Ninety Days to Falmouth

Free sample — the opening of Chapter 1, Wheat at Port Victoria. The complete book (176 pages, 24 chapters) comes as DRM-free PDF + EPUB with purchase.

Chapter 1: Wheat at Port Victoria

The bag came down the chute at him with the weight of a drowned man, and Eino Saarinen took it on his shoulder the way Kalle had shown him — knees, not back, and let the jute settle before you turn. The wheat inside shifted like something alive and then lay still. A hundred and eighty pounds of South Australian wheat, sewn shut at Balaklava or Bute or some other dirt-road town he would never see, and it was his to carry twelve steps across the hot iron deck to the hatch square, where Timmerman Aro’s tally boy cut a notch and the bag went down into the dark.

Twelve steps. He had counted them the first morning and stopped counting the second, because counting made them longer.

The sun stood straight overhead and there was no shade anywhere on the water. Port Victoria lay a mile off across the shallows, a jetty, a pub, a line of wheat stacks under corrugated iron shining like a signal mirror, and between town and ship the ketches came and went all day — Falie, Nelcebee, little wooden things with tan sails and motor smoke, each one bringing four hundred bags out to where Vindarna lay at anchor in eight fathoms because there was not water enough at the jetty for a ship that would draw twenty-one feet loaded. The ketchmen swung the bags up in rope slings, four at a time, and the ship’s own tackle took them, and the men took them from the tackle, and so it went, bag by bag, four thousand one hundred tons in bags of one hundred and eighty pounds, and somewhere in the fo’c’sle there was a man who claimed to have worked out how many bags that made, and nobody wanted to hear the number.

Eino’s hands had split on the second day. The jute did it — not the weight but the weave, dry as wire, dusted with grain chaff that got into the cracks and burned. Kalle Sund had looked at his palms that evening, turned them over like a man reading a poor hand of cards, and said, “Piss on them.”

“On my hands?”

“Tonight and tomorrow morning. It hardens the skin. Or don’t, and by Cape Horn you have no hands at all, and then what does your mother get back?” Kalle was thirty-four and had hands like tarred rope, and he had been right about everything so far, so Eino had done it, out on the fo’c’sle head in the dark where nobody could see, feeling like a fool. The cracks were closing now. They hurt in a different way, a working way. He could live with it.

He set the bag on the square and straightened, and for a moment, waiting for the sling to swing in again, he let himself look up.

He had been aboard eleven days and the looking still did something to him. Four masts. From the deck the mainmast went up a hundred and ninety-eight feet, and he knew this the way he knew his catechism, because Lundqvist the sailmaker had made him say it back: royal above topgallant, topgallant in two, topsails upper and lower, the great course at the bottom that weighed more than a ton of canvas alone when it was wet. Yards squared and bare now, cargo gear rigged where the braces belonged, but even stripped for lading the ship had the look of something meant. Steel from truck to keel, built in Scotland in another century, and every wire and chain of her led somewhere and did something, and a man who knew her could stand at the brace winch and turn a hundred feet of yard with one arm. That was the thing he could not say in a letter without sounding simple: that she was a machine, the biggest machine he had ever touched, and she ran on wind and salt meat and the backs of twenty-six men, and there was an examination in Mariehamn that could make him one of the men who commanded such machines, if he could get the sea-time, if there was still sea-time to get.

“Saarinen.” The tally boy, bored. “Bag.”

He took the next bag.

They knocked off when the last ketch of the day cast loose, and the watch below had rigged the wash-deck pump so a man could sluice the chaff off himself with warm gulf water. Eino ate his supper on the main hatch — pea soup, hard bread, a mug of tea the color of bilge — and afterward, in the last of the light, he took his writing things forward and sat on the spare spar lashed along the fo’c’sle head, and wrote to his mother.

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