Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 1
Chapter 1
You’ve reached chapter one. But even if you’re new to the story, I’ll recommend you begin with the table of contents, because you need to understand why I say this was written by Thaddeus Thomas and Herman Melville.
And now,
Kraken in a Coffee Cup.
Chapter One
On a damp November, I pause before a coffin warehouse below a black-eyed widow who watches the muddy progress of carriages as they pass in the rain. The storm is slight but lingering, a veil fallen upon a mournful horizon, and from behind the pane, her black eyes settle with a glint of recognition. Ashamed of my coffin lust, I flee, a wretched man in flight from a sin which cannot be outrun. Night falls upon New Bedford, and with neither food nor bed, I wait for sleep as I wait for death, though no one will pay the warehouseman for his goods on my behalf. I shall enter that under-earth journey without the merest dinghy to buoy me.
My teeth chatter against the curbstone, beneath a dim light not far from the docks. Above the light, a sign swings and upon it rises a tall straight jet of misty spray. The sign’s dilapidated little wooden house, gable-ended and one side palsied, leans sadly over my sharp bleak corner, and poor men with tattered soles step over me in search of golden liquor. I know the poverty which finds its sanctuary in a bottle and have seen the wealthy drunken on the tepid tears of orphans. Honest feet are poorly clad, and the same hard hand drives us under, some to drink and some to die; the time has come I play the latter.
Though most ignore me, one stops, and I look up into the widow’s eyes. She calls me friend and commands her companions to lift me to my feet, and in her company, I find myself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminiscent of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hangs a large oil painting of unaccountable masses of shades and shadows. A frosted hull is half-capsized over three, blue, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.
The widow follows my gaze to the painting. “It’s the end of the ice-wrecked Starling, the phantom of which they say anchored in this very harbor.” Her description reeks of mockery, but I am no one to argue with the cruelties of human kindness. “At first light that day, her widows watched the ghost ship sail, and the town’s fastest vessels, giving chase, lost her in open seas, clear and calm.”
I nod with a pretense of belief, but my attention is now on the bar, where stands a vast, arched bone of a whale’s jaw, so wide a coach might drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, a cursed Jonah, a withered old man, who sells the sailors deliriums and death.
He pours his poison into villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel lines measure fullness in degrees. Fill to this mark, the charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass—the Cape Horn measure—which I gulp down for the widow’s shilling.
“Have you someone to bury?” she asks, and when I shake my head, her eyes sparkle, like burning ships in a midnight sea. “I recognize you from the coffin-maker’s, measuring your shoulders against his wares. If it’s death you’re courting, my late husband’s ship awaits you. Sail with him, and a coffin will not be wanted.”
“Your late husband?” I ask.
“Whenever you find yourself growing grim about the mouth; whenever you find yourself bringing up the rear of every funeral; and especially whenever it requires a strong moral principle to prevent you from deliberately stepping into the street—get to sea as soon as you can. Consider it a substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato may throw himself upon his sword, but you will quietly take to the ship.”
Her speech leaves me both befuddled and nostalgic, for when I was a child, a similar circumstance befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never have entirely settled.
I was crawling up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous, when my stepmother dragged me out by the legs. After the most brutal bathing of my remembrance, she packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year. I threw myself at her feet, beseeching her to give me a good slippering for my misbehavior; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time.
She ignored my pleas and scuttled me off. For several hours I lay there broad awake, but at last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare; and slowly waking from it, I opened my eyes, and the once sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing seen, and nothing heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the bedspread, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form to which the hand belonged, sat by my bed-side. For ages piled upon ages, I lay there, frozen with awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken.
Then the creature spoke in that black and silent moment and chose as its own, my stepmother’s voice. “There are ways aplenty to die in this world, but if you’re going to risk Sheol, and Lord knows your curious nature will risk it long past the days for a slippering, risk it for something noble, something true; risk it for family, neighbors, church, and country, not for the draw of spaces bleak and narrow with no more reward to offer than in digging your grave.”
I give the widow no answer that night, though she announces herself certain of my answer. She cannot know I’m no stranger to the call of ships at sea, but they have made themselves strangers by fate and circumstance. With the widow gone, I settle down onto the bench to sleep, reeling from starvation quenched with liquor, praying to God for annihilation; amid the whirl of woe I feel, a deep stupor steals over me, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in my passable berth, my misery drags me drowning down to sleep.
In the morning, with my welcome spent at the tavern, I seek out a chapel as refuge. The sky meets me with driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy, bearskin jacket, I fight against the storm until I reach a small scattered congregation of sailors, sailors’ wives, and widows. A muffled silence reigns, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshiper purposely sits apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seat myself near the door and, turning sideways, am surprised to see the widow beside me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there is a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in her countenance.
She is the only person present to notice my entrance. She leans to my ear and whispers, “Those whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here lies my beloved; they know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all faith and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”
“Your husband will not sail again from these harbors,” I say. “I cannot serve upon his vessel.”
“Why is it a universal proverb of the human dead that they tell no tales, though they contain more secrets than a hundred shipwrecked shores?” she asks. “How is it we refuse to be comforted for those who dwell in bliss; why do all the living strive to hush all the dead; and why should the rumor of a knocking in a tomb terrify a city? All these things are not without their meanings, but faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”
Yes, I think, there is death upon the waters—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity. But what then? We have hugely mistaken this matter of life and death. What they call my shadow is my substance. In looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through water, and thinking thick water the thinnest of air. My body is the dregs of my better being. It is not me.
“What was least of your husband is lost,” I say. “The best of the man you remember remains.”
“Do you imagine a ship made by men will carry you into countries where God does not reign?” she asks, and I confess no contradiction.
“An old woman, sea-bereaved, may watch a young man sail,” she says, “and a young maiden may yet welcome home the captain she’s to call her husband. Serve the ship that sails to Tartarus. Its captain will do right, both by his men and by me.”
#
At the widow’s word, I prowl among the shipping, but how plainly I’m a fugitive. No baggage, not a hatbox, valise, or carpetbag, no friends accompany me to the wharf with their adieu.
At last, I find a ship receiving the last items of her cargo, where claim is made the captain can take me to the ship I seek; and as I step on board to see its captain in the cabin, all the sailors desist from hoisting in the goods. I see this; but in vain I try to look all ease and confidence; in vain I essay my wretched smile. I see it in their faces; strong intuitions assure them of the one certain truth.
I am no innocent.
—Thaddeus Thomas
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With the language...it is very reminiscent of reading one of the "Classics." Well done Thaddeus!
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