A Furnace Afloat

Joe Jackson

Good luck had consequences.

Perhaps he didn’t know it yet, for Fred was angered beyond words. This is what it comes to, he thought: a high-hat’s offer of money for something more precious than gold. He hated Henry in that instant as he stared back at the gaunt face, wide eyes, mouth frozen open in hope and surprise. Why didn’t the little bastard just ask for water instead of going on about how much his watch would bring? As if there was a pawn shop here in the Pacific; as if he could eat the watch case and mainspring. That’s what the rich always assumed of the poor—that they were slaves to the price of a trinket, lackeys to be bought and sold. It didn’t work like that, not here. Sure it was easy to take money, but what people like Henry never understood was that you did so to survive. Survival was what ultimately mattered: the fuel that drove the anger, that primed the panic of starvation, that lurked in every shadow like a thug. Survival was the chasm dividing the rich and poor, a divide the rich would never bridge because they hadn’t experienced what such life did to a man. It twisted him to something brutal, turned him inside out with vengeance till he was ready to kill just to be heard. Eventually he assumed that killing was the only way to be heard. The gap would grow wider, the hatred deeper, until the entire world was like their little boat, swept by a wrath that raged like a furnace till nothing was left but ashes in a drifting hull.

A clipper ship set afire and sunk through one man's carelessness; a 4,300 mile voyage in a longboat; a class war enacted in the microcosm of a castaway's world--survival does not induce democracy any more than a voting system.