooking in burned pots and rusty pannikins in some Grand Banks trawler’s galley—aye, and far too fast-set in me ways of doing things to be taking orders from no captain hadn’t seen what I’ve seen in this world. “Best bide ashore awhile, Ben Hazeltine,” I says to meself, “and see who might be needing what you yet can do. There’ll be someone,” I says, “as there always is,” and I’d believe it, too, days on end. But I’d been used to a lot of things regular, not only me meals. Henry Lee, he were one of them, him and his bloody salt wine. Not that I’d have gone back working for the fool—over the side meself first, and I can’t swim no better than poor old Monkey Sucker. But still.
So when Henry Lee’s young wife shows up at me door, all by herself, no husband, no servants, just her parasol and a whole great snowy spill of lace down her front, I asked her in like she were me long-lost baby sister. We weren’t close, didn’t know each other much past the salon and the dining room, but she were pretty and sweet, and I liked her the best I could. Like I tried to tell Henry Lee, I don’t belong in the same room with no lady. Even when it’s me own room.
Any road, she came in, and she sat down, and she says, “Mr. Ben, my husband, he miss you very much.” Never knew a woman quicker off the mark and to the point than little Mrs. Julia Caterina Five-other-names Lee. I can still see her, sitting in me best company chair, with her little fan and her hands in her lap, and that bit of a smile that she could never quite hide. Henry Lee said it were a nervous thing with her mouth, and that she were shamed by it, but I don’t know.
“We’re old partners, him and me,” I answers her. “We was sailors together when we was young. But I’m done working with him, no point in pretending otherwise. You’re wasting your time, ma’am, I have to tell you. He shouldn’t ought to have sent you here.”
“Oh, he did not sent me,” she says quickly. “I come—how is it?—on my ownsome? And no, I do not imagine you to come back for him, I would not ask you such a thing, not for him. But you… I think for you this would be good.” I gawk at her, and she smiles a real smile now. She says, “You come to us alone—no friend, no woman, never. I think you are lonely.”
Not in me life. Nobody in me life has ever spoke that word about me. Nobody. Not me, not nobody, never. I can’t do nothing but sit there and gawp. She goes on, “He has not many friends either, my Enrique. You, me—maybe one of my brothers, maybe the abogao, the lawyer. Not so many, eh?” And she puts out her hands toward me, a little way. Not for me to take them—more like giving me summat. She says, “I do not know what he have done to make you angry. So bad?”
I can’t talk—it ain’t in me just then, looking at those hands, at her face. I nod, that’s all.
No tears, no begging, no trying to talk me round. She just nods herself, and gets up, and I escort her out to where her coachman’s waiting. Settling back inside, she holds out one hand, but this time it’s formal, it’s what nobby Portygee ladies do. I kissed her mother’s hand at the wedding, so I’ve got the trick of it—more like a breath, it is, more like you’re smelling a flower. For half a minute, less, we’re looking straight into each other’s eyes, and I see the sadness. Maybe for Henry Lee, maybe for me—I never did know. Maybe it weren’t never there.
But afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I don’t mean her, not like that, wouldn’t have occurred to me. I mean what she said, and the way she looked at me, and her coming to see me by herself, which you won’t never see no Portygee lady doing, high nor lo
w. And saying that thing about me being lonely—true or not ain’t the point. It were her saying it, and how I felt to hear her. I plain wanted to hear her again, is all.
But I didn’t. It would have meant seeing Henry Lee, and I weren’t no way up to that. I talked to him in me head every time I saw one or t’other of our ships slipping slow out of the harbor in the morning sun, sails filling and the company pennant snapping atop the mizzenmast. And her hold full of poison. I had time enough on me hands to spend with sailors ashore, and shillings enough to buy another round of what’s-your-fancy, and questions enough to keep them talking and me mind unsettled. Because most of them hadn’t noticed nothing—no shipmates turning, no buyers swimming out to sea, no changelings whispering to them from the dark water. But there was always a couple, two or even three who’d seen summat they’d as soon not have seen, and who’d have to down more than a few jars of the best before they’d speak about it even to each other. Aye, I knew that feeling, none better.
They wasn’t all off our ships, neither. Velha were still a fair-sized port then, not like it is now, and there was traders and packets and merchantmen in from everywhere, big and small. I were down the harbor pretty regular, any road, sniffing after work—shaming, me age, but there you are—and I talked with whoever’d stay for it, officers and foremast hands alike. Near as I could work it out, Henry Lee were right, in his way—however much of the salt wine were going down however many throats all over the world, couldn’t be more than almost nobody affected beyond waking next day with a bad case of the whips and jingles. Like he’d said to me, just a few, a very few, and what difference to old Ben Hazeltine? No lookout of mine no more, I were clear out of that whole clamjamfry altogether, and nobody in the world could say I weren’t. Not one single soul in the world.
Only I’d been in it, you see. Right up to me whiskers in it, year on year—grown old in it, I had. Call it regret, call it guilt, call it what you like, all I knew was I’d sleep on straw in the workhouse and live on slops and sermons before I’d knock on Henry Lee’s door again. Even to have her look at me one more time, the way she looked in me house, in me best chair. I’ve made few promises in me life, and kept less, but I made that one then, made it to meself. Suppose you could call it a vow, like, if that suits you.