Wild Wind Westward Page 9

  Forever.

  Was not the terrible finality of forever more imposing than Kristin’s promise to him, and his to her, on the day they had taken and consumed each other’s images from the waters of the pool?

  Eric had a momentary impulse to race down the mountain, crash into the church, and steal Kristin away. But he was not too desperate to understand that such an act would be his last, and would do Kristin no good whatsoever. At least now, with all the villagers bent upon the ceremony and the celebration to follow, he could get away. Where? Oslo, first. He could lose himself there for a time. And then what? Get some kind of mean, backbreaking laborer’s job? Become a hired arrangement of flesh and muscle for any man who deigned to pay him a wage? No. He rejected such a fate as soon as he thought of it. That kind of life was not for him. But, as a dispossessed landsman, what else might he do? Where might he go? Sweden or Denmark, perhaps, or maybe Germany. But if he did so, he would be an outsider in old societies that were organized for and manipulated by old, established families.

  Then he knew. The first fateful glimmer of his destination came to him. He would go westward, across the sea. He would ride with the same wild wind that, centuries earlier, had filled the strange square sails on the ships of his Norse forefathers. He would go to America and from there, somehow, some way, someday recoup his fortunes and fashion a way to regain Kristin and his ancient name! He did not know how he would do these things, but he knew that if he ceased to believe or to hope, he might just as well end his life now, here in the hills of home.

  So, twenty years of age, utterly defeated save for a strong blond body and beating heart, Eric Gunnarson threw the pack upon his broad shoulders, turned away forever from the village of his youth, and set off down the road toward Oslo, and destiny.

  Part Two

  New York, Oslo, London,

  1860–63

  I

  “Hey! You! That’s right, you, the big Scandihoovian lummox. Where in hell do you think you’re going?”

  Those coarse, scornful words welcomed Eric Gunnarson to America.

  He had climbed up out of the boiler room of the United States merchant ship Anandale, to take a look at New York, and, stunned to sheer astonishment by the swell and size of it, had wandered down the gangplank and onto the pier.

  “Get your ass back on that boat, Sven or Lars or whatever your name is. Hell, I bet you can’t even understand a word I’m saying, can you?”

  Eric turned, without real anger, to look down upon a wizened, crafty-looking man in a blue cap and uniform. The man’s little pig eyes stared out at Eric from beneath the wool cap pulled low for warmth. It was cold, brutal January in New York, and an icy wind howled down the Hudson River. Eric stared back at the man for a long moment.

  “Yes, I understand English,” he said slowly, with the lilt and roll of Norway still on his tongue.

  “Then do as I say and get the hell back on the Anandale,” snapped the man, somewhat surprised but undeterred. “Foreigners like you got no business in America.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Eric, before turning and reboarding the ship. “That is why I have come all this way.”

  He went back down to his bunk in the boiler room, which had been his home for six months of slow peregrination across the oceans of the world. Yes, I do have business in America, he repeated to himself, lying down on the bunk. Soon he was lost in thought. He had to think of a way to get off the ship. He had served it well, feeding coal into the boilers to fuel its long voyage. And it had served him well, too. From its unprincipled captain, Hubert Dubin, he had learned more than a speaking knowledge of the English language: he had learned that life in the new land of promise might not be vastly different from that practiced by the Rolfsons.

  “I like you,” Dubin had said one night. “You’re a big blonde dumbkopf, and you shovel-coal like a machine, but I don’t mind saying that I don’t find you too pathetic to share a brandy.”

  The S. S. Anandale had been off the Azores that night, and over a month out of Oslo. Her itinerary was, as Captain Dubin put it, “catch-as-catch-can,” a phrase that both intrigued and mystified Eric, until Dubin explained it in simpler terms. “You go where the wind blows,” he chortled.

  Eric had had, at that point, only a month’s exposure to the dull, manifestly beaten-down and dim-witted Irish crew, nor did he grasp, in its English form, the not-too-complicated metaphor of “catch” that Dubin had used. But he understood instinctively the significance of “wind.”

  “A man goes where the gold is,” Dubin clarified. “You know, the shekels, the gelt, the bucks.”

  “Bucks?” Eric asked, as Dubin downed a brandy and poured himself another. Eric thought of male elks in the mountains. One month on the sea, and he had only begun to trace the connections of tongue to tongue.

  “Yes, bucks. Dollars. America is ruled by them.”

  Eric thought back upon his homeland, and the Rolfsons. Kristin must be in Oslo now, living in the Rolfson mansion. Money. That he understood. But to learn America operated in the same way was more than a disappointment. It was saddening. Captain Dubin noted his crestfallen expression.

  “What’s the matter, Sven, hey?”

  “I had heard other things of the land to which…to which I want go.”

  “Sure you have. You Europeans don’t know nothin’ yet. But you just wait. Don’t be in no hurry, mind you. America’s just like any other place, ’cept more complicated. That’s why I’m sailin’ all over hell an’ gone.”

  Noting, too, that Eric had not understood the idiom, he clarified himself. “I’m just out to make me a buck,” he said. “But don’t you go worryin’ your Viking heart none. I’ll get you to the good old US of A just like I said.”

  Indeed, that was what Captain Dubin had promised.

  Eric, having come out of the mountains and down into Oslo, had immediately made his way to the docks. He was tired and hungry, and always watchful. He had killed an officer of the law. The current state of affairs in Norway did not benignly countenance the death of an official at the hands of unpropertied malcontents, a characterization which would be applied to him should his apprehension be effected and his person called before the court. But neither did Eric lightly countenance what had been done to him, nor accept without bitterness the fact that flight was his only safe haven.

  If he could achieve it.

  Oslo port disconcerted him. There was so much going on, all at the same time. Activity never ceased. Dozens of ships filled the harbor, either tied to the docks or lying at anchor out in the water, waiting to load or unload. He could not understand many of the languages spoken along the quay, and even more was he anguished by the smell of stews and sausages cooking in the shops along the waterfront. He had no food with him, and the few coins in his name had been left behind a chimney brick in the house that now belonged to Gustav Rolfson. All around him sailors and laborers babbled and rushed. He walked onward, trying not to attract undue attention, his belly shrinking and rumbling.

  Then, as he passed a ship bearing the letters U.S. S.S. Anandale, he heard the sounds of a struggle. He did not understand the words—although he presumed them to be English because he knew U.S. meant the United States of America, of which he had read—but he knew the sound of conflict well enough. There was a fight going on up on the deck of the vessel. He stopped. A couple of Norwegian dockworkers came up beside him, listening, too, to the quarrel. They laughed, seeming to understand.

  “What’s going on?” he asked them, in his native tongue.

  They laughed again.

  “Lars Ingersoll has just lost his berth,” jeered one of the men. “He hired on as a boilerman, but he’s drunk as a skunk all the time. I guess the American captain found him out.”

  And with that two figures appeared at the top of the Anandale’s narrow gangway. One of them, a hulking blond youth, staggering and flushed, braced himself on the gangway rail and started down to the dock.

  “And stay off my ship, you soused
Nordic turd!” yelled the man behind him. “I already got enough whiskey-swilling micks aboard to keep the stillmasters of the world in clover.”

  He punctuated his cry by giving the unfortunate Ingersoll a solid kick in the rump, which caused the young man to lose his balance and tumble down to the pier. Ingersoll was shaken, but too loose in drunkenness to have been hurt.

  On deck the captain was wailing and bellowing in the guttural English tongue.

  “What is he saying?” Eric asked the docksmen, who were laughing at Ingersoll’s attempts to rise.

  “What? He wants a new man for his boiler room, that’s what. He plans to sail in an hour.”

  “And what would such a man have to do?” Eric asked.

  The man and his companion regarded Eric as if he were daft.

  “Are you some kind of farm lout or ninny?” one of them shouted. “It’s like living hell. You live in a room of iron and shovel coal into a furnace of iron. The heat will drive the living God from your soul. But the ship will move.”

  “Modern times,” added his companion. “God goes but the ship moves.”

  Above them, on the railing of the Anandale, the captain was still shouting and gesticulating. Ingersoll lurched to his feet and staggered drunkenly toward the nearest dockside tavern.

  “What manner of man is he seeking?” Eric asked.

  The two dock workers slouched away, laughing. “Somebody even dumber than Ingersoll,” one of them called back, over his shoulder.

  Eric stood there on the pier, his pack still upon his shoulders, and looked up at the captain, who was pointing at him and shouting. And Eric knew. This opportunity would not come again. He would be gone from Norway, true, but never would he come before the court, and never be lifted to the gallows. Boiler room or no, hell or worse, it would not be more than a man born Starbane could bear. He dropped his backpack and began to make shoveling motions, there on the dock.

  The ship’s captain ceased to gabble, regarded Eric in wonderment for a moment. Then he laughed. “Ya, ya, Sven,” he said, motioning Eric up the gangway. “Ya, ya, you come on up here, Sven. You good strong boy. You shovel coal real good, ya, Sven?”

  Eric went on board the Anandale, wondering why he was being called Sven when his name was Eric. He did not understand until he met the Irish crew, that everyone from Norway was called Sven. Or worse.

  It bothered him, because he was Nordic, and had always thought himself and his people to be lords of the mighty earth.

  Captain Dubin showed considerable interest in Eric as the Anandale passed down the North Sea, through the English Channel. The cliffs of Dover were white to starboard one evening, and Eric was taking one of his twice-a-day walks on the deck. Above him the stacks were smoking black and full, and the Anandale was moving fast. Her itinerary included the Azores, South Africa, across the South Atlantic to Buenos Aires, then north to Rio, Caracas, Havana, and finally New York. Eric, was making progress at English but was by no means proficient, sought to explain his hopes to the wily captain who had given him a job.

  “In America, I work,” he said. “And after some time is passing, I have money.”

  Dubin thought that was terrific. “Hey,” he cried, lifting a glass, “that’s the spirit that made America great. Only there’s one fly in your ointment”

  “Fly in my…what? I understand that not so much.”

  “Ha ha ha,” roared the Captain, “but I don’t think you’ll do much of anything in America.”

  Eric looked very perplexed, and Dubin thought that was funny, too. “You see,” he said, “I suspect you’re running from some kind of big trouble. But you just stay on the boat and work for me, and I won’t tell a soul.”

  Eric knew, even as he heard Dubin chortle and yap, that he would somehow get off the ship. But he grasped, too, the peril of his position. Having so recently been confronted with the legal apparatus of his home country, he suffered dark imaginings as to what might happen to him were he to seek escape from the floating world of the Anandale. But he had to. He would not win the right to take back his name by spending a life of virtual servitude in the grimy boiler room of a decrepit freighter. Nor could he hope ever to see Kristin again, trapped forever between one shore and another. He would wait. He would see what New York looked like.

  In the meantime he did his work, served his watches, shoveled coal into the fiery maws of the engines. His mates were Kuffel, a pale-eyed loutish specimen who said nothing, merely responded to events in his dull life with a phlegmatic, all-purpose grunt and Flynn Maloney, a wiry, toothless Irishman, who never got the coal dust out of his hair because he never tried. Maloney had the gift of gab, and from him Eric learned many words, if not great wisdom. Kuffel, however, resented not only Eric, but Eric’s conversations with the chattering little Irishman. Even the dullest of men do not wish to feel excluded from the camaraderie of their peers.

  “Uhhh,” Kuffel grunted one night in the galley, where the crew was eating a watery stew of indeterminate ingredients, “I tink duh Svenska buggers duh mick.”

  Everybody laughed, the rough, mocking laughs of hard men. Flynn Maloney leaped to his feet, swung at Kuffel, who blocked the punch and returned a shot of his own, slamming the bantam Celt into a steel bulkhead. Maloney cracked his head against it, and dropped unconscious to the deck.

  Eric, who had not understood the expression to which Maloney had taken offense, looked around, puzzled. The crew members were laughing at him, now. They looked down on boiler room personnel to begin with, and moreover Eric’s strong good looks and strange language threatened them, made them uneasy.

  “The Viking buggerer,” somebody yelped.

  Eric still did not understand. Kuffel was grinning his doltish, gap-toothed grin. Then cook’s helper Smythe, recently promoted from cabin boy, told Eric what the expression meant. Kuffel was fully as big as Eric, and at least as strong. He was already on his feet, standing beside Eric, waiting for him to make a move. But Kuffel did not have a chance. Eric spun to his right, catching Kuffel in the solar plexus with a powerfully driven blow. The boilerman snapped forward, a momentum hastened when Eric grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face down into the steel galley table. Kuffel’s teeth scattered like ivory chips across the tabletop, and he let out a great bloody bellow of pain, grabbing at his face. Eric then shoved Kuffel forward across the table, sent him flipping like a cartwheel onto the deck. Three crewmen stood in Eric’s path as he made for the downed man.

  “That’s enough,” they menaced, fists raised and ready, “that’s enough, Sven. Anymore and we’ll be feedin’ you to your own furnace.”

  “Some things I do not take,” Eric told them and, in further answer, sent one reeling with a crashing right cross to the jaw, slipped his leg behind another and slammed him to the deck, and made for the third, all in the space of seconds.

  “Okay, okay, Sven,” the crewman said, dropping his fists and backing away, “that’s okay, no harm intended.”

  Eric seized him anyway, and applied a brutal hammerlock. The crewman winced and cried out. The rest of the crew looked on in awe at the speed and authority of this Nordic savage, whom they had previously thought dull witted due to his unfamiliarity with the language.

  “The name is Eric,” Eric informed the man he was gripping. “Say it.” He wanted to say Eric Starbane, but he had no right to that name now. He was not his own man. He was a hired hand.

  “Eriiiic!” bleated the man, as the pressure on his arm was tightened.

  Then Eric released his grip, and the crewman flopped forward, landing next to the bleary, half-conscious Kuffel. Maloney was coming to, looking around dazedly.

  “Hey,” he cried, observing the crewmen lying all over the galley deck, “I didn’t know I had that much of a punch left.”

  After that incident the crewmen left Eric alone. Dubin, upon learning of the quick work Eric had made, sent for him. Eric was wary when he entered the captain’s cabin.

  “Sit down, sit down.�
� From his ubiquitous brandy bottle he poured two healthy mugsful, and handed Eric one of them.

  “Drink up. I think maybe I seriously underestimated your potential. How about we strike a deal?”

  “Deal?”

  “Yep, a business deal. That’s what every smart man in America ought to know how to do.”

  Eric’s interest quickened. “If you are speaking, I will be listening,” he said. He was still having a bit of trouble with tenses.

  “How’d you like to be first mate, on a permanent basis? Pay you twice as much as for shoveling coal.”

  Eric thought it over. The Anandale was steaming northward now, her long voyage almost over. Venezuela lay behind her, and Cuba, then America, awaited.

  “Dropkin is first mate,” Eric observed. Indeed, there was a considerable amount of tension between the manipulative, rule-bending captain and his punctilious first mate, who was, nonetheless, respected by the crew. Becoming a pawn in a struggle between ship’s officers was not Eric’s idea of wisdom.

  “I plan on cashiering Dropkin in Havana, anyway,” Dubin was saying. “You’re a natural replacement. Big, strong, smart, and—”

  He did not continue. He did not have to. The unspoken words were: “—If you jump ship, I’ll have the authorities check into the trouble in your past.”

  Eric thought quickly. Among the first mate’s duties responsibility for managing docking activities ranked high. Dealing with harbor masters, supervising the unloading and loading of cargo, analyzing and not infrequently haggling over the difference between the actual amount of a shipment and the entirely fictional count reflected in bills of lading. In port, at dockside, on ship, this meant that the first mate made the acquaintance of, and was known by, many people at each port of call.

  If Eric hoped to leave the ship, to be well known or even recognized in port would be to jeopardize everything.