On deck the men are listless. The heat swells until the air is viscous with humidity. Sweat runs at their necks and temples. There is no wind, and they cannot stand it. Rough hands, iron stomachs, mouths filthy with fury and words as dark as starless midnight. Men of the sea. I share their passion, their dedication to the secure borders of this tough hull. A sheltered world, in the end.
Our sails now lie slack, like a woman’s petticoats pegged loosely from the towering masts.
Five bells.
I practise my confession, but can see no clear point at which to begin.
I was born in a small village in West Lothian, Scotland, in 1819.
I stop myself here, for what fact of birth can describe the fact of being? Except perhaps for the damp. The winter flooding. The wet and sullen earth beneath my simple cradle. I remember the touch of cold, mossy stone; and such dark, a deep dark, a deep unbreathing dark that you could feel against your skin and inside your lungs.
My constitution was made between the walls of that cottage, its humble door facing the sea. Water would become my solid ground, but it was the sky that I sought to hold.
Since then I’ve seen many seas and many lands, and now it is a final port I seek. This image you’ve gifted me guides my passage: a woodblock print, you call it. It shows a single, almost childlike barrel of an indigo-blue and white-clawed sea, curled atop with energy and about to release. I’ve known something of that. You chose it well, and with speed I could tell you so. But the absent wind has abandoned us to a deflated sea and feverish imaginings. My men show signs of disturbance. There are stories of what becomes of this.
Each night I am arrested by dreams. Emerging to take breath in the already-stifling morning stillness, what do I find? After all these years. Ghosts. There, in the hallucinatory rise and curl, press and fold, valleys and mountains of a vast silver aqueous motion.
Ghosts I must reconcile with the living…
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