Cruzaste Mares
na aventura da pesca da baleia,
nessas viagens para a América
de onde às vezes os navios não voltam mais.

—Jorge Barbosa, “Irmão”

Long after his whaling days were over, Abraão Vieira dreamed of ice. Not the blocks still shipped in sawdust from the cross-cut ponds of New England to the melting tables of Calcutta and Martinique, not the lashing sleet of winter that wrapped the telephone wires of New Bedford as glassily as the rigging of its schooners and sloops, not even the rime bursting at the end of Clarks Point where he still walked with his scrimshaw-headed stick, grey-haired as the tide. He dreamed of the ice at the top of the world, coating the waves like oil or grinding them together like stones: the ice that sang and cried, that froze on lips and lashes, that knit ships like scars of soot into the sea. He had always imagined that in age he would return to the shores of his childhood, the blue lace of the Atlantic fanning itself white over black sand as hot in the sun as if it remembered the volcano it had blood-spouted from. He had been sixteen when he left, brown as the ratlines he clung to as the horizon rolled the dry, hungry, coffee-ridden mountain of his heart out of sight. At sixty-one, he no longer expected to set eyes on the pastel tumble of São Filipe again, but he was beginning to wonder if he had left the Arctic grounds.

He had known men of whom it was true. On Herschel and Kekerten Islands, he had helped to scrape their graves out of the fire-thawed frost-lock of the earth; he had carved their markers as carefully as he would have fashioned a cask instead of a coffin, iron-bound alike against the small foxes that trotted so demurely in their drift-white coats. Fevers or the surgeon’s knife had kept them, accidents of drunkenness or weather or tempers as short as the will-o’-the-wisp of winter sun. Ballads might mourn in the voices of their women, but Abraão could not imagine that the dead whalemen of the cemeteries were much troubled by dreams of the ice that sealed them to their shrouds—if they did not repose in expectation of the resurrection, he had always pictured them homesick as any sailor who never did have to go home. He was willing to credit more to the dead of storm and shipwreck, drifting souls the sea had gulped down with all their sins like a seine dragged about them and left their memories to roll in the swell with their bones. The prospect did not strike him as fanciful or blasphemous, any more than he would have coiled a loose rope against the sun even now. When he dreamed of ice, he thought of Ezra McKay.

Did you leave a sweetheart? Enéida had asked him once, as forthrightly as she had met his eye across a blockade of sailcloth in bales on the errand-crowded cobbles of Front Street, and a smile had glimmered in her own like a wake on the night sea. Even in the earliest years when half the time he returned to find her gone with the other women for the cranberry-picking on Cape Cod, migrating by the wages of the harvest instead of the almanac of the Arctic fishery, he had known what she meant by it. Had he left more than promises on Fogo, an American widow wearing black for a living husband she might die without meeting again? Had he kept a woman at the far rim of the world, puzzling out between their Englishes—her Inuktitut, his Kriolu—a language beyond their bodies? They were too old for sweet words and the darting, daring games of an adolescence half an ocean and a starving life away, but he loved Enéida Tavares like the first surprise of salt wind and the first shy of a step ashore, he had taken her walking down finer streets than his share of the lay could afford them and lain awake on the thought of their clasped hands like ironwood and acacia inlaid, and he did not know how to answer her yes or no. He had never courted the bright-haired boatsteerer, his Irish-pale face always burnt across its cat’s nose in the try-work summers, never gathered him a bouquet of the small mauveine blossoms he had learned to call aupilaktunnguat or etched his portrait into the intimate bone of a busk. In the amber-blue twilight that was dawn of wintering out, he had kissed his mouth and more, against cold, against distance, for the idle watches of conversation between Lahaina and Port Clarence or the electricity of Ezra’s arm about his waist as the aurora crackled its ghost-green curtains above the Galatea’s rail, and by the time the pale-sunned skies were thickening with terns and buntings and eiders and the pale-pebbled shores with harp and ringed seals hauling out, he had not yet had his fill. He never asked himself if it was love, what they did that a ship’s master could have had them in irons for. Damn fool, he remembered saying more often than kretxeu. Even waiting on deck for the whaleboats to return from the chase, when a cooper would be needed as much as a forecastle hand for the blood-greased, gull-mobbed work of cutting in, he had felt more than anything a wry kinship with the Boston girl Ezra had told him of, waiting for him like a wife already with all her family dead against the match and her holding fast as a lifeline, a rock of a girl, Ezra dreamily extolled her, a fire-eater, a pole star. Listening by the rose-glow of a sunset long after midnight, Abraão had wondered what kind of constellation it made them. A comet, he thought across forty years, or a shooting star such as they had watched streaking the cold fall night of the Galatea’s passage through the North Atlantic, another and then another after it like the sky itself coming loose from the zodiac, a lion’s mane of sea-quenched light: before he saw its like again, Ezra McKay would be drowned and his Elizabeth as good as buried, and Abraão Vieira would say finally, honestly to the woman who had never waited for him and smiled to see him each time like the dark, restless heat of the earth, Never another woman but you. It was not a lie, and if she discerned the truth beneath it, she married him still before God and the congregation of St. John the Baptist, a little assertion of Kabuverdi in their brightest and best-brushed Sunday clothes defying the disdain of the paler Portuguese. Nha dosura, he murmured in the pearl-hours of the morning, nha sukuru, nha korason. If she cherished a tryst of her own among the back-bending days of the cranberry bogs or a suitor who had voyaged no further than the lading of Merrill’s Wharf, he left it to her to tell him.

Long after he had ceased to expect it, he dreamed of Ezra. It was not a dream of that short, filthy, stunning summer nor the Arctic pack that had closed behind it, the fast and drift ice that the whalemen had cursed and the sun dogs danced in, that had near crushed the Galatea and stopped its fourth boatsteerer’s clever mouth for him in the end; instead he found him sitting at the end of Central Wharf as if watching for the fishing fleet, the Eastern-rig draggers and scallopers that had stolen the new century’s march on the whalers, their casks of oil and bundles of whalebone so much a phantom of the world before the war and so familiar that it was not until Abraão slung his own legs over the salt-tarred oak of the pier that he remembered his age and with it that in 1919 it had been decades since Ezra McKay was alive. He did not look like a dead man, his weather-beaten face and his hemp-whitened hair tipped to the sea breeze, the white shell buttons of his coat almost respectable for a retired seaman. He did not look as a ghost should have had the decency to, not yet thirty when the barnacled black flukes spun him down into the blue-skinned depths of the Beaufort Sea. While the gulls swung their lost cries over the water, he said nothing to Abraão, despite his smile slowly broadening in the late-skimmed light; it occurred to him long after waking that perhaps a drowned man could not, that all his words were lumps of anchor ice, knots of cold-water kelp. By dawn, it was a dream of tamarisks and famine and his youngest child who had never wandered the kiln-slopes of Pico do Fogo, gazing out to where the offing melted into cloud. He could not believe it meant anything, any more than the dreams that were a kind of Arctic if he had only heard tales of it, spectral plains of snow in a shimmer like submergence, so that he could not be sure which side of its freeze he stood on. He could not shake it off with the taste of coffee and katxupa refogada, the low gold of the winter sun that would never dip as far as it had on the Cumberland Sound.

He thought of lighting a candle at Nossa Senhora da Assunção, for a man who had cared less for God than for the breathless tangling of bodies in the lee of a glacier’s leavings or a bride-bed’s sheets. He would tell Enéida, whatever she had not guessed from the hard-learned letters he had written for years and posted to the Danvers Lunatic Hospital as faithfully as if they were money sent home. He had had a sweetheart and if he had a haunting, he would live with it like the ice of his imagination, his yearning as for his family or his island: his morna, carved in whale or walrus ivory. There was always someone who never returned, somewhere never returned to. Nha jelu, Abraão Vieira named the ghost of his lover, and began his answer at last.

© 2024 Sonya Taaffe