Rough Passage to London(6)

His mother would be heartbroken when she read the letter he’d left behind, but there was nothing to be done. He could no longer work under his father’s thumb. The old man’s anger and rage had only intensified after the tragic news about William and Abraham. Josiah got along with his father, and so did the girls, at least those who remained at home. Asenath had married a church deacon named Talcott from the small inland town of Gilead, but neither Sarah nor Nancy showed any signs of leaving Lyme. Then there were the two younger girls, Maria Louisa and Jesse. They would all find a way to keep the farm working, he told himself. Then again, he knew the pain he would cause his mother, and he felt the knot in his throat return.

After William and Abraham had left home, Sally Morgan was determined that her younger son get a good education. She was friendly with Margaret Carpenter, one of the local deacons’ wives, who was well read and had a small library and a piano. She persuaded her that Ely was the scholarly one in her family and asked if she could teach her young son about the Bible’s lessons and also introduce him to some of the classics like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Part of Ely’s mother’s hopes was that her religious friend would instill in her young son an ambition to become a deacon or even a pastor at the Lyme Congregationalist Church. Margaret Carpenter’s father had been a ship merchant, and she had traveled with him when she was younger to Paris and London. France had left a strong impression on her. At church meetings, she’d described the Parisians as poor, misguided heathens who worshiped statues of naked men and women and who cared about nothing but gratifying the carnal mind and feasting their lowest senses. In England, she said, the food was awful and the people boring.

Sally Morgan had thought these negative views of the ways of the Old World might persuade her son to give up his wayward dreams of going to sea. Paradoxically, the reverse happened. Young Ely Morgan found Margaret Carpenter’s descriptions of her early life at sea to be the most interesting part of their Sunday-afternoon reading sessions. She had spoken to him of the beauty of the sea at dawn, and showed him one of her sketchbooks with watercolors and drawings of the ship’s deck with ocean birds flying alongside. All of these stories only served to fire up the boy’s imagination.

Ely again thought of the note he had left for his mother in the kitchen. He had simply written that he had to leave home to find Abraham and he did not know when he would return. He thought back to the words he had used, and wondered if his letter would give his mother any comfort.

“You must kiss all my sisters, Mother. I am sorry I had to leave without saying good-bye. I hope you will understand my decision one day. With love and respect, I remain your son, Ely.”

With the wind picking up and the choppy seas splashing on the deck, the captain could see he was shorthanded. He only had two sailors and a cook on board. The winds were piping up sharply now. The headsails were thrashing about wildly, the lines all tangled together. The two men on the foredeck, inexperienced and dim-witted, were having a hard time wrestling with the halyards. Something must have gotten snagged. With no one else available, he turned to Morgan and looked down at him with a hawkish stare.

“Can you steer, son?”

Morgan nodded, gulping slightly. He was already feeling a little uncertain about what he was doing.

“That’s good, ’cause we’re headed into a blow,” said the captain as he stroked his thinning whiskers. “You just hold the tiller on this course and don’t let go.”

Captain Foster pointed at the black thunderclouds moving in from the west, indicating with his other hand the course he wanted Ely to steer. He handed the tiller over to Morgan and clambered out on top of the cabin house to help two other sailors trying to lower the flapping main gaff topsail. Morgan grabbed the tiller, his fingers wrapping around a well-worn, twisted, rope-covered grip. At first, he was thrilled that he was steering a ship, but then he began to be frightened. He couldn’t believe how much the four-foot-long tiller pulled at his arms. It was like trying to rein in a team of horses on the run. He braced himself with his feet against a wooden block on the deck, and pulled with all his might. Like most farm boys, the only boats he was familiar with were scows, small gaff-rigged sloops, and rowing skiffs. For that matter, he had never been in rough weather before, and as the ship began to pitch and heave, a strange feeling started to come over him.

The seas had started to build and the water was swashing over the decks. He was feeling dizzy and suddenly sick to his stomach. His head was spinning. He’d never been sick like this before. The ship was heeled over at an alarming angle, and pretty soon Ely let go of the tiller as he threw his upper body over the side in a reckless effort to rid himself of this sudden misery. It felt like the whole upper portion of his body was turning inside out. The acrid taste of bile filled his mouth. He paused for breath, and then the whole paralyzing process began all over again.