by Sarah Lark
The other men did not exhibit the least aversion to this job. On the contrary, the stench seemed to give them an appetite; they were obviously excited about the prospect of a meal that featured fresh meat. The men regretted that they could not bring in the whale meat, but it rotted too quickly. So after removing the fat, they would leave most of the body in the sea. The cook would spend the next two days cutting meat out of the whale, having promised the men a solid meal. Lucas knew he would not touch a morsel of it.
Finally the time came to release the remains of the whale from the ship. The creature had been largely gutted. The deck was still covered in pieces of fat, and the crew waded through slime and blood. The cooking of the blubber would still last a few hours, and Lucas realized that days might tick by before the deck was cleaned. Lucas doubted it was even possible—certainly not with the simple broom and buckets of water the men usually used to swab the deck. Presumably, they would simply wait for the next heavy storm to flood the deck and wipe away all traces of the slaughter. Lucas practically longed for such a storm. As he thought over the events of that day, panic began to well up inside him. He would probably acclimate eventually to the journey’s living conditions, to the cramped berths and the unwashed bodies, but never to days like this. Not to the killing and gutting of these massive but obviously peaceful creatures. Lucas had no idea how he was supposed to make it through the next three years.
The fact that the Pretty Peg’s first whale had entered “the net” ended up working in his favor. Captain Milford decided to land at Westport and drop off their prize before setting sail again. Their stop would ensure a good price for the fresh blubber and allow them to empty the barrels for the next stage of the journey—and it would cost the men only a few days. The men rejoiced. Ralphie, a short, blond Swede, began swooning over the girls in Westport.
“It’s a little dump but it’s being built up. Till now just whalers and seal hunters, but a couple of gold diggers on their way. S’pposed to be real mountain men there—someone said something about coal deposits. Anyway, there’s a pub and a few ready-and-willing girls. I had a redhead there once who was well worth the jack, I tell you!”
Copper approached Lucas, who was leaning on the guardrail, exhausted and sick.
“You thinking about the next brothel too? Or would you consider celebrating the successful hunt right here?” Copper had laid his hand on Lucas’s shoulder and was now running it slowly down his arm in what could almost be called a caressing gesture. Lucas could hardly miss the invitation underpinning Copper’s words—but he was undecided. There was no question he owed Copper something; the older man had been good to him. And hadn’t he thought about sharing a bed with a man his whole life? Hadn’t images of men come to him whenever he pleasured himself and when—with God as his witness—he had lain with his wife?
But this here…Lucas had read the writings of the Greeks and Romans. Back then, the male body had been the quintessential ideal of beauty; love between men and youths was not considered objectionable as long one did not force the boys into it. Lucas had wondered at the pictures of the statues that had been created back then. How beautiful they had been! How smooth, how clean, and inviting…Lucas had stood in front of the mirror and compared himself to them, had attempted the poses those youths had assumed, had dreamed of himself in the arms of a loving mentor—who certainly looked nothing like this whaler. Though he was friendly and good-humored, he was still massive and reeking. There was no possibility of washing himself that day on the Pretty Peg. The men would slip between the decks, covered in sweat and filth, sullied with blood and slime…Lucas pulled away from Copper’s inviting stare.
“I don’t know…it was a long day…I’m tired.”
Copper nodded. “Don’t worry; go to your berth, boy. Relax. Maybe later I could…well, I could bring you something to eat. Good chance there’s even whiskey around here.”
Lucas swallowed. “Another time, Copper. Maybe in Westport. You…I…don’t misunderstand me, but I need a bath.”
Copper let out a booming laugh. “My little gentleman! Fine, fine, I will personally see to it that the girls draw you a bath—or even better, for the both of us. I could use one too. Would you like that?”
Lucas nodded. The important thing was that the man leave him alone for today. Full of loathing and disgust for both himself and the men whom he had joined for this adventure, he retired to his flea-ridden bunk. Perhaps the fleas would be put off by the stench of blubber and sweat. A hope that quickly proved futile. On the contrary, it seemed only to attract more bugs. After squashing dozens of them on his body, Lucas only felt dirtier. Still, as he lay awake, listening closely to the laughing and shouting on deck—the skipper had evidently offered up the whiskey—and finally to the men’s drunken songs, a plan began to form in his mind. He would leave the Pretty Peg in Westport. He didn’t care whether he would be in breach of contract or not. This life was altogether too unbearable.
His escape had actually been rather easy. The only problem was that he’d had to leave all of his belongings behind on the ship. It would have looked suspicious if he had taken his sleeping bag and his few articles of clothing along for the brief shore leave the skipper had allowed the men. He took a few things to change into—after all, Copper had promised him a bath, so he could justify them on those grounds. Copper laughed about that, but Lucas did not care. He was only looking for an opportunity to run away. This quickly presented itself when Copper consulted with an attractive red-haired girl about finding a bathtub somewhere nearby. The other men in the pub were not paying attention to Lucas; they only had whiskey on their minds or were staring at the girls’ ample curves. Lucas still had not ordered a drink, and thus avoided the guilt of skipping out on his tab when he now stole out of the bar and hid himself in the stables. As it turned out, there was a rear exit. Lucas took it and slunk across a blacksmith’s yard, a coffin maker’s shed, and a few unfinished houses. Westport was indeed a dump—he had been right about that—but it was also true that it was being built up.
The village was situated on the bank of a river, the Buller, which was wide and calm where it emptied into the sea. Lucas made out sandbanks interrupted by a rocky bank. Most importantly, though, a fern forest began just beyond Westport, a deep green wilderness that looked, and likely was, completely unexplored. Lucas looked around, but he was alone. Apparently, no one else sought the emptiness beyond the houses. He would be able to flee without being seen. Once he’d decided on a course of action, he ran along the river’s edge, seeking cover between the ferns wherever possible. He followed the river upstream for an hour before he thought he’d gone far enough to relax. The skipper would not miss him right away, as the Pretty Peg was not set to leave until the following morning. Naturally, Copper would look for him, but not by the river, at least not at first. Later, he might look around the riverbanks, but surely he would limit himself to the area around Westport. Lucas would have liked to head deeper into the jungle right away, but his revulsion at his own filth made him pause. He had to clean himself up. Lucas stripped down, shivering, and hid his dirty things behind a couple of rocks—he gave some brief thought to washing them and taking them with him, but shuddered at the prospect of scrubbing the blood and fat out. So he held on only to his underwear, and would have to abandon his shirt and pants. That was regrettable; if he dared to come into contact with people again, he wouldn’t own anything more than what he wore on his back. But anything was better than the slaughter on board the Pretty Peg.
Lucas finally slid down into the ice-cold waters of the Buller River. The cold pierced him to the bone, but the clear water washed all the dirt from him. Lucas lowered himself deeply into the river and reached for a pebble, which he began to rub on his skin. He scrubbed his body until he was red as a crab and hardly felt the water’s cold anymore. Then he finally left the river, put on his clean clothes, and looked for a path through the jungle. The forest was terrifying—damp and thick and full of massive, unfamiliar plan
ts—but Lucas’s interest in his homeland’s flora and fauna came in handy. He had seen many of the giant ferns, whose leaves sometimes rolled up like caterpillars and seemed almost to come alive, in textbooks and overcame his fear by trying to name them. None of them were poisonous and even the largest tree weta was less likely to attack him than the fleas on board the ship. Even the various animal noises that filled the jungle did not frighten him. There was nothing here but insects and birds, mostly parrots, who filled the forest with their strange calls but were utterly harmless. That evening Lucas made a camp out of ferns and slept not only more easily but also more peacefully than during his weeks on the Pretty Peg. Though he had lost everything, he awoke the next morning with refreshed courage—which was surprising given that he had walked out on his employer, broken a contract, and amassed gambling debts that he had not paid back. Still, he thought, almost amused, soon no one will be calling me a “gentleman”!
Lucas would have liked to remain in the jungle, but despite the abundant fertility of this green hell, nothing could be found to eat. At least not by Lucas—a Maori tribe or a true ranger might have seen things differently. As it was, however, his growling stomach forced him to look for a human settlement. But which one? Westport was out of the question. Everyone there was guaranteed to know by now that the skipper was looking for a sailor who had jumped ship. It was possible that the Pretty Peg was even waiting for him.
Then he recalled that Copper had mentioned Tauranga Bay a few days earlier. Seal banks, twelve miles from Westport. The seal hunters surely knew nothing about the Pretty Peg and weren’t likely to care. But the hunting in Tauranga was supposed to be flourishing; doubtless he could find work there. With a light heart, Lucas headed that way. Seal hunting could not be any worse than whaling.
The men in Tauranga had indeed welcomed him, and the stench of their camp was more bearable. After all, it was in the open air, and the men were not penned together. It must have been evident to the men that something was not quite right about Lucas, but they did not ask any questions about his tattered appearance, his missing equipment, or his lack of money. They dismissed Lucas’s threadbare explanations with a wave.
“No worries, Luke. We get enough of your type. Just make yourself useful and bag a few pups. On the weekends we take the pelts to Westport. Then you’ll have money again.” Norman, the oldest hunter, sucked good-naturedly on his pipe. Lucas had a sneaking suspicion that he was not the only one here running from something.
Lucas could even have felt comfortable among these reticent, laid-back Coasters if it weren’t for the hunt itself—if you could even call the slaughtering of helpless pups in front of their horrified mothers’ eyes “hunting.” Doubtfully, he looked at the club in his hand and the animal before him.
“Well, do it, Luke! Take the pelt. Or do you think they’ll give you money in Westport on Saturday because you helped us with the skinning? We all help each other out here, but you only bring in money for your own pelts.”
Lucas saw no way out. He closed his eyes and swung.
9
By the end of the week Lucas had almost thirty seal pelts—and was plagued by even more shame and self-hatred than after his stint on the Pretty Peg. He was determined not to return to the seal banks after the weekend in Westport. The town was a burgeoning settlement. There had to be employment there that did not cause such personal torment—even if it meant admitting that he was not a real man.
The fur buyer, a short, wiry man who also ran the general store in Westport, was quite optimistic on his behalf. As Lucas had hoped, he did not connect the new hunter from the seal banks with the whaler who had fled the Pretty Peg. Perhaps his thoughts did not carry him that far back—or he simply did not care. In any event, he gave Lucas a few cents for each pelt and then readily answered his questions about other work in Westport. Lucas did not admit, of course, that he found the killing unbearable. Instead, he pretended it was the loneliness and the all-male company on the seal banks that had become too much for him.
“I’d like to live in town for once,” he explained. “Maybe find a wife, start a family…just not see any more dead seals and whales.” Lucas laid the money for the sleeping bag and clothing he had just bought to change into on the table. The trader and Lucas’s new friends bellowed with laughter.
“Well, you’ll find work easy enough. But a girl? The only girls here’re those in Jolanda’s establishment above the pub. They’d be about the right age to marry though.”
The men just took Lucas’s remark for a joke and could hardly stop laughing.
“You can ask ’em yourself right now!” Norman said good-naturedly. “You’re coming to the pub, aren’t you?”
Lucas could not refuse. He would have preferred to save his meager pay, but a whiskey sounded good—a little liquor might help him forget the seals’ eyes and the whale’s desperate thrashing.
The fur trader named a few other opportunities for work in Westport. The blacksmith might be able to use a hand. Had Lucas ever worked with iron? Lucas cursed himself for never having given a thought to how James McKenzie shod the horses on Kiward Station. Those sort of skills could have made him money here, but Lucas had never laid a hand on hammer and nails. He could ride a horse—but nothing more.
The man correctly interpreted Lucas’s silence. “Not a hand worker, eh? Never learned anything except how to beat seals’ brains in. But construction would be a possibility. The carpenters are always looking for help. They can hardly keep up with the contracts, with all the world suddenly wantin’ houses on the Buller. We’re going to be a real city! But they don’t pay much. No comparison with what you earn doing that.” He pointed to the fur.
Lucas nodded. “I know. But I figured I’d ask anyway. I…I’ve always been able to see myself working with wood.”
The pub was small and not particularly clean. But Lucas was just relieved that none of the patrons remembered him. They probably hadn’t given the Pretty Peg’s sailors a second look. Only the red-haired girl who was serving again that day seemed to look at him appraisingly as she wiped down the table before putting whiskey glasses in front of Norman and Lucas.
“Sorry it looks like a pigsty in here again,” the girl said. “I told Madame Jolanda the Chinese doesn’t clean right.” The “Chinese” was the rather exotic-looking barman. “But so long as no one complains…just the whiskey or something to eat too?”
Lucas would have liked to eat something. Anything that did not smell of the sea and seaweed and blood and was not quick-roasted over the seal hunters’ fire and gobbled down half raw. The girl seemed to care about cleanliness. So perhaps the kitchen was not as filthy as he might have feared at first glance.
Norman laughed. “Something to munch on, my dear? No, we can eat in camp, but there’s no sweet dessert like you there.” He pinched the girl’s rear.
“You know that’ll cost you a cent, right, dear?” she asked. “If I tell Madame Jolanda, she’ll go and put it on your tab. But I won’t be like that—for that cent, you can have a grab up here too.” The redhead pointed to her breasts. He groped heartily, joined by Johlen, one of the other men. Then the girl skillfully removed his hand. “There’ll be more of that later when you’ve paid.”
The men laughed as she stalked away. She was wearing tantalizingly red high-heeled shoes and a dress in various shades of green. It was old and had been patched more than once, but it was clean, and the sexy lace flounces had been carefully starched and pressed. She reminded Lucas a bit of Gwyneira. Sure, she was a lady, and this half-grown child here a whore, but she also had frizzy red hair, pale skin, and that flash in her eyes that indicated that she was not at all resigned to her fate. This was certainly not the final station for this girl.
“A real sweetheart, right?” remarked Norman, who had perceived Lucas’s gaze but misinterpreted it. “Daphne. The best horse in Madame Jolanda’s stable and, what’s more, her right hand. Without her, nothing would run around here, I tell you. She’s got everyt
hing under control. If the old lady was clever, she’d adopt the dear thing. But she only thinks of herself. One of these days that girl’s going to run away and take the best attractions with her. What do you think? You want her first? Or do your tastes run to something wilder?” He looked at the others with a wink.
Lucas did not know what to say.
Fortunately, Daphne returned with a second round of whiskey.
“The girls are ready upstairs,” she said as she passed the glasses around. “Drink up at your leisure—I’d be happy to bring the bottle too—and then come on up!” She smiled encouragingly. “But don’t make us wait too long. You know, a little liquor provokes the desire but takes away the performance.” Just as quickly as Norman had reached for her rear before, she now seized him between the legs for revenge.
Norman jumped back but then had to laugh.
“Do I get a cent for that too?”
Daphne shook her head, letting her red hair fly as she did so.
“Maybe a kiss?” she twittered and drifted away before Norman could answer. The men whistled after her.
Lucas drank his whiskey and felt dizzy. How would he get out of here without failing miserably once more? Daphne did not arouse him at all. And yet she seemed to have set her eye squarely on him. Even just now, her gaze had lingered a bit longer on his face and slender, but muscular form than on the bodies of the others. Lucas knew that women found him attractive—that was unlikely to be any different with the whores in Westport than with the matrons in Christchurch. What was he supposed to do if Norman really did expect him to join them upstairs?
Lucas contemplated escaping again, but that was out of the question. Without a horse, he had no chance of leaving Westport; he would have to remain in town for the time being. And that would not work if, first thing on the first day, he marked himself for all time by fleeing from a red-haired whore.
