“You ask me where my family is?” Joanie continued, squatting at Margaret’s side and gripping her wrist. “My husband was a carpenter. He could turn his hand to anything from a coffin to a wheel. My son was his apprentice and clever at it, too. Better than his pa, to tell the truth of it. Our daughter was as pretty as a dove and fifteen years of age. No way they’d leave her behind. But me — what am I? What use am I, a married woman?” She spread her hands, displayed herself in the firelight, a weary mother, plump and pockmarked. “And what about my little boy? Step forward, Suff, and show your face to our friend. He was only nine years old at the time. No place on board for him, either.”
“Why not?” Again, a question that Margaret understood she had to ask.
“Because they wouldn’t be able to slave him in a field or use him in a workshop, that’s why. Not yet, anyway. Too young and small. ‘Try again when you’re a man,’ they said. They could have said the same to me, except I’ll never be a man. And so I’ll always have to be American.” She spoke the last word as if it were a burden that would take her to her grave.
“We’re all Americans now,” one of the gaudier women said. “No ship’ll take us, not one of us.”
“I told my husband that I wouldn’t hold him back,” Joanie continued, raising her voice again, “but he said he’d rather stay with me. Keep the family together. I could’ve cried. But my son and daughter had already set their hearts on it. You know, the ‘dreams of leaving.’ Young people have a right to want the best. There’d be nothing here for them. They couldn’t stay. It wasn’t safe…”
“There’s nowhere safe.”
“I told my husband, ‘Don’t let them go alone. They’re not old enough to lose both parents. You go with them, and then I’ll follow on sometime, when I’m rich enough — or when I’m man enough.’ It bust our hearts, it snapped our family in two, but that’s what happened, that’s what happens down there every day. You’ll see. Me and my small boy waved them off and saw their boat shrink before our eyes and then it disappeared for good. We judged ourselves the most unwanted people in the world. That’s our story. And…Margaret, is it? If you’re not lucky, that’ll be your story, too. That’s the cold truth. This coast is blighted by bad luck. It’s no coincidence. Why does seawater taste the way it does?”
Margaret shook her head.
“There’s salt in tears, that’s why. The ocean’s one great weeping eye. On clear days, we can see the curve of it.”
Two women from the cottages joined Margaret for the last part of her walk. She was embarrassed by their presence at first, although there was no one else to witness the company she was keeping or to blush with her when both women linked their arms with hers, taking it in turns to be the windbreak. They were dressed not for walking but for attracting men. They were bare-legged, and even though they wrapped themselves in shawls against the bitter edge of the breeze, their skirts and blouses were flimsy and revealing and their hair was elaborately dressed. The plumper, quieter of the two was probably a little younger than Margaret, but the skinny one was thirty-five at least, flat-chested, spotty, and pallid, though forlornly beautiful in a way that eludes women who have not been toughened by misfortune.
Unlike Joanie, she’d not lost any children to the boats, she said, but her husband, when given the choice of keeping his wife or following his dreams, had chosen the more abstract of the pair. “Life before wife,” he’d said. That was two summers ago. She’d had to spend a month or so living rough at the anchorage, learning the crafts of begging, stealing, whoring, and sleeping in hollows. But toward the end of that summer, her fortunes had sweetened a little. She met another abandoned wife, a woman married for just a year but already with a child at her breast and desperately hungry, cold, and heartbroken to find herself so quickly “widowed.” Two women now. They were a sisterhood, and though their futures were hardly rosy, their lives seemed a little less bleak. That afternoon, buoyed up by each other’s company and impelled by the demands of the child, they explored along the coast above the river mouth, hunting for a safer place to sleep, somewhere free of men. They found the fishermen’s abandoned cottages and boats. Within the month, by summer’s end, with the stream of migrants slowing for the winter and the sail ships no longer crossing, the sisterhood had grown to nine, plus seven children and the wild dogs that they’d tamed with food and kept as guards.
“We always go down to the anchorage when ships are in,” the skinny woman said. “There’s pickings to be had. There’s sailors — pink as hogs, they are — looking for a woman, and quick to pay. Can’t understand a word they say, but when it comes to it, the noises that they make are all the same.” The plump one laughed. And Margaret laughed as well, though these were noises that she’d only ever heard from other people’s rooms. “Anyway, I call the tunes,” the woman continued. “When men are set on that, they’re meek as lambs — most of them, anyway. I take control. I do them with my hands if I can get away with it. Easy earnings. Quick to rinse off. No risk of pregnancy or catching Mrs. Phylis. I’m not ashamed. I’m not happy, but I’m not ashamed. We have to eat. It’s no more than you do with your husband once in a while, I bet.” She squeezed Margaret’s arm to share the intimacy and laughed. Margaret smiled and nodded, but — this was strange and unexpected — she felt ashamed to be so innocent. Mrs. Phylis. Who was she?
Fairly quickly, however, despite her embarrassment, Margaret was glad of the women’s company. Their chatter ate the journey up. Their manner was warm and irreverent. There’s safety in numbers. Besides, they knew the quickest route.
The path from the women’s cottages soon abandoned the flats and dunes and rose a bit to crest a narrow wind-torn bluff, alluvial and stony, and Margaret, still with a woman hanging on each arm, was looking down on a sight that was cluttered and entirely baffling. The boats, she understood. There were already three sail ships anchored midstream in the quieter, browner waters of the river mouth. Their sails were rolled up and tied back to the masts and rigging. From that distance, they seemed too small to take more than a dozen passengers. A fourth vessel, much larger than the others, its three masts still hung with twelve individual square-cut sails and with further triangles of canvas at the prow and stern, was negotiating the banks and channels, looking for shelter.
A traffic of cargo skiffs and rafts worked between the moorings and the shore. It was only when a man began to climb the rope ladder of one of the smaller ships’ sides that Margaret could tell how huge the ships actually were. Even their seemingly tiny flags must be the size of blankets. It was a peaceful, hopeful sight, however. Ships and water. Nothing sinister.
On shore was chaos of a kind Margaret had not witnessed before. There was a wide fringe of mud and weed all along the edges of the estuary, deeply cluttered, on both sides of the river, with great, abandoned slabs of rusting metal red in the sunlight, some of them the height of twenty men and chilling in their rawness; other pieces were intricate and inexplicable but no less unsettling. Here were rotting hulks and carcasses greater even and more foreboding than the junkle on the journey east had been. Nature could not — would not want to — shape so many squares and rectangles or perfect spheres, so many ducts and cylinders, so much massive symmetry. This was the craziest work of men, or of something worse than men. Even the mud itself seemed unearthly; what earth could boast such oily blues, such vivid greens, such silvers or such reds? The unstinting details of antiquities were always baffling. Margaret raised both eyebrows at the sight, and blew out her breath. She whistled, even. She was shaken by the discovery of so much debris, especially on this dream-making coast where surely all the worst of all the past could be forgotten by the emigrants.