Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
I was noticing something I devoutly did not want to. The Jemmy seemed to be groaning more often.
I held myself dead still to be sure.
Yes, oh sweet Christ and every dimpled disciple, yes: my berth was starting to sway and dive.
A boat is a hole in the water. And a ship is a bigger boat.
I heard Rob wake with a sleepy “What?” just before full tumult set in. The Jemmy stumbled now against every wave, conked its iron beak onto the ocean, rose to tumble again. The least minute of this behavior was more than enough storm for a soul in steerage, but the ruckus kept on and on. Oftener and oftener the ship’s entire iron carcass shuddered as the propellor chewed air. Sick creatures shudder before they die, don’t they. I felt each and every of these shakings as a private earthquake, fear finding a way to tremble not merely me but every particle of existence. Nineteen did not seem many years to have lived. What if the old Bell Rock had drowned me? my father remembered being asked in boyhood by Alexander McCaskill at the end of that floodtide tale. Where would you be then, Alexander the Second? What if, still the question.
Even yet this is a shame on me to have to say, but fear brought a more immediate question, too, insistent in the gut of me and below. I had to lay there concentrating desperately not to soil myself.
Amid it all a Highlands voice bleated out from a distant bunk, “Who’d ever think she could jig like this without a piper?” Oh, yes, you major fool, the ranting music of bagpipes was the only trouble we lacked just now. The Atlantic had its own tune, wild and endless. I tried to wipe away my sweat but couldn’t keep up with it. I desperately wanted to be up out of Steerage Number One and onto deck, to see for myself the white knuckles of the storm ocean. Or did I. Again the ship shook; rather, was shaken. What was out there? My blood sped as I tried to imagine the boiling oceanic weather which could turn a steamship into an iron cask. Cloudcaps darker than night itself. High lumpy waves, foaming as they came. Wind straining to lift the sea into the air with it, and rain a downward flood determined to drown the wind.
The storm stayed ardent. Barrels, trunks, tins, whatever was movable flew from side to side, and we poor human things clung in our berths to keep from flying, too. No bright remarks about jigs and pipes now. The steerage bunks were stacked boxes of silence now. Alberta, Manitoba, Montana were more distant than the moon. I knew Rob was clamped solidly below me, those broad wheelwright hands of his holding to whatever they had met. The worst was to keep myself steady there in the bunk while all else roved and reeled. Yet in an awful way the storm came to my help; its violence tranced a person. From stem to stern the Jemmy was 113 of my strides; I spent time on the impossibility of anything that length not being broken across canyons of waves. The ship weighed more than two thousand tons; I occupied myself with the knowledge that nothing weighing a ton of tons could remain afloat. I thought of the Greenock dock where I ought to have turned back, saw in my closed eyes the drowned cart horse Ginger I was trying every way I knew not to see, retraced in my mind every stairstep from deck down into Steerage Number One; which was to say down into the basement of the titanic Atlantic, down into the country where horses and humans are hash for fish.
Now the Jemmy dropped into a pause where we did not teeter-totter so violently. We were havened between crags of the sea. I took the opportunity to gasp air into myself, on the off chance that I’d ever need any again. Rob’s face swung up into view and he began, “See now, McAngus, that all could have been worse. A ship’s like a wagon, as long as it creaks it holds, and—” The steamship shuddered sideways and tipped ponderously at the same time, and Rob’s face snapped back into his berth.
Now the ship was grunting and creaking constantly, new and worse noises—you could positively feel the Jemmy exerting to drag itself through this maelstrom—and these grindstone sounds of its effort drew screams from women and children in the midship compartments, and yes, from more than a few men as well, whenever the vessel rolled far over. Someone among the officers had a voice the size of a cannon shot and even all the way down where we were could be heard his blasts of “BOS’N!” and “ALL HANDS!” Those did not improve a nonswimmer’s frame of mind, either.
The Jemmy drove on. Shuddering. Groaning. Both. Its tremors ran through my body. Every pore of me wanted to be out of that berth, free from water. But nothing to do but hold onto the side of the berth, hold myself as level as possible on a crooked ocean.
Nothing, that is, until somebody made the first retching sound.
Instantly that alarm reached all our gullets. I knew by heart what Crofutt advised. Any internal discomfort whilst aboard ship is best ameliorated by the fresh air of deck. Face the world of air; you will be new again. If I’d had the strength I’d have hurled Crofutt up onto that crashing deck. As it was, I lay as still as possible and strove not think of what was en route from my stomach to mouth.
Steerage Number One’s vomiting was phenomenal. I heaved up. Rob heaved up, every steerage soul heaved up. Meals from a month ago were trying to come out of us.
Our pitiful gut emptyings chorused with the steamship’s groans Our poor storm-bounced guts strained, strained, strained some more. Awful, the spew we have in us at our worst. The stench of it all and the foulness of my mouth kept making me sicker yet. Until I managed to remember the limes.
I fumbled them out and took desperate sucks of one. Another I thrust down to the bunk below. “Rob, here. Try this.”
His hand found mine and the round rind in it.
“Eat at a time like now? Angus, you’re—”
“Suck it. For the taste.” I could see white faces in the two bunks across from us and tossed a lime apiece over there as well. The Jemmy rose and fell, rose and fell, and stomachs began to be heard from again in all precincts of the compartment. Except ours.
Bless you, Madam Irish. Maybe it was that the limes put their stern taste in place of the putrid. Maybe that they puckered our mouths as if with drawstrings. Maybe only that any remedy seemed better than none. Whatever effect it may have been, Rob and I and the other lime-juiced pair managed to abstain from the rest of the general gagging and spewing. I knew something new now. That simply being afraid was nowhere near so bad as being afraid and retching your socks up at the same time.
• • •
Toward dawn the Atlantic got the last of the commotion out of its system. The Jemmy ploughed calmly along as if it had never been out for an evening gallop at all. Even I conceded that we possibly were going to live, now.
“Mates, what’s all this muss?” The steward put in his appearance and chivied us into sluicing and scrubbing the compartment and sprinkling chloride of lime against the smell, not that the air of Steerage Number One could ever be remedied much. For breakfast Rob and I put shaky cups of tea into ourselves and I had another lime, just for luck. Then Rob returned to his berth, claiming there was lost sleep to be found there, and I headed up for deck, anywhere not to be in that ship bottom.
I knew I still was giddy from the night of storm. But as I began to walk my first lap of the deck, the scene that gathered into my eyes made me all the more woolheaded.
By now the weather was clement, so that was no longer the foremost matter in me. And I knew, the dry brain way you know a map fact, that the night’s steaming progress must have carried us out of sight of land on all sides. But the ocean. The ocean I was not prepared for nor ever could be.
Anywhere my eyes went, water bent away over the curve of the world. Yet at the same time the Jemmy and I were in a vast washbasin, the rims of the Atlantic perfectly evident out there over us. Slow calm waves wherever I faced, only an occasional far one bothering to flash into foam like a white swimmer appearing and disappearing. No savage liquid plains these. This was the lyric sea, absently humming in the sameness of the gray and green play of its waves, in its pattern of water always wrinkling, moving, yet other water instantly filling the place. All this, and a week of water extending yet ahead.
I felt like a child who had
“How many voyages do you suppose this tea has made?”
“Definitely enough for pension.”
“Mahogany horse at dinner, Aberdeen cutlet at supper.” Which was to say, dried beef and smoked haddock. “You wouldn’t get such food just any old where.”
“You’re not wrong about that.”
“The potatoes aren’t so bad, though.”
“Man, potatoes are never so bad. That’s the principle of potatoes.”
“These ocean nights are dark as the inside of a cow, aren’t they.”
“At least, at least.”
“We can navigate by the sparks.” The Jemmy’s funnel threw constant specks of fire against the night. “A few more times around the deck will do us good. Are we both for it?”
“All right, all right, both. Angus, you’re getting your wish, back there on the Clyde.”
“What’s that, now.”
“You’re walking us to America.”
“Listen to old Crofutt here, will you. We find, from our experience, that the midpoint of the journey is its lowest mark, mentally speaking. If doubt should afflict you thereabout, remonstrate with yourself that of the halves of your great voyage, the emigration part has been passed through, the immigration portion has now begun. Somewhere there on the Atlantic rests a line, invisible but valid, like Greenwich’s meridian or the equator. East of there, you were a leaver of a place, on your way FROM a life. West across that division, older by maybe a minute, know yourself to be heading TO a life.”
“Suppose we’re Papists yet?” Sunday, and the priest’s words were carrying to us from the Irish congregation thick as bees on the deck’s promenade.
“I maybe am. There’s no hope whatsoever for you.”
“This Continental Divide in Montana that old Crofutt goes on about, Angus. What is that exactly?”
“It’s like, say, the roof peak of America. The rivers on this side of it flow here to the Atlantic, on the other they go to the Pacific.”
“Are you telling me we’re already on water from Montana, out here?”
“So to say.”
“Angus, Angus. Learning teaches a man some impossible things, is what I say.”
“Too bad they’re not bumboats. I could eat up one side of a leg of mutton and down the other about now.” Autumn it may have been back in Scotland, but there off Newfoundland the wind was hinting winter, and Rob and I put on most of the clothes we possessed to stay up and watch the fishing fleets of the Newfoundland coastal banks.
“And an Irish smile, Rob, what about. Those sisters you were eyeing at Queenstown, they’d be one apiece for us if my arithmetic is near right.”
“Angus, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. I only hope for your sake that they have women in America, too.”
“There’s a chance, do you think?”
“Shore can’t be all so far now.”
“No, but you’ll see a change in the color of the ocean first. New York harbor will be cider instead of water, do you know, and it’ll start to show up out here.”
Then came the day.
“Mates,” the steward pronounced, “we’re about to pass old Sandy Hook. New York will step right out and meet us now. I know you’ve grown attached to them, but the time is come to part with your mattresses. If you’ll kindly all make a chain here, like, and pass them along one to the next to the stairway . . .” Up to deck and overboard our straw beds proceeded, to float off behind us like a flotilla of rafts. A person would think that mine ought to have stood out freshest among them, so little of the sleep in it had been used.
• • •
New York was the portal to confusion, and Castle Garden was its keyhole. The entire world of us seemed to be trying to squeeze into America through there. Volleys of questions were asked of us, our health and morals were appraised, our pounds and shillings slid through the money exchange wicket to come back out as dollars and cents. I suppose our experience of New York’s hustle and bustle was every America-comer’s: thrilling, and we never wanted to do it again. Yet in its way, that first hectic experience of America was simply like one of the hotting-up days back in the ’wright shop, when the bands of tire iron were furnaced to a red heat and then made to encircle the newly crafted wagon wheels. Ultimately after the sweating and straining and hammering, after every kind of commotion, there was the moment as the big iron circle was cooling and clasping itself ever tighter around the wheel when you would hear a click, like a sharp snap of fingers. Then another, and another—the sound of the wheelspokes going the last fraction of distance into their holes in the hub and the rim, fitting themselves home. And if you listened with a bit of care, the last click of all came when the done wheel first touched the ground, as if the result was making a little cluck of surprise at its new self. Had you been somewhere in the throng around Rob and me as we stepped out of Castle Garden’s workshop of immigration into our first American day, to begin finding our way through a city that was twenty of Glasgow, you might have heard similar sounds of readiness.
Then the railroad and the westward journey, oceanic again in its own way, with islands of towns and farms across the American prairie. Colors on a map in no way convey the distances of this earth. What would the place Montana be like? Alp after alp after alp, as the Alberta adherent aboard ship assured us? The Territory of Montana, Crofutt defined, stands as a tremendous land as yet virtually untapped. Already planetarily famous for its wealth of ores, Montana proffers further potentialities as a savannah for graziers and their herds, and where the hoofed kingdom does not obtain, the land may well become the last great grain garden of the world. Elbow room for all aspirants will never be a problem, for Montana is fully five times the size of all of Scotland. How was it going to be to live within such distances? To become pioneers in filling such emptiness? At least we can be our own men there, Rob and I had told each other repeatedly. And now we would find out what kind of men that meant.
America seemed to go on and on outside the train windows, and our keenness for Montana and Lucas Barclay gained with every mile.
• • •
“He’ll see himself in you,” I said out of nowhere to Rob. I meant his uncle; and I meant what I was saying, too. For I was remembering that Lucas Barclay had that same burnish that glowed on Rob. The face and force to go with it, for that matter. These Barclays were a family ensemble, they all had a memorable glimmer. Years and years back, some afterschool hour Rob and I were playing fox-chase in the woodyard of the wheelwright shop, and in search of him I popped around a stack of planks into my father and Lucas and Rob’s father Vare, eyeing out oak for spokes. I startled both myself and them by whirling into the midst of their deliberation that way, and I remember as clear as now the pair of bright Barclay faces and my father’s pale one, and then Lucas swooping on me with a laugh to tickle his thick thumb into my ribs, I met a man from Kingdom Come, he had daggers and I had none, but I fell on him with my thumb, and daggered and daggered ’um! Was that the final time I’d seen Lucas before his leaving of Scotland, that instant of rosy smile at a flummoxed boy and then the tickling recital? The lasting one, at least.