Terese Svoboda

Pirate Talk or Mermalade

Heare the mermaides singing

— John Donne

…her body as big as one of us; her skin very white; and long haire hanging down behinde, of colour blacke; in her going down they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a Porposse, and speckled like a Macrell.

— Henry Hudson, skirting the polar ice, June 15, 1608

For Bill Raymond and Linda Hartinian

I

1. 1718 — Nantucket Beach

I’ve seen boats as big as this whale. I’ve seen gryphons the same size, with teeth growing in even as they were taking their last breath.

You have not. And not a live one.

I’ve been to sea, I’ve seen all you’re supposed to, being at sea. I am sixteen, after all.

If you’d stayed at home, you would’ve seen to Ma. I’d be a pirate twice, with two voyages under me, if I didn’t have that.

Quit your carping. Go stand on its middle. Maybe it will release its wind if you jump on it.

For sure it will stink to heaven if I jump on it.

Let’s poke out its eye.

It’s a wonder you’re not tired of poking whales, a’roving on the ocean like you do, with all the new sail.

Here’s the stick — let’s do the eye.

Cap’n Peters says there’s luck in a whale’s eye. Some men use saws on such as the eye, to examine the socket and take away the skull too.

You told this Cap’n Peters about this whale?

Cap’n Peters can see it himself. He’s anchored out beyond the neck, nearly done scouring the fresh-wrecked Abingdon. He’ll come.

Our greasy luck! Then the sooner it dies the better, and not for anyone but us to collect it.

It’s alive all right. Look at the eye.

Help me with the stick. A donkey could haul it out, where could we get a donkey?

If we had a donkey I wouldn’t be walking the beach looking for rope to catch the mussels on, would I? If we had a donkey, you wouldn’t be shipping out every time the wind blew and leaving me here with Ma, myself only in short pants still and no cutlass.

We need a donkey. The smell alone will bring Peters.

Do you believe in whales? I mean, that they talk?

Two fiddles can talk. One calls, the other says Yes and then some.

Whales dance when there’s boats coming with harpoon.

The way pirates do on the gallows.

Not all of them.

They’re crying whales, not singing. Poke here.

They swallow the pennywhistle and dance on the tips of their tails on top of the water. And sing.

Whales cry about their future like all creatures worth killing. There’s a tear now, with Peters coming. Look — I can make it dance without singing.

Let it be, it’s starting to bleed.

I’ll let it be with a cut of the knife. If only I had a good one, if only Ma hadn’t sold that bit of a blade while I was gone.

She’s sold all her brooches, down to the tin-and-garnets.

She sold the true baubles after you were born — or gave them up, cleaned out by whoever she had after you had a father, cleaned out clean as a pike in a trough.

They use beetles to clean the skulls when they’re empty. Cap’n Peters says so.

Peters, Cap’n Peters — would he be the one seeing Ma now?

He’s seen all of her, if that’s your actual meaning. How huge those skull-cleaning beetles must be, so big they can’t walk after all that eating, beetles that could eat all of every one of the colonies.

Slippery here, whoa.

Cap’n Peters has got his glass on us now. There, over the wave.

No.

Tease me like you don’t know he’s watching. Play foot-in-the-water. He’ll think we are but careless boys and won’t beat us when he sees us.

We are but boys. If I only had a knife—

If you grouse and slaughter the whale before him and he balks and whines, Ma will tie herself to the rafters and I will have to cut her down. It’s a poor revenge for her living from one man to the next, though she swears Cap’n Peters is her utter last.

I told you to get her set right, to take Ma to someone while I was off at sea, a woman with a cure.

She wouldn’t go, she said she’d have no business with someone like that, she didn’t need no one other than Father. She talks to Father from the rafters where you can see the sea out the little window, she talks to you out that window too.

She doesn’t know who Father is.

This be true, but still she talks.

This fish is leaking like a ship come ashore.

Whale, it’s a whale, not a fish. And if you would quit your poking at the eye, it wouldn’t leak so much. Poking it like that makes the sound it makes worse.

You talk like a sea captain with your “Don’t this” and “Fish that,” a bloody captain, the kind I don’t take to.

It’s the life of the sea, you said. Yo, Ho, Ho, you said.

I will give you another punch to match the first.

It breathes — hear it? Cap’n Peters says they are cousin to us.

I can’t hear anything while you blather on about Cap’n Peters.

I say we leave it alone because Cap’n Peters will pay us to chop it up. They’re bound to want the steaks and oil even if it be old, and some of the bone to hang their hats on, and bone for those who truss up the women.

That’s real work, all that chopping.

Aye.

The bone is all I want — I can carve “The Apostle on the Desert” into the bone.

I can carve that — one cut meeting another.

You are a stupid boy. Look — it thinks it is a creature of the land now, it wriggles so. It wants to walk about on its tail.

With the next big wave, let’s push it in with our backs.

Let’s kill it.

Die, die.

What’re you whispering?

Nothing. Die, die, or they’ll get you, you whale of us all, you fool whale.

You are whispering.

I’ll whisper if I want to.

The whale’s dead anyway. Why else would it be on the beach?

Not breathing like this it isn’t dead. Not yet.

Look, Peters is bringing his hooks and axes. And a cutlass! There’s a knife.

It’s soapy-feeling on the outside.

Pitchforks and pries. Let’s poke it through to the brain before they get here, let’s poke it to make it dead before they poke it, so we can claim it and get the bone. I am grown, after all.

Die, die.

Why do you cry like a girl?

I’m not a girl.

Whale-lover, then. Crybaby.

Listen to it breathe.

I can’t hear anything but Cap’n Peters and his men beaching loud like six blacks banging dishpans.

It’s breathing big.

There — I’ve got the stick through, no thanks to you.

It still breathes.

If I hang on it here and pull down, the whole side will rip and they’ll know it’s ours. Give me a hand—

2. Home, an hour later

Ma, there’s rope in my soup

Eat it or you can’t watch the hanging.

I can’t, not a drop more, Ma. All the chewing hurts my teeth.

It’s bone, that’s all. Bone against bone. Chew it up, then spit it into your hand. See — a pig clavicle or a horse bone, not rope. Sit still and stop your wheezing and sneezing and snot-dribbling.

The drumming’s so loud today, my head hurts.

Old Hubble is getting his practice, best at the dirge in all the colonies I’d say.

There — at the bottom of my bowl — see?

It’s a bit of chew. If we sit just right, maybe we’ll see the beardtips flame again. I do love the rope.

Ma.

Any less punishment and the ocean would be crowded with rogues.

Put up a rag to curtain it. Father must’ve been a pirate, I hate these hangings with such a fever.

Eat your soup. And the bones too. I sold yesterday’s rope for those bones. And wipe your nose on my skirt. Your father, a pirate — what will you be thinking next? I’m on the lookout for a better man than that, boy, even Peters only takes boats that broke.

Makes a person want to go to sea, your soup.

You’d be your brother then, and curses to you. Hark — here’s the catch ‘o the day, the pirates walking.

Brother is not so much at sea now.

Brother had better be, and making coin for us too. Such black hair on that pirate — sure to use indigo as anything, in disguise.

Ma.

Stop your sneezing. Were you out standing in the sea this morning? Stay out of the water, you’re supposed to pull up the ropes, not go in after them.

The ropes were caught.

Water will kill you, one way or another. Is that the priest waving now?

I could tell but for fat Morgan Little.

He’s got to both say the condemnation and the Praise Lord. The magistrate broke his leg this morning climbing a stile and no one else will do it.

Let me go off, Ma.

You don’t want that food, it’s rotten, only good for throwing. Sit down and eat your soup.

But Ma.

Hush, they’re singing now — the pirates are singing. I heard these were merry folk, that they boarded ships singing songs with their knives out full and not between their teeth. That was their mistake, not having their hands free to grip the boat.

They wanted a good cutlass.

Singing makes you brave. Hear how many verses they have? The baker hiding in his hood can’t stand still for all this singing.

The baker will dance with his bread.

Look, he’s using an old rope today, Master Mason’s, the one he dipped his sheep with and can’t get out the smell.

You know all the ropes.

I have taught you well enough. Not so much the writing of letters or the sum gathering, but all of ropes and their histories.

Plenty of rope here.

They’ve soaked his beard in gum. You can hardly see the faces for the smoke.

I wonder how many more are not caught, like mice in hay.

The baker’s banged the heads together, jigging them up so close.

I feel it.

The mortal dance ought not to be done without someone watching. Look, look, I say. Fierce they are, and fierce be their Nancies. A sour look or two at choking.

They dance in my soup.

We ought to sell seats here. People like to sit and watch.

People like to press close and not sit, they like to hear everything clear.

It’s a shame, having to cut the bit that holds them up, with the price of rope as it is. But there’s a nice length left and I’m sure to get it.

You can never catch your breath after. It’s a kind of pleasure for you.

Hold your tongue. I see your friend is picking pockets again, collecting the coppers while they watch it to the end. He’ll take his turn.

The far pirate’s still shaking.

Where’s his family to pull on his leg and break his neck? The baker’s cut his rope too soon.

I told you they all don’t hang. He must’ve swallowed a pipe.

Or sung the right song. People do stop their gossip for a miracle.

It’s worth living to see a miracle, isn’t it, Ma?

Miracles only bring trouble. I’ve had my own, and worse. Be off with your friend now, and look into the pockets of those who are gaping the most. And don’t forget the Cap’n’s kit. He’ll have something in it for me, if he’s not drunk it away already.

All he’s come in with is a wreck, and a whale washed up.

Then he’s blessed enough and won’t hit me so hard. Be off with you.

Don’t leave that bench, Ma. I don’t want you getting low while I’m gone, and trying the rope.

You’re not to worry. All the rope I had was in the soup, knowing I’d get fresh.

3

Go ahead, finish it. Your brother’s caught the death of a cold anyhow and didn’t take but two spoons of it, only a drink from the bitters.

A real sailor in him, like me, with a taste for bitters.

Real bitters.

The soup’s a pip, Ma. You’ve been stewing the heel of a boot at least, if it’s not the cursed albacore straight from the shell.

Eat the soup and tell me what you are doing ashore and not hauling the fish or the fur. Your boat’s not due to port for another three months and what coin will I use if you don’t sail in with it?

I need a woman for cooking and boiling and such and I’ve come ashore to marry her, Ma. I will marry a woman who will keep you from making over such soups as this.

The sea has made you bold. But a wife will be another mouth to feed before others in bottom rags come crying with their mouths stretched wide like the robin birds. Only fools marry sailors.

You’ve married them yourself, I believe.

Marrying a man of the sea is like marrying a boat. They never come home. Or they take to pirating and they had better not.

No pirating for me. I’m set to learn to whittle the whalebone. There’s plenty of money in it — I hope to do “The Shepherd’s Lad Standing against the Wolf” and “Samson Pulling down the Temple.”

Aye, there are many who like it, especially those who are not the seafaring kind, who think sailors go out to look after a pool of fish with birds’ feathers and lures and bobbers and spend so little time troubling them that they learn to carve the bone.

Brother can mind the shop, fetch me the customers and light the lamp.

He isn’t a boy to mind even his mother, always running about and complaining to me about myself. But how shall we eat while you are whittling thus? Have you drawn a purse from a dead woman’s girdle?

I’ve gained the means. I’ll tell you—

Shshsh — not so loud on your luck. Someone comes along the passage now, your brother, I hope, and no one else, with whatever Cap’n has hauled in for me.

To judge from the sound of his dragging, that kit of Cap’n Peters’ is ever bit as big as he is.

So I do hope. That’s a sneeze! Like a dry drunk with the snuff, that boy.

You’ll be killing him with his cold, having to haul such heaviness.

Is that what they say to sailors in a good blow? Is that what they said to my Jimmy?

Father is Jimmy now, is he? The one who died of a sailor’s pleurisy? Does this Cap’n Peters prefer to hear of Jimmy over all the others, the snot-drowned sailor of the seven seas?

Where’d you hear of my Cap’n Peters — a’sailing?

It was on land I heard.

Ah, Peters is a brisk fellow, keeps a fine reputation on the docks. Why, many a boat would have him if he weren’t about in his own, many a farthing is wagered that he can outsail even the cutthroated pirate. He knows when a boat’s going down before she knows it herself, especially out by the neck.

Brother! You’ve eaten my lot.

She said to.

She would eat it herself anyway during my labors. Which is why you sent me out just then, isn’t it, Ma?

This bit of a heel and rope is not worth calling me a glutton, a thief, and a tyrant. A Caligula he thinks me, and that I’ll poison myself and him together.

After these many months gone, at least she’s the same in her bludgeoning talk. No more height on you, then?

Not unless I stand on a whale.

Ha — you’ve got your wits about you at least. Ma, take his bowl and fill it with the last boilings — I know you have it somewhere for yourself.

I keep a pot of seaweed worth nothing.

That’s the one.

See what the window looks onto now? Where we used to play? The rain tries to hide it.

There’s a lot of sawed wood in that.

It’s mostly them cleaning the holds of the Spaniards and pirates — two today. We’re always hearing the Dies Irae.

Speaking of the Christian teachings, your brother’s come to have the banns said.

You made no mention—

He proclaims it, the sailor who’s out of a sail, a man made of romance even grander than yours of pirates. But the fair and first question is — did sweet Cap’n Peters ask after me? I’m the light of his light, what he turns his boat to first after tidying up the beach.

Not so much when I saw him. He has a woman in tow that he claims is his daughter.

Daughter? I’ll daughter him. That scum of the ocean — he never talked of a daughter. Did he have her on the breech? Did she come up out of the sea?

Don’t grip him like that, his shirt will rip and then where will you get the thread for it?

Daughter, ha.

Ma, don’t beat the bearer of news you must already guess.

Your brother cuts me down from my fate to tell me I’m crazy — and then tells me my true love has got up a daughter by way of a voyage.

Open the kit and see what he’s brought you.

He’s sure to have rope. And there it is. Lovely. From a shop.

I’ll soon be setting up my own shop with the bone Peters has promised from that whale.

You chose the bone instead of a share of the oil?

What oil? What bone?

If you weren’t always busy in the rafters with your noose-making, you’d hear the news. I found the beached whale that Cap’n Peters is hauling in.

We found it.

You did not tell your Ma.

He checked the ropes while I met the daughter and made Cap’n Peters promise me the bone, just what I need to start my life on land. Peters has towed the whale to a safe place.

It won’t be there long.

Keep your tongue in your head. He’s a dry captain and doesn’t touch a drop.

You need a roof to keep you dry from his drops.

The gibbet for you!

If that’s the story, then I’ll face Cap’n Peters myself over a glass and pull the bone out of him. I must have the bone to woo myself a wife.

He has this new daughter.

Then the bone be the dowry.

Peters never told you where that safe bone place is, is what I’m a-fearing.

Cut out your tongue and swallow it.

Why isn’t he telling me about this daughter to my face? I will string myself up and make a face for him to remember.

I’ll take that rope. I might have to tie Cap’n Peters and his daughter to their chairs whilst I go about in removing what is rightfully mine.

Snatching it out of my very hand! It was Cap’n Peters’ gift. Here, take this bit instead that I’ve been using for the thatching.

The very whelp of the house? The blimey Blessed Virgin Mary I’ll take it. I’ll take my Ma’s hullo, as sour as that, as take the thatch rope, I’ll take my leave.

He’s better off gone.

He’s in a hurry.

I tell you, it’s the Harold in him that wants the shore instead of the sea, that medaled officer who wanted a woman on land more than a woman aboard.

The one who built the gallows and then left for England on the press yard fees he stole? That Harold?

Aye, the steps and the string, the same. He was just collecting from Spain by way of England. Died of the gout before he could return, or so the letter that came said.

He left out the best of the gallows’ supports, it seems. It leans like the gout itself.

You know as well as I do what makes it lean — too much in the way of business. It was lucky that pirate got away or it would have fallen on the baker from overuse. Now sleep off this chill you’re feigning. I will turn over a piece of coal to rid the room of the cold your brother brought from his seven seas.

The bench of sleep.

The gibbetty bench of sleep and the love of a sailor-brother and the sound of the waves and all that land somewhere else that they slap.

He’s back for good?

For the good of a woman, not for us.

I’m going to sea with him, Ma. When he sets sail again as he will, because all sailors sail once they do.

You say that and I’ll put the poker down your throat, I’ll hang myself and drown in a dropper of water. You go to sea with your brother and I will—

Then I will have no reason to return. You will always be returning. That is the way of those born beside water, of all the water in you from your father, the Captain Edward of the great ship Whizzen. One lump or two of this coal that I’ve stolen out of the bishop’s own braziers?

Two, Ma, my true Ma.

4. Three Months Later

I have examined all the varieties of jack-in-the-pulpit in the field, every one, and there are three, I believe, and none of them full-blooming which makes the naming of this variety that much more trying. I also bring a specimen of penny frog for you that I have caught here in the folds.

Girls don’t take off their bonnets to catch frogs in them. Not even girls using a cane.

You do if you are teaching Winthrop, the half-wit heir. Peters knows the game and has instructed me well. Have you seen the boy?

My brother says you can have too many frogs in a field. He said they push up Dead Man’s Fingers for one thing and I told him—

Alive, alive-o.

This one is squashed about the foot. What can I learn from that, that you, with your lameness, cannot teach?

It is a frog from the inside that is most worthy of examination, very like a person perhaps.

Dead Man’s Fingers are not so much a part of a person, are they?

A plant like the mushroom, their companions. Many of those fingers grow in the marsh behind, the one that is home to all these frogs.

Catch the frog, kiss the frog and like it.

I’m not going to play your silly game. These are lessons for the boy really — where is he? — and you’d best not be about at all.

Teacher, teacher. I can tie a Hugenot, I can lift a bull.

A bull-calf. I am sixteen too, you know. Almost old for a teacher.

I am your elder by a week and not ugly to you, Miss Count-Your-Pupils. The fiddler last night played only for your feet I suppose.

I made my way. But you cannot even sign your name to paper.

I am familiar with every family of seabird and all mathematics up to geometry, so long as I don’t have to write the sums out.

That is what you claim.

And you? How about the sum-making you puzzle over in your teaching, your froggy subtractions?

I have added all the varieties and those that I counted four paces from the tree bearing a name from Linnaeus that the boy studies. Of them all, the sum is 258, in other words, taking the three plantings of snowberries minus 136 makes 122 posies, added and subtracted both. But where, I am now asking, are all those posies now to make up such a sum? What’s become of them?

Here you are.

Oh, no! Oh, no! These are supposed to provide lessons in adding and subtracting for all of the next week. Now I will have to go back to the book, I will have to teach the boy from the book. Oh, why did I ever leave the sea?

Don’t screech so. If the boy’s father hears—

Oh dear, oh dear.

Please don’t sob. Crying won’t obtain for you a way out of teaching. I will though.

Bother! You will fill me up with children before I’m grown. I am the first of my family to become a teacher, a family in which no one has ever read before, or even pretended to.

Cannot Cap’n Peters read?

He is less my family than you know.

Some say that, though the taking of orphans as salvage is common enough.

It is nothing shameful. I was combing my hair on a rock.

And Peters?

He treats me most cruelly.

It is the way of men.

Not all men. I saw your brother weeping at the whale.

You did not.

I am your teacher and your better, I know what I’ve seen. And I know where the bone of the whale is, those bloody bones.

Of course you do.

Don’t stand so close. My cane!

I wish to trap the small insect you described as comely where it has landed on your shoulder.

Oh — of the genus which includes the beetle of which there are thousands? But this is the only one with seven or nine marks on its wing.

Nine marks. I make good progress but you will not bless the work.

Please — there should be more than ample room on this escarpment for both of us.

Room for twenty more dr y-eyed angels such as yourself?

You must practice the writing of your name. I have showed you the E. You must form it in the air every day, and on the ground if you are lacking paper.

A noble letter, E.

If you can’t write your name, you will be beholding to many.

Beholding to you, perhaps? In reading, the letters bend and float away and will not stay.

Reading is like a sea voyage, you either attend to it and see the world, or you stay at home. Tristram Shandy was tossed over many a ship, which is how I at last learned the skill.

You know nothing about the sea — you never teach it.

Nothing that is known about the sea is true.

So you say.

I shall teach you just the beginning: How the Sea Was Formed. A carpenter cuts a king’s worth of trees and lays them flat to each other, then nails them together with the teeth of all the birds that fly which is why so few birds have teeth now. When he has finished, the wood makes the bridge from this land to the next. Still, it must be painted. The carpenter has blue powders left over from coloring the sky. The strength of this paint to adhere to the air is very great but the power of it to stick to the wood is so much more. What is left puddles before the carpenter can put down rags to stop it. In most places, where the blue collects, it shines darker than the sky but elsewhere it runs into the sky and joins it. Under the strength of this blue, the birds’ teeth loosen and fall out and then the teeth sink into the sea, only later to float up to the beaches as shells. The boards themselves, as blue and as lively as they are, come loose and change into the rafts that drift by the drowning who can’t find the bridge for all the blue color.

I would not guess it.

Man cannot fly but he can swim.

Some, I have heard. I can’t. Water has always crept up and filled my shoes with trouble or taken our roof. Only when it buoys a boat do I want to venture upon it. My Ma screams in fear of it.

Your Ma has been taken too much by it.

Some sailors have had her, even from the far seas, and roughly too. I think it is why she loves the rope so, she dreams of belaying herself to land at last.

If I did not have these curls to keep, I would show you how gently the waves lift and hold your arms.

You will always have curls to mind.

I will.

Dust to dust, as the church says, not water to water.

Water to water.

I get seasick just hearing you say that. The way you sing it.

Water is ever more prevalent than earth. How many days can you journey by sea? How many by land?

I do not journey these days. I am a poor boy who studies but what you tell him.

Let me say then I think it is time for you to immerse yourself. Listen to my song. Come, come—

But your curls—

Over here. Through the rocks. The song.

There are currents. There are terrible fish. The waves—

Take my blasted cane! Waves to hold you, waves to — ah, Winthrop.

Snake! Snake!

Unbanded. I believe it is harmless, but you can’t be certain about one so orange along the tail. Hold it tight about the head, or it will bite you. Count the colors as it dies.

It’s dead, Winthrop. You’re going to die.

Don’t put fear into him. He might tell his father and his father will have you jailed for stealing his lessons.

The boy is slow, and will be slower.

Leave the snake in the thicket and go along. That’s a fine boy.

A boy with a fine purse.

The water—

I want no more to do with water, I want a berth on shore, with the whale’s bones and a woman who can carve its bone where I instruct. It is your own Cap’n Peters whom I fear has drunk the bone down.

Your Ma is ill over Cap’n Peters.

Cap’n Peters is ill over you. I will give you my name, make you a fortunate wife with an honest hearth.

The time is near when a woman will not need to set her hand in contract. Why not give her merely a set of numbers as can be found in any book to suffice for a term of possession, and not the name of a man? There are surely enough numbers, and more.

You are certainly a clever teacher and will make a clever wife.

Cease tempest-crying over that snake bite, boy, and press the burdock against it. Keep your hand over the wound where it swells too, that’s right.

You know so much about these things?

You must address me with belief in your voice.

Belief is a learned thing, like writing.

You do not learn your way to me.

Ways open daily like routes between blocks of ice athwart the bow that the brave sailor faces so often before his triumphant return.

Remove your hands from me. I will have the boy’s father lash your back to ribbons, with Cap’n Peters providing the whip.

Are these Dead Man’s Fingers?

Brother! I told you to stay away and ask questions later.

Point them toward the sky. Pray, point them up to where the blue clouds await their carpenter.

She is full of cant. You talk to her. I’ll see you later at Ma’s.

What do you two whisper of?

Of how prettily you speak of carpenters and clouds.

Thank you. Your brother is less sure of his words.

He is unused to women, having been at sea. That makes him a bad judge of their wiles. I know women from my Ma.

What about us is wily? I am as open as a hand. As for you, it’s not the Dead Man’s Fingers you want, it’s the full hand of a life you can spend. Here, open your own.

What ho! It’s as hard as marble, with the blue of a wave inside.

The whale’s eye. It should be dry and gone by now, eaten by cats. I found it in amongst the sycamore leaves, left from when that poor whale was taken asunder. Have it and study it. I like the way you laugh.

My brother is not watching? He will see nothing?

Nothing, I swear it. He cuts his thumb sawing on a stick as if it were bone, and sucks the wound.

5. Another Six Months

As tractable as a dog, she was.

A hound, I think. A harrier.

Likening me to dogs! When I think of all the trouble you’ve been.

Ma, don’t talk. You’re making bubbles of the blood.

I tried to return you after the theft but the family was gone, in grief I suppose. I was in Hampshire or Maudin’s, a’laundressing, or making the swords’ scabbards, or looking to the curling goods. I remember the sea and the stink of civet cat. It was after I fell in — and out — with the maharajah.

The leech that was left for her — find it. I think it’s crawled beneath the chest.

The man kept civet cats, fifteen of them. For the perfume. Baltrick was the name.

Not Kinnell?

Kinnell once gave me a trinket beaten out of gold. He’s the one who urged your return. At Godspeed, he shouted, over your infant cries. It could’ve been Reverend Baltrick. Or the maharajah.

No water — let her speak. Her lips still move.

The stealing wasn’t hard. A loaf under the blanket in place of you.

Which of us is stolen, Ma?

They wouldn’t pay my price to fetch you back. Or they didn’t receive my sign. They went sailing after the maharajah.

Peters’ route? The high one?

Don’t ask her more, she can’t speak.

She speaks.

A cow bellows better with a beet stuck in its throat, she struggles so.

What, Ma?

I wanted lads to fetch and cover me on the occasions when I had drunk overmuch, and to carry water that I should not have to do it myself with all my fine husbands.

I’ll close her eyes.

Don’t touch me.

That was surely the last breath.

Another.

I found a penny here, beneath the sheet.

You will need two.

Not if you never close your eyes, Ma.

I was in Hampshire — or Maudin’s. A man came up out of the sea. He had arms only, such arms.

What sailor was this one?

Manuel, a man from the seas of the south. He had a big mustache, and he wept that I should hold him.

A mustache like my brother’s?

She has no more to tell.

She is finished now.

She stirs.

He left, and I wept an ocean.

I’ll hold her up. Take a breath now. Did she ever tell us true?

She made the soup, she called us sons. You don’t waste breath on a deathbed.

But she only clouded the water.

Listen. That was surely the departed rattle, that last. You can’t wake the dead.

She’s green about the face—

Don’t go to sea, I tell you, don’t.

The sea? But — I will go, like brother.

We all go. What else?

Ma! Ma! Quiet yourself.

One of us is stolen, if not us both, and one of us—

The mustachioed man, the sea—

Ma!

She is surely done now. Open the window. Here is the mop. I’ll lay the coins.

It was just something she said. Look — I have her nose. She is my mother.

And I have the height of the beggar on Bond Street. Who is our father?

Are we even each other’s?

We were too young to know if that were true.

At least I will no longer find Ma hung on a rope everywhere.

Use the mop on your tears. What a woman you are.

It was her great wish, to be hung by her own hand. If she’d have just cut the mussels off the rope, she wouldn’t have suffered so. The terrible wounds at her neck. The coughing into it. She didn’t trust the baker. Those are badly crossed buns, she’d say to the baker and not put a penny his way.

Yes, yes. We’d better be doing the washing ourselves now, or the flies will take Ma to her rest.

Each fly with the face of Ma, each face the same and not ours.

We are men complete now, we need no mother. For a scene in whalebone: “The True Mother Greeting Her Lads.”

Surely the true father is dead. So many years have passed and not many live out their time.

There are tales about fathers who die and leave their estate to those who have been stolen away. It bides us well to consider this.

Not if he crawled out of the sea.

Or died of the snot, like Jimmy. Or built the gallows.

Or stole the bones of a whale with drink.

Or a dozen others.

A new woman we need more than a father. A woman to cook and carry the water.

Aye, water is the point of all this.

6. Dead of Winter

It’s too cold to even drag a nib over paper, let alone write my name.

You’ll be writing on a block of ice in midwinter to learn the signing, that’s what she said. And here we are.

Why must I sign a marriage contract? It’s just a delay, one of so many.

It can’t be so difficult if she can.

It’s easy for her. Her name is shorter by so many letters.

Until she gets ours. She says I remind her of her sister.

What — you?

Some way I make my laugh.

After I make my mark, you won’t need to laugh with her again. Oh, but what if someone sees how I sign and uses that for himself? I’ll make my money without all this writing, and as for marrying, she can sign for us both. Besides, I’m sure to topple the bottle just keeping the paper in order.

My sister Kate, she said, would advance the argument thus: If he can’t write his name, he can’t give it to you.

Peters is all the family she has. Oh, bother. So few of the seabirds yield the right nib for a seaman’s hand.

You should have swum when she asked.

Am I a donkey to be tested to see if it is worth the sale?

You don’t swim either, no one swims in the sea if they can help it. I wouldn’t swim even for the bone.

Or a wife?

I need to spread my name with offspring, not with a nib.

I don’t understand why she doesn’t put the test to someone else.

I am a man of high quality.

Just learn your name and write it or I will.

Threats, idle threats. I suppose the devil needs a signature too.

Put the curve there. I bought you a bit of tallow so you can see the paper after the sun sets.

The sea takes an X. You can join a crew with just a mark. Why couldn’t Peters have taken up with someone less taxing?

She’s slapping herself in the next room to keep the cold off, she’s tapping her cane.

Waiting’s a good lesson for someone whose relation could drink up a whole whale’s bone, as he may well have. Not to mention my own waiting, my soul dragged out and around for these many months, trying to find out what she wants.

It’s not Peters she wants. His signing is wrong.

You have spoken to her in confidence?

We were waiting for you to bring the paper.

Ach — I’ll teach the teacher — about waiting. We will wait in the cold, and not write.

I must’ve slept.

You snored to heaven.

What now? The ink has frozen in a puddle.

But you managed it — look.

I did that? I don’t remember — Is the fire out? Let me sleep just a little longer.

I’ll take it to her.

The tails be a little long.

The way my sister would make it, if she were one of us. Your finger is stained.

I dropped the ink.

It is your hand on this paper.

No, no. -Aye. I did it to reduce the steepness of my distress, having to listen to him all these months. Now the banns can be said and it can be over.

You are female. I see it now.

What? I am my mother’s son.

There is more mystery under the roofs of bakers than inside your smalls. Let us all meet at Eben’s Kettle.

Peters would hide the bone here, with the very weft of the sea underfoot, a smuggler’s hatch in the floorboard to load unseen from the water.

It’s not in these rooms, neither of them, that I can discover.

Are you wanting me for the bone or for myself?

For your cleverness, for then others will know your teaching as my own wife’s, for your shapely hands, for your gentle way with a needle—

At least you learned the courting well enough. Take the bone as my vengeance to Peters.

There’s bone sticking out above the tideline — where the snow starts.

We’ll return grateful, my dear. Then the banns.

That’s a strange bit of singing she’s making.

It’s the wind. The wind howls and chills her.

Do you believe she’s a’witching, brother?

She’s a woman, brother.

Aye, she’s that. And found combing her hair at the sea.

She combs her hair at all hours and places. I’m taking her to the parson to be married — not like Ma and her doings — and then I’ll build a house away from the sea, with the door facing the land.

She won’t like that.

It’ll be a relief to her. Is that Peters? Go to the turn in the road to see.

I’ll pile the bone into the sack.

She’s gone.

You were sent to check the road — she’s gone?

I looked behind the door and around and under it all and into the hatch hole. There’s her cane.

She didn’t pass by here, I didn’t take my eye off the road.

The hatch was laid open, the water swallowing there as angry as ever.

Bother the woman. I don’t see her marks anywhere.

She told me stories about a carpenter and his boards, why the horns are doubled on caterpillars, and how two Welshmen found gold in the mountains.

Cap’n Peters will say we drowned her for the bone.

Is she swimming under the ice? She does like the water here, even the icy water.

That’s what queered Cap’n Peters to her, her winter swimming.

She could be in the woods, naming the winter buds, getting past us. We will go walking and find her petting an ermine she’s found wild.

She was always looking for someone to sign or to swim. Well, the ocean will keep her only for a few days or she’ll be found in the ice in the spring. Let’s go. We’ve got the bone.

We can’t leave without her—

There are fish in the sea, hungry fish looking for what they can find. If Cap’n Peters catches us, we’ll be judged wrong for sure.

No, no, no.

Stop up your eyes. She was my woman, at any cost, cripple or not. She was mine. Who’s that — Peters coming through the drift?

It’s her, of course.

It’s his saws and scythes. Run!

II

7. 1720 — Caribbean

Mr. Shanks, Mr. Luggams — a fine day for the tropics. Not too buggy. All that sugar loaded on the Mary Stewart will attract the bugs.

You bloody well threw yourself at them, you did.

They’ll take us on, I know it. I’ve seen them around with the card players and darters, fetching up crew with a hard knock to the noggin. We’ll save them the trouble.

Isn’t it enough that we fair escaped Cap’n Peters on the first vessel we found? Peters would’ve had us lashed to his bow if he’d caught us. To be caught as a pirate is bullocks’ worse.

I’ve seen a pirate get off, go running down the street with the rope still tied around his neck.

Idiot. I must talk to Sitwell. I overheard him say he had positions working with the watches and clocks. I’d be good twisting flax, preparing the strap to bind a watch to the pocket. It’s like the cutting of bone, the same careful fingers. Why, I’ll soon be buying bone from my wages, carving “The Shepherd Lad Standing against the Wolf” in a trice.

He’s sure to have cutlasses, watch man that Sitwell is, sure to have swords in his cupboards as springs and tallow. You’re the one who dropped the bone when Peters was upon us.

Two hills past the dock, Sitwell said.

He just needs someone to lift his goods and drive his horses. A bought slave you’ll be to Sitwell.

I say I must try his offer. I am the elder and I know my mind. Anyway, we can’t go home with Peters prowling for us.

Here you could be a chimneysweep as well as a watchman, the competition’s not so great here as elsewhere, especially with so few chimneys.

No chimneys.

You could sweep, sweep your way up while I’ll be eating toad-in-the-hole three times a week on board a boat as black as soot — and you’ll be sooted. Instead of buried myself, I’d like to bury a chest full of treasure. It’s either the plague or the biting of insects that’ll get us here on land, dead as doornails. To the sea I say, to pirating.

I hate the sea life. I worked the docks, I never did sail.

Brother!

Repairing the ropes and hawsers. Rope is in the family — at least Ma’s. I had all the tall tales of the life of the sea, without the spray. I did as Ma begged us — I stayed ashore.

So sick you were of the tilt and slosh coming over, I did wonder your sudden loathing.

Aye.

My own brother making up a life he didn’t spend.

Aye.

But seeing Shanks and Luggams debouche the dock with all their booty, so brazen with their loads in broad daylight! And how they fill out their snuff with the dust of gold! I think those pirates who get hanged are done for the greater good of the thieving that is done to us, such as the removing butter from the dairyman’s cart.

That butter was for Ma. And only once before I went to sea. Or did not.

You’ve got the pirate blood in you, you just need the place to shed it. In a few strikes of the clock, Luggams and Shanks will put their feet upon the deck again, time enough for us to gather provisions, to buy that new blade you admired yesterday with what little coin we have left.

These two do sail a big ship, with double masts. I don’t wonder at your temptation.

Pirates are just sea folk who work for themselves. I think you lack the strength for the pirate’s life.

I can lift a bull and anchor. I have the strength — on land.

Beat me in the balls for a fortnight if pirates don’t do well with the ladies, that much I do know. They don’t cast out nets or drag long line, women come running to them. Not like that last woman you had.

The pirates’ women invite their friends around to your execution, set a table with cakes and ale under the gallows, and bring your only child to it.

Ah, but the mermaids don’t fear the pirates, and they’re thick as shrimp hereabouts.

A mermaid is just a woman not grown, one who snatches at men and leaves the offspring to comb out her hair. Not a pretty enough picture for me.

Shanks and Luggams have repaired to the fo’castle. They won’t be there long, the crew’s hauling sail.

Go then, you don’t need me.

Need has nothing to do with it. It is as a courtesy I’m asking you to come along, landlubber though you be, as your brother I’m asking you. Our trust be doubled and our profits too, onboard as pirate brothers.

We may not be such brothers as you think, if Ma died true.

We must hunt our true father and start our true lives. Our father will not find us, that’s for certain. Let’s roll the whale’s eye for an answer. Left, you pirate, right, you stay.

Where did you come into that eye?

Found it in a drift of sea spindle.

It could be mine, part of the bone I tried to claim.

You’ll drive me to the pirate life, with your bone found in every bone.

Well, I know what’s good for me without throwing the eye. There’s your Luggams now. I’m sure he’ll take you onboard like lice to a bird.

Mr. Luggams! Here!

Be off with you. The ocean’s too much a cradle for a man so grown as myself.

I’m good on the fo’castle, Mr. Luggams. I’ve had years of it.

8. Indian Ocean

You don’t know the glory of being hung on a hook and dragged by your lip when you must leap from the water just to ease off the pain. Pull it out!

It will leave a gash if I pull it straight. I keep seaweed at the bottom that defies the wounds of the flesh. How else does a fish last with a grimace of hooks?

You departed so strangely, the winter upon us, and Peters fast approaching.

It had to be.

I have the whale’s eye still. Will that help?

Don’t show it, there be sailors about even in the dark of this clouded night and the ship’s heaving to the gunwhales. It might roll away.

I’m sorry to catch you.

I’m glad to be caught. When I saw it was your hook, I rejoiced. Just wrench out the barb. I will brace myself against you and the rail, tight.

There.

That’s better. I have been hauled up by the mouth four times looking for you and your brother, each time promising this and that until they tossed me over.

This fishy part is new and shocking.

Not so new. The skirts all women wear to confound men hid it. The cane laughed at you.

Strange, I don’t hear the ocean when I am beside you, the deck does not roll. I’ve been onboard for over a year now and nothing like this has ever happened.

Night brings its own confusions. I will instruct you on the history of the night sky, as I have your brother about the sea. Four poles cut from saplings are given out at the world’s edge next to its furious wind, the one that enjoys whipping such poles when they are still barked and leafed. When the two ends are pushed into the earth, the wind rips so hard at the spaces between the curve they make with the other poles that the skin of the earth comes up at the edge like a rug upturned. This underside glows with the iridescence of underground creatures who have crawled by their own light inside the ground. Now they smolder in the night sky. Not everyone believes their light is made of fire because they’re so cold but lay your hand on ice and pull it up fast — it too burns.

All the night talks when you talk, even with such a gash.

Together we will tell Father you have been found.

I know nothing about this father.

Yes, you do.

Stop grabbing at me, stop it. The water is fearsome, the ocean is death. I am alike in this with my brother — we do not enter the water.

That is one truth you will have to pierce for yourself.

I am a pirate now, and know only my own intent.

Best for you to hold fast to the whale’s eye then, for luck.

What kind of luck is that — it’s drowning you’re offering.

I heard Cap’n Peters went under a fortnight after we sailed, swallowed up by a cup of tea, his heart crushed, losing you.

He was in want, after your Ma departed, telling stories about her so even the sea could hear.

Watch your bleeding mouth. Ma did not know his wants after you arrived.

That’s what your brother says. Who can know the heart of a woman, especially one like your Ma?

Perhaps it is my brother’s heart that is unknown.

Tell him you’ve seen me treading the waters, go ahead.

I would rush up the mast and shout your name but he’s not onboard, he didn’t take the oath, not seeing the pirate life for what it is, a port a’glitter at every call, swords a’plenty and no landholder taxing every tomorrow. My brother continues his oath against all water by staying off it.

A sea of tears, perhaps.

His letters are smeared, it’s true, but someone else writes them. Quiet, it’s Shanks abroad.

A night catch! What a fisherman you are. I see from all the blood you’ve stuck it well. I’ll finish the gutting and offer you the liver if it’s of a size. Keep your hand on it while I fetch my good knife.

Over now, quick.

9. 1722 Caribbean

Give that back — it is my only shawl, it is the shawl you married me in.

I haven’t had a watch to do for months — we can’t eat a shawl. We must trade it for bone so I can triple our profits.

Go to the ends of the earth, and sail to where the serpents lie. To sell my shawl for an inch of whalebone — bone that’s no good even in a pot!

People pay well for a picture on it — but there won’t be much left after I settle the chits you’ve written clear across the island.

Better than written across my tombstone. How I rue offering you my timepiece for your improvements. For just a look, I said. And you looked and looked.

It was you who took the glass off the works, who pulled the stem.

You said I needed a minute hand, I said there were too many hands already.

Gladness fills me to know those works have stopped. Now I will be cutting this bone, and people will like it. The port is a’swarm with new folk off the boats, and overseers who need to know when to quit the slaves. It’s busier here than London, it’s the center of the world in commerce — and in fashion too.

You thought people would like a feather stuck on the works to brush off the flies.

There are few who appreciate my timepiece thus far, with or without the flies, but with my improvements—

Only fifty-three here keeping the time or the like, less your own watch which I hide, and the ships’ clocks, when they are in port. Even if you wind each of them every week, there are still only fifty-three to divide with Cyrus.

He must be of noble birth to gather the business so quickly, regardless of what he says, a duke at least or a—

He is too handsome by half, yes.

I think you’d be just as pleased to be without a shawl, to show yourself.

Oh, let the ocean take you.

Cyrus, Cyrus — she’s yours.

Close that window, you fool. It’s market day.

I should be down there beside Cyrus, listening to him unhook the watches out of the waistcoats of the wealthy by his very words. Never has there been so many who needed oil in their works or their clockhands reset until he opened his shop.

And where were you?

You had dresses a’plenty until Cyrus washed up.

You did nothing about him, always mooning over getting the bone or moaning over your brother, the foul pirate. Give me that shawl back.

From where, pray tell, do you get the cotton for your petticoats? Stolen of the pirate. The cocoa for your cups in the morning? The pirate. The lovely Madeira? Even the ribbon in your hair be blue only on account of the pirate’s indigo. The foul pirate.

Don’t you think Cyrus is a handsome one? He’s four years your younger.

Quiet, woman. I’ll not have you scull the bottom for daggers. I will take the Hope to the last port if you drive me to it, and leave you behind. I will, even though I fear a voyage at sea more than I fear your noise and bother. Keep the shawl.

Cyrus! Cyrus!

I am so easily rid of?

We have no children. You were too timid.

That is your own doing. Or not doing. But this too can change, knowing the temper of your heart and of Cyrus’ desire. But not with myself as witness. I will sign ship’s papers today, I will.

I believe you will. And let it be a long voyage out — on the Hope.

My luck will leave with me.

Perhaps — but what if Cyrus will not have me?

You think so little of me that I must bear such a question? Fruit falls from the trees here, winter cannot harm you. You have your shawl. But I would hoard your petticoats too if I were you. The daughters of others are younger.

And eager, even for a tradesman such as he. You should send for me then, as soon as you come into money.

And blacken my future further?

How will you rise in the morning with a starched collar and leggings without holes? And eat as quickly as you can seat yourself? Answer me.

I now know the compromises a man makes. You are an expensive charwoman who spares me nothing. The years I have spent with you.

Two — no more.

Put that pot down.

I shall not until you receive damage.

Amazon!

10. 1723 High Seas

The sails like a curtain, stars and then no stars.

My mother loved the line, especially the rope as thick as the mate’s wrist. Even my brother worked the line, in secret, though on land, not the sea. You’d like my brother, though you’d put fear into him with all your fierce tattoos.

A man must be his own placard if he has lived out a legend. Rain behind that swell of stars. There — through the straights.

A squall?

A squall.

That last lightning nearly stopped my heart.

Those were good flashes.

Luggams says in the worse of storms, the lightning goes green and runs up the rigging.

Hear the singing?

No singing in these straights. Luggams hates the singing.

It can’t be the fish, singing.

Luggams forbids all singing whatsoever now that Shanks is gone. He doesn’t like the caterwaul of cats neither but cats we have to have, for the vermin.

Aye. The pigs we shipped before would at least dance, they would eat out of your hand for a sniff of bread.

Pigs will eat your hand.

A pirate bunch, pigs. I wish we had some still.

If you eat at all, best eat in private, with yourself alone on the poop deck, or else someone will fight you for it.

Not for me the poop deck. The stink!

Clean as the Pope’s hand. All that is left to eat is shoes, and those who have them have chewed them soft as chamois.

I think Luggams chews on gold coin.

His teeth show it. A doubloon on a starving ship is as good as a shell cast upon a beach.

The second mate’s tied a Spanish coin to his line to lure the fish.

Good luck to him! I do miss the turtle’s banging.

A great turtle it was, two hundred weight if it were one.

Now there’s a beast — it didn’t eat for four months and still tasted sweet.

I once had luck fishing in the night. Once only, and didn’t eat it, though the fish be bigger than even that turtle.

Why not, by the boils of St. Augustine!

You don’t hear the singing?

No songs, none. Boil the sand inside that whale’s eye you pocket and eat that.

That’s hardly fish. You’d do better to keelhaul yourself and pray you scrape barnacles off the bottom of the boat with your chest. They attend only to god, these fish below.

Minister fish, a whale. The second mate will catch nothing.

Or the fish will catch him, like Shanks, out from the bottom of a wave. That shark leapt like a marlin to catch him. I felt sorrow for the shark, having Shanks to chew. Here, wet this bit of knot and snap it at the watch in the crow’s nest. Leeward, now.

Those were real curses. My brother used to say pirates cursed for nothing, just to put fear into anyone’s hearing, but I think we curse most often to hear ourselves alive.

More like fiends than men. Let us curse altogether and get the sails up.

Bloody sails. I do miss the Yo, ho, ho. I wish Luggams would have it.

Turn your head thus and sing yourself:

Booty, ho! By the blood of Our Lady.

Booty, ho! Put gold to my shingles

and pied silver to my latch

and teeth all gold in a row—

Booty, ho!

Mind the line there.

I’ll bury my gold and live out my days full to the ears with grog and no one will come around accusing me.

To have lost every penny of the last run.

They were bigger than us.

Bigger, ha. Too bad about the booty. You voted for Madagascar?

The Cape, the Cape is the way. Prizes going to the bottom of the ocean for want of pirates at the Cape.

We’ll need a heap of wind to get there.

And a bit of bread or a haunch. With a spit turning right on deck, and dandyfunk, and flip in our cups to the top.

Gunpowder punch! Wait, the line be fouled there.

I’ll lend you a hand. That last island we tried, there was a lad who swam out — He looked so like yourself. A copy in black.

So they say. ‘Tis a favorite island of mine, it is. I’ve stopped and gone down a dozen times.

Others have called it a little Boston, after you.

Once or twice, I admit, we’ve had to pull anchor in haste. See the dawn star off port?

Aye.

That’s no storm coming before it with the daylight — a sail’s upon us.

Ahoy!

Ship ahoy! Arm yourselves!

It’s a terrible moment when you thrust your head over the side, a-scrambling for purchase when they could stick your throat so easy—

Aye, and we go ahead in this wind so slowly you’d think we were towing our pots astern and the mattresses.

Huzzah!

11. A Day Later

Ocean makes me sick.

Grog makes you groggy. Land made you landbound. Drink a little saltwater to let the sea settle in. Pirates always take a dose just before the swells start.

I won’t fall for drinking one of your wee grogs a second round. There I was, about to land and start a new life—

Of clocks and watches! Not even your beloved bone. I’ve saved you twice tonight, once from the other cutthroats aboard, and once from your own life.

Did you have to hit me bang on the pate quite so hard?

You’ll get used to it.

I’ll never be getting used to taking blows from my own brother.

This is a pirate ship.

Yes, yes, so they say. Just make up a paper that declares you took me by force then I’ll give you no trouble. You have me now, brother, in the burden of a prisoner.

Hush. You’re no prisoner. Luggams remembers you. He’s taken you on to pull my mate’s line.

Is that so? I am sorry to have killed your mate.

You did not have to run him quite through.

I did! I did have to run him through! He would’ve done the same to me.

My mate was fair that way, though you would have liked him. From Boston, where the Tattoo King put his marks upon him. Here, take the sail hand-over-hand with the needle and mend these exploded holes. At least the man had sons a-plenty.

And you have regained a brother.

But lost a cutlass.

He fell to the deep at my single thrust.

He did. Throw me the line.

But I thought pirates kept chests full of weapons, everything shared, that’s what I thought, and then divided it in the pirate way, which means, for one, I should have seen a bit of what we were hauling that you ate right after the taking? At least a bit of it. When does the cheese from my boat stop at me, with the haunches of lamb, sheep and beef, given out in the proper pirate’s way? On a regular vessel at least they offer around the gristle.

Stop, you must stop. Every boat rides its own sea, whatever it becomes. Do you think we sign in a circle, the way they tell it, or swear upon a hatchet instead of the Bible? Smith, the quartermaster, tells it true.

They call him quartermaster, this lawless brine-mouthed bunch?

This be the pirate life, says Smith, the new pirate’s: he should be tarred so that his skin turns pale, as pale as a turnip — that is, after all the peeling — and that it is the paleness that kills the cowards and not the sharks he screams to be fed to, all blown up with white after the tar’s gone, and bleeding red blood through the skin. Pale as a turnip — it is a nice turn of the tongue. That’s the start of a pirate life got right, the way Smith tells it. You wait.

A story like that’s why I prefer belowdecks, I’ll take belowdecks anytime. Without the sea in my face, I can think of the land.

No air below except a rat’s cough. I’m for sleeping under the sheets midships and chancing I’ll get my throat cut when someone slips on board to right the wrongs and retake the treasure, such as we did on your boat. A great wont of treasure on your boat I might add, unless we count the watch plaitings.

Treasure for some. You didn’t have to throw every bale over.

You won’t be wanting those plaitings now anyway, that job is gone. You can get the boat’s works set straight for us instead.

Set me off on land!

Here be the Smith I was telling you of.

The two of ye quarrel so, you’d think you were made of one mother, bad luck to us and to you both. They say brothers save each other and none of the rest.

We are not so much brothers, not really. Not according to our Ma. Besides, we quarrel away, and stick the loser.

I fought with the brothers Bungleston who raged the seas the back end of the ‘80s. Aye, I served under the Roger — not the jolly, mind you — and for fun, one brother would take a plank and magic it right across the water, over one wave and another, and sometimes he would signal to us, all the while sinking into the foam. Fish took the other brother when he, for spite, at last put the board under himself and sank straight down. Brothers they were for sure.

A danger to themselves and others.

But this boy’s got arms on him that could lift a barrel of sand and a face that would belay a mother, if she saw two of them together. You boys keep the deck quiet with yourselves if you can, and take the watch whilst I have a hand of whist, and wait.

Aye, aye.

Aye. Aye, aye, aye.

You are giddy, fearing for your life.

I can’t stop laughing. What were the chances of my own brother falling prey to us? At least I can laugh, I am falling down laughing at that. It’s time to laugh.

We are the only two aboveboard now.

Not so loud. We have a job to do.

We?

Tie the wheel down, brother.

What is about to happen?

Luggams knows. He’s folded his spyglass like a snail’s trick and taken it below.

Brother?

I’m the pirate captain now, like atop the whale. If you weren’t so green, you could scale the ropes and sing out verses from the f’osicle in honor of Luggams who hates them.

You remember wrong about that whale. It were me atop.

You were gouging at the eye, the bloody eye. I stood atop and heard it sing.

It were the woman Peters took, singing.

She couldn’t sing, she could only count.

You weren’t listening. I wish I had a cutlass. I don’t like the quiet.

They do keep a chest full of cutlasses below.

I knew it so.

They sort them after a boat-taking such as yours. Myself, I snatch any one that comes my way. Roger and Ebert, the plunder lads, they’ll be joining us at the next ocean.

I’d like one with bone at the hilt or a ruby and a broad blade like an Indian’s.

Leave the whalebone and watches and you might make a pirate yet.

A cutlass, just for protection. To cut my way back to land.

Hear that?

You could hear a bream breathing. That’s nothing.

You don’t know the half of the fear that swims under to get at you. All seamen worth their salt — and that’s heaps of salt — know there’s strangeness under their feet, about how it’s us or our cousins at the very bottom, walking around as usual, breathing in and out the actual water.

It’s a strange life, the sea life, I’ll grant you that.

Soon you’ll have the look of the strange yourself.

All this glug-glug-glug of grog, and the hold, and me with a bump on my head.

One of the others would’ve quartered you with two blows.

This be the price I pay, this and the yo-ho-ho. I hate the water more than before. Hear it again?

That’s weather, that’s nothing.

A hole’s starting in the side of the ship, a hole where someone’s swum under with a poleaxe.

You’re just trying to frighten me. That sound’s been breathing since the fishes swam, since the sun came up on your quartermaster Smith telling his story. You don’t hear anything.

They’re sharpening their cutlasses on each other’s cutlasses. They’ll be over the side even sooner and sharper. We have to go first.

Some ship must’ve seen you take mine.

Water’s seeping into the side of the ship. We’re going to have to swim for it.

There’s no one in sight.

Only the Malagasy swim, with their daggers in their mouths, and so jolly the rest of the time.

I’ll tell them I was taken by force, I’ll say I never did what pirates do except that you would kill me if I didn’t. Let’s hide.

You landlubbing coward. Take this pig knife. It will make a pike if you lashed it to the mop with a length of line and twist the line double. We’ll board them first, as quick as they show themselves.

With all the cutlasses you save for yourself, you’ll soon be safe and lifting grog in Marseilles, impressing the women with your pirating.

Stop kicking at the door. They’ll think you’ve been hung and never come out. You have to make it sound like happiness. A jig. Like this. Dance the way you danced with Cap’n Peters’ girl.

I never knew you could pick up your feet like that.

Ma could, when she wasn’t practicing to dangle. Or when she dangled. The fiddler knew.

Let’s wave the white flag before we stain it with our own blood, let’s tell them Luggams made us do it and show them Luggams. If I hoist this—

Keep your shirt on.

Before I die, let me show you the bone I carved on the voyage out, bought with the last of my money. “Man Sawing at a Tree on the Occasion of His Betrothing.”

The title is bigger than the piece.

Aye.

Don’t break the door down. Someone is as liable to come through with a plate of brisket as with a knife.

We’re the plate of brisket. Don’t you see? We’re the tasty chum and that’s why they’ve left us up here, to draw them out. I think the deck leans. They’re counting the powders and purses below.

These coves we’re passing do stink of the Spanish or at least of a Moor tied up in them, burying treasure by the chest as if it were a crop. I say, two boats in a week! What luck!

Hullo! Over here! Bring them on!

They come on like flies.

I’ll clean the foredeck with this fork. You get the others up out of their coffins belowdecks — let them fight to their ends and not ours.

12. Hours Later

Get up now and quit your moaning. Best we mop the deck with the blood of the others.

My leg.

Get up, I say. I think we’re the last. No one else is looking alive.

Leg.

You can move that leg. You can, I saw you move it when that Moor went after you.

See his cutlass, how it shines — it shines like a jewel in a jar.

Move your leg.

Tomorrow. See the light on the edge of it?

I’ll move your leg myself then.

My leg!

Don’t scream. Give me your kerchief to stop the blood. And your cutlass.

Not the one I wrested from three brigands and a captain with just your pigknife held between my teeth?

Magnificent, you were. So fierce their eyes didn’t blink but you had them shaking. You slashed and slashed. I wondered where you found your piracy so quick, it must be in the family. Now, give me the cutlass.

You’ll have my own knife at your throat, you will, just like I had the captain with it.

Want me to pull out the bits from your leg with just this pig knife and my fingers? There be holes in the sail and gulls in the rigging and dead men rolling the deck in their blood, and you won’t loan me the use of your cutlass to save yourself, however it was obtained?

So long as I can see it.

You’ll feel it.

Wait, wait — where is it going?

There’s coals left from the cannonwork — I must burn you to stop the blood.

No, no, not that.

I can slip the cutlass from your fingers after all your insides have rotted. A fine cutlass it is too, with those rubies in the hilt, or is it all my brother’s blood?

It’s my foot I can’t move, nothing’s wrong with my leg. This foot is stone.

Watch the flame, watch the flame.

Why can’t I faint like a girl?

Just breathe steady instead of making all that noise. Bite the rope like it was Ma’s, served up in the soup, and breathe.

I’m bimmm-fff-iiii-ttt-ing.

Leave off me with your bloody chops, you cur. Bite the rope, not me. Already so much blood slicks up the wound I can hardly get a grip on it and I’ve still got the sawing to do.

I’m fainting, I’m going to faint.

Then faint, in Christ’s blood, faint.

I can’t.

Stop that screaming, someone will hear.

They’re all dead.

Are you sure? They could be like us, they could be resurrecting and fit to kill, or a half-dead cook with his knives.

What — you go wiping the blade on your sleeve like I’m a bloody joint of lamb?

The lice won’t stick if I drag it across me clean. If I douse it with water, the sharks swarming will come. Breathe when I do. Breathe.

Breathe, breathe — where did you get a knack for this breathing and butchering?

Bother. The shot is too far in.

You’ll cry if I die.

From joy to be rid of you! Sing out or talk, your shrieks make the cutting hard.

O, the merry old man of Bis-do-bee!

Better.

I dreamt of a mermaid the size of a whale with a place to move around inside her, a pleasure place.

Really? Maybe I dreamt it too and didn’t tell you. There’s the shot. Now, hold still. This blood is so bloody slippery.

Give me that cutlass! Give it to me! You’ll do me no more harm.

I’ll knock you in the head with it, I will.

The cutl—

Egad, I will have to chop the whole of the leg, to the joint and around. You’ll not be thanking me for this. Use the courage you swore to when Luggams made you the pirate you didn’t want to be.

My head. You didn’t have to crush my brains out!

Now to the coals again.

Coals!

Just a quick burn.

My leg.

As soon as I have you trussed, I’ll toss the leg over and goodbye, just like that. Goodbye in the dark and good riddance. Then I’ll steal the bo’sun’s false leg if he hasn’t rolled off, and make you a new one, bye-the-bye, to fit. A leg you can jew up a dance on the spot for the ladies — but hold still now and stay quiet and quit that bleeding.

Four hundred gold pieces?

If there be a pirate left to pay you for the leg. The ship be ours now, and all its little treasure to split between us. There’s a squall in the dark that’s coming for us, but the sails still be strong. We could be in for a flip.

The ship’s leaning on her shoulder already, the fish will be climbing my boots by dawn.

Boot.

Aye, the one.

13

The ship sails itself.

14. Days Later

Having to haul the fly-besotted enemy overboard, it’s another offense against us.

They could’ve left the charts.

They could’ve left the sails unslashed, the rigging primped and the rudder sound.

Where are we? We’ll never see our shores again in this drift, unless we are taken and hanged.

Hanged.

Will you shut that parrot up?

Hanged.

Hold the beak.

The governor himself sat with Shanks and Luggams, and refit their ship in sight of Boston harbor. I heard the mate tell of it.

Home is not Boston harbor.

If we could but steer home.

It’s not so far off when it comes to measuring from sea to sea.

A visit home is your grave day.

O’Maury, O’Mallory, they grow their own crosses—

They sit on the shore a-counting their losses

The lassies come begging with boils on their -

And still you keep dancing

And still you keep jigging

Praising the glory of the Cutlass King’s lashes.

You made that up.

I made it up while Luggams slept, and sang it in my sleep while he forbade it. I love to sing. I learned from Ma’s husband, the sixth.

Hanged.

You know, in another week, I’d have had a solid gold cutlass. We were going up against the King of Cutlasses in a week, the great pirate of España with his knives of gold.

Soft knives, that, in solid gold.

Oh, yes, he would have been our next except you had to practically bleed to death, wriggling round the deck like a briney shrimp, chasing me with your leftover leg.

Shrimp, never.

Hanged.

I’ve heard of a parrot that could recite all the rivers in Africa.

There’s enough talking between the two of us.

But if you were to—

I’m not dead nor drowned in the drink yet.

Tis’ a fine leg I made for you, yours is. It’s the table that’s not much anymore.

I fear my stump is spoiling. Even the spoils you took are spoiled.

That ham they had!

The velvets stood up with mold.

I look nice enough in them, my stitchery done best without the wash of blood.

Butchery, not stitchery.

Hanged.

Shut up! Shut up! I can’t stand it.

Our dead foe taught it, to lash himself with warning.

“Save the cook” is better. That’s what I’d teach it. Every time before I stick someone, I ask Cook? first, not brother.

A spate of brothers and all of them like you, with your time pieces a’rusting, and foul, desperate boats.

Hanged.

Brothers all, brothers who will make you drink seawater soon enough.

You knew that would bring up the pearls. They were all I had from two years of repairing watches. Now all I have is my leg, the lost one, swimming beside the ship. Would that it would guide us.

By the by, you are free now. Free of the pirates’ hold.

Free to die? I swore, didn’t I?

Hanged. Hanged.

It’s a smart one, to fly off so fast as that.

You should never have released it.

It’s taken such a liking to you. Pretties your shoulder.

Begone! Begone! It’s just waiting to see if I die of my leg. A bird of prey.

The game then, before it returns.

Black teeth — Queen of spades.

Blind eye — My deuce.

Nine o’ hearts — Pegleg.

Bit pecker — Double sixes.

Fiver — Hook hand.

Pieces o’ eight.

You win.

At least the bleeding’s stopped.

Pull down the canvas to shade me. I hate all fish though I could swallow a white-fleshed one now, I could.

Hanged.

It’s just come back to check on your leg.

Hand me the poker. With the cutlass and the redhot poker, I’ve got twice the chance of killing it.

Take care, your leg’s not — and the wallow of the boat—

Never mind the leg. I’ll get it, I’ll get it. It’s not so high that I can’t — with this poker—

Watch out! The deck there — the rope—

Once more — I’ll get it sure this time, I will — If I have to hear its gallows’ talk once more, I’ll—

You missed by a length.

I’ll throw this belaying pin at you too, I will, if you don’t stay quiet. I think I nicked the wing of it. A nick and a jab, it was, and a good one with the poker. You don’t see the bird now, do you?

I don’t see the poker neither.

I would sleep but the pain — every wave jolts it — I can’t abide the pain in my leg. Or what it once was.

Calm yourself. You’re bleeding again.

That is not the death smoke that the priest makes, smoke traveling from the far yonder of the boat?

Not incense, no. But smoke it is. Where did you throw that damned hot poker?

Not far enough, not overboard. I can see the fire rising.

15. 1723 Desert Island

I love an island.

I love an island with a bit of wood on it.

Yes, we could use a bit of wood, deserted and empty as it is.

With my leg burnt to ash, I think of wood more than you, I ponder quite a bit over wood.

I would have paddled my own soul to heaven and back for you to get at the wood of our skiff but it drifted. I pressed hard at the oars but our boat stood still with you screaming Fire! of your leg.

I was afeared you had forgotten me.

It was enough to drag your sizzling leg ashore with that cutlass trying to drown us both. Who could see the bloody shore for the smoke of the boat burning and your leg? I couldn’t. I was glad for the island, happy for dawn at last.

It’s not just the dunes, the dunes suck down the prince of legs, it’s this stick I suffer forward on, this twisted length of rotten driftwood you think is so bloody perfect.

You wouldn’t want a leg of palm. The Queen’s ton it would be. Real wood will float in from the boat. Just wait.

I’ll crawl from one end of the island to the other, from leeward to windward, that’s my waiting. Cannibals wait, I can’t.

You are an idiot.

Tis true. Soon enough a lost shrike or a pigeon or that Hanged will come flying over the island and instead of eating the seed in its beak like a glutton after all its flying for days and days with nothing at all for food, it will drop its seed over a soft patch of sand where the seed will take root and sprout and then branch over our heads to make a place for the gluttonous bird to rest in after all his flying for days and days. Just for me a fine leg will be grown from the tree which we’ll then saw down in great haste, having waited as we must, fully for twenty years, but having eaten the bird some years back.

Sea almonds! Wherever I step.

I thought they were stones of a rough sort, hampering my way like every anthill and crack.

Your cutlass could break them open if I could but use its rubied hilt or its broadside.

It is all I have, in protection — and to practice my carving. We must get a gull to drop these almonds from high onto a rock.

You’ll be buttering gull on toast in heaven before it obliges us with that great trick. Your cutlass. Now.

I’ll run you through first.

You are such a pirate.

I am a legless man in distress. Stand back!

Try for a button on the first mate’s canvas or the lace and underthings of McDougall fast across my chest. Come on.

Bless my cutlass, you are such a sight swimming in all those clothes. They are barely dry.

McDougall was really the one for fancy clothes, always pawing through the chests. I heard him say he was careful not to shoot through the actual hearts of the well-dressed gentlemen so as not to ruin the lace at the front.

At least it’s cloud season on this island, and cool for all this you are hauling on your body like it was all you had.

It is.

Hanged.

Mercy!

It liked the fire, it warmed itself by the flames.

Get thee away from me.

Egad.

That was fair close. I swear upon my gobspit that island birds eat more than others, they have that much more to drop.

Make yourself calm. The bird is gone.

I’ll play calm when there’s no more wave. What? The print of a hand?

A print of a hand.

A cannibal’s for sure.

Or a monkey’s. There’s the palms here for them.

The belt of the earth is higher than this, and monkeys winter in places warmer, or I would.

No footprints, just these marks of a body dragged behind. Another like you, legless.

We must find and succor him!

And share rations? The sea almond splits only in two. You were right, it must be a cannibal’s.

Hanged.

Oh, why couldn’t we be put ashore according to the rules, with a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and a pistol with one load? Why did we have to burn and sink? Why this bird—

When the rain comes, you’ll catch it in your mouth in the midst of your caviling. Me, I’ll find a cup in a shell.

To the cannibal then, we’ll toast him.

16

So — the hand was yours. Why, why, why do you follow us? We’re but lost lads ruined from greed with nowhere to go even if we change one island for another.

I chase you best through water.

Without your cane you will not gain on me here on land. Except that we are marooned. But for a drink of water, I could use the water.

Rest your wants. The parrot knows the way to fresh water — that’s why you should heed it.

My brother will kill the parrot first and drink its blood.

Tell him the cannibal sent it and if he lets it out of his sight, it will squawk to the cannibal of his fire.

He thinks the cannibals are roasting his leg. Every night he wakes screaming that the other leg’s gone and bades me to touch it. For him I concocted a salve from a plant as I cut from the shore. Except for the bird, he is better.

I’m sorry that the bird recites “Hanged” so willfully. He must have been cheap, that’s all I can say, with a teacher not so skilled as I. I would have taught him “Water.”

Oh, for a lime! Get us off this island now, we are bound to this sand and tree and its almonds. Oh, but for a few fish.

All I can do is follow and wait until you will follow me. Our father despises you every day for not choosing the sea, for locking yourself to the land. Feel around your neck.

I have no gills if that’s your meaning.

The mixing of the races does not always come true. Pity. But the sex is always sure. You’re my sister.

Don’t touch me there.

After Peters caught me, I sang the wrong pirate off the gallows. When first a creature like me comes up out of the deep, all humans and time are alike. I knew you to be a pirate, just not where. After you slipped me your brother’s name signed by you, I knew you better. Except you were male. Show me your females.

I will not.

I will swim beneath the poop deck.

Not that! It is hard enough.

Together we will tell Father you have returned.

I know nothing about this father. Leave me be.

He is the father you seek. Didn’t your mother tell you?

My mother told me of many fathers, none wishing death upon me.

Although Father is not weighed down by gold and other appurtenances, just by the fishy depths, the pirates so often cannot keep their ships afloat even on sunny days and their treasure sinks to him of their own accord.

All of that treasure is his?

And yours, by way of family, with the squabbles that attend it.

I can’t breath underwater.

You haven’t tried. Gill/girl. It’s just a slip in the writing. Let me teach you exactly how they come together.

Oh, no — that’s a lesson I don’t want.

Two sister fish we are, and one knows the ways of the shore and can sing a sailor to the very brink, and one trails her hair the way they do, until it catches a sailor.

I have heard the singing when I press my ear to the hull. I have heard my own.

A pirate sees the hair in the tide before he swings, a true wild swag of it. He has to sing back quick or his nether part will grow longer and longer with him a’dangle on the rope. We are uncommonly clever about a man’s parts, as you will be too. You must come with me, for the love of our father who abandoned you because he could not stay.

The world is scarce of love, it washes few and drowns most of those.

You will not come?

There it is — the rain at last. I must race to the shells I have collected and nurse my brother.

You are bound to your brother as fast as husband to wife.

Don’t come upon him or he will think he is raving for sure and I will have to attend his supporations all over again. And don’t leave any more of your prints. He will become a cannibal himself if he is reminded.

You send me away after all my trouble? Why can’t you see that you know your rightful place all along, and long now to swim there?

I am no girl, nor fish. I am not your sister, nor your father’s child. I am a pirate on a pirate’s island, with no past at all, and surely no future. Do not slander what little I have left. Begone from me. Leave my sight!

17

In the beginning, everyone lived beside water.

I like that. Beside and not in it.

Everyone lived beside water that was sweet and you could drink all of it. You didn’t wait for a storm, you didn’t wait for a bird to show it to you.

Water, I want water.

You should not have scared the bird.

Let it fan me with its water-love, let it fly to me with a key to water around its green neck. I didn’t mean to throw so many rocks.

Sit down, sit down. The dew can be sucked from the leaves on the morrow. Let us try again for a water story: Tataunga, the great chief—

— whose teeth crushed shells, who cannot see his business his belly is hitched out so far, who keeps pirates behind staves to dance on his fire.

The savage king Tataunga gives a great feast in praise of water, with grog and beers and soups—

Not soup. Never soup again. Too much rope in the soup.

Tataunga possessed two beautiful daughters, begot by a woman flung off a maharajah’s vessel.

Named Ma.

They are all named Ma who have you as a son.

One of the daughters escaped the evil Tataunga and the other stayed below and kept her fins. The son who is not so beautiful is from another father.

So many fathers. What of the fish woman?

She’s a whale. Small, but not perch or something with silver in its skin.

Whale, fish — they are all mostly water.

O, hateful water, oh beautiful water.

This beautiful fish with watery fins and skin the color of ruby beaches at sunset the boy befriends, speaking to her just long enough to get her true secret.

Many palms sway behind Tataunga as he dances — what secret would that be? The secret of life? I know that secret, it’s the thing that Tataunga does at night to his last and final daughter.

No, not at all. The fish gives him the secret of death instead, that’s it, the fish tells him how death fights us.

We are all dying. Great gasping breaths, the hawking, then the phlegm. How can we listen?

Don’t lean on me so — the daughter possesses an eye that sees beyond all others and she uses it. Though Tataunga sends her to every part of the sea, to every shore that the seas wash up to find her sister and her secret, he dies before he hears it.

I have the eye. See — a whale’s eye.

Give it here. That eye is mine.

I was given it, I didn’t take it from you and I need it now, to fight off Tataunga with mine eye.

It stinks. You don’t want it.

I’ve had it too long to stink, unless it be the stink of my skin against all these washed-up clothes.

Keep the eye then, you cur. Tataunga brings his hooks and axes. I see him bury himself inside the whale’s chest.

I’ll bury myself.

You’ll get sand down your gullet, you’ll choke on it.

You are without respect! Tataunga comes to cut out your tongue.

Put down that cutlass. It’s my cutlass.

The palms wave as if to attack, we must fight Tataunga.

All right, we’ll fight the palms so they don’t cut out your tongue. As long as you don’t harm the stick I walk on. Tataunga!

Tataunga! Not so close. I think you are too close.

The battle ends with Tataunga drinking a cup of grog with us—

— and weeping over his lost daughter.

What about the daughter?

His tears fall upon the lost daughter and they turn into treasure, pieces o’ eight in bags of silk.

Finally, treasure. Which Tataunga doesn’t need or want so we hasten to take it.

But you are Tataunga.

I thought you were the daughter.

The fish?

I am not the fish either. I am not even the whale. The secret! The secret! I’ll cut it out of them.

Let me seize that sword of yours. You’ll do yourself harm.

My eye! You have cut mine eye! You have poked out my eye!

Don’t — scream — so.

My eye, my eye!

It’s just the one, you can do all your looking with the other.

Get away. Get away. My eye!

Hold it with your thumb to stop it bleeding.

Monster!

We’ll get you a patch, a lovely patch out of hide, or a black swatch. It’s not like losing another leg.

What am I to do? I’m blind.

You are the one-legged brother who creeps, and now you will have to creep alongside me.

Curse Tataunga and all the Higher Powers!

It’s a blessing is what you must think — your one eye will see what comes next where two cannot, they are too busy conferring.

You dream that. What would I see?

A man with a fork rising from the sea to take out the other.

Mercy!

18. A Year Later

I don’t know how you see anything through your one eye.

It’s a ghost boat yonder, or nothing. It’s a boat that floats for sure, that’s all.

— A square-rigger?

A true boat, and it coming toward us!

Indeed.

Let’s flap our rags, let’s jump from a tree! Fire! The fire! Coax up the fire!

No time. They’ll be ashore before we can find enough kindling. Besides, they’ll never stop if we look like brigands drying our takings over a fire.

Southbound.

Southbound will be fine. Southbound will be just dandy.

Southbound it is. And a big fine ship it is. The newest of sails, all rigged right.

The bones of the burnt hull lure them.

How will they see us?

They see us, they’re tacking.

We are but two castaways from a boat caught in the rocks and burnt, that is our story — ah, what was the name of the vessel you heard was refitted?

The Mayflower or the Maryflower, some-such.

We are two castaways from the Mayflower, all that was left of the hundred of your countrymen accosted by brigands and left for dead after the burning boat catched on the rocks.

The flag is English?

It is. But the tale of being beset by something like the Frobisher ship is better, with its fraud so long ago of saying they were looking for the Passage, poking about and picking up women and not discovering — everyone knew Frobisher was a pirate. We begged to be put off the Frobisher-type ship and die here, rather than go on with the likes of that kind of captain.

Pirates like to leave a captain. I vote for the Mayflower. The less piratical our boatsmen the better.

Oh, bother — the Mayflower or the Maryflower then. Move your hand from the glass, you hide the sight of the crew. A monk’s on deck — see his cowl?

He will be kind to us.

Unless it’s a Moor in disguise. I can’t tell from those robes.

If only I had mine eye.

They need water enough, with a barrel like that.

I’ve forgotten what happened to my leg.

You fell into a well behind the topiary, the topiary behind the — what, what? — it comes to me — the chapel at Edgerton. Your eyepatch is from a fight between us when we were but infants. Which is true more or less since we’re naught but boys now. Big orphan boys.

It’s a fine thing you’re still so light of beard. They like it when there’s a woman. That frill off MacAdam’s cuff does the convincing. And the skirt from the washed up trunk.

Hanged.

It can’t be. I dreamed feathers flying into the dark of the night, it didn’t die, it came back. I should’ve eaten it long ago.

Leave it be. It found us water.

Hanged.

It led us to the brink first.

We must boast that the parrot will find a port, that it was the best of luck for us having tamed it.

Not in all the water of the seas I have drunk will that parrot be luck for us. Damned bird.

Hanged, hanged.

Which of the clothes to put on top for me?

Plaid, it’s plaid, a bold plaid it is. There may be some who fled Scotland.

I shall go all enraged — I was all set to land at a new port for the time-pieces when the pirates o’erpowered my ship. But I need a paper that says you took me. I don’t want to complicate the road we are set on by not having the right history.

But it would declare me a pirate!

Yes, well, maybe we would surprise them better as two warring sides.

Better we double our forces and turn on them just as they turn the key in your lock.

You were fighting athwart the boat in defense of me.

Hanged.

Get the bird off my shoulder.

I’ll stuff it inside your shirt for a heaving bosom.

Ah, yes, that could fool them.

And hide my cutlass under your petticoats on a belt around your leg. They won’t think of you with such a weapon. Or should I be carving the wood with it: “The Fine Maiden Hurries to the Dock for Communication from Her Lover?”

No, I will act as a kind of closet for the cutlass. Then after all the introductions, I will fall in a faint in the excitement so you can cover my face and carry me on board with all those weak lady excuses they make. Then we’ll poke them.

I’m bound into being a pirate.

It is our best chance. Over here! Over here! We’ve been besieged by cannibals daily.

Don’t say that — they won’t land.

They all like to say they’ve killed the cannibals in defense of the ladies. Hope they don’t confuse us with them though. But cannibals have far more teeth than we show. Please — mind the rocks. The rocks are what caught us — the great boat the Maryflower—

The Mayflower—

The Mayflower, god rest our ship and all the souls upon it, it was cast onto the rocks and there met its fiery end. Here! Over here!

The rocks caught us but they’ve spread for you due to the flag you’re flying. Delighted to have you come ashore.

Hanged.

Miss Hanged, if you please.

19

You are no monk.

Zee cut of zee monk’s jib iss zo cool for zee nethers. But you — you are no uzual caztaway!

My sister, Monsieur.

Miss Hanged, if you please. Daughter of the First Magistrate of Barbados.

A lovely ranzom for zee daughter of Julian Julien, zee castrated cur of the Carribbean.

I was got out before he was maimed.

Aye, well, I don’t doubt that he had zome meanz about him. Give Miz Hanged and her bird the, the how-do-you-say? cloizter where she might go pale in the arm and the faze so as to fetch a better huzband in zee first zlave market we come to, or persuade Julian Julien zhe is worth a virgin’z ranzom. White as zee znow you will be by zen, and a big enough purze for uz, like az not. And find her a fine comb of fizhbone got from her father, the fine caztrated Julian. Adieu, mon cheri, I will veezit you zoon, zo zoon. Az for her having a brother — Julian Julien muzt have led a buzy youth.

Hanged.

I am a watchmaker of some repute. M’lady knows—

Zilence. Do not zpeak of Miz Hanged. We are not talking about zee father of zuch a woman. Perhapz we should be talking of parrotz.

I am not even English, I am from Salem, from another father.

Comme si comme ca, zneaking puppy of the colonies. Back to your ztationz, the rest of you. I don’t want to zee the lay of the land, I want to zee zeez one’s zkin.

I swear to you!

Sacre bleu! Zuch a young one. Zo fine a zkin for zuch a pirate’z back. You will learn the wayz of the flesh — mine.

Five lashes only! I cannot take more than five.

The lash lovez you. The lash lovez and lovez the onelegged—

Only ten!

Yez, yez, yez. Oh, yez. We will zee how many.

No more!

Hanged.

Only after a pirate haz zeen the lash can he be trusted. Bligh, take heem below — and have the leg looked after by zee carpenter, zome paint applied. When zee lucky zailor recoverz from hiz lashes, he can inflame me with a leg as zhapely as hees zeester’z. And ztow the unbozomed bird in my quarterz.

20. A Week Later

I try to throw up my skirts.

It is hard to distract him. Just the sound of my pegleg upon deck and he comes at me again with his lash.

He calls me his bête noir.

Isn’t that one of those little cakes? He is stupid not to force you or we would be dead and at the bottom of the drink, both of us, from your lack.

They had dugong the week before.

“Zee fair mermaid of zee zea.” He has taken you away so often to “heez zuite” it’s hard to believe he has not tired of the farce.

I keep him off with stories — how boats will sail underwater by the power of cannonballs, one ball smacking the other, of the prince who cuts off his finger and a new prince grows from it, of the mermaid who sang to the wrong man — you know, whatever I can twist together.

We would still be swanning the decks if the parrot hadn’t flown from your bosom and ruined our Mayflower story. And the magistrate had to be impotent! Spending so long on that island even the gossip goes green. But the shackles are the same.

At least I don’t have to bear them on my ankles. It would be hard to sneak down with their clink, clink, clink.

If I ever get hold of a cat o’ nine tails—

You sound pirate enough now.

Aye, I’ll cut that parrot down first, and then the rest of them too. Avast ye, and the like.

Where can we escape to? The swells are high enough without us.

See the paleness in me.

Pale as a pirate’s turnip.

Bother. Let’s talk of the soup they kept in the Turk’s Head pot, across the gibbety square, the fine bones and mustards we never ate as pirates.

We’re in the soup now.

It is rough today.

Everyone else in chains goes aboveboard but you.

I don’t want to go up. There’s Silas and Fremont, dead of the fever and if the Frenchman finds them, I’ll have to haul out their bodies and my wrist is finished, a bloody stump from these shackles. I might as well get a hook now and be done with it.

You should not have got your hand caught in that loop of rope.

I was trying to grab for his faretheewell when he walked down with his whip, and my peg tripped me. But what of you? You’re a gimlet-eyed false woman with your fineries so fair, so many castoff jerkins you look about to birth a nation of castaways.

They do round me. He lets me keep them all, even the lacy bits.

No more talk of the Frenchman. Let’s talk of women, the women of my wants, the women in my life.

The harridan, your wife?

She made me drink quince at every meal and diced my socks with rough yarn. There is nothing like that kind of a woman to suck you down.

The anchor that pulls you under.

The woman we courted, now there was a woman.

Aye. A pirate’s woman before we were pirates.

I daresay she had an eye for you in my dazzling wake.

An eye, yes, but not a foot. She didn’t stray from your path.

The last woman I heard had a tip-tap so light on deck it could have been a goat.

It was a goat. You could smell it roast for hours.

Not food, not so much food in our talk. Me-hearty me with a song if you must. My wrist!

Avast ye, creature of Ma-a-a-mmon,

Bail ye, swine, past long lost Adam—

You rhyme without shame.

I hate this belowdecks of yours and my getting pale for a slavers’ auction. Let us talk of fish instead, of the fish swimming alongside us, a’singing.

That was a swell, no fish song.

They sing what fools we be, you a scrimshaw saint, I a dead mother’s helpmate.

Your foot is in my hair.

I thought it was vermin!

The fish sing that the wind is upon us now. The fish, the wind — they sing together.

Your bowels are so loud I can scarce hear myself.

Now a scratching only, a fish come to gut us from below.

21. Six Months and a Storm

All hanz on deck! Methinz zee ship is zinking or I have fallen into me glasz! Where is zee crew?

Washed over or strung out on the line, shackled and drowned behind the boat.

I zay drink to zee drowned then! Where is the plug to plug ziss hole?

Lightning green on the rigging, the spar’s loosed up on deck, and the waves—

A fairy show. Evil faireez. I have seen fish standing on the wavez to greet uz, fish big as zaintz. To zee wine eenstead, zwill a drink to the cutlass by ze Savior de Papa, as ze Portuguese would zwear it!

Hanged. Hanged.

Which way, parrot?

Zee parrot knows zis lightning. Drink to zee parrot.

The wheel’s tied off.

Itz spokes cried out for the rope! By my gown of zee Christian monk and the gown of Meez Hanged and zee bold waters of Julian Julien—

Well done! He needed the crucifix as hard as you gave it.

The gash won’t kill him. Another wave!

I thought you’d washed over with the rest.

I hate the deck so, I stayed clear of it when they halloed.

Oh, god let us stay afloat.

Another.

That’s the mast going. Take his sword — it is yours, the rubied one. Fasten yourself to it.

The lash, I want the lash too.

Leave the lash, you idiot.

Waves across the fo’sicle, waves that—

Took the lash.

Yo-ho-ho, yo-ho-ho, yo-ho-ho.

Drink his drink down. All of it. It’ll hot your gullet, quiet your bloody bones, it’ll settle you where you need settling.

Argh!

His blood rushes out as quick as the water rushes in.

Hanged.

I’ll cut off the beak of it!

Enough slaughtering.

No wind of a sudden.

Clear as Christchurch! The sky scrubbed rough with soap.

This could be but the eye, just the eye of the storm.

I’ve heard tell of it.

We’ll swim home.

Don’t dance in the rigging yet. I’ll climb the crowsnest.

Maybe we are drowned and don’t know it. The blue-painted ocean — who said that? Why do you dally so?

Don’t tip the flagon so deep. Wait until I make my report.

Report?

It’s a trick of the weather up there. Is there a rope yet to belay me?

Under that cask that is split.

I don’t see a cloud in all of the sky, not a one.

My stump be a’tingle, how can it storm more?

We’ll need real luck this time. The parrot—

— left its feather.

I’ll take a drink now. What — just the dregs?

If the wind comes, athwart is where I’ll be the safest. I’ll lie down there.

It’s black above now, you drunkard.

There’s a face at the scuppers, a dead slave come to haunt us. Oh, god from above!

A woman?

They say they come at the last.

Only a screaming wind and more wave.

Best we lash ourselves down.

Yes, the deck at last.

Not both of us to one plank or we’ll both go to heaven.

One for both, or none. No swimming for me.

Nor for myself neither.

The wind! The wind!

Come away from the side. The heaving’s less here, hold to the hatch.

The heaving’s worse, the wine — I’m—

All over me.

22

I saved you.

I thought the fish saved me.

That terrible fish? It was as big as the size of yourself and roiled through those waters like two men, it was as big as the water pigs Bligh told us of.

Must’ve come up from the deep on account of the storm.

It had you afloat on its scales until I came at it with my cutlass. I couldn’t see its face—

You stuck it with the cutlass. Almost through the gills.

Gills or gullet, I couldn’t see for the thrashing. Waters like hell, they were. It had ahold of you and you were going full to your end, going down, down, down in all your many clothes.

My pockets will drown me yet.

Take out the coin next time.

I had no coin. I saw other fish circling, while it had me.

Not I.

Others came up around it in the swirl of the blood and the storm.

You did not see that. You were too soon holding fast to my leg and blowing to the surface.

I saw what I saw. The fish was less holding me than pulling me down as sure my leg now dangles for the sharks to trim.

I saved you with my wooden leg afloat.

If the wind hadn’t fallen, we would have been finished, wooden leg or no.

The wind fell.

The wind is falling more now.

Falling.

Falling.

The water is cold and will be colder — this current sweeps north.

More boats north.

The waves will decide, boat or not.

So soon? What ho?

Those rogues never turned our way before, unless to gull us. Stay low.

Let’s hullo them.

No — wait for a sign—

We should wait while sharks and the other fishy demons eat off our last three legs?

We should. That’s Smith at the bow, that villainous grogman, the keeper of the stories of brothers Bungleston and of pirates pale as turnips. From Luggams’ crew.

Friend or foe? I don’t remember.

Friend, friend — I don’t know. Someone we know.

You two, whatever you be doing in the drink swimming like the fish knew your names? Get on aboard and rest your fins.

23

What happened to your face?

Lightning.

It was not lightning. As true as I am the Reverend Baltrick and have run before many a sail on the open seas, never have I seen what I saw with Smith. It was a fish that hit him. It flew up and hit him across the nose on his way up the mast that last day we were becalmed off the Cape. A plague of fishes such as the Bible speaks of had flown onto the boat, even into his pockets and down his shirt. They flew in from all the heavens and one hit him.

Poor fish.

Aye, Smith even found fish in his bed a day or so later, didn’t you, Smith?

As you say it, Reverend. But the lightning did it.

He smelled to heaven.

I say it was lightning, Saul’s true lightning, that mess of fish coming at me in the air, the Lord’s will. The Lord knows. He sent a fish flying up out of the sea a’flapping to my face as sure as lightning.

The Lord? Is this the Smith that sailed the seven seas with Luggams and myself?

Yea, I be that Smith. And this be your brother from the takings?

Aye, and a fine pirate my brother was after he was hauled.

True pirates, drinking the sea in shifts, hanging onto that leg for hours.

Pray, put thy swords and the small knives in the chest there and drink some of our wee grog to stop your shaking from the cold of the deep. The cutlass chest is eight paces hence, more or less, put it there. That’s it.

Mind the pegleg.

Why, our thanks to you, Reverend Baltrick. The grog is good, not the burnt peas we drink that slavers make.

Well, we be not slavers. Have no fear of that. And no blow will sink us because we have cleared the sucking sump of the gates of hell and are bound over the farthest seas in Our Lord’s name back to our port. But now I must see to changing the course. Smith, thou wilt stand watch.

Baltrick, Baltrick — I believe I heard our mother speak of this Baltrick.

Could he be the Baltrick of the Heaven Sent, the preacher of the Seven Seas she did once have the acquaintance of, as they say?

This Baltrick knows no women.

None? Not even in the seeds of his youth? Our mother swore on her deathbed—

Reverend Baltrick is not the man of your mother’s bed, death or not.

Our mother did swear of many.

You have his very eyes, brother.

You can see that, with your one?

What are you two whispering?

We have much to be grateful for and thank the Reverend indeed.

The Reverend has it that you must attend the rigging now, with my help. There’s a loop that is bent wrong from the blow.

I’ll take the halyard.

So, Smith, how did you come into this service from Luggams’? To my memory, you left his boat just before we were wrecked.

It was just a matter of shifting my doss, you know, when nobody was looking. After Luggams came to nothing and a bad doubloon, owing to the fine crew he shipped, I quit him for a tighter lot. That is to say, I sail now for the Lord Almighty straight out of Boston Harbor even on the blackest of days, and in storms, in search of souls.

Our Smith, the pirate? I say it again but I can’t believe it.

I rescue pirates and return them to the Bosom of our Lord, or as the Judge sees fit.

Judge?

This one with the leg isn’t right, is he? Always wanting to repeat. Has he been lightning-hit as well as me?

He’s right enough, Smith. Go on with it.

My task is to steal the heinous souls of pirates back for God and Mammon, and on the occasion of a soul unrepentant or as a judgment against the people, the Reverend here sails them in and then the Judge tries them and hangs them.

For a bounty, of course.

The wise-legged one! He at least knows the cost of saving the souls of pirates for our Savior who both giveth and taketh away the way. Do not worry, we are not so far from land, a day’s journey, no more, and you too will soon be taketh away.

Smith!

The storm pulls hard when you have the Lord Almighty coming for you. Belowdecks, now.

We too be saved and sorry, and will be full of joy to abide in the searching for souls with you. Let us enter Boston in triumph, for the judgment of pirates other than ourselves!

It’s the eye patch no one will believe. You shan’t pass for naught but pirate.

I’ll pluck it off and offer my eye-hole.

It’s the patch and Boston harbor only a tide away, and the number of pirates we find who are scarce as you hereabouts, except after storms. And, of course, there’s the bounty. Stand just here on your pegleg — another point of the pirate.

I’m a watchmaker, not a pirate.

Reverend, they go not willingly to God.

No — not the irons again—

We hoist sail and wash the decks better than most. Our last captain — a Frenchman he was — thought well of our handling of the line. This hook I have be the best ballast for a sturdy knot.

To blows then!

Good for you, Smith — in one strike. But methinks you should have found a better set of shackles in port. What do we go out for if we have only this soft tin — to rescue crippled sailors from their watery grave? Fetch the bit and the cord from the chest.

Not so tight.

Smith’s a blackguard, Reverend. I tell you in our sainted mother’s name.

Yes, perhaps he seems reformed at hand, but he’ll tow you to hell and back for your ship. Whilst ourselves, we are just poor boys afloat, rescued and homeless from the terrible storm.

Quiet, the two of you, or I’ll belay you both again with the “hand o’ God.”

Have pity. We are your sons indeed, sent by and by. Our very mother tells us Baltrick’s the one, aye, Baltrick, and we set sail to find him, no reason other than for the recovery of our father.

Prithee?

Oh, father!

24. Boston Harbor

Why did they have to hang Smith in such a dead wind? Row faster and the stench will lighten. I’ll watch the course.

I see nothing but the blasted moon of your back.

Just row and we’re bound to hit something.

Baltrick.

Sea wolves and jackanapes! No wonder Ma didn’t hold to him. I’m sure the heat of hate has already set his sail, if not the stink of Smith, Baltrick’s bonus.

Smith always did stink.

He stank up the whole of the colony. The gaoler told me the surgeons were wanting a try at him, to have a peek at his heart and suchlike but the gibbet was too soon fouled by crows dissecting on their own, having a look at the black heart themselves.

You are a one for disappointing that gaoler. He didn’t like Smith.

I sang when the noose came up.

And what be the tune? I may need it yet.

The song is on my tongue tip, it is there but I can’t tell you, it is gone the way they say it goes. But you can be sure I didn’t stand around trying to catch it again — I ran. Pray, how did you stall your gaoler’s fancy?

With the figures I put into the gaol wall using the spoon butt—“St. Peter Choosing the Keys.” My years of practice for the bone repaid me well. For every prisoner the gaoler said he would always get the cleverer, and I was the cleverest of all.

Aye. The burying you told him was.

Oh, but those eight buried silver bars, I say like I have laid eyes on them, even hauled them halfway around the world. Like pirates float to the beach on bars of gold or silver!

That would be a shipwreck.

I made mention to the gaoler of that fresh water running in the glen just outside the town. A right marshy place, I say. Then he tells the hangman I need time to repent and brings me double rations and forgets to close the door quite so hard as before. We be needing a new door for half a year now, he says and he lifts his eyebrows like they aren’t his own.

It’s the spoon you stole they’ll hang you for next time.

It’s the ring in my ear.

They have the teeth of pirates is what the woman called out from the hanging crowd. Look at their teeth, will you? They have the teeth of the islands, soft from the cane and the scurvy.

Never trust an innocent girl.

With us still heaving out of the sea. And Smith talking of the Lord as quick as he could.

It was his sister that didn’t like him, that was the poxed woman who called out. We did a bit of convincing with Baltrick too.

Just row a bit to my shoulder, I think I see the shine of the sea starting under that slice of the moon.

No. A squid jumping to the light.

These good town fathers chose to have a man hold a red hot iron just for stealing a chicken.

The gaoler followed close on me in the night, with a fat cudgel ready to put me in that hole he was going to dig for the treasure.

I saw bits of his shirt left on the thorn that keeps that harbor so quiet.

You saw him then?

I followed his shirt and stole up behind him and he nearly dropped his shovel, he was taken with me so sudden. I said, Here, I said, I am dead, and I gave the shovel back to him. The silver’s ten paces farther, I walked away saying. Pieces o’ nine, I heard him say while I turned to find you, pieces o’ ten. Like he was counting it already.

We must watch ourselves exact at this latitude or he’ll have us on the boil.

Unless he finds O’Henry’s chest.

Only O’Henry’s own mother knows the whereabouts of that chest and she is carving the rock that is over it with a teaspoon, keeping the leavings in a bag under her skirts. Besides, O’Henry turned Mohammedan before he left Luggams. You can hear him moaning in that part of the marsh, My foreskin, oh my front piece.

Stop, stop. I haven’t laughed for a week.

It would be enough for the gaoler to find his gaol empty of the pirate next to be hung, but for the gaoler to be found guilty of the unlawful stealing of a pirate’s treasure unlawfully got!

The judge will see to the finding — and then split it.

Maybe there are truly bars of silver buried in there, resting? With the trees, the mud, the easy confluence of drowned sailors and ships and O’Henry moaning in the marsh?

Our ploughed luck. And here’s more of it — we might as well be glued to the sand with this leadbottomed skiff of yours, it sits so heavy in the water against a tide like this.

A ship will come along, a better one than before.

There’s a tolling now.

Three. Time moved slow waiting for you to come out of the muck before I heard your whistle.

Row to the next cove, there’s bound to be a ship there, in such a pirate’s drink.

But whose?

Row, just row.

It’s a danger—

Wish we were served with Smith’s flying fish today. I could eat two raw, still flapping.

Nothing will come along, ship or whale. We’ll have to row to Timbuktu.

Hanged.

Egad!

It means we are on the right road.

Like the devil’s hawk it is, waiting for me in the damned true hunger of my youth, fluttering above.

Hanged.

Food, food at last — that’s what I hear. Flying swankey.

Row. And row.

Sometimes I think you’re happy to have that leg of wood, to trail it beside my rowing and tease the bird.

Oh, many’s the time I wanted such a leg, oh, yes. To go with mine eye and hook. Get to your rowing hard. Harder!

Hanged.

Hush, hush — a ship.

It’s got Baltrick’s prow on it.

You thick-witted, skull-less, one-legged, one-eyed idiot-brother — not so loud!

They must be out carousing.

The boat, hold the boat — Don’t hit it again. Where’s the line?

Hanged.

Not if the watch is drunk and sleeping.

Let’s see what we can take before they take us.

A pleasure to plunder our dear father, be he yours or mine.

25

Beef, beef — and that one that holds the corn — the lightest one’s leather. See, the chalk marks?

A little more of the candle and I could see — move the candle thus. Your arm ruins the light—

I hope the watch can’t untie your knots.

His head is knots.

Here’s a cask about the right size of the ones I heard Baltrick was taking on, though it’s not dry. Hear it?

Open it anyway. Gold plates in wine — I’ve heard that tried. Baltrick’s shipwright has a beard that points to mischief in that way. But easy with the cutlass. You don’t want vinegar and gold splashing the deck.

What a mess.

Cornmeal — and gold sacrileges, gods of one or the other. You’d know Baltrick would have those.

Maybe a dozen.

Hanged.

The bird will give us away again. I’ll catch it in this corner — it can’t fly off down here. Just — by the neck.

No!

Like a dream! Not even a squawk. Mind the blood. I’ll skewer the bird to my peg to quiet my walking, that’s what I’ll do. But first a feather.

You fool you, you fop.

Aye — and you’re the pirate.

Not as stupid as you. There’s got to be more booty at hand than just gold gods for our sacks, and a handful of feathers. What of this barrel?

If the mallet were here—

Jerk it hard—

It’s open, it’s open. Move the light close.

For delivery at the dock and right to their Missus’ carts, I’m sure. Not spoilt a bit.

Baltrick did like the making of a pickle.

I wonder how O’Henry’s head feels about being so close to Flannery’s parts. Help me get the staves back.

Do they stay pickled once they put them in the ground for burial? Is it sort of an immortality they give them, unwitting?

Unwitted.

A lot of salt it took.

Salt they have.

Hush. It’s someone alive above and looking about.

It’s them come back, Grifton or some lug. Baltrick walks like a lord, it’s not him.

Grifton’s the sort who might kill us if we haven’t got gold, as much as if we do. Let’s take the gods.

I’ll stay below as always.

We must show ourselves, fight or beguile them.

That’s my arm you’re pulling, my arm where it was lashed and the hook that pulls so.

You come up or you’ll end up in a barrel yourself. Mind the blood.

Baltrick!

They must have polejammed him. Guts and more guts.

Hush.

If it’s mutiny, whose side should we cast for?

The navigator’s. At least then we won’t be lost.

III

26. 1728 Arctic Spring

Serves him right for wanting his name on a map and not treasure. I’ve heard of navigators like him but I never wanted to lay eyes on one, let alone drop his anchor.

We shouldn’t have left the ship to hunt. The seals were a trick of light, luring us.

Seals was his excuse. He wanted an explore. If only he hadn’t dallied, waiting for the clouds to part like some sign.

They didn’t part, they parted us from the blasted boat.

The next melt of ice and the boat will hove to. I swear it, he says. But everyone knows the snow falls year round here.

He was headed right off the edge of the earth.

I could feel that through my socket. Some big cataract at its very edge.

First a loud roar, he says, and all the creatures of hell will fly up and push the boat down, all those winged dragons he talked of.

That’s the truth of it.

A pleasure to eat him.

It was the parrot that loved us.

A love light on me shoulder. The way treasure is never heavy, the same.

You’re an old guff, saying that about a parrot so long gone, and so hated.

It’s the change of heat and the company that makes it so. I never thought we’d be anywhere the drifts would come up to my boot.

Nearly all the way to your tinkler, it is.

I wished I had those boots of yours. I take back what I said, that you looked like a dilly on the streets of Yarmouth, I meant to say those boots just cried out for trouble.

What? I can’t hear you with the sacrileges clanking.

Trouble, I said. I loved that parrot.

White — white all over.

Worse than a dead ocean on a flat day. Hardly a sea to see in such a snow.

Treasure’s not heavy in the heath, not heavy on horseback, not heavy in the hold — but heavy as hell’s a’blazes in a snowstorm and heavier still when the snow’s all over and boot high.

We must leave it.

But treasure be the point of pirating.

All this time and we had a wont of treasure, yes, yes, but leave it now we must. The treasure, or your life. That’s always the way of treasure.

I wouldn’t leave it for an explore and I won’t leave it now.

A map, then, for where we finally heave it off.

Think high thoughts, where the snow starts in the heavens — the sacrileges are not so heavy.

The last paper we had was charts.

The navigator burned them soon enough. To get warm, he said but I know he did it so we couldn’t get back and say he got himself and us lost.

We didn’t eat him at first, did we? We tramped.

He kept coming up.

Froze where he fell. Froze with the ashes of his charts sooting his pantleg.

I’d burn them myself all over again, just a cat’s ass warm it would make me, mind you, the way it did.

But don’t you remember — you still stand in the clothes of that first wreck as well as the dead of this one — you have paper. If you could be so kind as to review the pockets of Giorno? I went through mine own when you needed a sweet to suck on, as you might remember, and I can tell you right off I haven’t a scrap. Giorno had jewels wrapped in paper, I saw him steal them from the diva.

I can’t quite reach—

I can bend my hook. Alsop’s pockets, full of damp salt herring, Redbeard’s with twine — always one for twine for garroting, and here’s a shark’s tooth from Davy Brown’s or else his own tooth, what do you think? And here’s that whale’s eye.

Don’t you ever throw anything out?

I’ll be keeping that.

There’s a pocket in the rear in these rags of Louis’ and they’re as empty as they should be for one so prone, Lindamood the Younger’s kept rocks, rocks I tell you, that’s all he ever wanted. Giorno’s jacket was the rubbed blue? You’re right, I remember Giorno had paper for toileting, like he was royal. Candide he called the pages.

Check that brace of pockets he kept by his belt. My hands are too stiff.

Candide was short, I remember him saying. But there’s nothing.

So much for the literary boot.

What about carving a map into your leg, notches that tell the place of the booty-leaving by way of the carving?

Last time it was only three days before we forgot what the marks meant and then the wood splintered and I needed a new leg. You could carve notches into my good leg now, it’s as cold and as stiff as wood.

My tongue’s bit in pieces.

That’s the parrot feather you bit, where it was hanging low to your hat and froze.

It could have been a quill.

No ink but blood.

Oh, for another bird.

Pirates nearly always put treasure somewhere hard to find, it’s just hard to find the pirate who can ever find a treasure again.

You’ve had too much sun in the face.

Look who’s talking about sun, with your eye crusted shut and the patch missing.

They’re shut so I don’t go blind looking at that earring of yours against the ice.

That isn’t my earring, that earring froze and tore off at the start. That’s the sun itself through the fog that’s coming up fast through the ridge we’ve got to make for.

The fog’s running toward us.

Swill, that’s what we need. A nice bowl of swill.

A nice warm gallows.

A lit fire under our feet. A map that shows where to go, not so much of where we’ve been. The next cove or the next.

Oh, for the navigator.

He could read a map and draw one too.

It’s not my fault he stepped into the first hole he found in his explore. A man has to watch his feet in the snow.

And not burn the map. At least we didn’t go in for that idea of his of roping us together. Where would that have put us?

I do heartily repent.

I repent I did so little mischief.

I was lucky to get a striped shirt to parade about the deck in — though it looked more like prison garb in advance to me.

Always the fashion with stripes.

My sacrileges, my beautiful sacrileges.

Six of them are mine.

Any fool going south will see them thirty miles away when the snow’s all melted.

There are no other fools. Besides, the snow will never melt.

You said Carnaby went this way.

Carnaby liked a mirage. Carnaby smoked mussels and hid them in his shoes. I would’ve liked to have eaten his shoes.

Carnaby never left the boat, the boat we’ll never find.

Did the ice eat it?

The ice or the wind or it sailed away.

It could’ve been in the next cove.

No.

Carnaby’d be the one to find the gold gods, if he were about.

Carnaby hated gold, he only took pearls. I heard him say so. Picky after all his years of plunder.

People coming upon our sacrileges will run to them. A mirage! they’ll shout. Like Carnaby.

Or they’ll walk the other way, afraid it’s the golden gates swung wide. Again I say — Farewell to the gods.

Straight on?

Straight to hell, that’s where there’s heat.

Where we left the treasure is a kind of monument to us.

We’ll be dead by the time someone finds it.

That’s the way of monuments. They don’t put them up if you’re still alive in the world.

Who’s to know it’s ours if we don’t mark it? If we’d made a map, at least we would have marked the booty like an owner with an X. We must go back and mark it.

“Stiff” it should be named on the map, after ourselves.

Let us turn around and put the X—

Ahead — there—

What-ho?

Whisper proper now, whisper. We don’t want to scare it.

27

I slaughtered it on the spot. With my cutlass drawn so.

It didn’t even lunge at you.

I held on. I put my pegleg into the ice, and held on.

It was sick.

I hacked its head off.

Bother your boasting. I’m going inside. Wake me before the slit freezes shut.

Wait — there’s room for two if we eat this or that and get rid of the offal, a little more room just there.

This bit’s good.

Too bad there’s no wood. It’s big enough inside for a fire.

Someone would find us if we had a fire.

Someone would save us if we had a fire. It’s the rule of the ice.

They’d just save us for later.

I’m colder than you. Pull your leg in and close the gap with the head.

You’ll have to unscrew the leg.

It’s off. We’ll have a nap. It’s warm through.

Into the belly of the beast, foot to head, the two of us about to be birthed into another world not half so—

That was quite a bear.

Not so much white as green. I thought it was a shrub come to life.

Not as green as that.

Mossy.

If you be the back legs, I’ll be the front and we’ll creep up to a pack of them.

The front paws are frozen dead to the drift.

Pull, pull.

No, sleep, sleep.

Sleep will kill us.

Sleep.

Open the wound as a window.

There. Now the snow is houses-high.

There be no houses here.

Some new snow, as I said.

You forget how much in your sleep. It’s no deeper.

We’ll sink and be swallowed, we’ll need a boat to cross it.

It will harden or it will melt.

What’s that coming? Another bear?

Quit your shaking, you with your mighty cutlass.

He wanted our bear.

He wanted a bit of talk.

He wanted to separate us and then slaughter us.

He wanted to get inside.

A South Seas whaler, can you imagine that? A man from the colonies is a rare enough but a whaler from such a place, coming all the way from what they call the Viceroyalty of Peru to here?

Must’ve been pressed.

Must’ve been hard pressed.

So all the time you had a paper.

Aye.

Kind of him to read it.

He thought it would save him, I thought it would save me. Baltrick wrote it out, the cur. But instead of it swearing I’d been forced—

It said to kill us.

It were the Black Spot, only with words. I could have read the Black Spot. At least I didn’t give it to the gaoler.

You get to your death and it says the same for everyone.

I should have learnt to read words.

And myself!

The paper was very complimentary to my bravery.

He read it wrong.

You’re a cagey brother. It shows we are not related, this caginess.

You were looking at me with eyes penny-size whilst his whale-lance whistled through the bear.

His face was at me so sudden.

We had the bear’s true likeness with that fur upon us so well and tight, and breathing hard with us going about inside. He was no fool.

Too bad you hit him so hard.

I didn’t think so quick as my cutlass.

We could have wanted more of a talk from him.

Aye. A bit more before the dying.

At least he read out the paper.

But he ate the paper.

Must’ve been hungry. All those weeks he had without what you need, food or a drink of water. Alone.

Put your hat on your head, your nose has gone black.

By the blood of the bear.

That whaler thought you were the almighty himself, with a pitchfork and tails, and that by reading he could get a berth with you, the devil-priest carrying the paper for our hangings.

You’ll not remember.

What?

He was our brother. See the ring on his last finger but one? A perfect emblem of the scar on your back.

You’ll be seeing brothers in bears next. You are saying we shouldn’t eat him?

I am not saying so much as that. I’m saying Brother!

A South Seas pinkie whaler? Ma could do better than that.

Brother!

He would eat you and then me if we had not been so fast. Better we drag the leg of the bear with us for food and keep watch for the boat he left behind him with others of his like. He’s not going to spoil.

I’ll keep my cutlass clean.

Let’s try seven paces forward and then seven west and seven north and fourteen east, each time forcing a distance away from them without returning.

I hope you prove better with numbers than with letters.

Seven’s the number, a lucky one. See, we’re moving directly in one direction even though we’re touching all four of them.

Seven, and seven, and seven. The seven seas. I can do sevens.

And fourteen. Oh, for a cove and the depths.

You did make a pirate, didn’t you, after all, brother?

Seven.

Sorry. You have to watch which way. Now I’ve lost count.

What’s this? Did somebody else leave their golden gods out on the ice like a service was wanting? Is this a regular dropping off spot for sacrileges? What could the priests and Beezlebub be thinking? All of them in a nice little row like that, not buried nor mapped neither.

Quiet now, silence. You’ll shake the snow off the cliffs.

I have the need to speak as much as you do. South Seas, South Seas.

Spit it out. South Seas! But silent. By the by, isn’t that your ear there we saw from the last time around?

The navigator’s. Too tough, remember?

Perhaps our boat met the South Seas’. “Two Boats Abraided by the Icy Seas” be the figure.

Aboutface on seven, lips or no lips, I say. We’re walking away from them, we’re leaving them.

Was that a whole turn or a half?

The wind feels by half.

Yes, that’s good. I remember the wind against the gold.

Nothing can scare me after Ma.

Must be death coming on if you’re telling me about our old Ma again. Must be death in a hat or all this quiet.

Shshshsh. Someone’s abreast of us.

It’s gone, whatever followed.

There’s always blood to mark the spot.

Only if it were plenty.

You want to kill me to mark it.

I did not say that.

It were on your very lips.

Nothing but ice on my very lips. Let’s leave the cutlass instead of blood. Finders would know pirates was here with such a one as yours, with the rubies at the hilt.

You just want me unarmed, you’re wanting me to leave it so you can grab it and use it on me and then eat me too, your own brother.

Never. Truly, never. Ach — these lips.

You’re not going to bother with a match or some wood like you did the others, you’re just going to take my cutlass and stick me to mark the treasure with and then eat me raw and bloody.

Bloody hell.

Give the eye up.

It’s mine.

Give it up.

I don’t have it.

I know which pocket.

Oh, which?

She was my woman and not no one else’s — not Peters’ nor yours, you traitor of the seven seas. Brother!

Give me that back, give it to me—

Traitor.

You threw it, you half-a-brother with half-a-leg and one eye and no brain and a hook, with an idiot’s stagger and the pirate’s want of parts lost out of stupidity and cupidity and titty — goodbye this time for good or ill. Goodbye and nothing. You can find your own way, you can crutch along until your stump goes soft, you jealous slag. I’m away, I’m off, I’m gone.

28

You cast out the whale’s eye?

My brother threw it.

He is not your whole brother and you are not the son of the father you think. Here, take it back.

I don’t have a father.

Your father floated to the top, and then sank straight to the bottom where your mother has wormed to.

My mother was buried.

There’s good water beneath your place, and strong current. Your mother does not fear it anymore. Now, get your foot out of the drift and listen: Your father is dead at last of the cut your brother gave him in the troughs of the storm.

He was the fish we fought?

A man of the sea. The mustachioed man of your mother’s Manuel.

Begone, you witch of the sea. Such lies!

But I have your child.

No, no — the child gone over?

The one you birthed from all your clothes.

The boat voted to put the babes and Molly off, for lack of food. I had no choice. I stitched an X to its pocket. I wanted it to have my name at least.

Name, name. Does the minnow bear a name? I was planning a treatise on the names of the healing kelp but no one will read it. They prefer to stare at the sky until the kelp washes over their wounds. Come below now. It’s time. Your babe is here.

Not below.

That’s the fear in you again, the mother-half that fights the father. How far I’ve had to chase you! Come now, the ice shifts, it will close again soon.

The water—

The sweet, sweet salt of it.

Can I not rest on your fishy rump and think it out? For a short time at least.

Oh, thinking, that’s what you’ll do there? Hasn’t the fighting of pirates and all the charnel-making chased thinking clear from your head?

It is thinking that makes me live. My true father, dead?

Seven, and seven. To fourteen.

My brother comes, to spite me.

Live then.

29

It must be the cold. You must have seen things. That woman from before? I have but one eye but even I can see this is not the place for such rendezvous.

Seven. And twenty-eight. Wipe that eye of yours better. Night is approaching. I saw her.

Night is not approaching, day is.

Seven.

You should not go off without me, brother.

Aye.

You won’t leave me again, will you?

I didn’t leave you for nothing, you forced me to go by throwing away my one thing, you brute!

Aye.

Aye.

Do you have a rope?

Am I the child of my mother?

Tie it between us so we cannot part.

Between us? As stupid as that navigator, letting Death have a chance to laugh twice?

I say tie it. I cannot drag my leg on without knowing you are here with me, talk or no talk.

You’ll drag me down.

I’ll lead you out. I know the way.

You do?

I have the bravery, I found it after you left me for good, to see things.

Let us keep to the number.

Quit muttering.

That monk — the Frenchman on the boat that slaved us, he muttered to himself too. I caught it from him. He lay athwart the hatch while you were below. Sometimes while he muttered, he worked out a paper from under his robe and folded it.

He had paper?

He would fold it and fold it, this bit of paper, into a gull that flapped.

Seven hundred and fourteen. He made a bird from a paper?

Aye. I saw it, while telling out one of my stories to keep him from lashing you. It flapped, his bird, like life.

You’ll be seeing our Ma next, as easy as paper flapping from that hardly-a-monk’s hand. Stop flapping yourself.

The snow’s in my face. And you’re dragging the rope.

We haven’t eaten it?

Not much farther.

Not so far that you can fly.

Seven.

If only we had paper, we could burn paper.

Or make a map.

Or a bird.

Or put death on it, like my paper.

It’s the bear.

Aye.

We have been circling it.

Circling sevens. And more.

What’s that great bit of cloud over there? Seen, there, in the side of the ice.

Another trick of the eye.

You’re just trying to throw me off again, first gabbling over the whale’s foul eye, then the story of a fish you can sit on to help you think, then of that detested Frenchman who folded gulls — I swear you are a brother to confound another. Just look and tell me what you see.

A whale.

A fish-whale?

One of these white ones you’re supposed to stay away from, a great white whale suspended in the air with string, and snow forcing its gullet like krill in a wave.

It is not. It’s a gull too close. There’s too much fog to see.

It’s a whale.

Then it’s come for its eye. Give it up, give it.

Never.

You must.

Gone.

Or just a cloud.

Or we’re inside the fish—

— and another’s come to swallow us.

Or something’s slipped out and gone down below, into a hole in the ice.

By the ghost of all the blubber that rinses these seas! It’ll come roaring up next at our feet when we least expect it, it’ll come roaring up and rip off our legs and chew us up alive like one of those map serpents.

At least it’s not — my female parts.

30

Keep walking. First you see things that aren’t there and now this talk of female parts. Seven. I’ve known you since all the seas were fair game, you bastard, we were boys together with our Ma, our gibbetty Ma.

Seeing that we’re going to die, I thought I’d mention my true parts.

The wind has changed, the ice is freezing itself. Did we turn wrong?

It changed, like me.

Now that we’re not going to die just yet, you stop that telling of things, I mean we will die but we don’t have to do it just now. So whatever it is you’re wanting to tell me more of, you needn’t be in a hurry to.

You always admired my backside.

That I did. I do, as a brother should on the sea. But you as a woman? You’re my brother and that’s how brothers get along. Quiet yourself.

Ha! You’ll see — you’ll be rubbing your bloody stump against me, melting the snow for miles.

That’ll keep me walking a league or two more.

I wore curls and a dress until you were out of short pants.

All the young wore them, it was the fashion to dress and curl. I myself wanted powder.

Ma wished to protect me from her drowning and throttling and the dangerous drubs she plunged herself into. She said women had these ways and I shouldn’t be ashamed but that I should hide them all or men would open me up, the men from the sea beside our house, every pirate and captain and huckbutt that sailed or swum up.

I’d die before I’d tell a thing like that on myself. A woman!

Better I tell and we walk a little faster. Seven is the number.

Unless seven is a mistake from the start, another mistake from the start like being from some other parent, our Ma being that way and you being our Ma’s way, a woman that is.

I am a woman so every man I killed coming aboard could be killed for Ma and myself, together.

I’m lifting my boots a little higher just to clear my haunch and get back quick to tell the pirates about the woman they remembered smelling way back before. If it be true.

A siphon for when I made water. A siphon — you never saw.

I never looked. I have my delicacy.

I confess to having used your cutlass to cut my own wailer’s cord as I birthed him one dark night out of Newfoundland. Out of all the clothes I wore to round me, I bore a wailer from the likes of that slaver dressed as a monk. There, I’ve said it twice.

The Frenchman who slaved us? Who folded the paper?

Whom I did not trick, I could not. Which is why I believe we were unchained at the storm, why we were not drowned as the others were.

I always wondered.

I never had the rations to bleed until the monk took me on as a pet. Or else the father could have been Phynias.

Phynias with the pig knuckle hands? I only heard about him.

It could’ve been Phynias. I didn’t complain. I gave the wailer over to Molly, the wretch, with her two others.

The wretch we tossed overboard?

She and the babes were tossed, yes.

And you?

My eyes couldn’t take the sun, if you remember. I stayed down below for once, buttering the seams for a week.

I did wonder. You hated belowdecks.

No one will take me for who I am, I’ve been too long at it. Even you don’t get the gist of it and you’ve tried my backside.

It was dark, it was always dark. That’s when you do a thing to your brother.

You never were much for exploring.

Pirates are a perfect picture of a person piecemeal, falling apart.

I’m five years younger than you, I’ll find the ship.

You’re a woman, and women don’t live.

There’s a handprint in the snow, do you see it? In the drift.

It’s our frozen mates’ hand, trying to get to the water that’s there, just beyond.

We ate them all, remember?

Or one of those South Seas folk — and their boat is near.

Or a new boat?

A bad business, a handprint in the snow. Better a hand.

The first time we get a clue we are somewhere, you quarrel with it. At least we have found water not so frozen. We must follow where it flows, sevens and sevens, to a boat. Put that cutlass down.

I would but I can’t get my arm out of the air. Give it a tug, would you? Careful. The right way.

Maybe I should sing. I feel like singing.

You can’t sing, if you sing the snow will fall on us, off the mountainside, straight from the ice.

Next time I trip over the treasure, I’m going to stamp on it. It’ll have my bootprint then, my own hobnail.

How thick is the ice?

It could be just water, the difference between truth and consequence, or it could be the sky flattened and now broken. I don’t know about thick. There’s a snow in my brain and ice all about. And a heat fog. The kind a whale leaves after a spout.

It could be ice with teeth and breath.

Or a toothless bird, one of a flock left after the ocean was made.

Or a folded paper.

Quiet.

If you can speak, I can sing:

There was an old man with a single eye

Who danced upon the ice.

He chopped a hole so deep with his peg

He slid up to his arse.

You’ve scared them.

No.

See where the creatures run up to that hole and look over? See — at the end of my arm. They trot right up to the water like Sunday parsons, with their necks streaked in the colors of the sun. They stand on their heels, the tops of their beaks tucked to their bellies, squinting into the sun and all that white.

It can’t be, it can’t be.

There’s more of them, over there, sliding right over the edge.

Mind the edge. Thin ice — here and here—

Get off me. Your damn leg put a bruise in my shin. Stand up on your own good leg and hold the rope.

Take the cutlass now. I can’t balance with it.

You trust me with this sacred weapon? The one you swear by and sleep beside and love truer than your own brother?

Take it.

The birds stand on the edge and then just slide right into the thaw. It looks like true amusement. When we were boys in the colonies—

You never were a boy in the colonies.

Eyes. Just there.

Go at them with my cutlass, brother mine, mine own brother. Take it and fight them that has eyes before you freeze to your death in your breasts and quim. The whales you love so much with all their spouting steam will crack through and we will fall into their caverns — but we will have our cutlass out and thrashing.

The eyes are in the ice.

A brook of chatter even unto the empty wind. Let us fight. We must fight them. Give me that.

Put it down. Don’t you see? Your foot is on her head in the ice below.

It’s a she who comes at us? I can run through a she as well as a he.

Wait — she holds a child to the crack, mine own child.

Say it is a bird or a seal or a fish.

She is hoisting my child up. It looks like me. It waves.

I will cut this she the way I cut when you and I were drowned and going down. I will kill this monster now, the way I did to save you from the creatures the time we swum.

There she is, as real and clear as the water itself.

You’re as wrong as Ma.

She speaks. She says, Aye, and gestures.

This is a cursed game and I won’t play it. The sound of this is enough to know you’re dead and done. Stop talking to your feet. The ice is too thin here, yes, with animals under it who would tear us to bits in an instant.

Aye? Or mine eye?

I am turning and walking the sevens. First the femaleness, now the raving.

No, no — hold up. Take this eye of mine, the whale’s eye. Look through it.

At last, you’re giving it.

Fit it in.

It has the look of dice.

Take your hand away from your face and feel your way—

The ice is shaking.

To the shore — you must see her.

No, no — the ice is thinner here.

The lights! See the lights behind her!

I don’t see any lights.

I be a woman with two eyes and I see them: a red, the purples of the cloth, a tincture of orange, the color of light.

Take your eye back, I don’t want it if that is what you want me to see.

Come, she says come, doesn’t she? With all that loud breathing? Let me out of this rope.

I can’t swim you know, I can’t swim at all.

Just let me—

Mercy! We’re cut.

It’s the gills of a fish below. A whale. Look close! Stop your leaning!

You’ve run me through. With my own cutlass, my very own brother.

I did not plunge it, you ran into it.

The blood runs fast, it likes the cold. Not death, not death.

You would not let me go to her.

Aye.

The true brother.

Aye.

You saw her then, didn’t you? With the eye? You must tell me.

I saw—

You must tell me.

Mark the spot—

What did you see?

The sea, I saw the sea. And—

And?

You, a she, the sea—

Did you see her?

I saw — sister — I saw—

I will mark the spot, I will. What did you see?

Aye, the sea.

Just one more breath! Oh, brother!

Ma!

Here be his X, one false leg, one true, spread. But where be my sister? My true sister.

Acknowledgements

Thanks very much to Professor Kris Lane, Sondra Olsen, Gay Walley, and Steve Bull who is the best pirate of all.

Content

Terese Svoboda
Pirate Talk or Mermalade

I

1. 1718 — Nantucket Beach

2. Home, an hour later

3

4. Three Months Later

5. Another Six Months

6. Dead of Winter

II

7. 1720 — Caribbean

8. Indian Ocean

9. 1722 Caribbean

10. 1723 High Seas

11. A Day Later

12. Hours Later

13

14. Days Later

15. 1723 Desert Island

16

17

18. A Year Later

19

20. A Week Later

21. Six Months and a Storm

22

23

24. Boston Harbor

25

III

26. 1728 Arctic Spring

27

28

29

30

Acknowledgements