Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine Read Online Free Page B

belly. Then I would join him and we would take turns scanning the sea for floating bottles. Our forty years’ voyage yielded perhaps twenty-five found in this manner. The best days being overcast and greyish with the horizon distinctly etched, a sea so flat and calm that each ripple would seem to have its own character. Then the telltale green or blue glint. Unguentine would pass me the field-glasses and slide down the side of the dome, his bare feet striking the deck with an awful whack. To my shouts he would navigate towards the speck. News at last, I chanted, news at last! I remember the day. I never learned. The barge was now drifting. The gap but a hundred yards. Unbelieving, I slid down to the deck. This was no ordinary bottle we were drawing near to, no simple wine bottle, but a huge blue thing of five gallons riding high on the waves and crammed with papers. Unguentine emerged from the pilot-house and lowered himself into a prone position on the deck with his dark hair-matted arm reaching through the railing, fingers dipping into the water, the hissing and bubbling of the steam-engine boiler coming from a porthole open nearby and seeming to fill the whole black sky, while I held his other hand between my two, my feet planted firmly on deck. I saw his fingers stretch wide as we drifted closer. His breathing tight, whistling through his nose. Strands of his long white hair trailed in the water. Then the tips of his fingers touched the bottle and spun it closer. He grasped its neck. I shouted. But that was that. As usual he flung his shirt or some cloth over the thing and hurried away with it to a hiding-place I never discovered. Perhaps he muttered something about it not being fit for a woman to read, later in the day, noting the despondent cast in my eyes. It could have been anything. To the very end he was to forbid me all reading matter other than what was already on the barge, encyclopedias, dictionaries, repair manuals, cookbooks, agricultural publications. Everything I needed ever to know was in there, he once tried to tell me. Still, I squeezed some consolation from those bottles we hit upon every year or so, in knowing there was at least some news about even though I might never see it.
    We stayed at anchor that day for the spring seeding, planting and grafting, and opened the dome windows wide to admit passing flocks of insect-eating birds, and the trees chattered happily as they went about their work. Unguentine discouraged overnight stays and nesting, however, and towards sunset he would go about the barge with a long pole and gently beat the branches until the little grey birds would fly away with a pathetic twig clutched in the bill and no doubt suffering under the illusion that there would be another barge such as ours within easy flying distance where they could rest in peace. Unguentine’s attitude being that we could not afford to feed them continuously; also we had a few pair of doves and pigeons. I was always saddened to see those flocks flutter through the windows and circle the barge a time or two before setting off in the dusk, a handful of peppercorns cast to the winds, and would have to rush down to the antechamber off the engine-room that was our bedroom to weep for the children I would never have, that being before I had the courage to do so in front of him. There I would lie in wait for him to note my absence. He would, in three or four hours. Finally when he climbed below deck after dark, wondering where his dinner was, perhaps with a storm come up and rough seas and blinding rains, I’d sulk and lure him into the warm and steamy darkness and from the hairs of his warm body I’d breed a myriad smiling, sparkle-eyed one-year-olds, my broods, my flocks. In the churning seas, below the waves, together inside our hammock woven in coarse sailcloth by Unguentine’s deft hands, a spherical webbed sack which hung and swivelled between the two walls of our bedroom, we would spin round and round