Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Then someone groaned. She stopped and looked around.

  The sun had appeared on the horizon. Flecks of light danced on the gray water like bloody coins, and the bluffs were turning red behind her. Down by the water, someone was rolling over, lifting himself to his knees, looking about to make sure he was in this world and not the next.

  At first she was frightened. Here was a pirate, a desperate man. Then she saw the whales’-tooth necklace and cried out his name.

  John Autumn stood and tried to run, but he tripped over a shattered spar, and gold coins fell glittering from his pocket. He stared at them for a moment, then at Serenity, and like a frightened animal, began to limp up the beach. He did not go far before he collapsed in the sand once more.

  She knew him. He had lived on Jack’s Island, and they had played as children. He claimed Autumnsquam as uncle and Serenity’s great-aunt Patience as aunt. He said it was Patience who had fixed the necklace of Autumnsquam and given it to him. No one was certain of such things. There were many legends. What was certain was his seamanship. He knew the Cape shoals as well as any, and it had been rumored that he had taken his knowledge on the pirates’ account with Black Bellamy.

  She knelt by his side. “Was this Sam’s ship?”

  He pressed a finger to his lips, as though he could not tell her. His hair was a tangle of salt and snarls, his dark skin darkened by his time in the southern sun. And whatever had given him the gash on his forehead seemed to have knocked him senseless as well.

  “Johnny, my Sam! Tell me about my Sam.”

  “Can’t stay.” His left foot and ankle were twice the size of his right, but still he tried to rise.

  “You’ll be goin’ nowhere on that leg.”

  He grabbed a broken piece of planking and levered himself to his feet.

  “I’ll help you. Just tell me about my Sam.”

  “Can’t stay. Can’t stay or I’ll hang.”

  “I bore his child, Johnny. Tell me.”

  “Cap’n Sam’s dead.”

  Serenity felt the milk in her breasts let down, whether from fullness or the sudden rush of emotion, she did not know. “Is he among these dead?”

  He shook his head again. His mind seemed to be clearing. “The last I seen him, he lashed hisself to the helm. I was goin’ to cut him loose when we turned turtle.”

  “Were you… were you really pirates?”

  He pulled a piece of eight from his pocket. “You’ll find these on most. Weighin’ ’em down to their deaths. Look through the wreckage, you’ll find plenty more. If I could stay, I’d be rich.” He scanned the top of the bluffs. “But they’ll be comin’. Soon they’ll be all over the beach.”

  He dug the plank into the sand and tried to move again, but he did not go far before giving up. “I have gold enough in my pockets to let you and your babe live half a year in Boston. I give it all to you if you get me up that bluff.”

  The sun was full above the horizon. Its light was now hard and white and made the dead on the beach seem of no more value than the broken spars and smashed casks. To the scavengers who soon would come to pick over the wreck, they would be worth less.

  Serenity told Johnny to get himself to the base of the bluff. Then she went about the business of collecting two hundred feet of line. She found a length wrapped around one of the broken spars, another around a cask, another lying loose. For all her exhaustion, she worked quickly, stopping only to pick up gold coins spilled from a dead man’s pocket. She could not bring herself, however, to put her hand inside.

  She tied the line under Johnny’s arms. Then she climbed to the top in a switchback pattern, as she had when she was a little girl disobeying her father’s order to stay off the bluffs.

  At the top, she wrapped the line twice around a tree. With Johnny using his arms and his good leg, she hauled him to the top and hid him in the small clump of bushes where she had collapsed.

  “You can’t leave me here,” he said.

  “No one’ll see you, and I must go to my baby.” She put her hands on top of her rock-hard breasts and massaged them. “I’ll come back with my father’s cart.”

  “Where can we go?”

  “Jack’s Island?”

  “They’ll be waitin’ for me there.”

  “Do you fear witches, then?”

  “I fear nothin’ I don’t believe in.”

  “Then we’ll go to Billingsgate, to Goody Daggett’s.”

  v.

  The news spread quickly that Bellamy’s flagship, the Whydah, had struck the bar. And a haul from pirates’ heaven she was, a three-hundred-ton trader and slave galley taken off Jamaica with twenty thousand pounds of gold in coin and dust, indigo, ivory, Jesuit’s bark for quinine, and an armament of eighteen twenty-four pounders.

  No one knew how many people plundered the wreck in the days after. It was the law in Massachusetts Colony, which by now had swallowed up Plymouth Colony, that whenever a ship was wrecked, the town clerk took possession until proper disposition of vessel and cargo were made. This meant until the town and colony took their share.

  A more time-honored law said that abandoned vessels were the property of those who salvaged them, and in the God-fearing hamlets of Cape Cod, this was the law that mattered. After all, Cape Codders lived isolated and independent at the edge of the earth. They endured nature’s worst and counted the best as part of God’s Providence.

  From the Whydah they hauled off spars, line, broken barrels, casks of wine, planking, whatever cargo survived the surf. One man even found an elephant tusk rolling in the waves. Many found pieces of eight and other coins. And a few found more than ever they would admit.

  Captain Cyprian Southack, sent by the colony a few days later, found nothing. The seas were too rough to save any of the treasure that the shoaling sands had begun to bury, and few Cape Codders had any intention of surrendering what they had secreted in their barns and mattresses.

  When they did not bring forth their spoils, Southack sent men to every farmhouse on the Lower Cape. One he sent was a Cape Cod barrister whose family was well connected to the Colonial government—Ezekiel Bigelow, son of Brewster.

  During the second week of May, he and his associate, a fat Boston man named Worthington, reached the settlement at Chequesset Neck. They sailed over to Great Island and stayed the night at the sign of the Spouting Whale—“Samuel Smith, he has good flip, Good Toddy if you Please, The Way is Near and Very Clear, ’Tis just beyond the trees.” After they turned in, Smith sent word to his aunt, Sarah Daggett, that the king’s men were coming.

  The next day, they crossed Jeremy Island to Billingsgate Island, the windswept stretch of dunes where Jack Hilyard had put up his first tower. Other whalemen still kept a tower, trywork, and whaling house on the island. Fishermen had also come, and oystermen as well. Most built shacks to stay for a season, though a few lived there the year through, Josh Daggett’s widow among them.

  “What do thee want?” Goody Daggett squinted in the harsh sunlight, of which there was no other kind on Billingsgate Island.

  Ezekiel Bigelow removed his hat. “We come to ask, marm, if you’ve anythin’ from the pirate ship Whydah, or know of any who does.”

  She laughed and her three teeth stood out like jokes in a sermon. “Oh, most certain I do. I’ve fifty gold sovereigns in me budge, if thou cares to fish for ’em, and me cat’s got a gold bell ’round her neck give to ’er by Black Bellamy hisself.”

  “We merely do a job, marm. And what about him?”

  John Autumn glanced up, then went back to carving a piece of whalebone. He little resembled the Indian people remembered. He had taken off his necklace, shaken his hair out of its English knot, and sat by Goody Daggett’s door, bare-chested and breechclouted, with a blanket around his legs to conceal his splinted ankle.

  “He ain’t been off the island in two weeks, ’cept to go up to Sam Smith’s and fetch me a bucket of beer.”

  Bigelow brought his face close to the Indian’s. “Do you
sip the beer as you bring it?”

  John shook his head.

  Worthington grabbed the Indian by the chin and twisted his face. “A question was asked. Answer with your tongue.”

  Control your temper, thought Serenity, who hid beneath Goody Daggett’s bed. She had come to Billingsgate that morning to tell of the rumor now running about Eastham: the only known survivor of the Whydah, a carpenter kidnapped by the pirates, had seen Johnny Autumn’s body on the beach as he climbed the bluff before dawn. When he came back with the townsmen, the Indian was gone.

  “I ask you, Injun, do you sip any of the beer?”

  “No. That crime for Injun.”

  “Indeed.” Bigelow smiled, though his cheeks remained hollow. “How came you by the gash on your forehead?”

  “I hit him with me fryin’ pan when he come late with the firewood,” said Goody Daggett.

  “Hear, hear,” said Worthington.

  Serenity felt little Ned stirring in her arms. He was awakening, and he managed to get out a cranky little squawk before she could get her breast into his mouth.

  “What was that?” asked Ezekiel Bigelow.

  “What?” said Goody Daggett.

  “Who else lives here?”

  Goody Daggett pointed across the dune to a shack on Grampus Bay. “The Hatch brothers, but they be fishin’.”

  Then came a louder squawk from the back of the house.

  The king’s men looked at one another, and Johnny gripped the knife beneath his blanket.

  Serenity held the baby tight. If they found Sam Bellamy’s woman here, it would mean the end of freedom for Johnny the pirate and for those who had hidden him.

  There was another squawk and old Goody Daggett laughed. “That’s Lucinda.”

  “Lucinda?”

  “Talkin’ to Josh again.”

  “Josh Daggett? Your husband?” said Bigelow.

  She shifted her eyes onto Worthington and gave him a little wink. “Dead he is. Five year now.”

  Worthington stepped back. “Then who’s Lucinda?”

  The old woman went inside. There were more squawks and the tinkling of a little bell, and she returned, cradling her cat in her arms. It was, of course, as black as pitch.

  “Lucinda, say hello.” Surreptitiously, she scratched a fingernail on the cat’s asshole and made it squawk.

  Worthington took another step back. “They said you were a witch.”

  The old lady offered the cat to Worthington. “Stroke her fur and she’ll bring you luck. A cat who can see the afterlife’s a rare thing.”

  Worthington raised his hands. “I’ve seen enough. Let us leave this old crone and her Indian… and her black cat.”

  Ezekiel Bigelow looked hard at Goody Daggett. “Do not play at witchcraft, marm. ’Tis still a capital crime.”

  Goody Daggett gave the cat’s bell a tinkle. “Who can know what a cat sees?”

  When they were gone, she broke out the beer and served Johnny first. “Thou be safe now, son. Haul me firewood and water, and stay as long’s thou likes.”

  Johnny reached into the bucket of oysters he had harvested that dawn. He opened one for Goody Daggett.

  “The pirate’s whore, the Indian, and the old witch of Billingsgate. That’s what they’ll call us.” Goody Daggett sucked in the oyster. “I say piss on ’em all.”

  Little Ned began to fuss, and Serenity shifted him from one shoulder to the other. “My father has softened some, now that Sam’s dead.”

  “Thou can’t stay there, darlin’. He’ll smother thee. Him and all the holy faces of Eastham.” The old woman slurped in another oyster and wiped the juice off her chin. “That’s why I lives out here, with no company but the wind and Lucinda.”

  The baby continued to fuss. Serenity shifted again, but he would not quiet.

  “Give him.” John took the baby and laid it on his knees. Then he reached under his stool and brought out the whales’-tooth necklace. Miraculously the crying stopped, the tiny eyes focused, the hands reached for something new. John teased the fingers a bit, then slipped the toy into them.

  “As skillful with him as with the shoals,” said Serenity.

  John smiled. “He can have it.”

  “But, John—”

  “I’ll never wear it again, not with king’s men huntin’ me.”

  “And Ezekiel Bigelow leadin’ ’em.” Goody Daggett spat. “Him and his people are hard ones. Always has been.”

  “It’s said Simeon was a good man,” offered Serenity.

  John nodded. “He told me I was good’s any white man. But he had strange parts, too. Old Keweenut, from Jack’s Island, he told me once him and Simeon buried a box at Cornhill by the light of a full moon.”

  “What was in it?”

  “He never said. Just big magic, that’s all.”

  “Big magic.” Serenity looked at Goody Daggett. “Sounds like somethin’ for a witch.”

  She cackled. “Ain’t no such thing as a witch.”

  Serenity came regularly to the island after that. She might beg a ride on a fishing boat at the Herring River or make the long walk over the dunes. Naturally her father objected to her wanderings. He feared that she was studying witchcraft and would one day be hanged for it. He would have greeted that fate more warmly than the truth—that she was falling in love with the Indian Johnny Autumn.

  No man could have been gentler with Ned, and none had ever been gentler with her. Johnny and Ned would play for hours, and when it came time to leave, the baby would always cry. While the baby slept, Johnny and Serenity would talk. And what he told her sometimes made her cry.

  Yes, Sam Bellamy had been coming back for her. He loved her so much that he endangered riches and crew for her. He talked of her so much that hardened pirates yearned to see her eyes change from green to blue like the sea on a bright windy day.

  Serenity did not entirely believe him, but she listened for hours to the stories. And soon, it was his admiration that she heard, not Sam Bellamy’s.

  Johnny said that most pirates were like Serenity, rebels against a world that put every person in a place above which he could not aspire. He took his lesson from Bellamy, who had proclaimed he would not “pin his faith upon a pimp of a parson who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckleheaded fools he preaches to.” Bellamy called himself a free prince. And there was a girl on Cape Cod he sought to make his princess.

  Some days, Serenity and Johnny would not talk, but simply sit beneath the sailcloth awning beside the house and stare at the blue distance. Or watch in silence as the gulls circled and swooped.

  And some days they would be filled with anger at the injustice of life. What crime, Johnny once asked, was there in stealing the Whydah? She had been built as a slaver and named for an African port where the slaves were sold. Every ounce of gold she carried had been tarnished by the tears of black-skinned men now gone into chains. “We punished them slavers as sure as the storm punished us. And for that they’d hang me.”

  Serenity put her arms around him. “They’ll never find you, John. I promise.”

  “I can’t stay here forever. And if I leave, I can never be seen with you.”

  “Do you wish that? To be seen with me?”

  “I dream of it, like Sam did.”

  He wore only a breechclout, and she did not deny that the sight of his flesh excited her as much as his words. In the bedroom, Goody Daggett snored beside the baby. On the bay, the fishermen worked their nets. And Serenity slid her hands down his flanks and untied the leather around his waist.

  Then she lay back on the cool sand beneath the awning and drew him onto her. Against her clothes, his nakedness felt all the more sinful. But this was not sin or rebellion. It was need. And no baby could fulfill it, nor any father’s psalm. She undid her bodice and pressed his face to her breasts. Then she raised her skirt.

  There was no other preliminary, because all had been preliminary to this. He entered her and she clung.

 
She moved to the island soon after and set herself up in an abandoned shack. Her father objected, but she gave her solemn promise that she would study no witchcraft. The few who lived year-round on Billingsgate Island paid her no mind. Most of them had run away from something as well. But the fishermen and whalers who came for the warm months were mostly family men and churchgoers, and so Serenity and John remained circumspect in their affections.

  And never did they sail together to Billingsgate town, which now was growing three miles north, within the harbor that Great Island, Jeremy Island, and Billingsgate Island itself created. Together, Serenity and Johnny showed their faces only on the lonely dunes.

  One late August eve, at Goody Daggett’s, they ate the corn that Johnny had coaxed from the sand with a dressing of bluefish heads, seaweed, and crushed shells. When they were done, Goody Daggett said that nights were growing shorter and winter would soon be upon them, so they had best think about leaving. “For there be no place bleaker, and I’ll not have bleak faces when the world’s too bleak for words. I’d rather have nothin’.”

  But Serenity and John could not leave together. And if they stayed, the fishermen’s wives might finally come to gossip. And what if the gossip brought back the king’s men?

  “Thou hast a bit of gold, hasn’t thee?” asked Goody Daggett. “What thee picked up from the beach?”

  “ ’Twould let us live a few months, somewhere,” answered Serenity, “were there a place Black Bellamy’s woman and an Indian could live without suspicion, or a place we could spend Spanish pieces of eight without gettin’ the attention of the colony.”

  Johnny poured more beer for the women and took some for himself. “Even at Smith’s, they say the king’s men keep a sharp eye for such coins.”

  “ ’Tis true enough, that.” Goody Daggett sipped her beer. “I did forget.”

  Serenity put her hand on John’s. “So, we need a miracle.”

  Johnny placed his hand on hers. “Or big magic.”

  vi.

  When he saw Johnny Autumn appear at Jack’s Island, Keweenut laughed and cried. He was old and his left arm was a useless hook and he said his mind lived in days that would never come back. They talked of Autumnsquam and Amapoo. They talked of Jeremiah Hilyard, who let Indians live on Jack’s Island, of Jack himself, whose axe had crippled Keweenut so long ago. And they talked of Simeon Bigelow, who had reminded them of their dignity. Then Johnny asked about the big medicine that Simeon and Keweenut had buried many years before.