‘Mama?’
‘Praise God. Praise God.’ Anna Maria’s mouth broke open in a wide smile. ‘Here! Here you are, you curious girl. He knew you would want to see it. Oh Lord, I thank you.’ She helped Thea sit up against her pillow, then, eyes filled with tears, passed her the glass bottle.
I watched Thea turn it over in her hands. ‘I’m here too,’ I whispered. I was afraid to touch her. I was afraid she would not feel me.
‘When was this?’ Thea asked her mother. ‘When did the desert come?’
‘Shortly before we crossed the equator.’
‘The equator?’
Anna Maria wiped her eyes and described how Christian Pasche had complained to the captain when the sailors had conducted their Neptune Ceremony, throwing water on all who had not passed into the Southern Hemisphere before. ‘He was adamant that they were startling the pregnant women,’ Thea’s mother told her, laughing. ‘Never mind that the women in question were having a lovely time up on deck, throwing buckets as well as the sailors and appreciating such a cooldown!’
‘Was Hanne there?’
I was trembling. Sea water rose in my throat.
Anna Maria’s smile faded. ‘Thea, you remember . . . Hanne was sick,’ she said carefully.
No, I thought. No, no.
‘She’s better,’ Thea said, frowning. ‘She was here.’
‘Here?’
‘I saw her. In the night. She was here, lying next to me.’
Anna Maria said nothing. Her brow furrowed.
I felt water soak my braid. It ran in rivulets down my back.
‘Thea . . .’ Anna Maria stood up from where she had been squatting on her heels. Sat down on the bed next to her daughter.
The hem of my dress lifted, as though suspended in water. I felt weightless, gutted with cold.
Thea shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Hanne did not get better.’ Anna Maria’s voice was sombre.
‘No.’
‘She died in Christ.’
The ocean was thundering in my ears. I could not hear Thea. Water was filling the bow, lifting me off the floor. I saw Thea’s face warp in grief, saw the bottle roll off the bed, saw her throw off her mother’s hands, but I could not hear what she was saying. My gullet swamped with brine. I lifted my hands to my face and felt the sailor’s stitch in my nose.
The water rose to the lamp. The flame went out in foam. Darkness roared around me.
I am dead, I thought.
I am dead.
tell all my bones
The time that followed remains blurred with pain. At some point I kneeled on the floor to pray. I prayed my tongue sore, seeking answers and illumination. If it was true that I had passed out of life, then why did I remain on the boat?
The connective tissue binding the bones of my life – my family, my work, the seasons I grew through – had always been God. Bible as cartilage. Prayer as sinew. I had never doubted that my father spoke truth when he told me that I had been redeemed by Christ’s love. Death would bring eternal life in the Lord’s Kingdom. In the beginning there was the Word of God and I had never doubted that Word. It was sacrosanct. It had assured me that death would separate my eternal soul from my mortal body until the final day of their reunion; that, if I died in faith, my soul would find sanctuary within the presence of Christ.
Why was I not in such a sanctuary? I had died in faith. I knew nothing but faith. I had never doubted, never sought to untether myself from the Church, never sought the possibility of otherness, other truths.
Again and again my thoughts returned to the vision I had seen against the brilliance of the sun, the holy flight of feathers. Had I been judged and found wanting? I felt again the old fear that I was ill-made, that my deepest self was unworthy. The thought that Jesus’s grace had not extended to me, had not covered me at the last as the Word had promised, reduced me to a howl. I prayed for forgiveness. If I could have scraped together assurance of my redemption, I would have done so until my fingers were bloody.
And yet, and yet. Where was the hell promised by Pastor Flügel? If I had been damned, why was I still with those I loved, those I knew to be sanctified by Jesus’s blood?
I am unloved and forsaken by God, I thought. I lay on the floor, my cheek hard up against the grit of the boards, sensible only to the wrenching of my soul. Hours passed. Maybe days. I took to prayer again, grasped for God in my desperation. The Psalm of the Cross swept through me, and I heard myself whisper, ‘I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax . . . I am poured out like water . . .’ before the world blurred about me and I was shuddered into darkness.
Dying is unlike living. The smooth running of time is for the beating heart only. The dead stutter. The hands on my clock do not point to numbers but to each other. There have been times since I died that I have suddenly woken as if from a faint and found myself in strange places. I am present, and then something overcomes me and when I regain my consciousness I am elsewhere. So it was, then, as I lay on the floor of a ship that no longer bore my living weight, no longer able to pretend I was anything other than dead. I collapsed out of myself. Time stopped and I stopped with it.
I was raised with the kind of faith that does not doubt. God had been as much a part of me as my own marrow, and when I discovered my bones to be empty, fluting music discordant to anything I had sung in church, my anguish was real. No wonder I could not keep mind and body together in those early days. I was dislocated. My axis was broken.
The understanding I have now, that the world spins on a deeper mystery than anything that might be set into language, was not with me then. Now I know that my mind is too small to hold the spirit. The spirit, I hope, holds me.
I woke later, when it was dark. I was curled on the floor by Thea’s bed, body shifting as the ship rolled in steady rhythm. There was the sound of sleeping women around me. A light snore.
Scripture was crawling through my mind, muddled into poetry.
Many sparrows. I may tell all my bones. Be not far from me; for trouble is near and surely goodness and mercy shall follow me. Surely goodness and mercy. Remember, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy lovingkindnesses. Turn thee unto me and many sparrows.
I rose to my feet and stood beside Thea’s bunk. There was enough light to see that Anna Maria was in bed with her, had an arm around her. They were both asleep. Both were still. But I could feel Thea’s distress coming off her like mist. I knew that if I touched her face I would find it swollen. Knew that, if the light were brighter, I would see something damaged in it. Fallen tree. Twisted branch.
‘Tender mercies,’ I whispered, and I brought my hand down until it hovered above her face. I felt the air warmed with her body, its close aura of life. ‘Lovingkindnesses,’ I said.