Two Men and a Bottle

Terence Bay, Nova Scotia

June 1873

The Reverend William Ancient returned from a job of ministry to find James where he had left him, in the vicarage kitchen staring at a bare wall on which the only adornment was a crude cross. The bowl of chowder, untouched, sent his stomach growling. The aptly named Mrs Isabel Cook would be rightly disappointed if she knew just how little James ate. He was getting thinner while the Reverend was undoubtedly getting fatter by eating all that surplus.

The glass though, the glass by the side of the smoked cod chowder, was empty. The bottle was empty too.

‘I’m not going to tell you that you need to eat, James,’ he said. ‘That’s a woman’s job.’

He put a bottle of spruce beer on the raw wood table, a form of payment from his parishioner. ‘Plenty more where that came from.'

James stirred himself just as a stream of Atlantic light cast him almost demonic. His scleras were pink, the lids around them red. A man who had been drinking and crying and had not found a way to stop.

‘So it’s a woman’s job to tell me to eat and a man’s job to urge me to drink,’ he said. It wasn’t meant to be anything but a statement, and yet William felt an implied rebuke.

‘I just want you to get past the day,’ he said quietly.

James placed his hand on top of William’s. ‘I’m sorry, friend. I am grateful.’

William covered the chowder with a tea towel and put it in the granite pantry. It would keep cool there until later. In the two months since James had fetched up here, the weather had warmed. There was churned butter and the pantries were stocked. Not like the first day of April when the ship ran aground. Four hundred souls were saved that night, all of them men, cramming into the fisherman’s modest homes. The local women trying their best with depleted winter stocks. Five hundred and sixty less fortunate souls had died, and James’s new wife had been the last one to go.

James abruptly stood up and such was his hunger, his punishment, he appeared to sway, holding the table for support. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he announced.

‘And I am coming with you,’ said the reverend.

‘Do you think I am going to throw myself from the rocks?’

William looked at him, because it was so easy to, and told him that whilst he was no wise man in such matters, he assumed that James would have already done so by now, that being his intention.

He took a bottle of spruce beer from the store cupboard, although it was cider he had decanted so that Mrs Cook would cease her tutting. The cider was ten times more potent than the beer. James was not the only one who saw the ship in a bottle.

Outside, the breeze was stiff but the air was mild. St Peter’s Anglican Church sat squat on the landscape, its steeple taller than the pepper pot lighthouse on the other side of the island. The one the SS Atlantic was trying to get to when it hit the rocks. The stones of the church glowed pink, like James’s eyes, in the searing light of the cool sun.

The reverend had brought salt beef sandwiches, hoping the breeze might stir the other man’s appetite. They walked in silence to the coast. The lush grass concealed sharp rocks, and although William instinctively avoided them, James had not yet learned to. Several times, William resisted the urge to take his arm.

He knew much of James’s story. He was born and bred in Hereford, England, and had fallen in love with Annie when they were children. He worked in the cider mills and Annie was so beautiful that he wanted more for her. Even when she was entangled in the mizzenmast of a sinking ship, four thousand miles from home, William could see that she was beautiful, her hair and her skirts tangled in the rigging, gripping fiercely to life.

James went to New York for two years to make money while his love waited at home. William had yet to learn how he made that money but he doubted it was nefarious. He then sailed home again, married Annie in a Hereford church, in the place they were both baptised, and three months later they left for New York, second-class on the White Star Line. It was an error of purposeful fate, to strive to attain your heart’s goal only to find that the timing of it was all wrong.

They perched at the edge of low rocks, their feet dangling. Elsewhere they were higher, but it was always the children of the rocks you had to fear, the ones hidden by the crashing surf. Today it was calm and they were laid bare, so bare that even a blind man might intuit their presence.

James came here every day to reclaim his wife’s body. He said he would not leave until she washed ashore. William knew she would not, but God help James if she ever did.

‘Why did you become a vicar, William? James asked, after a long silence. ‘Does it give you answers?’

‘I don’t believe so, James.’

‘Then what?’

‘It gives you the courage to ask questions.’

‘But that is merely curiosity.’

‘Then perhaps that’s what God is, James. The most godless people I know tend to lack it.’

They drank the cider, sharing the bottle, savouring the burn and belching like campaign companions. William offered James a sandwich but it was refused.

‘I got a newspaper today from a parishioner,’ William said. ‘There’s an enquiry under way.’

‘Why? The ship ran aground. Nothing more to say. You’re an ex-Royal Navy man, all the way from Portsmouth. You should know.’

‘In my experience, James, people who work for the queen tend to know what they’re doing. I’m not so sure about the people who work for the White Star Line.’

James, who had moved for two months like the fabled sloth, was more alert now. William was reminded of Frankenstein’s monster, (however miscast), where a bolt of lightening had animated something that had been dead. He thought of Annie’s body, no doubt still strapped to the mizzenmast, and the fearful aspect of her own resurrection. It is what tragedy does, making ordinary things fearful.

‘The chief engineer is still in Halifax,’ the reverend stated. ‘He is not ready to return to England just yet. He laments that all the women and children died, and that the 429 people these island fishermen rescued were all men.’

‘And why is that?’

‘The lifeboats broke in the storm waters. Women and children of course, would have been put on first, but that was no longer an option. Men are simply stronger and more likely to survive the odds. I was late to wake on that night, James. I had been drinking, but at about 4am I suddenly awoke and felt a silence, as if all my neighbours had deserted me in some great endeavour. In the distance I could hear exertion, people crying out, but I felt like a cocooned butterfly. I eventually emerged, full of Dutch courage. I think it was the ship’s distress rockets that initially woke me.’

‘And you saved two of the last three on board,’ James said. ‘A crewman, the one child who survived ..’

‘But I couldn’t save your wife, James. I tried. I really tried.’

‘As did I, William. But I fell and landed on the deck. I was unconscious as I slipped into the water. And yet she remained.’

‘For what it’s worth, I believe she was already passed. From exposure.’

‘I’d like to think that,’ said James.

William looked at the broad horizon. ‘Then think it,’ he said.

The sun was rising and the sea cast off its usual Atlantic grey and flirted with something blue. The reverend ate one of the salt beef sandwiches. James carried on thinking, his blond hair flipping in the breeze.

‘So why did you mention the chief engineer?’ he asked. ‘Was there a purpose in that?’

William swallowed the last of the sandwich, thinking he’d like the other one, knowing his hunger was expanding in the wake of James’ famine. But it was a small thing to cast aside.

‘In my experience,’ he began, ‘ship’s captains are all the same. They want to get somewhere quicker than anyone else. As long as the cargo is undamaged, that’s what drives them. In this case, these new big fancy ships, 420 ft, three decks and all the trimmings, the paying passengers are the cargo, but it’s the same principle. Hogsheads of beer, breadfruit or people, it makes no difference at all.’

William put his finger in the air as if to stop James from interrupting, although he showed no mind to.

‘Chief engineers think differently. It’s the same pride, but whereas the captain can throw caution to the wind, the engineer is more circumspect. On your ship, he was called John Foxley, currently living it up in a flop house in Halifax. Now, a week into your voyage, you hit a storm which didn’t abate. This is what occurs in the deep blue. People were being sick, they couldn’t eat, and all of that shine was wearing off.’

‘I suffered,’ James recalled, ‘but Annie had sea legs. A girl from Hereford with sea legs! She was sick a couple of times, but …’

‘I think that Foxley, the engineer, played down how much coal they had left. I think he told the captain that if they kept pushing through a persistent Atlantic storm all the way to New York, they’d run out of it.’

‘Do you think that’s true?’

‘No, I don’t, James. A company like the White Star Line would ensure there was plenty of coal in the hold. They would have put enough in there to ensure the running of the ship even if the storm had started in Liverpool and never let up. These money men don’t take chances on things like that. I think he lied all the way through about how much coal they had if they kept pushing through the storm at the same pace of knots, just to unsettle the captain, and maybe in there were valid concerns about the pistons. When it came to two days before docking in New York, the captain asked him if they could make it. I think Foxley said no, they couldn’t. He had to keep up the lie, you see?’

‘Why?’ James asked.

‘Pride, just like the captain,’ said the reverend. ‘The captain should have gone down and checked himself instead of taking Foxley’s word for it. Everyone knows the two professions don’t get along. So the captain made the decision, two days from New York, to stop by Halifax and get more coal, even though they didn’t need it. And no crewmen had ever been to Halifax before They didn’t take any soundings, and they didn’t know where the hell they were going. The ship didn’t need to be here at all, James. It would have made it to New York easily.

‘You can’t prove it, though.’

‘I can’t,’ the reverend conceded. ‘But I joined the navy when I was thirteen and I know the ways of men. It will come out, if not in this enquiry then the next.’

It occurred to William that he had no idea why he had blurted out his suspicions in that manner. It was crass and thoughtless. It would surely have been better to imply that it was God’s will, and yet James did not appear angry. In fact, he was calm, unlike the waters that had taken his wife.

‘Nothing will bring her back,’ he eventually said. ‘Fathers will have to live their lives without their wives and children, while they survive in shame. I wish them luck with it. I can only hope that the White Star Line will never make such a mistake again.’

‘It is as well that you didn’t have any children,’ the reverend offered. ‘But there is plenty of time for it. Plenty of time for you.’

James did not reply, but there was something in his blue-eyed gaze that made William consider his words. Had he not said that the stalwart Annie had been sick during the voyage, despite her sea legs? He made to speak but James shushed him. ‘Do you have that other sandwich?’ he asked.

When they returned, Mrs Cook was at the stove. She let herself in whenever it pleased her, and the reverend could hardly complain. The two men were both a little drunk. She knew about the cider in the spruce beer bottles, but she didn’t have to live with them. Her back was broad and defiant, but her face was smiling in the steam of the stew: tender beef, carrots, beans, potatoes and cream.

‘I took the chowder home,’ she said, not turning. ‘Waste not want not.’

‘I am sorry, Mrs C,’ said James.

She turned in astonishment. ‘It speaks!’

She took the stew from the heat with orders that it should be stirred occasionally to stop the cream from curdling. William went to minister to a woman who could not forget the wreck and saw disaster everywhere she looked, even those places she wasn’t looking, in her sleep and in her rare idle moments. He could not tell her it was God’s will. He did not believe that himself. He told her that God does not ask her to forget but offers the comfort of resilience, however hard the journey. To carry the burden of life with valour.

When he returned the sun was sinking and the sea was rousing. It could never stay calm for long. James was heating the stew.

‘You’ve got your appetite back,’ William remarked. ‘You’ll be leaving soon. How shall it be? Two days to New York by boat …’

‘I am never getting on a boat again ...'

‘…. or back to Hereford?'

‘Did you not hear me, William? I am never getting on a boat again.’

‘Of course. There are other ways.’

‘I’m leaving in two days and I’m going by road,’ his guest said.

‘Will you stay with your brother again?’

‘I will, until I’m settled.’

‘I meant to ask. What was it you did there, when you were saving money to get married?’

James poured a couple of glasses of cider into two clean glasses. ‘I made cider,’ he said, ‘and it was a hell of a lot better than this. But there’s something I want to ask you again. When I asked you why you chose to be a vicar, I wasn’t satisfied with your answer.’

‘It was a vicar’s answer,’ said William. ‘Vague and non-committal, I confess.’

James leaned forward, tapped a spoon on William’s hand. ‘If you and I are to be life-long friends, I demand the real reason.’

There was a moment's silence, in which an observer might have heard the sound of caution being thrown to the wind. ‘I was escaping the temptations of the flesh,’ he eventually said.

James sat back and clapped his hands in derision. ‘But you are young and handsome, and a vicar can be married. You’re not a Catholic! You could have a brood of children …’

‘Not that kind of flesh, I’m afraid.’

James leaned forward. ‘You like to make life hard, friend.’

‘It is not a life I would have chosen,’ William said. ‘I cannot change what I am.’

‘What you are? You mean who you are! You are not an animal!’

‘You are not offended?’

‘Only if you make a pass,’ James said, standing up and rolling up his sleeves. ‘But it will be a lonely life for you, and I regret that.’

‘But I will never lose anyone I love, don’t you see? Society forces me to embrace cowardice as my only solace. But you, James? You will find someone else and you will take that risk again. She won’t be Annie, she would never be that, but you will love again, and I will stay here ministering to grief that I will never truly experience.’

There was a silence between them, something they were accustomed to.

‘And I shouldn’t worry, James. I prefer brunettes.’

The vicar sat back in his chair, watching James dishing out the stew that only this morning he would not have eaten. New York was full of sausage and pickle and sauerkraut and he desperately wanted his friend to recall one good thing about this wild and uncivilised place. The food, at least, and the bravery of his rescuers.

They clinked glasses, and hovered thick buttered bread over the creamy stew.

‘Bon Appétit,’ said the vicar of Terence Bay.

‘You too, friend.’