The poop deck was cleared.
One crewman sat on a keg playing a mouth organ while another accompanied him with a fiddle.
The sailors tapped their toes and bobbed their heads to the jig. They milled in a large circle but did not dare venture out onto the open dance floor. The scene lacked some vital piece to inspire an all-out shindy.
Enter Sweet Molly!
Donning a dress and an orange mop wig, the gynandromorph waltzed onto the dance floor like an elephant in a ballgown.
That was all it took. Each man lined up for a turn to be tossed and twirled in Molly’s arms. It did not appear to occur to the seamen that the gonad-laden Amazon with whom they danced was in many ways inferior to the vivacious female partners they had all enjoyed in the various ports of the wide Pacific. The remoteness of our locale had obviously quashed any reluctance to be swanned about the decks by this masculine surrogate of femininity. Perhaps crossing the equator had disorientated them. I could not say. But they seemed to be having a good time.
Adamiah and I watched for a while, but then, being markedly separate from the grog-quaffing crew, we felt it was right for us to leave. We retreated to the front of the ship and lolled in the martingale netting over the bow.
*****
The day was lovely and warm. The distant sound of laughter and music lent an airy ambience to the setting as it mixed with the hiss of the cutwater parting the sea beneath us.
Quite pleasing.
Adamiah lay on his back in the rope hammock, peering up dreamily through the blade-like jibs stretched tight over our heads.
I, in turn, peered downward into the water. A pair of sleek porpoises was leaping in Cloud’s wake, keeping pace with the ship, and they were wondrous to watch. Such speed! Such playfulness! One wondered about their life beneath the ocean. One wondered about many things. Such was the museful mood of the moment.
My gaze drifted from those playful sea creatures to the figurehead fastened to the underside of the bowsprit. I studied her at an angle from over her shoulder. She was an exquisite work, carved and painted to appear like a larger-than-life version of an actual woman’s head and torso. Her hair was painted black, her skin the color of clouds. Her eyes, as if out of obligation to the sea, were blue. She wore a loose tunic, such as those worn by the Greeks and Romans of yore. Tipped forward as she was, her wooden white breasts hung on the tantalizing verge of spilling out from their cumulus confinement. A thing of udder beauty!
“Hoper?”
“Yes?”
“May I ask your opinion on something private?”
“That is what friends are for.”
Adamiah remained silent for such a long moment that I almost believed he had forgotten what he was going to ask. But then – “You remember how I told you about that time I had with Prudence’s ma in that cathouse?”
“I do.”
“Well, I was wondering, when do you suppose a man goes from being one who has never had a woman to one who has?”
I rolled onto my side so I could see his face. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, could a man still rightly call himself untried if he never went all the way with a woman until he finished?”
And then I understood.
“Well,” I said, sorting out a sapient rationality. “From what I understand, the point of no return is different for each sex. With a woman there are certain indicators that can never be repaired, and these tend to become undone upon that first moment she lets a man pass through her garden gate. For her, no matter how much she might regret it, or no matter how many minutes the whole encounter lasts thereafter, she has become something irrevocably altered in that very first trespass.”
“Oh,” said Adamiah, squinting at the sky. “I see.”
“But it is different for a man. No. A man can only truly call himself experienced upon reaching that sacred moment – that revelatory, eye-dilating, heart-fluttering instant when the floodgates of Nature’s truest and most powerful elation bursts forth from where it has been dammed and slopping inside a man’s masculinity since the day he was born.” I shook my head, considering. “Until he reaches that gush point, he is still considered, in most novels and poems you will read, an innocent.”
Adamiah appeared pleased at my explanation. His expression gave me to know I had told him what he wanted to hear.
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” he said. “It’s just that I was thinking about how pure and good Prudence is. She has never sinned in her life, I’m sure. She is spotless as the day God made her. So once we are married, and we finally lie down together, she will give me that gift of herself that she’s been keeping unsoiled and private inside her.” He shrugged and licked his lips, apparently pondering the details of that precious gift.
I found myself unavoidably pondering the same.
“So,” he continued, “I guess I was just hoping that I could offer her the equal of myself in return.”
He turned to me.
“Well, Adamiah.” I cleared my throat, gathering my flusterated composure. “I believe, strictly speaking, that you most certainly can.”
He smiled. “Thank you, Hoper.”
I felt I had granted him a pardon somehow, and yet I was not sure by what authority I had done so. Who was I to construe the Holy Commandments to fit this hopeful chap’s celibate longings? And yet it pleased him so. Surely it could do no harm to assuage the man’s trepidations with my dubious assurance. If he was going to hell for lying with another man’s wife, he may just as well remain ignorant until that surprise moment arrived.
“A fellow’s first time should surely be with the one he intends to be with forever in Paradise,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”
“Yes.” I rolled onto my back. “That is the most preferable scenario.”
I reminisced. I sighed. I decided to spare the poor fool any lecture on how devastatingly more complicated were the trappings of love.
The Pitfalls.
The Perfidies.
The Confusions.
He would know soon enough for himself.
I AWOKE NEXT DAY to the dolorous tocsin of a bell.
It was a signal I had not heard before, and something in its timbre and timing suggested that all was not right on our merry little ship.
I scurried above decks and found Adamiah standing with the crew. After questioning a nearby sailor, we learned the problem –
“Roll call has us a man short.”
Captain Nilsson and Starkey came to the rail on the high deck. The Captain stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his feet wide, peering down with a doomful scowl.
The sailors parted as Bosco brought forth a captive.
“Comey through. Comey through.”
Bosco handled the man roughly, squeezing the fellow’s upper arm in his brawny black hand. Bosco tossed him forward onto the low deck beneath the Captain. The man sprawled onto the boards, and then raised to his hands and knees, his head hanging down in the attitude of a sleepy burro.
“Here’s a conscripty Jones,” said Bosco.
Captain Nilsson studied the man from on high.
Cloud rolled and dipped on the sparkling sea.
The crew stood swaying, waiting.
“Stand up!” hollered Nilsson.
Jones slowly staggered to his feet, his chin still resting on his chest.
“Look up here!”
The man raised his face to the Captain. He appeared sickly and wrung out. His stance gave off a mix of defiance and fear.
“I understand,” said Nilsson, “that you might know the whereabouts of another crewman Jones.”
The man grudgingly dipped his head a single time.
“Speak, man!”
“I do.” His voice was a hoarse rattle.
“And?”
“Jones is overboard.”
“Blast!” The Captain gritted his teeth and stamped a boot. “And how did this come to be?”
The man did not reply.
Nilsson shouted, “How did this come to be?”
“We gots into the grog barrel,” answered Jones, “and gots ourselfs good and drunk.”
“Yes?”
Jones squeezed his fists, his whole body tensing. He appeared about to burst with pressure, but then he calmed himself and went on with his story. “Jones starts talking about getting hisself a kiss and would I helps him out.”
The sailors beside me twittered like sparrows.
Captain Nilsson glared our way, and then looked back to Jones. “Go on, then.”
“Jones wants to kiss the wooden lady on the mouth and so I holds his ankles as he hangs there in the ropes. He’s clutching her tits, one in each hand, hanging upsides down and trying to get his mouth up close to her big lips. But…” Jones shrugged. “We’re laughing so hard that I slips and drops him into the drink.”
Captain Nilsson closed his eyes, sighed, and rubbed his face in his hands. He peered wistfully out to sea, shaking his head. Then he spoke.
“Read the penalty, bosun.”
Bosco stood over Jones and called out for all to hear. “For thievery of the groggy juice – ten lashes.” He cleared his throat. “For fooly deeds leading to the deathy time of a crewman,” – Bosco peered up at the captain – “one keely haul.”
Nilsson nodded his approval. “Step to, bosun, and deal the punishment.”
*****
A seaman peeled Jones’s shirt from his torso. He was then strapped to a deadeye, his wrists tied above his head. All the crew gathered round to watch. It was sure to be a gruesome spectacle, but it was what passed for entertainment when at sea – a sort of artless morality play featuring Bosco as the dealer of justice, and Jones as the hapless recipient of the justice thereby dealt.
Bosco’s cat o’ nine tails slapped sickishly across Jones’s bare back.
Jones screamed.
More lashes fell onto the man’s flesh – Shlap! – Shlap! – resulting in a crisscrossery of bloody stripes that glistened like paint in the sunlight.
Jones trembled with agony throughout.
After the flogging, the sorry fellow was cut down, and he fell onto the deck in a gory heap. Two men lifted the staggering prisoner to his feet and wrapped a rope under his arms around his chest. They tied a fat knot, drawing it snug between Jones’s shoulder blades. The long end of the rope was run up through a spool hanging from the end of a gantry arm that swung out over the ship’s prow. The boom was locked in place, the slack line reeled up tight, and then a sailor pushed Jones out to dangle over the side of the ship.
He writhed like a string-puppet, swinging back and forth, his arms and legs thrashing as he twirled in space at the end of the rope.
“Letty him down to the wavy waves!”
Jones dropped into the splash alongside the ship. The wake caught him, and the rope stretched tight as he disappeared for a moment, then came up spewing water and obscenities.
“More line!” called Bosco.
Captain Nilsson and Starkey remained stationed on the high deck at the back of the ship. The rest of us marked Jones’s progress by watching down over the rail and following along.
The prisoner banged Cloud’s sidewalls, riding in the churning foam, appearing, disappearing, spluttering water as he traveled toward the stern.
At one point, when he was near the end of his keelhaul ordeal, Jones rolled onto his back and peered up the ship’s flank. It was only for part of an instant, but his gaze landed directly on my own. Those black eyes gleamed with terror and hatred. It was the look of a man who had just realized himself to be at death’s threshold. It was the look of a man who had lost in life and was pissed as hell.
An empathetic tingle passed through me.
And then Jones went down again.
Out of sight.
Into the darkness.
“Haul up!” shouted a sailor. “He’s sinking down.”
A large grapnel dropped into the murk where Jones had vanished.
“Fish him out! Fish him out!”
The deckhand in charge dipped the hook in again and again, dragging it back and forth in an effort to catch the line holding Jones.
Bosco jumped to action with a long-handled shepherd’s crook. He dropped down the wall of the ship, hanging by one hand at the end of a sideline, stabbing his crosier into the sea, trying to snag himself a Jones.
At last, he hooked on. But when he lifted up, all he had was the empty tail end of the rope. It drooped in Bosco’s crook, limp and frayed, as if it had been bitten off at the knot.
“Man overboard!”
The crew ran to the back of the speeding ship, peering down into the wash, searching for some sign of the sunken Jones.
A pair of deckhands climbed into the yards to get a higher vantage.
Captain Nilsson and Starkey squinted into the slipstream.
The whole lot of us scanned the following sea.
But it was no use.
We all felt the truth settle in at once.
Jones had met his end.
SOON AFTER JONES’S BAD luck, Cloud underwent a sea change.
It was as if the ship’s fortunes had been redirected.
Of course, the fretful brain always springs to extravagant conclusions at such times. Jones’s lung-burbling demise had put us all ill at ease and in a pensive frame of mind. The gods were obviously displeased with us for letting him drown. Maybe this particular Jones had been superior to the rest, more exceptional on the inside than his wretched exterior had revealed. Maybe he was a chosen one. Even blessed. The darling of some god or goddess. Maybe he was a favorite pet of Old Zeus himself, possibly even a sprouted seed from that divine being’s glorified loins – the part-mortal product of an erotic encounter between that virile Olympian and some fawn-eyed lass, some dewy nubile maiden who had tickled the great one’s Hellenic fancy with her bucolic allure and scrotum-fondling fingers.
Or maybe not.
One’s imagination tends to whimsically lurch about.
At any rate, Cloud felt to be at the butt end of some punitive act carried out by unseen forces.
The weather turned hot and sultry.
The winds stopped, the air stagnated, and the sails drooped like cowls of sackcloth.
The sea became languid as broth.
All the crew stripped to the lightest variation of their dress, some of them to shirtlessness, each man’s sun-pinkened torso glistening with a persistent sheen of perspiration.
A clipper ship without wind is a pointless dereliction, its purpose deflated, its potential speediness but a broken promise. The sailors, usually so purposefully trotting the heaving decks, grew restless. They cowered in the scant shade, passing time working scrimshaw, or twisting ropes into elaborate knots for self-amusement. Molly sat on a keg in the sail room, studying the floor. The mouth organist played tunes designed to allay the boredom – jigs and ditties, mazurkas and hops. But in time these songs all turned sour in the dead air, sounding less like music, and more like the bothersome drone of insects.
Idle thoughts began to drift toward the fornicational pursuits.
I saw the telltale signs.
Men stared into the sea; they stared into the sky.
Otiose sailors strolled aimlessly along the rail, their wonky gaits suggesting that some swelling between their legs was impeding their usual gait.
They chuckled under their breath and muttered senseless phrases – pieces of old limericks, or bits of conversations they recalled once having with some long-lost sweetheart.
I had seen it all before.
The libidinous madness.
The skewwhiff concupiscence.
I well knew the dangers. I would have to be on my guard, watching my own back, I suspected, as well as that of Angeline.
“Have no fear,” I assured the goat. “I am resolute and close at hand.”
“Blah-ah-ah,” she replied, and appreciatively nuzzled my thigh.
I stroked her neck and studied her black and white form fro
m above. The light in the hold was dim, but I had to admit, that cud-chomping damsel was becoming curiously more attractive with each passing day.
IN SPITE OF THE high sunshine, things grew evermore gloomy.
It was rumored that the passing of yet another Jones was in the offing. It seemed the man who had previously lost his hand had been recovering nicely only just days before, but with the turn in the weather, his nubbin had unexpectedly festered and turned gangrenous. The ship’s doctor had lopped off the remainder of the man’s arm to arrest the poison’s spread, but Jones’s future was looking grim. Sure enough, the toxicated blood leaked to his brain. After a few hours of ranting and madness, Jones’s heart failed and shut down his works.
Captain Nilsson asked Adamiah to give a funeral service for the freshly deceased.
“Of course,” said Adamiah. “Gladly.”
But I could hear in the high pitch of his voice that he was more than just a bit apprehensive.
“Relax,” I told him. “I will help you.”
We went to his cabin where I quick schooled him in proper epitaphic procedures, giving special attention to the importance of a somber tone and a doleful, yet reassuring, expression.
He practiced in the mirror while I watched.
“You’ll do fine,” I smiled, and patted his back.
But alas! In truth I felt the sudden pang of a doting parent who has just realized his son to be no more than a good-natured lummox.
*****
They laid out the latest dead Jones on a plank, feet to the rail, under a sheet of sailcloth. A large stone was bound to his feet. His draped form was peculiar to gaze upon. As the man’s hand and arm had preceded him to their watery grave, the lopsided lump under the coverlet looked to be incomplete. It brought to mind certain broke statues in Athens or Rome.
The crew gathered in their usual half circle at the perimeter. Everyone bowed their hatless heads and stood round in a manner of general respect.
Captain Nilsson and Starkey took their posts on the high deck.
Linklater stood at the corpse’s side, holding his Bible and a piece of paper upon which I had written a brief eulogy. Sweat streamed down his face like rain.
Fortuna and the Scapegrace Page 11
