Deep into the long, dreary night the Ocean moaned below and the wind howled above, the two elements conspiring to cause the Blue Baby Beth, a beauty of a ship, to creak like an old coffin hauled on ropes descending from heaven.
Sprawled across the decks of this sleek coffin where the stiffening forms of recently live men: Jonah Heel, two red men, and the twisted body of the crazed Englishman who had brought the red fiends down upon them. The last of these red fiends had not seemed so fiendish, as Clay had amputated his jaggedly shark-eaten leg and tended it as best he could. They called him Old Penny, just like they had called his friend who Mickey had beat to death in the deck fight with the same hands he had beat to death that dreadful lunatic of a white man.
Beneath these sanguine deck boards, through the long hours of the night, crept Clay Evenstar and Mickey Durst, like rat-ghasts among the catacombs of some floating mausoleum.
As the small, sleek ship drifted out upon the increasingly blusterous ocean, Fat Sam sobbed himself to sleep in old Jonah’s wheel hammock, from where the purser had forever kept watch like some fleshy gargoyle behind the ship’s wheel and before the stern lamp. Likewise, Old Penny reclined on deck with his half-gone leg propped up on Mickey’s sea chest.
Below deck, from the Captain’s cabin, to galley, and down into the hold where the one rat that Mickey had failed to kill on their voyage into the South Atlantic regarded them craftily from his unseen haunt, Clay and Mickey scoured the ship for the Captain’s log book, with the idea that Clay could read the directions for charting one’s way across a watery world and Mickey might somehow translate these directions into action through his mastery of sail-reefing and other such monkey-like feats of seaman that eluded Clay and Sam, the cabin boy and cook respectively.
In the end, what was gathered from among the Captain’s library was: the King James Bible, which Clay had learned to read from—the very copy used by Mistress Evenstar for this purpose—that dreadful Moby Dick storybook, heavy enough to smash in a head, which none but Mickey liked to hear read, a lock-clasp journal, the lock to which remained on the Captain’s person where he fell battling Old Penny’s mates, and his log book, with all entries of the original seaman’s guide written in some language Clay could not make out, though it used English letters. The Captain had entered his notes in the margins in English, which did them little good, since Clay could not make out the original.
At long last was another, very old, book, bound in deep red leather. This book had engraved in gold upon its cover a swirling image, like a whirlpool. The language within, was in English letters again, and in a language that seemed somewhat similar to that used in the guidebook.
It was deep midnight by the time Clay and Mickey sat around a lantern next to Old Penny, who, though moaning and glassy-eyed, showed interest in the red book, which Clay held up to him, allowing the old red man to mumble to himself, until he passed out.
Mickey then spoke up, “Blackie Boy, I should have paid attention to the Captain’s factoring instead of dancing at night. I know he used the sky to navigate, but have not a clue as to how it be done.”
“Never mind that, Mickey, the sky lights are covered by clouds now—not a single heavenly lamp to light our way.”
Mickey then seemed to resolve himself to action, and rose, headed down below deck, and soon came above with rolls of worn canvas, awl, needle and cord. He looked meaningfully at Clay, said not a word, and went to the crazed Englishman’s body and began rolling him up in old sail cloth. Clay then knew what the rest of the night would entail and leant Mickey a hand with the wrapping and sewing.
Once the lunatic was bound in his coffin of watery design, Clay felt rather self conscious about touching the Bible with the very hands that had bundled him up, but did want to consecrate this act in some way, if only of a garbled combinations of half-remembered verses.
“Lord, on behalf of this lunatic man: I beg that you forgive me my sins, excuse my unholy ways, and recognize this big ocean you have flooded this earth with as my Ocean Tomb, a way back to your grace someway, me thinkin’ this salty sea might be your son’s tears and a salvation river for me, where my soul might sleep.”
He then looked to Mickey, assured in his heart, that though he had meant well, that he had completely botched the job of combining what he could remember of burial prayers, him having been so broken up at the two funerals he had thus far attended in his young life to remember a word said over the grave.
Mickey merely snorted, “Betta than the bug-eyed bugger deserved. I’d beat the life outa ‘im again, on the very church altar, if it came to that.”
They then heard a creak as their eyes danced uncomfortably, and saw to Clay’s left that Old Penny was looking at them with wide knowing eyes, clutching the spiral case to his breast with one hand and making the sign of the catholic cross with the other.
And the deck slid on beneath their feet into the still darkening night, waves rising almost to the gunwale now, causing Mickey to look nervously aloft at the one half-reefed sail, wondering if the Captain would tell him to let it full-out to ride before this unsettling breeze that brought such dark clouds out of the ocean-swallowed east, or if he would command that they be reefed complete. For they felt it in their bones now, that a storm was coming, a storm that rocked the ocean, that rocked the ship, that rocked the hammock that pitched Fat Sam out onto the deck to wake from his sobbing slumber.
