Mayflower (Flor de mayo): A Tale of the Valencian Seashore

But not so Pascualo. "Stick to cover, eh! Well, you fellows can stay ashore if you want to, and twirl your fingers. I'm going out, and right now. I never saw a blow yet that would keep me home, when I'd made up my mind to go. The woman folks ought to stay at home. But I like to see men and not cowards in the fish business." He spoke in a tone of voice that did not seem to invite argument, and as though the suggestion of his staying in had veiled an insult. He turned his back on the skippers around, to get away from them, get away from everybody, who might know, and … laugh! "Into the water with her, boys!" And the oxen came out of the barn and down toward the shore. "Hey, Flor de Mayo there! Overboard, all hands, and get the skids down!"

The men in the crew obeyed their orders as they were trained to do, unquestioningly. Only tio Batiste raised a voice of protest, and he spoke with his full authority as a bull-dog of the sea.

"God, man, where are your eyes this morning! Don't you see the wind off there! Blowing like hell, man alive!"

"Oh, that ain't wind, that's rain, agüelo! No, no, it's going to settle down to raining. An hour or two of chop, perhaps, but not enough to make a chicken sea-sick!"

"Well, it's rain or it's wind. But if it's wind, the way it looks from here, it's all day with the man that gets into it!"

"Oh, go along home, tio," the Rector snapped with a rudeness he had never used toward that old salt before. "There's a job up at the church for you, janitor or something. This boat is no place for cowards nor for invalids!"

"Coward, is it? Coward, eh? I've been to Havana twice in a fifty-footer, belly of a sick whale! And on the rocks twice, in weather that would make you blue in the gills! By God, take twenty years off this back of mine, and I'd rip you up the front for saying that, the way I would a codfish! But into the water she goes, boys! When the captain speaks, it ain't for the likes of me to raise a voice. Into the water with her, boys, and to hell with her!" And the furious old sailor was through grumbling in time to help lay the last skid before the Mayflower's bow touched the surf. Another pair of oxen was already pulling at the boat that was to go team with the Rector's newer craft; and in a few moments both vessels had raised their huge lateen sails, and were dashing fast through the outer breakers with every stitch of canvas drawing.

The skippers ashore stood looking on perplexedly. The Rector's outfit was now well out to sea, and jealousy began to rage within them. That lanudo had gone mad! The idea of putting to sea in the teeth of a threat like that! But he had his eye on the market! Making a clean-up, eh? While they were standing around with their hands in their pockets! It angered them, this selfish impudence, as though the Rector were out to catch all the fish left in the sea. The boldest and most jealous took the lead. "Well, sir, where he can go, I can go! Does he think he's the only man that can sail a boat around here? Haul her out, Chepa, haul her out, and be quick about it!"

The challenge was taken up all along the shore. "Boyero! Boyero!" Everybody began calling for the oxen at once, and the drivers did not know which way to turn. The madness of the Rector seemed to spread like wildfire from one end of the beach to the other. The women ashore began to shriek and protest at seeing their men go out in the face of the dread east wind. Curse that skinflint Rector! Better stay home and watch his wife! Did he want to drown everybody in the Cabañal? Siñá Tona, in her underclothing, her thin gray hair undone and blowing in the wind, came running down to the water's edge. They had told her what the Rector had been up to. She had jumped out of bed to stop him.

"Pascualet!" she called. "Pascualet! Fill meu, torna, torna! Come back, come back!" But the two boats were already far, far, offshore.

And the poor woman, knowing that they could not hear her voice, began to wail and tear her hair, crying to God and to the saints in heaven! "Maria santísima! He is going to his death, the death of him, I say! Reina y soberana! Both my boys, and the little one, too!" What a curse had settled on her family! That pig of a sea would swallow them all, as it had killed her husband!

And the other women joined in her lamentation. But the men worked on in sullen frowning silence, unable to resist the jealous rivalry that was hurling them into the jaws of death in their relentless struggle for bread. They splashed out into the surf, till the water reached their belts. They climbed aboard their boats, and raised the sails. And soon a line of great white wings was vanishing into the mist, madly rushing seaward through the white caps, under a sky already lowering with tempest and black with the scowl of fateful augury.

CHAPTER X

"AND STILL THEY SAY FISH COMES HIGH!"

Four hours later the Mayflower was off Sagunto in the channel which tio Batiste, with his habit of judging more from the bottom than from landmarks on shore, was tracing between the Roca del Puig and the kelp grounds of Murviedro. Not a boat had dared go so far from home that day. The rest of the fleet could be dimly seen, strung out on the horizon in a wide arc from in front of Valencia to the offings of Cullera. The sky was a leaden gray; the sea a deep purple, turning to an ebony black in the troughs of the waves. The wind came in a succession of long frigid squalls that whipped the sails about and whistled through the rigging. The Mayflower and its running mate kept on, however, under full sail, dragging the bòu-net that was getting heavier and heavier from minute to minute.

The Rector was posted astern, at the tiller, heading the Mayflower into the menacing gusts, more from instinct than anything else; for his eyes were not on the water. They were fixed on Tonet, who had been trying to avoid their piercing gaze ever since the boat left shore. At times they would shift to little Pascualet, who was standing rigid at the foot of the mast, throwing his diminutive chest out in challenge to that sea, which, on his second voyage, was beginning to show its temper. The Mayflower was now pitching heavily as the waves came stronger and stronger; but the sailors sauntered casually back and forth about their work, as if nothing unusual were going on, though a false step would have thrown them overboard.

The Rector looked from Tonet to the boy and from the boy to Tonet. An expression of doubt gradually changing to conviction was written on his face, as he compared them feature by feature, minutely. No, Rosario had not deceived him. Where had his eyes been all those years not to have noticed the astonishing resemblance? And Pascualo's face grew paler and paler under its deep sunburn; his eyes were blood-shot as they had been the night before, and he pressed his lips tightly together to hold in the angry words that were tingling on his tongue and gathering in his throat. God, how people must have been laughing at him! Look at the boy! The very same face, the very same ways! Who could mistake them? Pascualet was little Tonet all over again, the frail nervous child he had tended like a nurse-maid in the tavern-boat. No, that was Tonet's boy, no use denying it, the living, visible proof of his dishonor! And as this conclusion settled deeper in the skipper's mind, he tore at the flesh through his open shirt front, and frowned with sullen animosity at the water, the boat, and the sailors, who kept looking at him out of the corners of their eyes, wondering why the captain was in such a black temper, though it was owing probably to the weather.

And why should he go on slaving like a dog? To earn money for that wench of a woman who had been making a public fool of him all this time? And create a future for Pascualet, leave him the richest fisherman in the Cabañal? No, no, no! There was nothing left for him to live for. Die, then, and take with him to destruction all he had been working for! and the Mayflower, his other child, that he talked to as he would have to a daughter – yes, her, too, away with her, and perish with her the very memory of the sweet hopes and dreams that had gone into the building of her. He wished to God that one of those big waves, instead of filling under the boat's bow and throwing her rudely about on its foaming crest, would open underneath her keel and let her drop to the bottom.

A signal came from the Mayflower's teammate. The net was dragging so heavy now from the huge catch inside that the boats were making scarcely any headway. Wasn't it about time to haul her in? Pascualo smiled bitterly! What the devil did he care! Certainly, haul her in when you please! The crew began pulling at the cable that stretched from the lower edge of the net to either boat, and they pulled and pulled joyously. In spite of the wet weather and the back-breaking exertion, Tonet and the sailors were in great glee. This was something like a haul! A hundredweight at every foot!

But tio Batiste, from his place on the tip of the bow, where every dash of spray was reaching him, gave a sudden call:

"Look, Pascualo, Pascualo! Look! There she comes! There she comes!"

The old fisherman was pointing to the horizon, where the leaden mantle of cloud seemed to be condensing into a blackish vapor. The Rector had been watching the men hauling at the net. The little boy and Tonet happened to be standing side by side, and the resemblance between them was more striking than ever.

"Pascualo, man alive! Pascualo!"

"What's up!" the Rector answered, coming to himself.

"The hurricane! It's coming! It's on top of us!"

The mass of black was driving rapidly nearer, and spreading out as it advanced. Overhead a livid flash of lightning seemed to rend the sky in twain, and the thunder crashed, as though a huge piece of canvas had been ripped asunder. And a moment after, the levante itself, that dread easterly gale that never blows in the Gulf of Valencia but with the breath of doom!

As the tornado struck the Mayflower, the vessel went over on her beam ends as though a giant hand had seized her by the keel and were trying to roll her over. The water came up over the lee rail almost to the hatches. The great lateen sail was flat on the sea like a sheet. Then as the vessel righted partly, down again, and again!

All this was the work of an instant. The first tremendous blast of the hurricane had caught the sail full, and about capsized the boat. But tio Batiste and the Rector scrambled along the almost perpendicular deck to the mast, loosened the peak-halyards and let the yard down. Freed from the pressure of the sail, the Mayflower came back to an even keel with the next wave. But Pascualo had had to let go the tiller, and the boat was wallowing in the trough, spinning round and round like a top in the boiling waters. The Rector was crawling back to the helm, with the idea of putting the Mayflower's head to the wind. She would not come round, however. The heavy net now held her fast by the stern, though a moment before it had kept the vessel from foundering by acting as a counter to the violent pulling of the sail.

The skipper looked around for his running mate. She came booming down the wind, dismasted, her sail overboard, her stern to the blow. She had cut loose from the net to keep from going over and was being tossed to leeward by the gale. The waves piled up behind her steep as walls, the tops blowing off every one of them and crashing down on her decks in a deafening roar. But she had done well, all the same. The Mayflower, too, must get free from the seine, and try to make Valencia. A knife was laid to the cable. It snapped at the next pitch of the vessel, which, with the tiller hard down, came round into the wind. The sail had slipped down to the deck, the cross-boom sticking within easy reach of the hand. But that bit of canvas caught the hurricane with tremendous force, bending the mast threateningly and giving considerable headway to the Mayflower, which was taking every comber over forward.

In that critical extremity the Rector became his real self again. "All hands, attention! Obey orders, and be quick about it. We've got to come about!" That was the supreme moment. If one of those water-mountains caught her abeam, it would all be over in a second. Pascualo, upright, his feet glued to the deck, had his eyes on the waves ahead, studying every comber carefully as it swept toward the vessel. He was looking for a smooth one among those driving ridges of water – some pocket in the gale, which would enable him to swing around without turning turtle.

"Now, now, now … ah … ah … ah!"

The Mayflower veered like a shot, sank into a great yawning chasm between two smooth but almost perpendicular walls, and she had her stern to windward just as the next huge breaker came, lifting the whole vessel aft, shoving her nose under forward, and tossing her to leeward as with a mighty punch in the back. Trembling, staggering, she broke free. The crew, catching their breath from the terror of the moment, looked out after the great green mountain as it passed on. They saw it curve in a somber arch of emerald over the other craft, dismantled, that was drifting helpless before the storm. The enormous comber broke, like a mine exploding, with cataracts of foam, and water thrown on high in columns. And when the giant, literally blown to pieces by the gale, had disappeared, to be followed by other billows just as noisy and just as high, the surface of the sea was bare, save for a piece of timber and a barrel with the head gone.

"Requiescat in pace!" tio Batiste murmured crossing himself and lowering his head. Tonet and the two sailors, pale and haggard, answered instinctively: "Amen!"

"Pare! Pare!" Pascualet was calling in terror, pointing toward the bow. The other "cat," his comrade, had been there when the Mayflower started to plunge. Now he was gone! The great Destroyer had swept him overboard, and no one had seen! Panic seized on the crew, in that ghastly moment of supreme peril. The deafening thunder claps followed one on the heels of the other. Chain-lightning hissed and snapped close by in all directions over the leaden sky, snakes of fire that seemed to be darting into the water to quench their flaming entrails; and the bangs of thunder came, some of them short, crackling like the roll of musketry; others deep, prolonged, booming. The rain was coming down in a torrential cascade, as though the sky were trying to fill up the valleys in the sea and make its power more violent.

But the Rector took the crew in hand. "God, have we sailors or women aboard here? And you came from the Cabañal, and are afraid of a bit of sea! You'd think you fellows had never been offshore! This isn't going to last. These easterlies are always freakish things! But anyhow! What's the use of getting scared? It's a sailor's place to die at sea! I always said so: sooner a lobster than a mumbling parson and the worms! Pull yourselves together, boys. And lash yourselves to something. The boat's all right. Just don't get washed overboard!"

Tio Batiste and the two sailors knotted the ends of their sashes around the mast. Tonet tied the little boy securely to a ring astern; but seeing that his brother, for a show of bravado, had sat down beside the tiller free, he crouched at the railing, bracing himself against a chock on the deck. A funereal silence settled on the Mayflower. The sea was now in such commotion that the kelp on the bottom showed its streamers in the troughs of the waves. The crests of foam were turning a dirty yellow from the mud stirred up. Spray, rain, bits of seaweed, lashed the faces and hands of the sailors cruelly. They were all now soaked to the skin.

As the vessel rose to the crests, the keel half out of water aft, the Rector could see other boats from the Cabañal in the distance, vanishing in the mists of the horizon. They were all running with poles virtually bare, scudding before the wind for shelter, though it would be much more dangerous making port than to hold to the open sea. And the claws of remorse sank deep into Pascualo's heart. He seemed to be awakening from a horrible dream. That night of horror passed in the streets of the village! Those four glasses of brandy at the tavern! That argument with the men on shore, and his impulse to put to sea! Could he have been guilty of all that? A more criminal wretch he was than the pair who had betrayed him. If he had been tired of life, he could have tied a rock around his neck and jumped off the Breakwater! But what right had he to drive all those innocent boys to death? What would the people at home say of him? It was his fault that half the fishermen had gone out in the very teeth of the gale that morning! And then, his other boat! Every soul aboard her lost, and because they had obeyed his orders like true fishermen! And how many other vessels had met the same fate? There was deep shame on his face as he looked at tio Batiste and the two sailors, lashed to the mast there and whipped and bleeding in the storm! He did not choose to look at his brother nor at Pascualet. Little it mattered if they should die – for at thought of them the thirst for vengeance flamed in him anew. But the other two, sons of mothers, old and dependent on them for support, and tio Batiste, who had survived so many dangers through all those years! Those surely he had no right to kill! And the sight of the three men crouching there on the wet deck, the ropes cutting into their flesh as they held on, half stunned under the buffets that rained upon them like hammer blows, drove all sense of his own danger from the Rector's mind. He scarcely noticed the waves that came splashing up around him. Nothing seemed able to stir that huge frame of his, but an anguish had reentered his soul sharper and more racking than that of the night before. He must live, save himself, leave his personal affairs for later settlement, but meanwhile get those men ashore, get those men ashore, all of them, and not add to the burden that the lost "cat" and the crew of his other boat had put upon his conscience.

The Rector centered his whole mind on the handling of the Mayflower. No need for worry just at present. That hull would stand any sea and they did not have to buck the storm. But how get into the harbor? That was the crucial effort in which so many came to grief. Ahead, just visible through the rain, the spray and the mist, the Breakwater could already be seen, its back looming above the water like a whale driven aground by the gale. How double that projecting point?

From succeeding crests the skipper studied the rocks that were churning in a hell of surf, and his heart sank within him at thought of the struggle ahead. Not another sail was in sight. Many boats, perhaps, had gotten in. The rest were already lost On top of the Breakwater, many, many black points, people, probably, who had come, crazy with fear, to watch the ghastly combat between man and the elements.

All the Cabañal had started down to the giant wall of red rocks as the first crashes of the storm had broken; and the people, indifferent to the breakers that might easily sweep them off, had gathered on the point in front of the lighthouse, as though their presence there might be of some help to their dear ones in the fight to enter the harbor. Under the torrential downpour women kept coming on the run, the rain biting at their faces, the gale washing their skirts about and whistling in their ears. And they stood there on the rocks, their shawls soaked through, praying, screaming, raising their hands to heaven. Men in oil skins and sea boots came hurrying along the shore, jumping from stone to stone, stopping many times, when they reached the Breakwater, to let a wave go by as it leapt over that obstruction into the inner harbor, leaving the red granite shining with the angry sweat of the tempest.

On the farthest projection of the jetty, where the storm surf was dashing highest against the outer rocks, stood Dolores, bareheaded, her face pale, clinging to siñá Tona, who was wild with anguish for her boy, her Pascualet, who was still out there! And the two women, with others also, cursed heaven with the foulest blasphemies, afterwards, suddenly, to bow their heads, crossing their hands over their breasts, and suppliantly promising masses, candles, offerings, to the Virgin of Rosario and the Holy Christ of the Grao, addressing those miraculous beings pleadingly, intimately, as though the divinities were present in the flesh there before them. Dolores finally drew her shawl about her and crouched for shelter behind the outermost rock, the wash from the surf climbing up around her legs, but her eyes she held seaward with the fixed motionless stare of a sphinx. On a stone farther back tia Picores towered on high with her massive bony frame. Anger writhing at her mouth, and her fists clenched in threat, she faced the sea with the sublimity of a tragic witch, insulting the wild turmoil with the gibes of the Fishmarket: "Pig of a sea! Streetwalker! Sow! They call you a woman, but you're a man, I say!"

The rain came in horizontal sheets before the gale, which caught individuals not clinging to their neighbors and tossed them around like reeds. All the anxious watchers were wet to the skin and their clothes clung dripping to their bodies; but absorbed in the enthralling horror of the spectacle, they were unconscious of the chill that was beginning to make their teeth chatter. A curse on the Rector's head! That cuckold was to blame for everything! He was the one responsible for the fleet's going out. It would serve him right if he never got in! And Dolores and siñá Tona caught such angry words, and lowered their heads in shame under public condemnation.

But one by one the boats rounded the Breakwater, cheered by the crowd, and greeted by sobs and cries of joy from the families of the crews who ran off toward the Grao to meet their men. Soon so many of them were in that the throng of the Breakwater was noticeably smaller. The harbor entrance had turned to a veritable hell of wind and wave and whirlpool. Three boats were still in sight, and for an hour, while the people ashore stood gripped in maddening suspense, they tacked and veered in the hurricane, struggling against the dread currents that kept sweeping them down the coast. At last they, too, got in, and a great sigh of relief and satisfaction rose from the crowd.

But it was then that the black horizon was suddenly cleft by another speck. A boat was driving shoreward in mad career though a mere shred of canvas was visible at the foot of the bare pole The sailors who had crept out to the most exposed rocks and were lying there on their stomachs to offer least exposure to the wind and waves, looked at one another despairingly. Too late, they all agreed. That straggler would be the blood offering to the sea! Impossible to enter now!

Sharp eyes soon made out the identity of the craft. Flor de Mayo!Flor de Mayo! The boat came on, now swallowed in the deep trough, now rearing on the crests of the combers. Siñá Tona and Dolores began to shriek and scream like mad. They seemed bent on rushing out into the water, and actually tried to reach one of the sea-swept boulders that stood out in the surf like heads of giants peering above the turmoil. And the sympathy and sorrow that misfortune brings to multitudes now turned to the two women. Curses at the Rector ceased. Sailors gathered round them with assurances that everything would be all right, though some of the men, foreseeing the inevitable end of the ghastly battle, tried to prevent them from looking on. And so an hour passed. A sight to turn your hair white!

Pascualo, out at sea, felt the need of encouragement in his anxiety. And he called to tio Batiste.

"You know the Gulf, tio," he shouted. "What do you think of the looks of things?"

But the old man, awakening with a start from his chill and torpor, shook his head sadly, and on the face above his white goatee the resignation of glorious, fearless manhood was written. No, in an hour it would be all over! No crossing the tide-rip in a sea like that. You could take his word for that! In all his life he had never seen such a wind! But the Rector felt the strength for anything within him. "Well, if we can't get in, we'll hold offshore, by God! and ride her out!" "No, you can't do that. There's going to be two days of it, at least. The boat might stand the seas, but you can't beat against this blow. If you try to coast along, you'll strike at Cullera, and if you get by there, you'll fetch up on the Cape. No, the one chance is running in. If it's dying, let's die near home, where so many of the boys have died, and in sight of the Christ of the Grao!" And tio Batiste, hitching around in the leashes that held him to the mast, got one hand into his shirt front, drew out a tarnished crucifix of bronze, and kissed it devoutly over and over again.

The old man's voice seemed to put spirit into the other men. "Cristo! a pretty time for parson stuff!" Tonet jeered with a sepulchral laugh, and the two sailors began to curse at the old man with blasphemous obscenities. Danger, instead of crushing them, seemed to translate despair into raving impiety. The skipper shrugged his shoulders indifferently. A good Christian he was! If you didn't believe it, ask don Santiago. But he knew one thing, that the only Christ who would bring the Mayflower through that fix was Pascualo el Retor, and he might even do the trick if the damned boat minded her helm!

The proximity of shoal water was now quite apparent on the vessel. The combers had stopped coming in huge but fairly regular mountains from astern. A cross sea was running now, throwing a violent nasty chop back against the wind, and the water, piled up along the shore, was tumbling seaward in a gigantic undertow that broke to the surface in boiling seething whirlpools. The Mayflower, every timber in her sound and solid, creaked and strained in the new turmoil of conflicting forces. She was virtually unmanageable between the impact of the gale from astern and the water catching at her keel from forward and abeam. But though great waves were breaking over her from all directions, her hatches were firmly battened down, and nobly she struggled free each time. The Rector understood, however, that, caught now in the tide-run off the Breakwater, there was no alternative but to try for the harbor.