Sally Gunning - Bound

For Tom. What Abigail said.

Humanity obliges us to be affected with the distresses and Miserys of our fellow creatures. Friendship is a band yet stronger, which causes us to feel with greater tenderness the afflictions of our Friends.

And there is a tye more binding than Humanity, and stronger than Friendship, which makes us anxious for the happiness and welfare of those to whom it binds us. It makes their Misfortunes, Sorrows and afflictions, our own. Unite these, and there is a threefold cordby this cord I am not ashamed to own myself bound.

A BIGAIL A DAMS , 1763

March 1 756

F or a time Alice remembered the good and forgot the bad, but after a while she remembered the bad and then had to forget everything to get rid of it; when it came back it came back in bits, like the pieces in a month-old stewall the same gray color and smelling like sick, not one thing whole in the entire kettle.

First was the ship. Alice had lived her first seven years of life in London before she got aboard the ship, and if she hadnt got aboard she imagined she might have remembered better those early years of her life, but the ship and what came after it took away all but a few brown heaps of London ash and dirt. She remembered helping her mother to hang the wash on the fence; she remembered learning to pump the foot wheel to twist fine linen fibers into thread; she remembered constantly sweeping lint and bark and wood chips from under her fathers bootheels as he sat and smoked and talked about the ship.

It seemed to Alice that her father talked about the ship a long time before they ever got on it. Alices two older brothers joined in with excited jabber about great stiff sails, sturdy beams, and wide, salted oceans, but Alice watched her mothers face and stayed quiet. Her mothers face had clouded at the word ship and stayed so through all her fathers and brothers happy clamor; Alice saw the face but didnt understand it. As her father described it, leaving two rooms full of smoke and damp for a fine house new-made by his own hand in a place called Philadelphia seemed to promise a life as big as the word. But after a time Alice stopped looking at her mother when her father and brothers began their talk of the ship, and when the cart finally came to collect them she was hanging on the windowsill in the same eagerness as her brothers.

Alices mother held her tight on her lap through the whole cart ride; when they drew up onto the wharf and saw the ship looming in front of them, Alices mother said, Dont be afraid, Alice, but Alice wasnt. She squirmed out of her mothers quivering fingers and chased after her brothers up the gangway. The deck of the ship seemed nothing but a large, fenced yard covered with boards, except that it groaned and creaked and swayed back and forth like the pendulum on a clock she had once seen at the magistrates.

A man wearing both hat and kerchief on his head led them down a narrow, laddered passage into what he called the tween decks; there Alice entertained herself looking at strange faces and listening to strange tongues as her mother hung a curtain around a row of bunks no wider than a set of dough trays. Alice had only just sorted the people around her into families when the tramp of feet overhead grew louder and the creaking and groaning of the ship grew stronger. The deck below her feet began to slant, a little and then a little more, and a collection of cries sprung up around them: Were away! We sail!

A small child wailed. A woman. Another. Alice looked at her mother and saw her eyes brim. Alice returned to her study of the oddly dressed, strangely gabbling people around her and felt herself well entertained until they began losing their stomachs.

Alices mother was the first in their family to turn the color of paste and go up to the rail; by the time she returned, half a dozen small children had already washed the tween deck with their vomit. Alices brothers went next, and last Alice, too sick to notice anything around her; when she returned below, the boards beneath her feet had already turned slick, the air sour and rancid, and the strange families that had amused Alice not long before now seemed too close, too loud, too familiar.

After a time Alices mother couldnt raise herself to climb the companionway to the deck, and Alice, who had stopped getting sick first, was assigned to run up and down with the bucket. Her first trip above in health amazed her. She could look around her now and saw the sails were indeed great and stiff as her brothers had said, the beams indeed sturdy, the ocean indeed wider than anything Alice had ever seen or imagined. The air off the deck felt like a cool, damp hand on Alices hot forehead; she breathed it in as far as it would go and held on to it through her return below as long as she was able.

With each trip above Alice noticed that the wind blew harder, which Alices father told her was a good thing because it would push them faster to Philadelphia, but Alice thought it good because it built white-topped mountains out of flat seawater and crashed them on deck in great snow showers. But after a time Alices father took the bucket from her and wouldnt let her go on the deck anymore; she heard him whisper to her mother of a young boy who had been swept overboard, to which Alices mother replied, Lucky boy, a remark Alice didnt understand and which her father wouldnt explain to her.