Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 7

  All Covington’s mysteries had a special interest for MacCracken. But he wanted them unravelled in their rightful place, in those ‘up country’ locations, as Covington said (where up meant down). MacCracken had contracted Covington’s corn to a miller. He had paid for half Covington’s cattle in promissory notes. He had expected Covington, though he never said a word of it, to supervise their business on the spot. He had his picture of Covington at his cattle yards, dressing him in imagination in an oilskin coat, wielding a fly swat and puffing a corncob pipe. This was before MacCracken ever saw him wearing an Argentine poncho and smoking thin cigars, thus confounding his every last supposition about him—that he was devoid of romance absolutely.

  The first night of Covington’s new residence there came a banging on MacCracken’s door. An imperious, troubled Covington stood there, a fishbone stuck between his teeth that he wrenched free while bellowing:

  ‘MacCracken!’

  ‘I am here,’ MacCracken stabbed his own chest (to the deaf ’un).

  ‘I want your gun. The ladies’ shotgun you keep for scarin’ possums off your roses …’

  ‘If you want something,’ said MacCracken, opening the broom cupboard where he kept the slim weapon, ‘you must get out of the habit of disparaging me for having it.’

  He slapped the gun into Covington’s hands, who examined it curiously, underlining his ingratitude. ‘I picked you for a breech-loading man, MacCracken. Such a convenient, slick conception of shooting they are. I meself am wedded to the old frontstoker. What are these charges made from, fly paper? They are somewhat clingy to the touch.’

  MacCracken only stared at the phenomenon before him. A gentleman without pretension when it came to securing a friendship—who made scorn his starting point. It was quite admirable, really—if you liked that brand of swank.

  All this was by way of an aside, however, because Covington then said:

  ‘MacCracken, answer me this …’

  MacCracken only half-listened, and surreptitiously consulted his clock, expecting Miss X and her nightly visitation quite soon, not wanting Covington to stir gossip before he must.

  ‘I won’t keep you, MacCracken,’ he sneered, ‘but where is God?’

  That caught MacCracken. God? Covington waved the gun around and asked MacCracken questions from his experience as a surgeon. ‘In your dissections at the Boston hospital, and ever after,’ he wanted to know, ‘have you seen evidence of a human soul?’

  The questions rained down on MacCracken’s slightly bowed head. Had he cut a man open and found any immortal part? When he was in Covington himself did he peer around corners? (No.) Had he ever cleaned out a possum? (No, he had never cleaned out a possum.) Had he ever cleaned out a bird? (No, he had never cleaned out a bird.) If he had, would he ever have found any difference? Was he not an educated man, compared with Covington, a dunderhead? So? And so on?

  ‘The difference, MacCracken, what is it?’

  Difference between what and what? (MacCracken mimed.)

  ‘Difference between a man and a rat, noddy-foozle!’ Covington bellowed. Then grabbing MacCracken by the elbow, he dragged him into the night. They stumbled along the shelled pathway leading to Covington’s gleaming, newly painted and snug-as-a-ship’s-cabin cottage with its lamplit nameplate ‘Coral Sands’. Within that whitewashed palace, through a square window-pane, MacCracken saw a short, humorously squat woman in voluminous skirts standing on a seachest and flapping her arms against her sides. She had jet-black hair pinned with a half-dislodged Spanish comb.

  ‘Shoo!’ Her eyes bugged and MacCracken saw why. There on the dining table, consuming an end of loaf, was a sleek whiskery rat. ‘Get it off!’ she shrilled.

  It was at this moment MacCracken realised that every word spoken to him that night by his friend, from Covington’s first banging on his door until now, had been bitterly sarcastic in tone. The sarcasm was not addressed to MacCracken. It rose to the height of the universe itself. Within that dome, rampant as a flea, stood the Mrs Covington that MacCracken had thought in their country fastness. He found himself commandeered as an illustration in a domestic tableau: ‘MacCracken will show you!’—and realised he was no more real to Covington in his rage than the man’s own face in a mirror.

  ‘Dr MacCracken,’ Covington silenced the woman with a roar, ‘says there is no God! And so bless you and shut yourself up, darlin’. A man is no different from a rat, and a man never frightened you, did he, eh?’

  ‘Blaspheme all you like and still say your prayers. Heaven prepare you, Syms Covington,’ she said.

  Covington waved a finger under his dame’s nose, and while MacCracken stood feigning amusement, he raised the ladies’ shotgun and with quick aim sent the rat slamming against the opposite wall without breaking a dish.

  ‘If you’d done that first,’ said the wife, hopping down, ‘we’d a-had none of this nonsense.’ She dusted her hands and introduced herself, giving the doctor’s hand a vigorous shake. ‘Mrs Covington, and very pleased to meet you, sir. I’ll put the kettle on.’ That done, she skipped back to MacCracken’s side while Covington stood nearby cracking his knuckles and staring into the night. ‘He gets his ideas,’ she lowered her voice and turned away from Covington. ‘I do my best, but Dr MacCracken,’ she drew breath, raising herself to her full height, ‘he has such hopes for you!’

  MacCracken allowed himself to be soothed by a cup of the best China tea. Then, with a neat bow, he bade them goodnight and went to join his pleasure.

  They weathered howling destruction in the Bay of Biscay, making course for Lisbon. Fear could be read in sailors’ faces but the one face to watch was John Phipps’s, that never showed anything but faith in his God’s intentions.

  Covington puked and moaned. Watched England sink like a plate in the suds. Felt he was being stolen but the feeling did not last. With stomach cramps doubling him over he learned to scramble and fetch. With a bar of holystone he scuffed decks hairier than any storms, and whenever he faltered looked around for John Phipps, his begetter in the life of the sea, and was rewarded by the sight of him, who was always in the act of obeying an order, running along deck in bare feet, hauling on sheets or hoisting himself up into the ratlines, his dark narrow face raised to the sky and seawater running down his beard.

  When Covington was over his first spewing he knew he would be strong. He was hungry and chewed on a heel of bread and a rind of damp cheese. When the sea rose in a green wall, striped with foam, it amazed him and he started singing. He and his small friend Joey Middleton, who was in the same mood, practised sliding between-decks. Their bark, the South Sea Castle, flicked about like a fly in a bottle, and the worse it got the more they hooted and hurrahed, calling on the heavens to do their utmost. They were like infants in a playpen the way they carried on. It made John Phipps somewhat proud. His band of pilgrims were all ship’s boys now, nippers, odd-jobbers, and officers’ servants. They spread their joy and it was a happy vessel. It was good to hear Phipps’s accents of the countryside when the watch was changed at four in the morning, and the boys were called to vacate their hammocks:

  ‘Oi, sleep any longer and ye all shall be hanged. Come on rascals, Slow-pace Dell, out of there Foul-wind Wingate and Crook, tip you over Sleepy-head Middleton, will you?’ When Phipps came to Covington he prodded him on the buttocks. ‘Is it the girl called Dull?’

  ‘Aye, and if you keep it up I will kiss you.’

  When they were some way out from England their Christian captain faced his duty and called for the cat-o-nine-tails to punish shoregoing offenders. A few had rioted in Portsmouth and delayed the sailing.

  It was fearful to watch. The bosun’s mate braided a whip from rope and quarter-inch line, and fitted a red baize cover to the handle. The boys saw drunkards and malingerers baring their backs and taking their punishment with a rag between their teeth. ‘Here is an example for you, a foretaste of hell,’ said Phipps. Bare human skin was a delicate parchment exposed to an underlining of blood an
d lymph by the dozen strokes the bosun’s mate made. The captain and the surgeon watched as the cat was applied with pernickety precision. The very first lick caused a man to jerk his body around, while on the last he slumped. The sight made all the boys sick and they swore it would never be them. Covington stared in pity. Animals herded by his Pa in the Bedford stockyards were never flayed as fiercely, because their hides were differently valued.

  The great trust that Covington had in the world’s advancement of his fate, that he was born to and found only rarely shaken, he brought with him from Bedfordshire to the sea. It only rarely rankled that his duties were all odd jobs, and that his cheerfulness was taken advantage of in the same way his big brothers had used him. He swabbed decks, nailed boards, mended barrels, carried buckets of food to the officers’ wardroom— and longed to be chosen for the clerk’s job of transcribing the ship’s log, so he could show his full mettle—but, whenever a messy task was to hand, such as plucking a fowl or despatching a goat, his butchering sire was invoked, and Covington was called upon to wield the knife.

  When he came up for air he struggled forward along the spray-whipped deck and clung to the bowsprit. It was his instinct to dive into water to clean blood from his arms. The whim had to be fought aside, even on a ship sailing the depths of the ocean. Covington dangled over the lively green swirls watching the ship’s figurehead dip and dive. She was a maid with hair streaming back, with small bold breasts and although she was just a piece of wood painted in simple colours, he fell in love with her, imagining himself to sleep at nights stroking her. She had fluted nostrils, dozy eyes, and a wide strong forehead.

  A feeling Covington had in dreams of celestial highways and lightbeams in clouds was translated into his experience of naval voyaging. Later there would be ghostly passages through narrows, blue fire trickling around masts in electrical disturbances; and there would be a giant ray flapping under the ship—it would be as big as the ship itself—and when the undersea animal turned and came beating its way back towards them as if to engulf all their timbers in its maw, Covington would have to be restrained from jumping overboard because of a wild conviction that got hold of him that he should wrestle with the creature and save them all. It would be his third ship by then.

  The young man climbing the stile—John Bunyan’s Christian rendered in coloured glass-panes—appeared at sea one day when Phipps threw Covington a rope as he staggered along the deck, and saved him from spinning overboard.

  ‘Thank Christ, John, it was you,’ the boy spluttered, his hero-worship at its peak.

  ‘You thanked the right one first,’ Phipps confided in him: ‘As for me, had I a thousand gallons of blood in my body, I could spill it all for the sake of the Lord Jesus.’

  That night when Covington stretched himself to sleep he pictured Phipps wielding his sword repelling enemies, and the great admiral, the one that John knew, coming across the water on a shining barge to see all was well. This was the way Covington stayed safe on his path—his adventure out from home. John Phipps had Christ and Covington had John Phipps understanding Christ, and that was the truth of the matter.

  Hammocks were piped down and it was sleep, palms held together under their chins in an attitude of trust. The sails leaned them into the night, high-walled and straining as the helmsman brought the vessel constantly up to the weather. Trickling and sloshing sounds accompanied them the whole way. They heard the vessel’s timbers groaning apart, admitting water, creaking shut.

  There was always a bias of gravity to one side or the other of a ship, a slope running up or down determining which way the boys went scuttling, with tin pots and lanterns clanking, and loose items sliding across the under-deck to tumble around their ears. There was always a dampness, too. Below decks it was dark like the lock gates where Covington used to swim. The oak planking was always wet and looming, threatening to split. Yet it was strange, considering the violence of the sea: there was always a feeling of safety, too. Everything could be trusted to have a good end.

  One day when Covington took his turn with Phipps at the bilge-pump, and Phipps asked him why he grinned when the work was so tedious, Covington said, ‘I am always full of good notions that come into my mind to comfort me as I pump.’

  ‘You have a great innocence,’ said Phipps. ‘Be sure that you don’t get taken for a fool.’

  Covington laughed at this, and stamped on Phipps’s toe.

  Phipps saw to it that they messed together, all five boys in a bunch, and saw to it that the one-armed cook never held back on the duff, the sea pie or the lobscouse, nor pease soup or even grog, much watered, when his boys scrambled for their dinner. They called at Madeira for victualling and ate grapes for the first time, also figs, melons and dates. They kept oranges in nets hung thick above their heads, and had a rule of honour that they were to eat one only when it started to go bad. The other two mess-mates were Door and MacCurdy, foretopmen with John Phipps. They were great simple West Country fellows and like big brothers to the boys. While Door carved the meat MacCurdy wore a blindfold and called out names, so that nobody could say they were given short rations through malice, or were given too much through being favourites. When excitement mounted Joey Middleton danced on their mess table, ducking and weaving to avoid the lantern and overhead beams—then went crouching with his back bent like a frog, as hands reached out and grabbed him by the skinny ankles.

  When they came into the hot latitudes, Phipps taught them how to make palm leaf hats, as favoured in the Caribbean islands. In talk of those islands Joey Middleton’s hopes of finding his father, the red-headed sailorman, were dashed, because the South Sea Castle made her course in a contrary direction, past Brazil on a survey of ports ever-southwards. Covington learned carpentry and odd jobs in that first season away, and learned to play the fiddle with seaman Door his teacher—long afterwards being able to recapture his days afloat from a sniff of tar and a shaving of timber, and from the quick bounce of a well-powdered bow on catgut.

  They were starting to be sailors and Covington felt pride in his new craft. As their Sea-Daddy John Phipps oversaw the boys’ cleanliness and their clothes, teaching them to cut out jackets, shirts and sailcloth trousers, and to sew, and to wash it all in a sea-bucket, and to mend their clothes as neatly as apprentice tailors might.

  Phipps was a great one for avoiding any show of favourites, although Covington had a vanity that he was the one. If he played ‘To Be A Pilgrim’ in a key of G on his fiddle, low as a bullfrog growling, it brought tears to Phipps’s eyes. Their special closeness was Covington’s secret and at first made him proud, then careless, then itchy at the restriction. For he grew past the conceit Phipps had that they were all his honest pilgrims. Covington had too much blood in his body: it pounded him along.

  Part of their orders as naval surveyors was the getting of creatures. On a wooded island a party went ashore with guns and ropes. John Phipps was well known as a countryman and favoured by the officers for the hunt. Phipps named Covington his offsider. They chased pigs with the help of a slavekeeper’s dogs and cornered a great tusker. Covington went in with the knife while ropes held the animal down. It took six men to carry the boar back to the beach, where it was divided into portions and rowed to the ship. There were fights over the crackling after the cooks had done their best, and the bones were cleaned for the surgeon to measure and compare. This wooded island off Brazil was the first place where Covington ever ate a banana. It prickled the back of his throat and gave him a rash on his arm. It was the first place he ever saw a slave, a tall man and black as a moonless coalheap, with skin of sweating lacquer as he ran with the dogs on long swift legs. Phipps fumed at the practice of slavery, and gave them his earful about it: ‘See how he’s bred for the chase.’ But his indignation wore thin with the boys when they saw the slave whooping with joy in the hunt. He was in there for the kill, and as one of the officers said, ‘Went in as well as ever I saw a man in my life.’ Besides, Covington saw the hut where the man lived. It w
as all done up comfortably.

  ‘Ignorance is your name,’ said Phipps to Covington, ‘and as your name is, so are you.’

  Covington whistled and jumped in the longboat, standing in the bow with his bloodstained arms folded as the oarsmen rowed them back to their vessel. He found he could give John Phipps the freeze, and make it last for days.

  Though they broke that coolness soon enough, when Covington saw Phipps hanging upside down from a hatch and laughing in his face. It was in a storm.

  ‘Are you afraid, Syms Covington?’

  ‘Not if you aren’t afraid.’

  ‘And why am I not afraid?’

  ‘Because of the admiral who sails with you, John.’

  ‘And who is he?’

  ‘He is a revelation of Christ to our souls indeed.’