She reached to lay a hand upon his knee and calm him, but then drew back. “A quarter is yours, Mr. Chard. And half belongs to us.”
The oar struck her so quickly and surely that Jane had no moment to raise a hand in defense. The blade of the wood hit the bone of her brow and split the skin like an overripe melon, a string of blood dribbling from the wound, and the blow knocked her upright where she sat. ’Tis said that in the moment of death, all of life passes through one’s final thoughts, and she did think in that split second of her mother with the youngest brat at the breast, thought of how she grabbed the wheel and saved the Sea Venture from drowning in the houricane, thought of Ravens smiling o’er her like a father, the men and women waving good-bye from the decks of the Patience and Deliverance, thought of Chard’s first kiss and the dream of life with Waters, all these contained in one moment, itself cleaved in two and both halves split further still, for what measure of time cannot be thus divided? There was no pain but the shock of the clock suddenly stopped as Long Jane Long slipped from the rowboat and into the Atlantic, and the world turned upside down, the sky now below her head, the waves above her feet. When she opened her mouth to cry out to the men in the boat that now looked as if it were beneath her sinking body, “Come save me,” she drew in the whole sea to her lungs, felt herself swole and pressed for air, as if both men and Carter, too, and the whole Virginia Company were upon her chest, and hoped some great fish would swim by and swallow her, the Lord save her, in the hour of her death, as she quit this world by one man’s fit of anger and by his most grievous envy.
By the end of her story, she had trapped us in the pathos of our own imaginations. The curtains framing the narrow window stirred a breeze redolent with salt-heavy sea, smelling of fish fries and steamed spiced crabs and oyster shells baking in the heat, though the sunrise, judging by the bruised color of the sky, was an hour or two away. Water gurgling in the sink broke the peace, and I peered into the bowl to find a little rowboat circling in a whirlpool that soon sucked down all: boat, water, a small island complete with miniature palm trees and what appeared to be a barking dog the size of a flea. Craning my neck and placing my head in the bowl, ear turned toward the drain, I thought I heard the distant refrains of some sea shanty, the voices thinning into a dreadful emptiness. The disappearance of Crab, in particular, filled me with a profound sorrow of the vicissitudes of fate that spare nothing, the innocent and the guilty swept away in one tide. This seems deeply unfair to me, an accident of design. The others huddled together on the porcelain edge of the bathtub, Dolly and the old man on either side of Long Jane, their arms draped over her wide shoulders, offering comfort as she quietly sobbed, her chin resting on her chest.
“But it was an accident,” I said. “Probably.”
They lifted their heads. Three sets of eyes stared accusingly awaiting explanation.
“That is, he—Chard—was probably aiming for Mr. Waters and hit her instead. Clearly, Waters made him lose his temper. He didn’t mean to …”
Jane glared as if I had just fractured her skull with an oar. A thin red scar appeared on her forehead, pulsing like an artery, and then abruptly disappeared. She bent her head and thick coils of slubbed hair hung like ropes toward the floor. I silently withdrew the manslaughter defense and offered no new theories, and we again retreated into the dark thoughts of our own minds. After a while, the old man asked, “Out of curiosity, what ever became of the fine young man who beat the girl to death?”
“Two years they waited for rescue, and only through the intercession of Mr. Carter did they not murder each other over the ambergris. He hid the gun the admiral had left behind and hid their knives and made them swear oaths after the ‘accident’ and gave them promise of salvation. If not in this world, then the next. All hope had been but abandoned when they espied the redcross sail of an English ship on a fine day in July of 1612. ’Twas the Plough, with sixty on board under the hand of Governor Moore, sent by the Virginia Company to make a settlement in the Bermudas from those survivors of the Somers expedition who had made it safely to Jamestown. To those on board, the three men were a strange sight. Nearly naked, brown as Indians, bedraggled, and hairy as apes, the mariners were a kind of legend, living proof of the grace of God.”