Salt Water

The sea did not kill Catarina Cayetano with a storm, though there was a storm, and it is the storm everyone would remember afterward and tell the grandchildren about. The sea killed her the way the mountain had killed Garachico — slowly, ordinarily, with no malice and no drama, using the dullest instrument it had. It killed her with the water in the casks.

Let me tell the passage first, because you cannot understand the death without the eight weeks of life that wore down to it. The España was a good enough ship and her master a decent enough man, and none of it mattered against the simple arithmetic of putting a hundred and more land people into a space built for cargo and closing the hatches over them for the better part of two months. They lived between decks in a long low dark that never got fully light and never got fully dry, in a stench that the first day seemed unendurable and that by the second week they no longer smelled, which was worse — bilge and vomit and the slop-buckets and the bodies of people who could not wash, packed in their allotted stretches of plank with their bundles and their children and their fear. The food was salt meat gone to rope and biscuit gone to weevil. The water, by the third week, had gone green and thick in the casks and had to be drunk anyway, because the alternative to bad water is no water, and the alternative to no water is death by a different and faster road. They drank it. Everyone drank it. And in the warm dark of a crowded hold, the bad water did the thing bad water has always done to crowded people, which the islanders called simply el flujo, the flux — the bloody flux, the gripe and the fever and the endless ruinous voiding that empties a body of its water faster than foul water can be put back in, and dries a strong adult to a husk in a week and a child in three days.

It went through the between-decks like the lava had gone through the lower town, unhurried, taking whom it took. Two children died in the third week and a young man in the fourth, sewn in canvas and slid over the side with the master reading the words while the families stood in the wind on the heaving deck, glad of the wind and the open sky and the brief reprieve from the hold even at the price of a burial. And in the fifth week it took hold of Catarina, because she was forty-five and tired and had spent the voyage giving the cleanest of her own ration of water to her men and the sickest of the children near them, which is to say she died, in the end, of being who she had always been, which is the only way the truly good ever do die.

—

It was in those weeks that Vicente came to know Mariana Curbelo, and it happened the only way it could have happened to a man like that, which was through work and through grief and not at all through courtship.

There was no courting on the España. There was no room and no privacy and no spirit for it; there was only the long grinding shared ordeal, and in an ordeal you find out what people are made of faster and truer than a hundred chaperoned Sundays in a plaza could ever tell you. And what Mariana Curbelo was made of revealed itself in the hold as iron reveals itself in a fire. While stronger-seeming people went to pieces — and they did, good people, brave people, undone by the dark and the stench and the fear — Mariana simply worked. She had a stomach that the sea could not turn and a calm that the dark could not reach, and she spent the passage doing the things that needed doing and that the frightened could not make themselves do: tending the sick who were not her own, holding water to cracked lips, cleaning what had to be cleaned, sitting in the dark with the dying so they would not die alone. When the flux took Catarina, Mariana was simply there, on the other side of the sick woman from her son and her husband, doing with competent unfrightened hands what Catarina herself would have been doing if she had been the one still standing — and Vicente, holding his mother's wasting hand through the worst of it, watched the Curbelo girl across his dying mother and understood her completely, as he had understood Inés across a church, except that this was the opposite of that, this was not the lightning of wanting a thing he could not have but the slow deep recognition of a thing he could build a life on; and he thought, again, in the only language his heart fully spoke, that she was well made and did not break under load, and he had now seen the load, and she had not broken. That was the courtship. It was enough. It was more than enough; it was the whole truth about a marriage, learned in a week beside a deathbed, which is more than most couples learn in fifty years.

—

The storm came in the sixth week, three days and two nights of a gale out of the southwest that stood the ship on her beam ends and sent the families sliding and screaming in the sealed black hold while the sea tried the seams of the world. They battened the hatches and the air went foul past breathing and the dark was absolute and full of the sound of a hundred people praying and being sick and a few, here and there, quietly losing their minds; and Juan held his wife and his son held his mother and the ship climbed and fell and climbed and fell and everyone aboard, the master included, spent at least one of those black hours certain they were going to the bottom. They did not go to the bottom. The España was well made — Vicente had read her joinery right, that first morning at the rail — and she came through it, and on the third day the wind eased and they opened the hatches onto a scoured bright sky and a long ugly swell, and the people came up into the light gray and filthy and alive and wept at the sun.

Catarina did not come up. The storm had spent the last of her. She had held on through it — held on, Vicente always believed, precisely because letting go in the middle of that terror would have been one more weight on her men, and she would not be that, not even dying — and when the calm came and the hatches opened and the danger was past and her family was safe, she let herself, at last, in the new quiet, begin to go.

She was three days dying after the storm, in the returned light, and they were the only three days of the passage anyone would afterward have called good, which is the cruelty and the mercy of it both. She was past the worst of the flux's indignity by then and into the strange lucid quiet that sometimes comes at the end, and her family made a small still island around her in the crowded hold, and people left them the room, as people do. Juan did not speak much. Juan had used up a lifetime's words on this woman across a small table over thirty years and had none left that were any use, and so he did the thing he could do, which was hold her, and be held, and once — Vicente saw it and looked away and kept it — once put his leather-smelling hand flat against his wife's gray cheek and leave it there a long time, the harness-maker's hand that had bowed to exactly two powers in all its life, laid against the going face of one of them.

And Catarina, near the end, sang.

Not loudly; she had no breath for loud. But she sang, under her breath, in the lucid quiet, the old cradle-songs of Garachico — the ones she had sung over the boy in the cradle the night the mountain woke, the wordless and half-worded tunes the island sang its children to sleep on, older than the wine, old as the first mothers on the rock. She sang them looking at her son, the grown enormous-handed man kneeling beside her in a stinking hold in the middle of the ocean, and she was singing them, he understood, to him, putting them into him one more time, on purpose, at the end — as she had put them in at the beginning — so that he would have them, so that they would go on; because she could not be buried in ground he could visit and she knew it, she would have no grave, no stone, no campo santo, nothing he could ever come back to and stand over; and so she gave him the only grave she could, which was the songs, which was her actual voice making the actual tunes, going into her son's keeping where no sea could reach them. Here, the singing said, as her whole life had said it. Take these. Keep them. And he took them. And he kept them. And that is why I can tell you about them three hundred years downstream — because a dying woman on the España understood, with the gray-eyed knowing that had always run ahead of her, that her body was going into the Atlantic and her self was going into the songs, and chose, at the last, to be buried in her son instead of the sea.

She died on the morning of the third good day, with the cradle-song unfinished, the way they always are.

—

They sewed her in a length of sailcloth, and the master let Vicente do the sewing, because Vicente asked, and a man who asks to sew his own mother's shroud is not refused. He did it with his own awls and his own waxed thread and his own sure hands, the trade his father had put into him and his father's father before that turned now to this last use — the pause, the gathered breath, the committed stitch, forty times and forty times again down the long seam of the canvas that held his mother, each stitch sure, each one perfect, because it was the last thing his hands would ever make for her and he was his father's son and he did not leave good work undone. They put a round-shot at her feet. And on a gray morning in the middle of the ocean, with the families gathered on the deck and the wind taking the words, the master read the office for the burial of the dead at sea, and they tipped the board, and Catarina Cayetano went over the side and down into the gray Atlantic and was gone, with no grave but the sea, in a place with no name, at a spot no chart marks and no child could ever visit; and the only monument she would ever have was already walking the deck — a big quiet wrecked young man with her gray eyes and her cradle-songs inside him, who would carry both to a far dry river and hand them on.

She has no grave. Do not look for it.
She is not in the cold green water; she was only lent it her body.
Her grave is a tune with the words worn off,
sung once more over a cradle that is not yet built,
in a country she never saw, by a granddaughter she never met,
who will not know whose voice it is she is borrowing,
and will sing it anyway, and get it right,
because some graves are kept by being carried,
and some women are buried in the living,
and the deepest place you can put a mother
is in the hands and the throat of her child.