Thea held out another can of tobacco, urgently. “For the boy’s mother,” she said, and Kay ran to the side and handed it down into the canoe.
The king man took it. Kay pointed back and shouted, “For his mama!” but did not know if the man understood her.
Then they settled to their paddles and oars and set off back to the island. It was almost twilight.
It was full dark by the time Mr. Best had brought up a washtub with fresh water, and by lantern light they stripped the boy and put him into the bath. Mr. Wright held him while Mr. Best cut his hair short, so it would not be so tangled.
The boy made no protest or cry, but submitted peaceably to whatever was done to him. He kept his eyes on Thea while it was done. Jiacheng brought up a white shirt and the smallest pair of trousers from the slop chest, the store of clothing left by former ship’s crew. The boy was put into these things (much too big) and set down again barefoot upon the scrubbed planks of the deck. He looked around, intently examining everything he saw, up in the ropes as well as around at all the people, shadowy in the torchlight.
Then he cupped his hands over his eyes and stood very still.
Thea went to him and put an arm around his shoulders. “Never mind,” she said, as if he could understand her. “You are safe here. We will help you and teach you, and you will be our boy.”
Francis watched her carefully, but said nothing. Kay did not know what he could have said, after all.
* * *
—
Of course, the boy did not have any idea how to go down stairs, and at first tried to lean forward and scale down them on his hands and knees. Thea caught him back and showed him how to take a step, and called Kay to help her walk him down into the saloon.
The saloon surprised him very much. Through his eyes Kay saw it fresh herself, how odd it was to find such a place below decks in a ship. The brass gleaming quiet and calm in the lamplight, the bird’s-eye maple panelling, the darker polished mantelpiece, soft sofas and chairs. The piano! That must be infinitely strange to him—wait until he heard her play, perhaps that would comfort him. She went around to all the various fixtures, pointing out their purpose, until Thea begged her to stop and sit still, and to be quiet for a little, for pity’s sake, so she took a wicker armchair and instead watched Thea lead the boy from place to place—doing no better with her laboured miming.
Jiacheng brought the evening pot of tea, and tinned milk for the boy in an enamel cup.
“What is your name?” Thea asked the boy. He looked at her but said nothing. She pointed to his chest and asked again, “You, you?”
Could he even speak? But Kay had heard him talking to the men as they left.
“Thea, Thea,” Thea said, pointing to herself, and then, pointing, “Kay.”
Kay nodded and pointed at her own chest, “Kay, Kay!” and back to her sister, “Thea!”
He said something very quiet, and they leaned closer to hear. Sighing, he said again, “Ah…Reng.”
Or maybe it was Aren? Or A’rang…Αρεγγ, it would be, in Greek, Kay thought. With the double g that makes an ng sound in ἄγγελος, messenger. Angel.
“Aaron!” Thea said.
The boy looked at her again, and after a moment his face spread into shy agreement—or acceptance or capitulation, who could say. He said nothing, but when Kay put out her hand to shake his, he caught at it, twining thin fingers with her as if in some children’s game, and he smiled, his eyes full of tears.
* * *
—
After a warm supper of bread and milk, they put him to bed in Mr. Brimner’s old cabin, which was still made up. Tucking him in, Thea told Kay, “You will have to help me make Aaron some clothes, since we have lost Mrs. Hubbard.”
Did she have to remind one of one’s sins every day?
Kay sat on the end of the bunk, watching the boy’s eyes dart about the cabin, watching his fingers feel the softness of the white sheets and the warmer spring of the navy woollen blanket that Thea had tucked in too tightly.
While Thea knelt beside the bunk to say prayers, Kay quietly used her boot toe to loosen it a bit, wondering, what am I going to do with this boy? She guessed the boy would be wondering too. Wondering and wondering, what are they going to do with me?
* * *
—
In the middle of the night, Kay dreamed of a line of children and a line of their mothers and fathers. Two separate lines stared at each other, at first across a rope barrier, and then the earth was splitting between them, wider and wider, a coulee crack in winter, each line now walking in snow on a separate dirt cliff, snow flittering down between them. Or it was railway tracks, those lines separated by longer blacker lines of the rails.
In her dream she heard the boy singing. She heard and was awake at once—it seemed she had only rested, floating on the surface of sleep.
Bare feet on the cool planks, she opened her door, taking great care not to let it squeak. The saloon was empty and tidy, nobody awake, so she moved down the corridor to the next cabin door and inched it open. The boy looked up from where he was singing into his fingers. His clean, dark-rimmed eyes shone in the small moon-spill coming through the porthole. Bare naked again, he squatted on his skinny haunches on the bunk, swaying as it swayed.
He stopped singing. His cheeks were sticky-damp with tears.
She put her fingers to her lips.
He put his to his.
“Shhhh…” she whispered. “Not at night.”
Although he could not have understood her, he raised his eyebrows two or three times, as little Sione had done in Ha‘ano. That meant agreement, in Ha‘ano. Maybe for him too.
If the boy was noisy or unruly, if he had nightmares, would Francis put him off at the next island, or find a boat or a canoe that could take him home again? That seemed a terrible thing. Kay could not quite think Francis would do it, or that Thea would let him; but taking him away from his home was terrible also. He might be weeping for his mama, as Annie had wept for hers. She could keep watch for him.
Pilot nosed at the cabin door, and she let him in. The boy put down his fingers for him to smell, and the pup jumped up onto the bunk, circled as he always did and settled into the blankets. Thea need not know.
Kay sat on the end of the bunk. This had been Mr. Brimner’s sanctum, his own place, but now it was all right for her to go in. She was the elder sister now.
“I will tell you a story,” she said. “Then you will be quieter and go to sleep.”
The boy sat up against the headboard with his thin legs hugged into his arms and watched her face, sometimes her mouth as she spoke, sometimes glancing up into her eyes and then letting his gaze slide away again.
She told him about Odysseus, the man of many ways, who was beleaguered and travelled about the seas, but at last, after ten years’ wandering, wound his way home again—
At least, she began to tell the story, but the sound of her own voice spouting an incomprehensible mix of English and Greek (when she could think of the words) dampened her spirits. It made her see how little she knew, or ever would know now, without Mr. Brimner to teach her, and how impossible it would be for Aren to learn English and speak with them, and then she thought of how Annie had not been able to speak in her own language, the muting of that…Soon Kay was too sad to speak at all.
When he put a hand on her knee to urge her to go on, she told him instead something soft and ordinary, one of the first things she remembered: once, when she was very little and went running after Mary into the cow byre early in the morning in new spring snow, to see a newborn calf there, its crooked, woolly legs struggling to get up and stand, its large, wet nose nudging at her chest by mistake, and Mary’s soft face laughing and dimpled as she showed Kay how to push the calf toward its mother. The soft warmth and dampness of that woolly fur, the warm closeness of the mother and the byre, and
the soft woodsmoke smell of Mary.
Sometime while she spoke, the boy turned back into the pillow and went to sleep. Pilot made a nest for himself between their legs and they were warm and safe, and the ship sailed on through the night without hurry or haste, through safe old dreams that nobody would tell you not to say.
* * *
—
But next morning there was trouble. Down in Thea’s cabin, drinking morning tea with her before Jiacheng had brought their porridge, Kay heard a commotion of running feet above. She ran to check while Thea was still pulling on her linen shirtwaist and tucking it into her skirt, but the boy was still sound asleep in his bunk. Aren, his name was. Curled tight as a fiddlehead, fingers in his mouth, and so still that Thea, coming after, was worried and felt for the rise and fall of his chest. She sat on the edge of the bunk and said, “No, no, it’s all right,” when the boy woke, startled.
Something up on deck, then. Kay sped up the companionway, and as her head rose over the ledge, she heard Francis shouting to “Stay back from the rail, in case they have projectiles of any kind.”
Who did he mean by they—and did he mean blow darts, or harpoons? Now she saw the boats, heading out from an island not far off. Many, many canoes. Perhaps they were coming for the boy, to buy him back or take him. She was afraid to ask it out loud. She slid into the shadow of Seaton’s lifeboat and stood mute, not wanting to be sent away.
Mr. Best told Francis they’d made forty miles from Anna Island overnight, and this ahead was Sonsorol. These islands were so small and poor, Mr. Wright had not thought them inhabited at all anymore. Francis put down the spyglass, not needing it anymore because the canoes were so close. Kay saw that the ship had already turned, and sail was being raised to put away at speed, but even so, they were soon surrounded by canoes, skimming over the water as if in a race, going a good lick—six knots, perhaps. Kay counted fifteen canoes, with ten or twelve men in each.
Sailors stood stationed along the deck, armed with sticks and staves, one or two with knives out. Jacky Judge was twisting his in the sun to make it glint. Arthur Wetmore stood in line too, sturdy as could be, though looking a good deal concerned.
Mr. Wright shouted to them to look alive for boarders, and then his shouts were drowned by the men from the canoes, all crying at once, “Tobac! Tobac!”
They were bound to come on board. From the lifeboat’s shadow, Kay saw their skinny arms reaching for the ropes as the canoes bumped alongside and jostled each other for water space.
Calling again to Mr. Wright and his men to ’ware climbers, Francis shot his pistol into the air—once! twice!—and the noise diminished a little as the invaders paused.
Then Francis called another order, and Mr. Best threw open a box and tossed a tin of tobacco across to him. Francis went to the side and shouted down to the boats to desist, but seeing the tin he held, they clamoured all the more.
“Tobac, tobac!” they cried, in many voices—there were so many of them, and they looked so desperate, that Kay was certain the ship would be overwhelmed. She thought what she must do, where she could hide Thea and Pilot and the boy.
Francis drew back his arm and hurled the tin of tobacco far behind the canoes, and two or three of them did turn back for it. One man, not waiting for his canoe to turn, leapt overboard and swam for the bobbing tin.
In the meanwhile, Cocker the bosun had been harrying his men to sweat the ropes fast, and the ship at last began to make real way—but still the canoes pursued, and one or another would come up with a bump and a scramble. Then Francis or Mr. Best would send another tin tumbling back through the air, and again the onslaught would be distracted as men fought with each other to reach the tobacco before it sank.
Thea came hastening up, alone, to find Kay. She whispered that she had left the boy shut in the cabin. They stood tight-clasped together by the lifeboat, fearful to leave or stay, and when a canoe slammed right beneath them, they looked down into the blearing eyes of a man who was climbing the side of the ship with fingers and toes as if it was a coconut palm. Then along came Jacky Judge with an oar and bashed cruelly at the man’s reaching hand until he fell off into the sea and was hauled back into a canoe by the others.
The screaming for tobacco never stopped, that was the worst of it. The men were delirious in their desire and pain—Thea said it was like poor wretches crying for morphine in a hospital. Kay was afraid, and afraid for Aren, down below. Then she saw his shorn head peeping over the companionway ledge—he was clever to have figured out the door fastening!—and he ran to the rail beside them to see who beleaguered the ship, staring over into the roiling confusion of canoes. The cries (he must have known that word tobac) were growing a little less violent, but were still enough to frighten Kay.
Aren looked down at the men but said nothing, and did not call out to them to come and fetch him home to his mama.
Thea caught at the back of his shirt anyhow, as if she thought he might jump over. “Come down with me,” she said into his ear. “We’ll find Liu Jiacheng and get you some bread for breakfast! This is no matter for us.”
He pulled a little against her hand, but she persuaded him down the steps again, cautioning him to take care with his footing.
Since nobody told her not to, Kay stayed on deck until the last of the canoes had been left behind, the men in it waving and laughing.
“We may be thankful for the breeze we had,” Francis told Thea later. “They’d have made short work of us if they had got aboard in that mood!”
But in fact, as the canoes tired of paddling and dropped away, to Kay’s surprise Francis had called out an offer to trade with the last two canoes, and made a great haul.
“I don’t know where I will be able to stow all these things!” cried Thea, when he showed her the treasure: a barrel of splendid sponges, beautiful shells and more of the exquisitely woven fishing lines.
“They’d have followed us yet, if we had not traded,” Francis said in excuse. “All they would take was tobacco. I got a lot of their arrowheads—and nine turtles!”
“Turtle soup and fried turtle for supper,” Thea said, looking them over.
Kay disliked eating turtle extremely. She knew a tortoise.
Aren had not had a word to say to the men, although they were from an island not forty miles from his home, and he did not seem to want to look at the things they had traded. That was interesting, Kay thought. Perhaps they were bad men who marauded along these waters and troubled his own place. When Kay pointed to the water where the boats had been, he looked vague and said a word she thought might be rengalack? Or perhaps it was his name again, only with something added.
However were people to understand each other when words were not written down? This was impossible. She went back to her Greek books, all shuffled and out of order because of the commotion of the morning.
* * *
—
He was not a bold boy, but not fearful either, Kay thought. Once they left the vicinity of the islands, he slowly emerged—not from hiding, precisely, but from where he had stood inconspicuous, melted into a shadow by the mizzen-mast. He stood watching her at her books now, his strong, broad feet easy on the deck, no need to wait for sea legs. Jacky Judge, running to make adjustments to the mainsail, caught him and slung him easily up to his shoulder, and then oop—up into the mainmast shrouds.
Not rising from the hammock, Thea put a hand to her eyes to watch him climb, crying Oh! but making no real protest. Aren laughed and grabbed at the ropes and scrambled up ahead of Jacky, easily beating him. Sad again for her spindly arms, Kay turned back to her now-orderly books and opened to the exercise for today.
TRANSLATE INTO GREEK:
1. If I had known that you were there, I should not have gone away.
2. Do not give anything to anyone till I come back.
3. You ought not to have sold that horse for so li
ttle money.
4. I thought that I should not be able to wait for you.
5. I sent a messenger (ἄγγελος, angelos) to tell him to come tomorrow.
She looked up from her work to find Aren staring at her books again—long lashes opening wide those clear eyes. He rested an arm on the table, casually, and leaned nearer to see her page. Checking to see that it was all right with her, he pressed a small finger gently onto the page, and looked a question at her.
“Greek,” she said. “It’s Greek, the language I was telling you the story in last night…” Then she said, as if she was a ninny, “I already know quite a lot of Latin.”
If it had been anyone but he, she would have blushed at this ridiculous boasting. But he looked at her lovingly and lifted his eyebrows in understanding. He had a companionable way of keeping his mouth closed that was agreement, acceptance.
In the evening after supper, Kay sat with Aren swinging in the hammock while Francis and Thea promenaded along the deck. No islands in sight, no worrying flotilla of canoes. Not far enough away (but of course Aren could not understand him), Francis asked, “What do you expect me to do with the little chap—train him for cabin boy?”
Her violet skirt swaying as she turned, Thea answered him shortly, “No, not at all. He is our boy now.”
From the still look of his face, Kay thought Francis was not in agreement, but he said nothing.
Thea began to teach the child proper English. He was a responsive little fellow, and had picked up a smattering of words already in these few days, at least to understand. She sat with him at one end of Kay’s table, making letters on a piece of scrap paper and sounding them out, as if Aaron was one of her early pupils at Blade Lake. How different these circumstances! The sea air wafting around the deck and the comfortable bustle of the crew both tempted him away from the table, but he seemed to have a strong desire to speak to them, and did not tire quickly of repeating the words she taught him, pointing to the pictures she drew.
The Difference Page 17
