The storm came on the ninth day after I woke.
I felt it building through the afternoon, in the way the light went out of the water and the sailors stopped calling to one another.
By evening the wind had found the rigging and begun to moan through it, low and steady, and the older women set down their sewing and looked up at the deck as if they could see the sky through the boards.
Then the sea took hold of us in earnest.
The Mayflower began to roll, harder with each wave, and everything that was not tied down came loose and went sliding across the floor.
A barrel broke free somewhere and slammed into the hull.
Children screamed.
I got both hands around a post and let the body take the punishment, this thin boy’s body that had never known anything like it, while I kept my head clear and my eyes open.
Above us, feet pounded across the deck.
Orders came down through the hatch in torn scraps, half of them eaten by the wind.
Beside me Brewster gripped a beam with one arm and moved his lips, and I could not tell whether it was a prayer or only his fear finding words.
Then I heard the sound I had been dreading since the wind first rose.
It came from inside the ship.
A deep, splitting crack, like a great tree breaking, except this tree was over our heads and holding out the sea.
Somewhere forward, a main beam had given way.
For a moment even the sailors fell silent, and in that silence I understood exactly how much trouble we were in.
A ship with a broken back does not cross an ocean.
It opens up in the middle of one, and everyone aboard goes down into the cold together.
The frightened boy in me wanted to freeze.
I did not let him.
I made myself look at the thing the way I look at everything, as a problem with parts, and parts can be worked.
I had watched them load the ship back in England, and I have always had a good memory for objects and what they can do.
Among the cargo below there was a great iron screw, the kind that belongs to a printing press, a heavy thing with a broad foot and a long threaded shaft.
I had looked at it once, idly, and thought that it was really nothing but a machine for pushing very hard in one direction, slowly, with more force than any number of men could give.
A press turns that force downward, onto paper.
Stand it the other way, brace its foot against something solid, and it would push upward just as hard.
Upward.
Against a broken beam.
I did not shout it across the deck.
A crew half out of their minds with fear would not take a plan from a servant boy in the worst hour of a storm.
But they would take it from Brewster.
I put my hand on the old man’s arm.
I had to say his name twice before he heard me over the noise.
“Mister Brewster.
The printing screw, the great iron one in the cargo.
Tell the carpenter to set it under the broken beam and turn it.
It will force the beam back up and hold it there while they lash it fast.
A screw pushes harder than any man alive.”
He stared at me.
I watched him weigh it, this strange, steady thing a sick boy had just said while the world came apart around us.
Then, because it was a good idea and he was no fool himself, he stopped weighing it and moved.
“Carpenter!” he roared, hauling himself toward the ladder.
“The iron screw, from the press.
Bring up the iron screw!” And he cried it as his own thought, which was exactly what I wanted.
Let the idea belong to the man they trusted.
It would travel faster wearing his name than mine, and I had no wish to be the boy the whole ship stared at once the danger had passed.
I did not go up to watch.
I stayed below with my hands on the post and listened to the carpenter’s mallet ringing on iron, over and over, above my head.
They saved the ship with a tool meant for printing pamphlets.
I have laughed about that many times since, in warm rooms, with all the years to look back through.
That night I did not laugh.
I shook with the cold and the fear like everyone else, and waited to learn whether we would live.
The beam took the screw.
The wood groaned, and held.
The Mayflower kept her back, and carried us on.
The storm was still on us two hours later when the other cry went up.
This one was different.
Sharper.
A man’s name, screamed, and then the one word that empties the blood of everyone who hears it at sea.
Overboard.
A man had gone over the side.
I pushed toward the hatch with the rest, though there was nothing a half-grown boy could do but be in the way.
Up on the streaming deck men were roaring and pointing into the black water.
Out there in the dark a man was being carried off from the only solid thing for three thousand miles in any direction, and the sea did not care in the least who he was, or who might come from him, or what he might have built with his life if he kept it.
Then, a rope.
A line had been trailing in the water as he went over, and by luck or by grace he had caught it, and now he held on with the whole mad strength of a drowning man.
I watched sailors haul on that rope with their heels dug in and their faces twisted, hand over hand, dragging a life back out of the ocean an inch at a time.
When they finally pulled him over the rail and he lay there heaving up half the Atlantic, the sound that ran through the crowd was not a cheer.
It was rougher than a cheer.
It was a shipful of frightened people remembering, all at once, that now and then the sea gives one back.
His name was John Howland.
I heard it passed mouth to mouth in the dark, like a small warm coal.
I said it over once to myself and kept it, the way I was keeping everything in those days, certain that sooner or later I would find a use for it.
Later, when the sea had gone from murder back down to mere threat, Brewster came and found me where I sat in the groaning dark.
He lowered himself down beside me, slow, an old man at the end of a long night, and for a while he said nothing at all.
“The carpenter tells me the screw saved us,” he said at last.
“He says he would not have thought of it in time himself.
A strange thing, that a tool for printing should hold a ship together.” He turned his head and looked at me.
“And a stranger thing still, that a sick boy should think of it when grown seamen could not.”
I kept my eyes on the dark.
“I only remembered seeing it in the hold, sir.
Anyone might have.”
“No,” he said.
“They might not.” He went quiet again, and I felt a question gathering in him, the kind that begins with how and has no easy answer at the end of it.
It never came.
Instead the old man reached over and patted my knee once, the way you gentle a nervous horse, and let out a long breath.
“You are an unusual boy, Thomas Wright.
I have buried enough good people on this crossing to be grateful for an unusual one.
Sleep, now.”
He rose and went back to his flock, and I sat a while longer in the dark, listening to the ship that had nearly been our coffin carry us on toward the shore.
I had made myself useful and kept myself small, both within the same hour, and not a soul aboard thought me anything worse than odd.
It was a good beginning.
I meant to have many more of them.