Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain's Tale Read Free Page A

would say. “No doubt they do their worshiping in a grogshop.”
    “It’s from a John Taylor,” Sally Morgan said slowly with surprise and a sudden note of doubt and hesitation in her voice. “Do we know a John Taylor?” No one answered. Ely watched his mother mouth the words as she slowly read the letter to herself. It was her face and the way it suddenly aged before his eyes that told the story. He watched as the letter fell from her hands onto the floor like a leaf from a tree. Her shoulders went limp and she began trembling and shuddering like an injured bird with broken wings.
    “What is it, mother?” one of the girls asked.
    In a weak voice that cracked into a faint whisper, she said, “They’re gone. Dear God, they’re gone.” With that she left the room, her head down and her body shaking. It was the older sister, Asenath, who picked up the letter from the floor and began reading it to all her siblings. Like a chiseled carving on a granite boulder, those words remained etched in Ely’s memory. Each time he recited them he felt a burning inside.
    Dear Madam,
    This is to inform you of all that I can concerning your sons. William sailed on the second day of June bound to Canton in the ship John S. Williams. Captain Depyster and I have not heard of her since.
    And as for Abraham, my Bosom friend and Brother, I am much afraid that we cannot meet in this troublesome World. But Let us Still Cherish the hope that we will all meet in that country where Sorrow and Sighing is done away. Where the wicked cease from troubling and Where the Weary be at Rest. So my Dear Madam, all the News of your Sons I Will send to you. I have Nothing Worth adding at present.
    Despite the promise in the letter of more news, none came. Nothing was ever heard from John Taylor again. Several weeks after receiving the letter, the family knew that William had died because the sinking of the John S. Williams was reported in one of the New York shipping papers, but Abraham’s fate remained a mystery. The dimly lit dinner table at the Morgan house was often filled with awkward silences. The crackling of the fire in the kitchen and the flickering of the candles in the drafty house only accentuated the long gaps in conversation. His mother, whose face had grown drawn and tired, had refused to acknowledge his death. “He’s out there somewhere,” she said. She even refused to give away his clothes and some of his treasured pennywhistles.

    Ely watched as an osprey lifted off into the air with its morning catch squirming in its curved beak. The memory of that letter never failed to make him teary-eyed. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as he looked up the river and thought about its long journey. The Connecticut traveled all the way from Canada to the Long Island Sound. It was open ocean after that. The Algonquian Indians called it the “long tidal river.” For years Ely thought that its name should be “the river with no escape” because he felt that it held him prisoner. When he was younger, he had stood on the high ground and gazed longingly down at the river. Occasionally he would see the tall masts of an oceangoing brig coasting downriver with the outgoing tide, the sailors’ songs filling the air as the men aloft set the ship’s square sails. Even as he hitched up a makeshift dragging cart to one of the plough horses, Ely used to imagine himself on one of those big ships.
    He now watched as the first orange rays of sunlight shone through the trees on the banks of the river. Small sloops and schooners carrying freight and passengers tacked back and forth. A flat-bottomed scow powered by long sweeping oars was carrying a full load of Jersey cows across the river. He looked off to the left and saw the rooftop of the Morgan barn framed by the first tint of red and yellow leaves on the oak trees. His family would be getting up soon to start picking the last of the delicious Golden Sweets and the first of the Greenings and