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.