The Hull
LV14 · Michael S. Moniz, after H.P. Lovecraft
Story catalogue · Reading guide
New Bedford, Massachusetts
14 March 1912
Graça,
I am writing to you because I cannot say these things to anyone here. The people here are good to me. The women from the parish bring food. The priest comes on Thursdays. Manuel’s cousin found me work at the mill, and the work is hard and the hours are long and I am grateful for both because the hours that are not filled with work are the hours when my body remembers, and I do not want my body to remember.
But it remembers. That is what I am writing to tell you. My body remembers what happened on the crossing, and my body remembers what happened after, and the two things are not the same thing and my body does not care that they are not the same thing. My body holds them together the way my hands hold bread when I am eating—both hands, one bread, and the bread does not ask which hand is doing the holding.
You knew me before. That is why I am writing to you and not to the priest and not to Manuel’s cousin and not to the women from the parish. You knew my body before the crossing. You knew how I walked and how I carried the water and how I slept. You knew that I was strong and that my strength was in my back and my legs and my hands and that I did not think about my strength because thinking about it was not necessary. The body worked. I did not need to understand how.
You knew Manuel. You knew how he was with me. You knew his hands on my shoulders when he came in from the boats, the salt still on his skin, and how he would stand behind me at the stove and put his chin on the top of my head because I am short and he was tall and the top of my head was where his chin fit. You knew us, Graça. You knew what we were before the ocean.
I need you to know what we were before I can tell you what happened.
• • •
We left Ponta Delgada on the seventh of September. The ship was the Canopic. White Star Line. I know this because Manuel kept the ticket and the ticket is in the box under the bed with his other things that I have not opened since February. The ship was large. I did not know ships could be that large. Standing on the dock looking up at it I felt the way I feel now when I stand in the street and look up at the mill—that the thing was not built for people like me but that people like me were necessary for it to do whatever it was built to do.
We were below. You know this. Everyone from the islands was below. The berths were in the lowest deck, past the stairs, past the corridor where the electric lights buzzed in a way that made my teeth ache, past the door that was heavy and smelled of paint and salt and something else I could not name then and cannot name now but that my body recognised the way my body recognises weather—not with a word but with a change in the skin, a tightening, a readiness for something the mind has not yet been told is coming.
The berth was small. Two beds, one on top of the other. Manuel took the top because I cannot climb when the floor moves, and the floor moved from the first hour. The walls were iron. The ceiling was low. The floor was iron. Everything was iron, and the iron was the ship, and the ship was in the water, and the water was the Atlantic, and the Atlantic was everywhere. Above us. Below us. On every side. I could feel it through the iron the way you feel the rain through the walls of the house in January—not wet, not leaking, but present. The water was present in the iron the way cold is present in stone. It did not come through. It did not need to come through. It was there.
I was not seasick. I want you to understand this because everyone assumes I was seasick and the assumption makes it easier for them and harder for me. Manuel was seasick. Half the people in steerage were seasick. The buckets were full and the smell was terrible and the women who were not sick were taking care of the women who were sick and the children were crying and the men were lying in their berths with their faces to the wall. I was not sick. My stomach was steady. My head was clear. My body was doing something else.
• • •
It started on the second night.
I was lying in the lower berth with my hand on the wall. The iron wall. My palm flat against it, because the berth was narrow and there was nowhere else to put my hand and because the iron was cool and the cool felt good against my skin in the heat of the lower deck where the air did not move and the smell of sickness hung in the dark like cloth.
The wall hummed.
Not the engine. I know the engine’s hum—it was deeper, steadier, it came from below and behind and it was mechanical and my body understood it the way my body understood the mill machinery later: a thing made by hands, doing what it was made to do. The wall’s hum was different. The wall’s hum came from outside. From the water. From the water pressing against the iron from every direction, and the pressing carried something in it that was not pressure and not sound and not temperature but that my body registered the way my body registers the moment before a storm—the drop, the stillness, the air pulling tight across the skin.
I took my hand off the wall. The hum continued. The hum was not in my hand. The hum was in my body. The wall had put it there, or the wall had opened something that was already there, and the something was vibrating now at a frequency I could feel in my spine and my ribs and the bones of my pelvis and the backs of my knees. My body was receiving. I did not know what it was receiving. I did not have words for what it was receiving. I still do not have words. I am writing to you with a hand that was inside the hum for nine days and the hand does not have words either but the hand is writing anyway because the hand is the only part of me that can do this.
Manuel asked me if I was all right. I said yes. This was not a lie. I was not unwell. I was not in pain. The receiving was not painful. The receiving was—Graça, I do not know how to say this to you in a way that will make sense—the receiving was like being listened to by something that did not have ears. Like being read by something that did not have eyes. Like being held by something that did not have hands but that held me anyway, through the iron, through the water, through the body that was lying in a berth six feet wide in the lowest deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic in September.
The something was large. I knew this the way I know the ocean is large—not because I had seen it all but because the quality of the pressure told me there was more of it than the pressure I was feeling. What I was receiving was the edge. The outermost reach of something whose centre was below the ship and below the ocean and below the floor of the ocean, and the floor of the ocean was not the bottom. There was more floor beneath the floor, and the something was beneath all of it, and the something was attending to the surface the way I attend to the sound of rain on the roof—aware of it, registering it, not disturbed by it, but aware.
I was the rain. That is the closest I can come. I was the rain on the roof of something that lived beneath the ocean floor, and the something felt me the way I felt the hum, and the feeling was mutual and it was not hostile and it was not kind and it was not anything that has a word in Portuguese or English or any language I have heard spoken in the parish or the mill or the streets of this city where I live now without Manuel in a room above a bakery where the smell of bread in the morning is the only thing that still makes my body feel like a body and not like an antenna that someone forgot to turn off.
• • •
It lasted nine days.
Nine days and nine nights, though the difference between day and night in the lower deck was only the sound—the daytime sounds of people moving and talking and children running in the corridor, the nighttime sounds of breathing and coughing and the engine and the water. The hum did not change with the light. The hum did not change with anything. The hum was constant. My body received it constantly. I lay in my berth and ate when Manuel brought food and drank when Manuel brought water and went to the washroom when I needed to and lay back down and felt the hum and the hum felt me and we were inside each other for nine days.
On the fifth day the hum deepened.
I know now—I did not know then—that the ship was passing over something. A ridge. A place where the floor of the ocean rises and the water is shallower and the distance between the surface and whatever is beneath the floor is less. The deepening was not gradual. The deepening happened the way a church bell happens—a single shift, a note moving down, and the new note holding, and the body adjusting to the new note the way the body adjusts to a heavier load, not by choosing to carry it but by discovering that it is already carrying it.
My body adjusted. I did not tell it to adjust. My body has never waited for my permission to do what it does. When I was carrying Marta my body did not ask me before it changed—it widened and softened and made room and the making of room was not my decision, it was my body’s knowledge, and I trusted the knowledge because the knowledge was older than me and knew more than me and had been making room since before I was a person with a name.
The deepening was like that. My body made room for it. My spine opened—I do not mean it moved, I mean the space between the bones of my spine became wider in a way I could feel but could not see, and the widening allowed more of the hum to enter, and the hum entered, and my body held it the way my body held Marta: without understanding, without permission, with the competence of a thing that was built to hold.
I cried. Not from pain. Not from fear. From the fullness. From the feeling of being so full of something I could not name that the tears were the only release my body could find, and the tears came and Manuel climbed down from his berth and held me and asked me what was wrong and I said I was homesick because homesick was the only word I had for a feeling so large it did not fit in my chest.
I was not homesick. I was further from home than homesick can reach. I was inside the hum and the hum was inside me and the distance between São Miguel and New Bedford was nothing compared to the distance between the surface of the world and what I was touching through the hull of that ship.
• • •
We arrived on the sixteenth of September.
The ship came into the harbour and the harbour was loud and the light was bright and the air was different—American air, which smells of coal and iron and something sweet I later learned was the molasses from the refinery on the waterfront. Manuel carried our bags. I carried Marta. My body walked down the gangway and onto the dock and the dock was wood and the wood was not iron and the hum stopped.
It did not stop.
The hum in the ship stopped. The hum in my body did not stop. The hum had been in my body for nine days and the hum had become part of my body the way a scar becomes part of the skin—not the original surface but the surface now, the surface that will be the surface for the rest of the surface’s life. I stood on the dock in New Bedford with my daughter on my hip and my husband beside me and the hum in my spine and my ribs and my pelvis and the backs of my knees and I understood that the hum was not going to leave.
It has not left. I am writing this letter six months after we arrived and the hum is in my body now the way the blood is in my body. I do not hear it. I feel it. I feel it when I lie down at night and the room is quiet and the bakery below is closed and the street is empty and the city is as close to silent as a city comes, and in that silence my body hums at a frequency that is not the frequency of a mill or a ship or an engine but the frequency of something beneath the floor of the ocean that attended to me for nine days because I happened to be lying in an iron berth six feet wide directly above it.
I have not been on a boat since. I will not be on a boat again. The women from the parish think this is because of Manuel. They think I cannot bear the water because Manuel died and the water reminds me of the crossing and the crossing reminds me of the life before the death. They are kind and they are wrong. I cannot bear the water because my body knows what is in the water. My body was told. My body was told thoroughly and patiently and over the course of nine days and nights by something that did not use words and did not need to use words because my body does not require words to understand what it has been shown.
I will never go home. I want you to know this, Graça. I will never take the ship back to São Miguel. I will never stand on the dock in Ponta Delgada and look at the harbour and smell the air that smells like our air. Not because I do not want to. Because my body will not permit it. My body was inside the ocean for nine days and the ocean was inside my body and my body will not go back into the ocean because my body knows, the way it knows how to breathe and how to carry a child and how to grieve, that if I go back into the ocean the receiving will start again and this time the receiving will not stop at the edge.
• • •
Manuel.
I need to tell you about Manuel now and I need to tell you quickly because if I do not tell you quickly I will not tell you at all.
He was killed on the eleventh of February. A Tuesday. He was walking home from the docks where he had been working on the fishing boats—he found work on the boats within a month, because Manuel could always find work on boats, because Manuel’s hands knew ropes and tackle and the particular language of the sea that the Portuguese carry in their blood whether they want to or not. He was walking on Acushnet Avenue. It was dark. A man came out of the alley beside the cooperage. The man had a knife. The man wanted the wages Manuel was carrying in his coat pocket. Manuel gave him the wages. The man used the knife anyway.
The police found Manuel on the pavement at half past nine. They came to the room above the bakery at ten. They told me in English, which I understood well enough by then to understand that my husband was dead and that the man who killed him had not been found and that the wages were gone and that Manuel’s body was at the hospital and that I could come in the morning to see him.
I went in the morning. I saw him. His face was the same face. His hands were the same hands. The salt was not on his skin because the hospital had cleaned him, but I could smell it anyway, the way you can smell the ocean on a man who has worked on the water his whole life even after he has washed and dressed and sat down at the table for dinner. The salt was in his skin. The salt did not leave because he died. The salt stayed the way the hum stayed in me. The body holds what the body has been given, and the body does not let go because the person inside the body has stopped.
Graça, the man who killed Manuel was not from the ocean. The man who killed Manuel was from New Bedford. The man who killed Manuel wanted eleven dollars and thirty-five cents, which is what Manuel carried home on a Tuesday after a day on the boats. The knife was a kitchen knife. The alley was an ordinary alley. The murder was an ordinary murder, the kind that happens in cities where men carry their wages in their coat pockets and other men know this and wait in alleys with kitchen knives.
There was nothing cosmic in it. There was nothing beneath the floor of the ocean in it. There was nothing ancient or vast or indifferent in it. There was a man with a knife and a man with wages and the wages were not enough to die for and the knife did not care.
I tell you this because I need you to understand that the two things my body carries are not related. The hum and the grief. The ocean and the knife. The nine days in the hull and the Tuesday on Acushnet Avenue. They have nothing to do with each other. They share my body the way two tenants share a house—same walls, same roof, different lives, different reasons for being there. The ocean did not kill Manuel. The man in the alley killed Manuel. The ocean was doing something else entirely. The ocean has been doing something else entirely for longer than there have been people to put in ships and send across it, and the ocean does not care about the man in the alley and the man in the alley does not care about the ocean and I am the only one who holds both and the holding does not bring them closer together and it does not make sense of either one.
The hum did not protect him. I want to say this plainly. The thing that entered my body on the crossing did not extend to Manuel. The thing did not extend to anyone but me. The thing chose my body—or my body was in the right place, or my body was built in the right way, I do not know which and the not knowing does not change the result. The result is that I was lying in an iron berth six feet wide and the ocean told my body what is beneath the ocean and then my husband was killed for eleven dollars on a Tuesday in February and the two things do not connect and will never connect and my body carries them both and my body does not try to connect them because my body is smarter than the part of me that wants things to make sense.
Things do not make sense, Graça. The ocean is vast and the alley is small and Manuel is dead and I am full of a hum that I did not ask for and cannot return and the hum will be in my body until my body stops and I do not know what happens to the hum when my body stops but I know it does not stop because the hum was there before my body and it will be there after and my body was just the berth it lay in for a while, the way I lay in the berth on the ship, the way Manuel lay on the pavement on Acushnet Avenue.
We are all lying in something. The something does not care about us. The something is not cruel. The something is large and we are small and the largeness is not a judgement and the smallness is not a punishment and the space between them is the space where we live and grieve and carry water and make bread and write letters to friends we will never see again because we will never get on a boat.
• • •
I am going to stop now.
My hand is tired. The hand that held Manuel’s hand and that held Marta and that held the iron wall of the ship and that felt the hum come through the iron into the bones—this hand is tired, Graça, and the tiredness is honest and the honesty is all I have left to give you.
Marta is asleep. She sleeps well. She does not hum. Whatever came through the hull into my body did not pass to her. She is two years old and her body is her own and her body does not carry what my body carries and I am grateful for this the way I am grateful for bread and for the women from the parish and for the work at the mill that fills the hours so my body has something to do besides remember.
I do not know if you will write back. I do not know if this letter makes sense. I do not know if the words I have put on this paper are the right words, because I have never written a letter before and I do not know the right way to put words on paper and I do not know if there is a right way or if the words just go where the hand puts them the way the rain goes where the sky puts it.
I think the words go where the hand puts them. I think the hand knows. The hand has always known more than the rest of me, and the hand held the wall and the hand held Manuel and the hand holds the pen now and the pen is touching the paper and the paper is holding the ink and somewhere beneath all of it the hum continues and the ocean continues and the thing beneath the ocean continues and I continue, Graça, I continue.
Pray for Manuel. Pray for me if you want to but pray for Manuel first because Manuel is not continuing. Manuel is stopped. I am the one who continues and the continuing is not a gift.
Your friend,
Rosa
• • •
Fiction by Michael S. Moniz. Produced with AI assistance in writing and editing under the author’s direction. H.P. Lovecraft is the literary influence; references to Lovecraft in source credits identify the inheritance or AI writing persona.
Edition and source
Selected final: LV14_THE_HULL.docx. Selection basis: only version. Story prose preserved; reading-edition title and credits standardized, source word-count notes omitted.
Source license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — Michael S. Moniz, after H.P. Lovecraft