Mr Darwin's Shooter

by Roger McDonald

  Covington turned his back on them, tears pricking his eyes. He had the feeling of the boy who shambles through the schoolyard alone, too old for play, too young for mastery of his fellows; or mastery of himself, either, if the truth be told: the one left out of company who plots his victories thro’ jealousy. He hoped Capt would relent his passions and give him leave to range about with his pocket-violin, as when he played in parks and along seawalls in Monte Video del Mar under Capt King. Covington appealed to Capt FitzRoy with a damp eye. Capt saw him not.

  ‘Tar bucket!’ called Mr Wickham.

  Covington worked around the foremast on his knees, caulking away to the strains of squeaky music. It was Carnival time ashore and the noise of it crossed the water and tickled the ear. He wanted to be gone from his duties, clicking his heels on cobblestones. He saw that Miss Basket was in the same mood. In her shoregoing finery she timed a jig with her rump and leaned over the rail, where her eyes tangled with Covington’s. You could almost say she chanced a smile; or as close to a smile as those gloomy Patagonians allowed. Down the back of her neck hung her ‘follow-me-lads’, curls and ribbons gracing a plump shoulder. ‘Whoa!’ Covington cried, in a show of high spirits, while Revd Matthews warned him with a hand gesture to bear away. ‘Boo!’ Covington told him, and Fuegia poked out her tongue. Matthews said, ‘I w-warn you, Master Covington. I mean to reach Chapel without splashes of tar on her p-p-person.’ So Covington set the tar bucket down, and Yorker being nowhere around, and Capt barking orders over the side, and Matthews thus blathering, he grabbed Fuegia’s elbow and juggled her into his arms, whirling her behind the yawl amidships.

  Matthews tapped his shoulder trepidatiously as he let her go: ‘I say, Master Covington, what’s this?’

  ‘Wouldn’t ye like to know.’

  It was not until smoky sunset the next day that Covington won his ship’s leave to go ashore. Mr Earle sat in their boat with his knapsack of paints. Door manned the sweep oar and contrived to bang Covington’s shoulder with every pull. Covington wore white dimity trowsers fringed at the bottom, a muslin blouse with loose folds wherein he wrapped his Polly Pochette, and low on his eyes a straw hat bargained from John Phipps. He was easy and independent in his humour.

  When Mr Earle turned his grin on Covington and asked if he would carry his load when they got to shore, Covington answered, ‘Carry your load yourself, sir,’ and Earle much liked him for his cheek. ‘Anyways,’ Covington added confidingly, ‘there are little boys for that purpose on the dockside.’ Then, more loudly, he boasted past knowledge of Bahia’s putrid alleyways, inventing jolly inns and pockmarked beauties standing in every Door. Mr Earle choked: ‘I hope you have brought presents for all your little bastards, Syms Covington,’ thus making the lads howl.

  ‘I keep no count of my by-blows,’ Covington answered, with Door knocking him sideways again. Thus his good spirits made play. Door stood in the stern, monument to a sailor’s vanity, making Covington full proud to know him as one of their bark’s finest; wearing a scarlet waistcoat tied with black ribbon, white dimity trowsers ditto unto Covington’s, his black hair oiled and tied in a pigtail, and, kept handy, a smart switch fashioned from the backbone of a shark.

  Door leaned at Covington, and sang, ‘Be cheery, dear Cobby, let your heart never fail, while the bold harpooneer is striking the whale.’

  Aye, Door was a rare lad. He stood ready, at last, to admit Covington into the charmed company of devils, which name Covington gave to the foretopmen ashore.

  The Samarang’s lads spotted them from the man-of-war’s high decks. The Beagle’s boat replied in like spirit, ‘Huzzah!’ as they dipped under her bows. From aboard that great vessel came a buzz of activity that was like a beehive; it made Covington feel he lived in a walnut shell with hydrographic survey poor cousin to battle orders. But even so, England’s navy ruled the waves. Light shone from the Samarang’s gunports and tickled the water, mixing the colour of honey. Wee Volunteer Musters was drawn to the scene most keenly, the glory of battle as fought in Nelson’s time being his greatest hope.

  As they pulled across the bay Mr Earle reclined easy as an admiral, and continued philosophical: ‘Why,’ he spouted, ‘the children of Love are more naturally and properly the heirs of a man’s inheritance than the unwished-for consequence of dull conjugal duty.’ Hrrumph to that, noted Covington, knowing it was Earle’s way of saying he would spike a maid ere midnight, and damn the consequences.

  As they docked Covington asked Musters if he was a-coming with him, but Musters bade him curt farewell in his piping voice, and leapt into the Samarang’s boat among other boys, and was forthwith taken over to mingle with his gods.

  ‘Where to now?’ the shipmates asked, jostling each other, singing, ‘Once before we fill, and once before we light,’ and telling each other, ‘Long may your big jib draw,’ and other low boasts about the night they had coming upon them, when they would get themselves drunk and dance the matrimonial polka. They knocked Covington around the head and called him a dog’s pizzle, but he allowed them to do as they wished, even to lifting him up and tossing him in the air while Augustus Earle paced alongside making his gap-toothed grin. They linked arms and hauled through crowds that were busy tossing bladders filled with water, which hit them, not Covington, putting the lads and Earle in a foul temper with all natives. It was there, between the water-front and the upper town, that Covington contrived to lose them at a wrong turn, and found himself alone with his Polly. ‘Seek and thou shalt find,’ said the scriptures. So Covington set forth on the next adventure of his life, from which there would be no turning back.

  He was not alone, exactly, for this was a night when slaves ran free all over the town. As Covington slipped between hosts of shadows he was grabbed by strangers whose fingers traced the lumpy ridge of his nose and whose thumbs dented the dimple of his chin in wondrous regard. Once, easy friendship would have grown from such prods. But Covington had no patience that evening. None either for the pleasures advertised dog-cheap at the door of every cunney-warren, where maids stood ‘in cuerpo’ as was said, with their gowns falling open. Any foreign sailor they enticed was called John, and so Covington was called John Corona, meaning Crown, for his big pleasant head.

  He lowered his chin and passed into the night. The air was thick as smoke. Lightning lit the heavens. At the far back of the town (high above a wild forest, as he was to learn) he was sent cowering into a stone doorway by a great rainstorm. The drops were big as silver eggs, breaking with a splash. There was nowhere else to go. Covington heard rapid guitar sounds, and found that where he stood was entrance to a donkey stable. Within, a quick-time was made that dinned his ears, out-sounding the deluge and setting his pulse racing.

  The place was lit by lanterns. All around, some standing, some with legs up on rough benches, were gangs of mulatto youths wearing bandannas, loose shirts and piratical pantaloons. They bade Covington welcome, and one he saw played a small four-stringed guitar like a ukulele, and one rattled a hand drum, and one tapped with a stick, and one had the face of a pug-dog: and that was the one who sang; and she was the ugliest wench Covington ever saw; but he must have been bewitched, because the voice that welled from her made his chest swell and his eyes water as if he knew all love in that instant, and would every time she groaned her passion. She was a dwarf who minted gold with every hard note she pushed with her breath, and between rounds drank from a goatskin of vinho sangorino. She said that her name was Leza, meaning beauty, a word Covington knew from belleza in the Español; and cocked her nose in the air with proud and ridiculous defiance as she spoke, for a beauty she was not, and never had been. Her ankles were thick and her bare feet stood flat on the floor like a hippopotamus’s, and her thumbs were double-jointed and very long-nailed.

  Covington experienced a longing to dance, to forget his life in its former part, and give welcome to the next, yet he soon found, if he dared essay a step with any but her, that this Leza came seeking him out, calling him John Corona�
�� and grumbling at him as if he had done her special injury. She drew him to her side as if she would own him; and he swore from the way she looked at him that her songs had grown to be about him.

  Covington did not like her game. It made him combative. One of the youths began to glare at him and mutter harm. It seemed Covington had displaced a favourite, the boy who played the cava-quin-ho, which name they gave to their wailing ukulele.

  Some time in the night Covington pulled his Polly Pochette from under a bench and played English airs. The gang laughed at his music and Leza spat. He found resin for his bow. He blew up a storm of notes to tempt their regard, and still they laughed, and rudely talked among themselves. But in a short while Covington hit upon a tender note; Leza made response with her vocal cords and sounded it too; it seemed they made it together; she rolled an eye, her throat shook like a string, and Covington’s Polly pierced the gloom with a note she had never made before. Here was a strange coupling for you, as in like manner they played one instrument, Her Ugliness with her voice, Covington with his Polly-Meow. Dancers went past in close embrace; Leza moaned; there were shadows against the walls, and the vinho went round more times than Covington remembered. Then he knew not who he was, nor where, nor what hour it was.

  Except that when, with a clatter, his Polly fell loose from his arms, he knew himself drunk as a rolling fart. He had had his fill of the fetid air and wanted to clear his nostrils, but was he allowed to leave? Ninepence to nothing he was. The singing showed him love, both sides of the coin. Leza had a grip on his waist like a bear’s, and a breath as bad. Covington had scant Portuguese but understood the words of her songs too well: they spoke of jealousy and rage, and he was her chosen one, and he would have none of it, and so he gave her a kick in the haunch that daresay inflamed her passion to hatred. ‘Lua na testy munha,’ she sang, which meant the moon was her only companion.

  Covington saw the glint of a cutlass and was flung from the donkey palace, marched to the head of a ravine and bucketed in a tremendous roaring rainstorm. From there he was given a push. A pit opened under him. Struck a farewell blow of metal he went sliding down a muddy slope. Broken-toothed laughter followed, then faded.

  For now, the town of Bahia was gone, swallowed into the no-place above. A bolt of lightning hissed. Covington’s legs jerked and his arms flailed, and he swallowed much mud. He tumbled one hundred feet.

  To his surprise, when he stopped rolling, he heard small birds twittering in a forest, and saw through the mist the greyness of morning.

  Covington had been struck on the forehead and bled a trickle. His pocket violin had her bridge broken and strings awry, but was otherwise intact. He huddled her to him and promised repair. The rain stopped and cloud lifted away from the trees in misty patches. The sun came over a rise and smacked him in the eyes. ‘Hey ho,’ he whistled, ‘what am I to do?’ Laugh, for what else was there to do in the pit of fortune?

  He strung his breeches on a bush and waited for them to dry. He bathed in a nearby stream that amazed him with its many clam shells, all pearly within. Spotted flowers were everywhere on the forest floor, and ropes of vines. He could not have been distant from the Beagle but had never been so far inland on any of his earlier voyaging. It felt like another world, a better and a stranger one. His Polly sounded dull and damp when he plunked her in his lap, but Lord, she had known worse. Covington fought battle with a giant mosquito, and won.

  He craned his neck. Bahia stood as distant from his hopes as poop deck stood from topgallant forecastle, or a boneyard stood from the House of Lords. But would that ever discourage him? Fixing his eyes upwards he gave thanks for life, and saw through a gap in the trees his fall-marks streaked from ledge to ledge. There was no trail back the way he had come. When he tried to re-ascend he slithered down again.

  He was late returning and knew he was up for a flogging. But what matter, he thought, still somewhat dizzy, ‘Let me conspire with fate or die in a devil’s nightcap.’ He returned to the stream and cooled himself in the shallows. His head cleared. He put a feather in his Phipps’s hat, that had half-melted in the rain, and with a strip of vine wove a necklace of small flowers. He was filled with a bubbling bravado, finding joy in everything, even to a leech that sucked his ankle of bad blood and swelled to the size of a chestnut. He cleaned his fingernails with a split shell that he tucked in his waistband, took up his broken Polly and wandered a muddy, meandering path through the deeps of the forest. He gave thought to the idea that Brazil might become his home in preference to a flogging.

  Thus dreaming of estates where he would keep slaves, but in kindly comfort, selecting females for his use, Covington went on for a time; when, rounding a bend, he heard loud gunshot echoing through trees, and winced, thinking it was aimed in his direction. But then through the woods he saw a figure coming, and lo—and to a great laughter welling inside him—it resolved itself into the spectacle of Mr Midshipman King, jaunty as a fresh cheese.

  Covington ducked down to hide himself from an unwanted encounter and planned to stay there, hunched as a stoat, when a pigeon flapped at his feet, stunned but other wise uninjured. Covington’s spirit overcame him. He gathered the creature into his hands, sprang up full square to show himself in a column of hazy sunlight, making himself, as it were, into a vision of the kind Mr Earle delighted rendering in water paints—the English sailor ashore in a forest clearing, clad somewhat in the native fashion.

  King spluttered, ‘Covington? What in the name of Zeus?!’

  Covington could not restrain himself, but cackled, and threw the bird up to deny King his prey. As the bird gave a few determined flaps King at close range raised his blunderbuss and let fly with fearsome accuracy. Powder stung Covington’s nostrils and the report made a ringing in his ears. Of the bird there was little more to tell: when the smoke cleared there were only a few floating feathers.

  King congratulated himself as a great huntsman might, by pounding his chest. ‘Thank you, Covington, what sport! Say we taught that bird to fly!’

  Only then was Covington aware of a second figure traipsing from the side bushes with an armful of greenery. King pointed at Covington as he scrambled to his feet, ‘Boom-boom!’ and their gent—for it was he—greeted Covington oddly:

  ‘Levar flor! Levar flor!’ he muttered, very red in the face. Covington was dumb-foozled. Here was the man who had fingered Covington’s scalp; who saw Covington every day within the small compass of their walnut shell; but who mistook Covington for a peon of the place.

  ‘¿Que?’ Covington responded, a vicious repartee in his head.

  ‘Flor … levar flor … flowers … carry to pueblo … to town …’

  ‘Darwin, you’re a nincompoop,’ chortled King. ‘Look what he carries—a fiddle!’

  The gent laid his seed pods and branchlets on the ground in a tumble of green. ‘Too much, too many,’ he grunted, then straightened and met Covington’s eye. ‘You?’

  Covington raised his hat: ‘Aye.’

  ‘Ah, yes, how could I forget?’ he puffed, his phrasing as delicate as if he had said lumpy noggin, and then: ‘What brings you to the forest, sailor?’

  ‘Alone,’ interposed King—it being against Capt’s orders to venture ashore without companions in foreign ports.

  ‘I wish I could easily tell you,’ Covington answered. ‘For I was set upon by a gang and pushed over a cliff.’

  ‘Is it such a dangerous town? I had not thought so.’

  ‘Covington is a rogue,’ said King. ‘You must not believe a word he tells you.’

  Covington bowed, crimping his annoyance. ‘And you must believe your ha’penny is good silver,’ he thought to himself.

  Darwin studied Covington and Covington studied Darwin in return. This was in effect their first meeting. It would ever be Covington’s pride to cloak dependence on good opinion by sending his glance back unflickering.

  ‘He’s cut,’ said King.

  ‘I am sober,’ said Covington.

  ‘You ha
ve a nasty wound,’ said Darwin, and fingered Covington’s temple, finding a tender place where skin peeled open. ‘I loathe to do this,’ he added aside to King as if Covington had not jug-ears to listen, and then performed a rough bandaging on a gouge that had not bothered Covington at all, using a roll of cotton or tow kept in his rectangular basket that bore the sickly smell of putrefaction.

  Covington spluttered his thanks: ‘Sir …’

  ‘It is nothing,’ said he. ‘Now find your way to the ship, taking care not to stumble.’

  Words stuck in Covington’s throat. He wanted volumes to speak out what was in him. He knew in his heart it boiled down to a plea: Know me.

  ‘Mr D?’

  Darwin swung back on Covington, smiling to hear a nickname coined so unaffectedly. ‘Follow the pathway, take the fork by the mulatto’s farm, where they keep spotted pigs and grow mango trees. Understand what I say?’

  ‘Sir,’ Covington almost pleaded, still trying to get something out that choked him and surprised him by its occurrence in his heart.

  ‘Yes?’ with puzzled impatience. ‘What else, lad?’

  Must Covington remind the young gent of what he’d found in him by kneading his nut by the ship’s rail? Friendliness, helpfulness, adhesiveness, amativeness, just to name four prominences that might yet determine the direction of Covington’s life.

  ‘I am well,’ Covington said.

  ‘Yes, Sailor Covington, excellent, you are well. You are bared to the bone by a cutlass, but you are well. Indeed you are well. Now along with you!’

  Covington saw he must fling himself home to the gent if there was any hope in heaven.

  ‘I cannot,’ Covington said.