Sea of Two Suns

by Nicholas McAuliff

  Isaac leaned into the bow and said nothing and drank a sip.

  “I am sorry,” said Francisco and he rubbed the writer’s back. “I am sorry Isaac, that was unworthy of me.”

  Isaac shook his head. “Do not be.”

  “What was her name?”

  Isaac shook his head again. “I would rather not say, if that be alright.”

  “Hold fast,” said Francisco. He fetched a lantern hanging from the bottom main mast and lit it and walked to the helm where he stayed for several minutes. He walked to Isaac.

  “More rum?” jested Isaac.

  Francisco put up his hand. “My brother you can start anew, if we make it back, forgive my morbidity. You can always start anew, and what is lost is never gone, just finished for now.”

  “For seven years it shone, Francisco. Always on my nightly walk from the Messenger to the hearth. Up in the far east corner of the tenement. In the winds, in the snows, in the muck and wet of August.”

  “A long journey to bear alone my friend,” said Francisco.

  Silence passed for a long time and they both drank.

  “An island of silver,” said Isaac. “You and I both know nothing such exists.”

  “Likely not,” said Francisco. “Maria cannot go on like this, the surgeon says she will likely persevere, but I last looked upon her and could not envision another decade, let alone lifetime with the Tuberculosis.”

  Isaac said nothing and placed a hand on Francisco’s shoulder. A tiny petrel or some nightly bird swopped down in silence and perched on the eagle’s head.

  “She said to me: ‘You are going to be a whaleman.’ I said, yes captain, and that was that,” said the Mexican. He smiled widely as if grinning at the ebony horizon.

  “Easy choice for you then.”

  “The first time I met my father-in-law he punched me in the mouth,” Francisco went on. “He looked down unto me and said: ‘if you bring whale oil to Durango, you may have my daughter.’”

  “How did that go?”

  “I did as I promised. When I left for this voyage, he put a hand on my shoulder and told me to come back. So you see, I must come back lest I incur the man’s wrath again.”

  “Far from home, Francisco. Far from the sands and heat. You never shiver. The frozen sea seems to be your temperament.”

  Francisco laughed. “But Isaac, I can see it,” said he, motioning toward the infinite black. “She will beat the Tuberculosis, she is strong. Faster so with a medical doctor, I think. Still clear-eyed when I left. Still rose and tended to the garden, just tires herself quicker, is all. Aye. Tuberculosis can be beaten. We will be in San Antonio by next summer. And when my sons arrive. Well, then we will build. She will expect something,” he said. “I best sharpen my scrimshaw else I be whipped when I arrive home.”

  Isaac smiled and laughed quietly. “Goodnight, Francisco,” he whispered.

  “Goodnight.”

  The writer retired below deck while Francisco remained.

  The moon was starting to dip down low to the far horizon, so that the Mexican did not have to strain his neck anymore to see the radiance.

  XIV

  “Prepare to brace fore and aft,” snarled the captain.

  A flurry of commotion on deck.

  “Hold fast,” the captain said. “Belay that, let’s get chow in us before this disaster starts moving again.”

  “She is not a bad vessel Captain,” grunted Francisco. “Away from the Jib you idiot!” he yelled and Simon stopped handling the jib sail and paced to the quarterdeck.

  “Deckhand, Isaac, bring up the little goat from the hold,” said the captain. He poured several cups of whiskey from a browned bottle, handing them to the men.

  A thunderous roll seemed to start from under the tide and rise through the clouds.

  “Rain, captain!” Herb proclaimed. “Perhaps supper can wait!” he exclaimed.

  The captain eyed the hunter and said nothing.

  “Let us worry for squalls and tides,” said Francisco softly as he sharpened two blades against a whetstone fixed to the deck.

  “Nothin to be concerned for, then? The rain at sea that is?” inquired the hunter.

  “Shut up!” barked the captain.

  “For some reason that reminds me of Missouri Territory,” said Herb, pointing to the distant stormy horizon. The hunter leaned on the bow and peered out toward the silent lightning dancing above the sea; far, far out but close enough to feel. “Last memory of me and my pa,” the hunter went on. “’Cept thunder on the horizon be above a sea of plains and grasses, and the horses be our bounty. We was in a little sod home then but we had a neighbor about thirty miles eastward. Dell. Old pig farmer. I miss that. I miss the rolling plains, from time to time. Watchin the thunder out under the night after a day’s work.”

  “There you are again!” snapped the captain. “As if we share your memories or give a single fuck!”

  Herb raised his cup.

  The captain filled the cups of the crew anew, skipping Herb.

  Lukas held out his hands. “I do not partake,” he said.

  “As I would have it,” snarled the captain.

  “Would have thought we would go through our salt horse and those cans first, captain,” said Herb. “May as well fatten her up.”

  “No bitch,” said the captain. “They scream day and night as it is without chow. Bring it up!”

  The captain filled his brother’s cup with a ladle of fresh water.

  “What you drink!” exclaimed Julius.

  “No Julius,” the captain said. “I have a biscuit with lard for you, the way you like.”

  The animal screamed and so too did the tiny pig from the hold.

  “You’ll be next,” yelled the captain.

  The crew laughed.

  “Hold her steady,” the captain said as he unsheathed his Kukri.

  Francisco and the hunter held the screaming animal at the quarterdeck, where it defecated.

  The pirate straddled above it and grasped its left horn with one hand, and with the other he slit the animal’s throat. It let out one final gurgle as its body crumpled to the deck while the captain kept grasp of the horn.

  “You collect that blood!” yelled the captain, and Jerimiah held a piggin under the raining blood.

  “That’ll warm our bones soon enough,” said the captain. “Get some of that in our liquor tonight!” he said, and his eyes were wild with the delight of the fresh kill.

  Nukilik started butchering the animal on the quarterdeck. He worked methodically along with his sister, and Isaac watched in fascination as the animal was soon rendered to several parts. Within moments its innards were thrown overboard.

  “You learn to waste almost nothing,” said Arnaaluk, and she snapped both horns from the head with the help of a whale-bone-machete.

  “Never had goat on my dish,” said Isaac.

  “It will taste like a slow roasted beef bone, don’t you worry,” replied Arnaaluk. “One of your fancy meals from the high city, where men no longer butcher their own food I understand,” she said with a grin.

  “True,” said Isaac. “Easier to fetch a mince pie or a brisket on my walk from The Messenger than be burdened with the toil of the stove.”

  Arnaaluk smiled and grasped the butt of her harpoon, slung across her back.

  “Have you fallen a whale before?” asked the writer, eyeing her and sketching in his journal.

  “No writer, but in the great American desert perhaps I will slay a white man before my time upon this earth is done,” said she.

  “Great American Desert is no place for a Cree,” replied Isaac.

  “Neither is Nantucket,” said Nukilik as he split the animal in two with three strikes, his sister holding its legs. “Yet we managed three voyages with your brothers and sisters.”

  “I would not turn my cheek to goat,” said Simon and the smiling man walked briskly toward the rendered animal. He tripped on a bundle of chains on the deck and kicked over the
tin of blood and it ran over the deck and splayed out as it disappeared into the deck’s crevices.

  “Idiot!” said the captain.

  “Puta!” screamed Francisco. “That was a day’s nourishment for one man!” said Francisco. “Landsman!”

  “Forgive me,” said Simon. “I am no landsman!”

  In an instant Francisco was at the small man and slapped him once, twice, three times to the deck.

  Isaac eyed the Mexican and others looked on silently. The captain seemed to be grinning in satisfaction.

  “No Landsman,” Simon whimpered.

  Isaac helped him to his feet and the two went below deck.

  The captain pointed at the duo as they descended the ladder. “Ahoy!” he said. “All hands,” and the remaining crew gathered in. “There goes the death of any crew. The bane of any voyage. Bundled together as they always do at sea! Take note, men.”

  Miska barked at low-diving seabirds. Little black flyers that barely made a sound as they sailed low over the sea, over the ship, perched on the riggings. They steadied themselves effortlessly as the ship creaked. The dog jumped toward them in futility, snapping the air with breyed white jaws.

  Isaac watched Julius laugh at the dog. It was as if Miska were a canine jester entertaining the stunted man.

  “Damned animal serves no purpose on this vessel!” said the captain. The pirate put his eye through a sextant which was aimed square at the horizon.

  “She’s a symbol of luck, captain,” said Nukilik. “Like your aquamarine there,” he said, pointing at the shining crystal around the captain’s neck.

  The pirate scoffed.

  “What do you there, captain?” said Isaac as he opened his journal.

  The captain ignored Isaac.

  “Getting our bearings,” replied Francisco.

  “Had I left her at Fort Cognac she would have been burned alive,” Nukilik continued. “You know those we worked for?”

  “Bah! I know,” said the captain. “Chief traders. Fur trappers. They either run you aground or chase you dead!”

  “The chief at Fort Cognac is not any chief trader,” said Francisco.

  “We’ve had a few run ins in the past,” said the captain.

  “Apprehensive captain?” asked Arnaaluk.

  “I fear no man,” the captain barked in response. “I fear that,” he said, removing the sextant from his eye and pointing to the sea. “But the same I can recognize death when I see it. The Ordained will die to send a message.”

  “Fur and Pine were disenfranchised in Paris,” said Isaac. “For six years. I have produced two articles on the very topic. Contractors and stragglers trap on their own using the forts as seldom rendezvous, skeletons of their former selves. Until he opened Fur and Pine and made his own proclamation. The Ordained, that is.”

  “He sees himself anointed to rise the company from the ashes though they have condemned him and reincorporated into another entity, focusing entirely on whaling out of London Port, to which they now have leasing rights,” said Francisco. “Still he holds sovereignty over all New France and the fur trade itself, for which the French certainly will offer no complaint. Such as why French soldiers protect him.”

  “How know you this?” asked the captain. “Last I was in the north he was a French Jesuit Missionary spreading his own gospel to Cree and Inuit and any lost souls with no trade.”

  “I spent some time at Fort Cognac,” said Francisco.

  “Oh,” said Herb. “Plenty of chances to mention you was a trapper, Francisco.

  “For one year,” said the Mexican. “We docked at Halifax at an opportune time and the talk of silver and beaver pulled me.”

  “I guess that didn’t work out for you,” said Herb.

  “No, no it did not.”

  “Must be hard for a man to accept, rising to the top of a trade when it be in its death throes,” said Herb. “The Jesuit I mean.”

  “Precisely,” said the Mexican. “But through fear and the word of God he convinces broken men to follow him. They say he has enough silver to buy them all.”

  “Does the man know the trapline?”

  “Though he doesn’t look it for twenty-two years he worked the frozen woods, aye,” said Francisco.

  “And thus Rocky Mountain Fur Company merged into what became Fur and Pine. Amongst many others. Hudson Bay being a shadow that left long ago.”

  “He thinks himself holy,” said Nukilik.

  The captain looked at the Cree. “If he is righteous than I am a saint,” he said.

  “By the time I left the trade Hudson Bay was nigh unheard of, their forts burned or shuttered or used by independent contractors or natives,” said Herb. “Ghosts I guess.”

  “Under the fist of Fur and Pine,” said Francisco. “The man’s vanity is of little import. His influence over countrymen and Indian both, is.”

  “Fur and Pine wasn’t much back then in aught nine,” said the hunter. “But the Huron and all the rest of ‘em saw to make our lives hell long as we kept going. There I was missing fingers and trying to run a trapline and shoot down northern Injuns the same.”

  “Are you going to shoot me down?” said Nukilik.

  “Wouldn’t be advantageous to me to gun down a man who knows the arctic seas, would it Cree?”

  “This ain’t the arctic,” said Jerimiah.

  “But the Cree decided the snows would be enough to stop us,” Herb went on. “Us in our dugouts and caves and they in their long teepees and warmed by furs both bartered for and stole. And they was right. So we took the snows shakin and blubberin but we found the caribou they had been tracking and slaughtered the lot of ‘em before we went south. Shot every bunny or quail we saw south to, left a trail of ‘em dead atop the snow.”

  “Were you not hungry?” asked Francisco.

  “Aye we was”, said Herb. “Still we killed everything we seen and by then it was dawn and the deed was done. Let them freeze us out, we starve them out, then we was done with the north. Two hundred men marching southward and killin everything they see.”

  “I see,” said Nukilik. He rose and tossed off Arnaaluk’s hand and paced toward the hunter, who leaned on the gunwale.

  “That’s right!” said Herb.

  “Show the world how cruel you can be? Very well, perhaps you will see my cruelty before we reach the silver island,” said Nukilik.

  “I have often seen men of bravado at sea,” said the Mexican.

  “Turn thy other cheek and they cut your fuckin head off Francisco,” Herb replied, still face to face with Nukilik. “This don’t look away Francisco,” he said, pointing to the elephant gun leaning against the nape of the eagle’s head at the bow.

  “Did I say I was a man of peace?” snapped Francisco.

  Arnaaluk pulled her brother away from the hunter.

  “Perhaps I will join Nukilik in showing you who I am,” said Francisco.

  “You cruel or the world cruel to you Francisco, ain’t no in between in that matter,” said Herb.

  “Hear hear,” said the captain, still aiming through the bronze-colored Sextant.

  “Only thing I seem to get right in this life,” said Herb calmly. “I can track game through dead forest, find an elk or a hare where there be even no roots to eat. See they always out there, the hunted, they just quiet and still and think we don’t notice, and most hunters don’t, yet I do.”

  “You never fail to make me feel better about my sins,” said Francisco.

  “That right Mexican? And you be there on your high horse thinkin you found another way?”

  “Long as it’s not your way Herb, anything but yours.”

  “I hear men could still make a fortune until after the war,” the captain said. “I always thought it easier to take what I needed, while you honest folk work off the sweat of your brow. Isn’t that what the chief at Cognac always used to say?”

  “A trapper I knew came up north to start, the man was fifty-five,” said Nukilik. “Had nowhere else but had a ch
ild late in life and needed money sent home to Boston. So as an American The Jesuit hated him to begin with.”

  “I am sure he hates Frenchmen the same,” said the pirate captain.

  “Alas he was slow to run a trap line and slow to learn but most lent him a helping hand,” said Nukilik. “But the Jesuit allowed him to wear no fur, so that the man wrapped himself in burlap day and night. And finally when the cold became too much he stole furs from the dog’s hutches, torn and filthy as they were.”

  “All of yous would wear them furs had you ever felt the cold of the north!” said Herb as he aimed down an unloaded flintlock.

  “They would!” said Nukilik. “But the bastard Ordained had the man’s fingers sawed off but spared the hands and then set him on cleaning and stewarding duties around the fort. But he let him keep the furs after that. He would hobble from shed to shed, doing this and that, clutching tools or pelts or whatever with two numbed hands like a lobster. We found him hanging in the storage shed before spring.”

  “How does a man string himself up without fingers?” said Francisco.

  “With a lot of determination, I would suppose,” replied Nukilik. “He was a kind man. Simple, the sort of simple that even the most hardened men would take sympathy on, like a child almost. Forgive me for saying captain, like Julius, maybe a bit sharper and more independent, but not too far off. But the insane Frenchman took pleasure in tormenting him, aye.”

  “Who is this man?” asked Isaac, writing furiously in his journal.

  “Same one who no doubt sent the Irish lunatic and Hessians and god knows who else after us and Turner and any other who defies Fur and Pine,” said the captain.

  A shot rang out and Miska barked shrilly.

  Herb took aim again with a second pistol, firing at the sky. The hunter laughed as tiny black birds fell silent and dead into the waves.

  “What did you do that for?” asked Isaac.

  “Ain’t no particular reason,” said the hunter. He took aim and fired again, this time two birds from the riggings fell as one dead entity.

  Isaac grimaced at the hunter as he shot again.

  The writer walked toward the captain who manned the helm alone.

  “Leave me be,” the captain said as he guided the ship toward ever freezing waters.