Kingston by Starlight

by Christopher John Farley

  Angel, eager for the chance to get a shot off, quickly followed his orders. A loud crack sounded and the crew cheered at the sound and the sight of the smoke.

  “We’re into it now, lads!” shouted Sugar-Apple.

  The two passengers of the fishing vessel were now seemingly consumed with fright. Both were at the oars, attempting to paddle into the wind and away from the William. Members of our crew crowded against the rails of the quarterdeck. They were, one and all, armed with boarding weapons, half-pikes and axes, long knives and belaying pins. But for now the only weaponry they actually employed was sharp tongues, jeering and cat-calling and whistling at the entirely futile attempts of the vessel to outrun our clearly superior craft.

  “’Tis a pity,” said Sugar-Apple. “It goes hard on those who endeavor to escape a privateer craft.”

  “Will Calico have ’em killed?”

  “Probably not. Old Calico’s got a sense of empathy for those bound in captivity.”

  “But he forced First-Rate and others into service!”

  “His empathy has its limits. Still, the captain’s father was abducted by a press-gang, so he understands the situation.”

  “What’s a press-gang?”

  “It’s a form of, shall we say, involuntary recruitment for the Royal Navy. Why join them when you can become a privateer and earn some real money? Anyway, they took Calico’s father and now he sails for the other side. Look there! I spy there’s a member of the fairer sex aboard the craft we pursue. It’ll go hardest on her if Bishop gets his claws into her.”

  The fisherman and his daughter were now directly below our ship on the larboard side. I looked down from the railings and caught the eye of the daughter. She was pretty of face and pale of skin, with yellow hair cropped close, almost like a boy’s, and with sea green eyes. Our eyes locked for a time, and I almost felt I could hear her voice, whispering some soft secret or heart’s confession, but then the sound was lost in the general commotion, and the jeers from the men and the howl of the wind. Did she feel something akin to the fear I felt when I was assaulted by the neighborhood lads and lassies in Cork? I had longed to be the hunter and not the hunted, to be the dog and not the rabbit— but could I stand idly by, knowing the pain and the loneliness that I had felt when I was in her position?

  In what happened next, it was almost as if I was watching myself from my perch on the masthead. In my reverie, I lost my balance and, falling overboard, grabbed at a rope along the side of the ship, and, finding purchase difficult on the slick side of the William, found myself swinging neatly onto the deck of the small fishing craft. I heard a cheer erupt from my fellows back on deck, who figured I had executed the move of my own volition. Quickly, I got my bearings. I was now on a bowsprit sloop or smack boat: a Bahamian workman’s boat without much to recommend it. The keel length, I’d estimate, was a good twenty- five feet, and aft of the mast, I spotted a cargo hold whose top had slid off; the fish in the hold splashed and writhed and splattered trying to purchase their freedom through effort. Before I had hold directly of my natural sense, my cutlass was drawn and my flintlock pistol cocked. I had neglected to put any powder in with the ball, but I hoped I cut an arresting enough figure to make its discharge unnecessary.

  “Listen well to my words,” I said to the pair, as my mind raced to come up with something to say.

  Their eyes opened wide, for I said these words not in my buccaneer’s voice, but in the reassuring tones of a maiden.

  “There are devils on board my ship that will make good sport of you,” I said. “If you wish to live beyond this day that the Creator has made, cast your oars into the water and surrender all your possessions— your victuals, your sea-catch, and what other supplies or treasure you may have.”

  Within eyeblinks, other members of my crew were also on board the small craft, including Bishop, with a parched look on his face that seem’d to signal that only blood would quench his thirst. But the confrontation, in the main, was over. The fisherman quickly surrendered his catch, which consisted of seven angelfish and a stingray, which, tho’ deem’d a delicacy by some, was considered a wretched repast by the men of the Will. The fisherman also readily revealed a hidden store of monies, consisting of five pieces of eight, three brass buttons, and something that was either a misminted shilling or a shard of cow dung. The admissions and submission placated our crew quite readily and they returned to the William to let the fisherman and his daughter continue sailing where they would, being of no further use to us.

  Bishop had a more demonic purpose in mind. The fisherman’s daughter was wearing a blue canvas dress that Bishop bade her to remove, and he cited a biblical passage in support of his cravings. I am no scholar of the Good Book, but I am reasonably confident that Jesus’ parable of the shepherd and his lost sheep was not, as Bishop argued that day, a call by the Almighty himself for all virgins to submit themselves to those that board their fishing vessels. The girl, who I assumed shared my interpretation of the holy scriptures, refused his entreaty, and Bishop, being determined to see his will followed, began the rough process of removing the girl’s garments himself.

  The fisherman, startled by this sudden assault, stepped forward for the purpose of protecting his daughter. This, I judged, would result in trouble that would only lead to bloodshed and death. The fisherman, who was small and slight of build, had no chance against Bishop in a test of strength and, besides that fact, the men of the William all stood ready to intervene should the fight go poorly for our side. The fisherman, with an assault on Bishop, was about to seal his own doom, and that of his daughter besides. What could I do? I had not the strength of limb, nor the skill with weaponry, to thwart Bishop. And he was now too fixed on his carnal impulse to be persuaded by reason and eloquence. What could I do?

  I stepped forward. With the flat of my cutlass I delivered, with great force, a blow to the forehead of the fisherman. Stunned, he collapsed and lay squirming on the deck of the ship as if caught up in some great apoplexy. Indeed, he resembled nothing less than some great sea creature, accustomed to breathing the waters of the deep, now dragged to the shore and suffocating on air. The men of the William laughed at the sight. Bishop, his assault on the maid interrupt’d, looked at the writhing fisherman and then at me, giving one last grunt before grabbing hold of a rope and climbing back to the ship. Laughter is the surest cure for lust.

  I had never attacked a man before, nor struck another living being with violence. Having now performed the deed, I was not at all plagued with remorse. In truth, I was surprised at how good it felt— my assault was like an overdue sneeze that, when released, cleansed the body and focused the mind. I wanted to strike the man again, but could think of no good reason to do it.

  As I prepared to depart, the fisherman’s daughter tugged my sleeve and pulled close to me.

  “I understand what you have done here,” she breathed. “Sir or madam, you have my thanks.”

  I raised my cutlass to her throat and pressed it so close that a thin line of blood was drawn ’gainst her neck, which was white as sea-foam, and she gasped a little.

  “Thank me not,” I said, growling in my man’s voice. “For if ever I spy you in these same waters, in this craft or some other, be assured that I will take possession of all you have, including your sacred honor and your very life.”

  Grabbing hold of her waist, which was slender, I press’d my lips to hers and she struggled in my arms. There was blood in my mouth, from where or what I do not know, her neck perhaps, but it had the strange effect on me of inflaming my senses. As she squirmed and her breathing grew hot and fast, I raised her skirt up past her thighs, which were flushed in color and soft to the touch. I looked her in the eye and saw a strange brew of emotion, fear, and confusion, yes, but also, perhaps, a long-buried yearning that had suddenly broken to the surface of her desires. I pushed her roughly to the deck.

  I took from the boat what provisions they had— two salted hams, some rough dry’d beef, and a dozen bot
tles of Red-Streak Cyder. And after that embezzlement, I returned to the William. By my soul how I hoped she understood my lack of gallantry! For, it must be said, I was not entirely certain if I fathom’d my actions myself.

  “Privateers bold and brave are we

  “Who sail on the snowy crested sea

  “Blow high! Blow high!

  “We live and we fight, for plunder, no more

  “We long for the sea and love not the shore

  “Blow high! Blow high!”

  The revelry lasted through the day and long into the night. As I went below deck to take to my hammock, I felt a dull pain in my innards that I at first attributed to a mixture of the grog and the evening’s excitement. It felt like scrivener’s palsy, not in the hands, but the belly. I then noticed that I had a dry crusty spot on my breeches; reaching down between my legs, my fingers came up wet with blood. Was this some malady of the ocean? I had never experienced such bleeding before nor heard tell of it! I thought to ask one of my shipmates, but I held my tongue. What if this difficulty was peculiar to women that sailed the sea? I found a shadowy corner in the lower deck and scrubbed my breeches clean; finding rags, I stuffed some beneath my legs and tied them in place. Whatever pestilence afflicted me, I hoped it would soon pass. I fell asleep that night feeling somehow separate from all my fellows and I wondered if that feeling would ever pass.

  chapter 13.

  I am not one for dreams. My sleep passes in darkness, or rather in blankness. I see nothing, I hear nothing, and, upon waking, nothing is remember’d. If I do dream, if Hypnos has indeed granted me gifts in the night, visions of childhood, of the cliff-ringed headlands of Donegal, the moist low-lying meadows along the River Shannon, or the soft, insistent rains of a County Cork spring, that too cruel god of sleep takes back his presents with the passing of each period of slumber. Nothing remains when I rise, not even the rain.

  Yet in the night that follow’d hard after the first fray, phantasms came to me on the wings of sleep and continued their grim visitations in the evenings afterward. Memories, mad, buoyant, and wild with color, floated along the river of my thought like self-slaughter’d Ophelia clutching her death-garland of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples. When I was a child in Ireland, my father was a lawyer of some training and reputation. But before I was born, there arrived a time and a circumstance when his first wife cast him out. I have no, as it were, first-hand recollections of these incidents, being, I must suppose, too young at the time for such events to register. Relatives and neighbors would not speak of it, at least openly. But from stories overheard and whispers behind fences, I long ago pieced together the puzzle of my upbringing. My father was cast out for a tryst he had with my mother, a maid he encounter’d on one of his gambling expeditions. When the outrage was uncover’d, his reputation hung in tatters like the dead leaves of some tree infected with worms. His first wife, who was in possession of a goodly amount of wealth, divorced him, but later granted my father, whose practice had dwindled with the spreading news of his adulterous habits, access to a small allowance to support the son that they had had together. The son and the mother were both in poor health, and so the former had been placed in the care of my father. That son died before I was born.

  Privateer life is long periods of drunken inaction punctuated by brief blazing moments of violence and celebration. So, between watches and sea-chases, in the time I should have been comfortably ensconced in my hammock, I instead crept around in the lower decks of the ship, in a futile attempt to outdistance sleep. I could not rightly understand why these particular visions had seen fit to make themselves known to me. There are so many beauties of recollection that I dearly wish’d would have come to me in the night in replacement. But the Creator, or perhaps he that rules below, did not bless me with those visions of that carefree earlier time. In their stead, I saw my father. Or rather I heard my father’s voice, by some trick of the mind or some dreadful sorcery. His words were not mere sound, but utterance made flesh. I felt them touching me, like callused work-

  a-day hands; I could see them, flashing in the midnight of my mind as lightning storms. And I could smell their foul odor, like some beast of the field, butcher’d and then left to rot in some damp place. My father was ranting against women, as was his wont; against woman-kind in general and his former wife. The female gender was his downfall and his curse, the root cause of his failings in his profession and his emotional dissolution. God had taken a rib from man to give form and life to woman and, in my father’s lifetime, woman-kind had returned to take possession of the remainder of the skeleton. And then he collapsed into piteous sobs. No river in Ireland was as comely, no castle so lovely to look upon, no garden as sweet to smell, as a beautiful woman. But, ahh, fruit while still on the tree is beautiful to admire; once fallen and given to rot, no odor is so repellent.

  But none of it was real. I awoke in my mate’s cabin. The room was dark and the wooden walls seem’d as close and tight around me as the sides of a coffin already sealed and committed to the earth and the almighty. Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who were both assign’d to my small quarters, were up and playing a game of dice in the flickering piss yellow light of an oil lamp. I could hear the creak of the ship’s hull and the footsteps of crew members walking in the passageway outside and crisscrossing the deck above. One of the twins noticed me stirring in my hammock and fixed me with a stare that, surprisingly, lacked a portion of the usual malice.

  “Join us in a game of dice, if you like,” the twin said (by his affable inquiry, I judged him to be Hunahpu).

  “I thank you, but not tonight.”

  “You were talking to Sugar-Apple on the gangway,” said the other twin, whom I identified as Xbalanque by the scheming tone in his voice. “Something about an iron trunk.”

  “No,” I said, “we were talking about an Irish wench.”

  “A wench?” interrupted Angel, who was bunked nearly half the ship’s length away.

  “We are far from wenches here,” said Xbalanque.

  “What this about a wench?” said Angel.

  “I was remembering a woman I once knew,” I said. “An Irish wench.”

  “An Irish wench!” cried Angel. “The lustiest creatures of them all! Forsooth, I pray you split her beard!”

  “Yea, I split her beard.”

  “A good man you are, a good man!” said Angel. “Would you like a quaff of my gunpowder tea?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I had a few musket balls for breakfast.”

  Now Xbalanque, skeptical of my answers, slinked his way back into the exchange.

  “What was this Irish wench’s name, and in what village did she reside?” asked Xbalanque.

  But I was already out the door of the cabin. The passageways were small and tight and rocked back and forth with the motion of the ship. Straw was strewn on the ground to absorb moisture and give the feet some traction. A young sailor with a shaved head and missing ear bumped by me, babbling something about Salmagundi. May Poseidon preserve us. Salmagundi was Sugar-Apple’s latest creation, a highly seasoned stew with ingredients that included all of God’s creations: chunks of meat (reputed to be beef but most probably rat), pickled herring, hard-boiled eggs (from both chickens and lizards), vegetables (probably seaweed or fungus), plus liberal additions of wine (or cider since that was all that was readily available), oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. I wondered if the young sailor with the missing ear was running toward the Salmagundi or away from it.

  I wandered past the keeping pen, where the farm animals were. All manner of beasts were here: a horned goat roped to a heavy plank (his constant bleating was as sour as his milk), a dozen chickens (which delivered eggs reluctantly if at all), and several large lizards that Calico had picked up on some previous voyage (the lizards were generous egg providers, but their product was foul to the taste).

  A few paces beyond, Zayd had his surgeon’s facility: a cabin with no door, a wooden table stained dark with blood, and his large m
edical chest. Zayd had no formal training in the medical arts, I suspected, but, as the ship’s carpenter, he was in possession of the sharpest tools and thus duly outfitted for the position. I had another occasion, when Zayd was out of his quarters, to peek into his medical chest and, at that time, I cataloged the following with my eyes: a number of saws of varying lengths, a selection of knives, a mallet and a chisel, a dozen or so syringes, pliers (some caked with blood), and a variety of forceps. Next to the chest, Zayd kept a large decanter of mercury, which he would liberally pour on any injury or wound that fell to his care. The mercury was not necessarily to clean the hurt; instead, I was told, Zayd had discover’d that his patients were most likely to faint after the sharp sting of the mercury, making it easier for Zayd to go about the business of amputation. The one happy aspect to the surgeon’s facility was that the screams of the dying and injured men were sometimes so horrendous as to cause the goats and chickens to fall silent and give the men in their hammocks a few moments peace.

  I climbed the steps that led to the quarterdeck. Dawn was nigh and so, too, my turn on the watch. I was loath to return to my hammock, so I continued my rambling walk. I strolled to the poop deck; I could hear a trio of voices coming from the captain’s cabin.