The Signature of All Things

or cajole into keeping him alive. He could scarcely believe there was no escape from this. He was appalled.
    The more appalled he became, the more Henry turned tyrant to his poor nurses. He wanted his legs rubbed constantly, and—fearing suffocation from his inflamed lungs—demanded that his bedstead be tilted up at a steep angle. He refused all pillows for fear they would drown him in his sleep. He grew more belligerent by the day, even as he declined. “What a beggarly mess you have made of this bed!” he would shout after some pale, frightened girl as she ran from the room. Alma marveled at how he could possibly find the strength to bark like a chained dog, even as he was vanishing away upon the sheets. He was difficult, but there was something admirable in his fight, too, something kingly in his refusal to quietly die.
    He weighed nothing. His body had become a loose envelope filled with long, sharp bones, and covered all over with sores. He could take nothingbut beef tea, and not much of it. But for all that, Henry’s voice was the last part of his body to fail him. This was a pity, in a way. Henry’s voice caused the good maids and nurses around him to suffer, for—like a brave English sailor going down with his ship—he took to singing bawdy songs, as though to keep up his courage in the face of doom. Death was trying to pull him down with both hands, but he was singing it away.
    “ With a red flag flying, let it pass! Shove it up the maiden’s ass! ”
    “That will be all, Kate, thank you,” Alma would say to the unfortunate young nurse who happened to be on duty, escorting the poor girl to the door, even as Henry sang out, “ Good old Kate in Liverpool! Once she ran a whoring school! ”
    Henry had never cared much for civilities, but now he cared for them not a whit. He said whatever he wanted to say—and perhaps, it occurred to Alma, even more than he wanted to say. He was staggeringly indiscreet. He shouted about money, about deals gone sour. He accused and probed, attacked and parried. He even picked fights with the dead. He debated with Sir Joseph Banks, trying again to convince him to grow cinchona in the Himalayas. He ranted to his deceased wife’s long-gone father: “I will show you, you skunk-faced old pig-dog of a Dutchman, what a rich man I intend to become!” He accused his own long-dead father of being a fawning bootlick. He demanded that Beatrix be summoned to take care of him and to bring him cider. Where was his wife? For what purpose did a man have a wife, if not to tend him upon his sickbed?
    Then one day he looked Alma straight in the eye and said, “And you think I don’t know what that husband of yours was!”
    Alma hesitated a moment too long to send the nurse from the room. She ought to have done it right away, but she waited, instead, uncertain of what her father was trying to say.
    “You think I have not met such men as that in my travels? You think I was not once such a man as that myself? You think they took me on the Resolution for my able navigating? I was a hairless little boy, Plum—a hairless little shaver from the land, with a fine clean arsehole. There’s no shame in saying it!”
    He was addressing her as “Plum.” He had not called her that name in years—in decades. He had not even recognized her at times during the past months. But now, with the use of the beloved old pet name, it was apparentthat he knew precisely who she was—which meant that he also knew precisely what he was saying.
    “You may leave now, Betsy,” Alma directed the nurse, but the nurse did not seem in a hurry to leave.
    “Ask yourself what they did to me on that ship, Plum! The youngest shaver there, I was! Oh, by God, but they had their fun with me!”
    “Thank you, Betsy,” Alma said, moving now to escort the nurse to the door herself. “You may close the door behind you. Thank you. You’ve been most helpful, then. Thank you. Off you go.”
    Henry was now singing an awful verse Alma had never heard before: “ They whacked me up and whacked me down, The mate he buggered me round and round! ”
    “Father,” Alma said, “you must stop.” She drew near and placed her hands on his chest. “You must stop.”
    He stopped singing and looked at her with fiery eyes. He grabbed her wrists with his bony hands.
    “Ask yourself why he married you, Plum,” Henry said, in a voice as clear and strong as youth itself. “Not for the money, I’ll wager! Not for your clean