The Signature of All Things

“So now you are the child and I am the mother,” and she woke with a scream, arms flailing. But nobody was there. His voice had been in German. Why would it be in German? What did it mean?She lay awake the rest of the night, struggling to comprehend the word mother — Mutter , in German—a word that, in alchemy, also meant “crucible.” She could make no sense of the dream, but it felt most heavily like a curse.
    She had her first thoughts of regret about attempting this journey.
    The day after Christmas, one of the sailors died of the fever. He was wrapped in sailcloth, weighted with a cannonball, and slid quietly into the sea. The men took his death without any evident sign of grief, auctioning off his belongings among themselves. By evening, it was as if the man had never existed. Alma imagined her belongings auctioned off among these fellows. What would they make of Ambrose’s drawings? Who was to say? Perhaps such a trove of sodomitic sensuality would be valuable to some of these men. All types of men went to sea. Alma well knew this to be true.
    Alma recovered from her sickness. A fair wind brought them to Rio de Janeiro, where Alma saw Portuguese slave ships bound north for Cuba. She saw beautiful beaches, where fishermen risked their lives on rafts that looked no sturdier than the roofs of henhouses. She saw the great fan palms, bigger than any in White Acre’s greenhouses, and wished to the point of agony that she could have shown them to Ambrose. She could not keep him from her thoughts. She wondered if he had seen these palms, too, when he had passed through here.
    She kept herself distracted with inexhaustible walks of exploration. She saw women who wore no bonnets, and who smoked cigars as they walked down the street. She saw refugees, commercial men, dirty Creoles and courtly Negroes, demi-savages and elegant quadroons. She saw men selling parrots and lizards for food. Alma feasted on oranges, lemons, and limes. She ate so many mangoes—sharing a few of them with Little Nick—that she broke out in a rash. She saw the horse races and the dancing amusements. She stayed at a hotel run by a mixed-raced couple—the first she had ever seen of such a thing. (The woman was a friendly, competent Negro, who did nothing slowly; the man was white and old, and did nothing at all.) Not a day went by that she did not see men marching slaves through the streets of Rio, offering these manacled beings for sale. Alma could not bear the sightof it. It left her sick with shame, for all the years that she had taken no notice of this abhorrence.
    Back at sea, they headed for Cape Horn. As they approached the Cape, the weather became so unseasonably fierce that Alma—already wrapped in several layers of flannel and wool—added a man’s greatcoat and a borrowed Russian hat to her wardrobe. So bundled, she was now indistinguishable from any man on board. She saw the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, but the ship could not land, as the weather was too fierce. Fifteen days of misery followed as they rounded the Cape. The captain insisted on carrying all sail, and Alma could not imagine how the masts endured the strain. The ship lay first on one side, then the other. The Elliot herself seemed to scream in pain—her poor wooden soul beaten and whipped by the sea.
    “If it is God’s will, we shall go clear,” Terrence said, refusing to lower the sails, trying to run out another twenty knots before darkness.
    “But what if someone should be killed?” Alma shouted across the wind.
    “Burial at sea,” the captain shouted back, and pushed on.
    It was forty-five days of bitter cold after this. The waves came in endless, rolling assault. Sometimes the storms were so bad that the older sailors sang psalms for comfort. Others cursed and blustered, and a few remained silent—as though they were already dead. The storms loosened the hencoops from their stays, and sent chickens flying across the decks. One night, the boom was smashed into dainty chips, like kindling. The next day, the sailors tried to raise a new boom, and failed. One of the sailors, knocked over by a wave, fell down the hold and broke his ribs.
    Alma hovered the entire time between hope and fear, certain she would die at any moment—but never once did she cry out in panic, or raise her voice in alarm. At the end of it all, when the weather cleared, Captain Terrence said, “You are a right little daughter of Neptune, Miss Whittaker,” and Alma felt she