Devotion(41)

‘This could be sent later,’ I said, taking out a bolt of black cloth. ‘What is it for, anyway?’

Mama passed Hermine to her other breast. ‘I bought it for you,’ she said, and gave me a sudden, warm smile.

‘For me?’

‘It is for your wedding dress.’

I snorted. ‘What?’

Mama said nothing. Her smile faded a little.

‘I’m only sixteen, Mama. It can be sent on later. If at all,’ I added under my breath.

‘You’ll be seventeen this year.’

‘Well, I won’t be getting married this year.’

‘I was sixteen when I married your father.’ She gave me a look with such an edge to it I felt like I’d been cut. ‘Put it under the mattress.’

I did as she said reluctantly, thinking that, if Mama was called away by Papa or one of the other women, I might have an opportunity to quickly pull the cloth back out and shove it into the chest that would be returning to the docks. The idea of sleeping on the material that would clothe me on my wedding day filled me with uneasiness.

But Mama did not shift from her seat, and the chest was nailed down by Papa before my eyes.


At dusk the captain sent word that we might be permitted to return to the upper deck. The hustle of the harbour had quieted, and stillness had fallen over the ships at dock and the buildings beyond the wharf. The sky in the west was the colour of a peach, and as I stood on the boards, breathing deeply, I thought I could hear the river beneath the ship pushing to the horizon, eager current running hopeful to the light.

The anxiety of unpacking and hastily fashioning living spaces in the ill-lit confines of steerage dissipated like vapour in the open air. A peace settled as we stood on the deck, so crowded with barrels that many of the men and boys had to clamber over them to find a place to stand for evening services. My eyes sought out Thea and, like a needle drawn ever north, I found her. As though my glance held the weight of touch, her eyes met mine. She smiled and I felt it pull through my spine like a thread.

The sky glowed as we prayed together on the deck. My father had asked to perform the service, and his voice was like a net cast out over us. It held us in the quiet.

‘We have not been led to this action by a desire to see a foreign part of the world, nor by the vain desire for riches, but it is belief in You alone, O God, and Your holy word that has made it necessary for us to take this step. And so lead us to a place in Your creation, where we can live and preach Your holy word in its truth and purity.’

I felt pure in that moment. I felt possibility crest beneath me, pushing me forwards into the world, and I thrilled at the uncertainty that awaited. Anything might happen.


That night we slept on the ship. The carpenter had not yet fashioned a crib for Hermine so she lay between Mama and me, little arms jerking into my chest. I remained awake, my head on my arm, listening to the murmurs of families behind their partitions. The boards of the upper berths complained as people turned in them. There was coughing. Rapid footsteps of women directing children to the water closet or scraping buckets out from underneath berths, and then the drumming sound of piss. Elizabeth Radtke was still crying. I heard Magdalena sit up, ask her mother-in-law for a wet cloth.

Later, when most seemed asleep, my face grew warm when I heard Elize Geschke sigh behind her curtain and quietly ask Reinhardt to stretch her cramping feet. It seemed impossible that I would hear such a thing, and yet I had. I was suddenly as privy to their intimacy as a spider on the wall. A ghost in the doorway.

The ship seemed a living thing to me. It was unlike sleeping on the barges, where everything felt temporary and open and free. The Kristi carried not only the weight of our bodies, our belongings, but the weight of something heavier, something living and soulful. Timelessness and temporality together, somehow, knotted in the cord of the wood. It feels like a forest, I thought. And I wondered at the boards above me and the trees that had been felled and skinned and offered up to the saw. I wondered what would happen to the trees I had loved.

The safety lamp in the main hatchway was extinguished and the darkness seemed absolute. I raised my hand to my face and, unable to see my fingers, placed them on my cheek. I touched my nose, my lips, and as I did so, my body again remembered Thea’s mouth upon my own and I realised that it had not been a kiss of farewell.

I wondered what Thea was thinking in her berth. Was she forced to share with Amalie, who might be still crying over the child who was not her child, or was Henriette Volkmann lying there instead?

I thought of Henriette, her narrow face sleeping peacefully next to Thea’s in the bunk. The image of the two of them lying so closely together woke something in me, brought upon me a kind of longing belied with dread.

I thought then, for some reason, of the bolt of cloth I lay upon: the wedding dress yet uncut, but nonetheless waiting for me. Crouching under the mattress like a dark flag of a country not yet known. It dawned on me that my future husband was likely resting in a berth in this same close space I lay in. And if not on this boat, then on one of the others filled with Old Lutherans, also sailing for the colony. I imagined myself dressed in black, hair bound with myrtle, head bent under the weight of vows and my hands taken up by a man’s hands. I imagined myself lying not next to my mother, as I was then, but beside the unfamiliar terrain of a stranger’s body, and in my imagining I saw skin and sinew thread from his body to mine, so that we were as one flesh. That would be it, then, I thought. I would be tied to him by tissue and cuticle and hair. Forever buried in the bodily tapestry of marriage. The thought filled me with panic.