Thrust: A Novel

Years later, John Joseph and I were both hired to work on another project, a monument to Indians to be built on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. I liked the idea; the two of us liked working together, and I thought our statue would be pleased to have a companion. The new statue was to be an American Indian warrior — similar in scale to the woman we built, but reaching even higher into the air. Any oceangoing ship on its way into the city would see the monument well before the woman we built. Thirty-two chiefs attended the ground-breaking ceremony, including Red Hawk, from the Oglala Lakota, and Two Moons, the Cheyenne chief, both of whom had fought the army at Little Bighorn and elsewhere. Two Moons had even been one of the models for the buffalo nickel.

But then the fundraising failed. Thanks to arguments among politicians and the wealthy, the project, like the chain, was dropped. By the time the world war came along, the following year, it was forgotten altogether. Even the chiefs’ names — Cetan Luta, Éše’he Ôhnéšesêstse — were remembered wrong, in the wrong language for the real story.

Stories get overwritten that way. In my home country, slavery was rewritten as discovery. When French colonials came to Saint-Domingue, they devoured the population as if we were the raw material for their own story of themselves.

Once I asked John Joseph what he thought about “discovery.”

“Be wary of travelers arriving during a storm,” he said. “The stories that come across water have teeth in them.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it stayed with me.

Sometimes, when we were drinking together at night after a day’s work, John Joseph, David, Endora, and I would talk about what might have been: if the woman we built had been allowed to represent emancipation — broken chains in her hand, the original story, her form standing on the bones of the Indigenous killed there, not as a monument to killing, but as a reminder that the birth of this place carried death with it in a way we’d need to reckon with. What if she had stood within that story, the Indian warrior her sentry and companion overlooking the Narrows? What if that had been told as the story of America? Instead of the story that came?

Endora was a former Dominican nun. We met aboard the Frisia, on the journey from Ireland. Our meeting is either a stain or a salvation in my memory, I’ve never been sure which. I was heading west because I needed work — factory work, I was hoping, in a steel mill. The steel mills were paying more than paper mills or cane fields or coal mines.

Late on the fifth night of the journey, a phenomenally drunk man was giving me grief on the lower deck. I couldn’t sleep at night, packed in so tightly among the hundreds of people and piled-up cargo, so I’d taken to venturing out after dark to stand by the railing nearest the stairs that led down to steerage. That night he came up to puke, and when he saw me, he whipped a knife from his jacket and came for me. He had me backed up to the edge of a railing, his arm swinging wildly back and forth with the blade, his head lolling with drink. I could hear the rush of water at my back. It was the middle of the night — almost morning. Dark enough not to matter to anyone. Plus, we both had among the least evident worth of any of the passengers on the ship; maybe, with his threadbare jacket and darkened teeth, he was looking for a way to feel bigger. The drunk man swiped at my arm and caught a lucky slice. Looks like we got a leper on board, he said — talking about my mottled face, my neck. Looks like you’re turning into a sea monster, best get you back where you belong. He said other words too, words I’d been called my entire life in four different countries. I don’t know where he was from, but his mouth was filled with bile, and as he sliced away at the air with the knife, closer and closer to my face, I couldn’t tell if he was looking to kill me or send me over. I lunged at his midsection, trying to knock him to the ground, but he clubbed his hand down on my back, hard, and I lost my bearings. He shouted down at me, drooling, then raised his arm for another attack. You diseased devil, he spat, his breath like rotting apples.

Just before the knife reached my head, I closed my eyes. That’s when I heard her.

“It’s got a name,” she bellowed. When I opened my eyes, I caught Endora in the moment before she smashed in his skull with a fireman’s axe. The man crumpled to the deck in a heap. “It’s called vitiligo,” she told the still mound of him at our feet.

We both stared at the dead man. Blood pooled on the deck around his head. “Help me get this louse overboard,” she said.

There was no noise at all around us in that moment, nothing but the sound of water. No lights but our faint navigation lights and the stars.