Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  As surely as every good thing must end, their secret could not last. Thinking themselves most alone and far from their camping grounds, Jane and Edward lay side by side on a sandy strand, bared to the sun, their sport ended and sweet fatigue overtaken them. Eyes closed, she dreamt of their rescue, sailing off to Virginia and marrying Chard to start a family there. But a shadow broke across their forms and startled her with its coolness. Looking up she saw at once it was a man, the sun bursting in a corona behind his head, and she did not know his name until he spoke hers. Waters, out looking for cahows, had chanced upon them. “Is it John?” he asked. “Long John Long?”

  She curled to a ball to hide and cover her nakedness. “It is Jane,” she said, “and please sir, I entreat you turn your eye.”

  “Do mine own eyes lie? Zounds, a woman, is she? I have not seen a woman so since the whores of Woolwich.” He plucked a shell from the sand and threw it at Chard, striking him on the leg. “And you, Edward, like mine own brother, only more selfish. How long have you kept this to yourself, you mottled dog?”

  Chard sat up and blinkered his eyes from the sun. “Envy does not become you, Robert.” A weary resignation colored his words and gestures. “Unfurl your sails, brother, for I seen your mainmast is a-ready risen. What’s mine is yours. Heave to.”

  It happened so quickly that she had only time to cry one No, and Waters was upon her. Lying beneath the ramming man, she turned her face to Mr. Chard to plead her cause and was horrified to see his intense stare and pleasure at studying the spectacle unfolding within arm’s reach. After Waters had finished, he rolled off her and kicked the trousers from his ankles. The three stretched out under the summer sky like sails set out to dry, thoughtful of the strange fate that had brought them thus together. The men did not notice that Jane was in tears, and Waters only said, “We must never tell Mr. Carter,” whereon he and Chard laughed like schoolboys ripe with mischief.

  And so they continued that June to make three out of two. At times, it would be as it once was, she and Chard together, and at other times, Mr. Waters would visit to take his pleasure, and still other times, they would all three go off together in ways she could not fathom until the men explained their intricate plans. More shocking still, the acts encouraged Chard and Waters to visit each other without her present, as she had heard men long at sea were said to do, tho she could not bear their seeming preference, for Jane found herself loving one and then the other, wishing one away, longing for the other’s return. In her feelings, they were two halves of one man. Whereas Mr. Chard was still gentle in private and coarse in public, Mr. Waters was most kind in public but like a wild man when they made the beast with two backs in private stolen hours. Waters’s passion excited her, and she recollected his promise when in the cave, and Chard, tho oft cruel, had the advantage of being first, and thus, in some way she could not reconcile even unto herself, best.

  In those rare moments when neither man bothered her, she wished for some way to make one man out of two and sometimes no man at all, for tho she knew not any before leaving England, Jane felt certain that moral law concluded sharing her bed was wrong, and moreso, she found herself preferring the other when one was upon her, missing the absent man, and thinking him the better of the two. She feared as well the ire of God for her fornication, and more than once resolved to confess her sins and rid herself of the men. She sought out Mr. Carter and found him alone on the beach, Bible in hand, and the other two men gone, off tupping one another, she supposed. In a casual manner, she approached and begged him to walk with her upon the strand so that they might talk, for some heavy thing rested in the heart. The mastiff Crab gamboled in the surf ahead of them, barking at the crashing waves, and fetching a stick thrown on the waters. Carter clutched the book in his crossed hands behind his back and walked like a great heron, long-stalked, his gaze fixed upon the ground, as gentle as a vicar gone a-courting, and Jane struggled to keep pace, her thoughts awhirl in her head, her eyes darting to the man’s inscrutable face, to the dog playing in the sea, to the strange visions present in memory of her two seducers. Where to begin my prologue, she thought, how best to tell the tale? Thanking Carter for his confidence, she leapt ahead, rehearsing the dark secret, wondering how he might react to her unsexing; would he understand and treat her as Ravens had, or would he, too, fall upon her like a savage?

  As she parted her lips to speak, Jane heard the dog bark instead and then come bounding from the sea, wagging its stumpy tail in circles as if to tell them something as dogs are wont to do by primitive means. Crab raced back to the object of its consternation, speaking loudly and with great excitement, and there, wedged within a trio of large stones, what appeared to be a dead man, tho they could not see to tell at first. As Carter and Jane made their way, wild surmises flitted across her senses: perhaps one of them, fallen from a boat or wandering on some hilltop and tumbling down, had drown’d in the ocean, and she feared it might be Waters, hoped it would be Chard, but just as she speculated, both men appeared from the opposite direction, running on the same shore, alerted by the dog’s alarums, so that all four arrived at the same spot more or less at the same time, and of the four, Chard seemed to know at once what had stopped in the crevasse. He hallooed them all and danced a jig upon the sand. “Rich, rich, I’m rich. It is the amber grease spat up from a whale.”

  Big as a man and heavy, too, the white-gray lump of ambergris loosed itself with much effort from the mariners who dragged it from the water. Weighing about thirteen stone, the chunk looked like the torso of a giant, sans head or limbs, and caught as well among the rocks were several smaller pieces. Laughing and shouting the while, the men danced with one another, and Jane could not resist the temptation to taste a small pebble of the stuff, but it were most foul, and she spat out the speck in her hands.

  “Hah!” Carter said. “The whale can swallow Jonah, but Jonah cannot swallow the whale.”

  Offended by the tone of his quip, she popped the nugget into her mouth, chewed it twice, and swallowed. The men cheered her derring-do, and Carter clapped her on the back. “You must know, sirrah, that you have et more than a whale, but a small fortune.”

  With the sharp end of a stick, Chard drew some numbers in the sand. “If memory serves, the Virginia Company offered fourteen shillings fourpence for a troy ounce, and we must have enough for two thousand English sterling. Rich, rich, I tell you, rich. The king of the Bermudas—”

  “Aye, and so are we all,” said Carter. “The four kings.”

  Jane thought of her mother back in England making do with three shillings sixpence each week for herself and four daughters. They would live like queens.

  “All we need do,” said Waters, “is hie this stuff to England …”

  His words shimmered in the sunshine, the blue waves never more endless, the horizon never more distant, the ache for home never more acute. Jane thought of The Moon and the Seven Stars, her mother fending off the men who supped there, the smell of ale and mutton, her little sisters underfoot, the youngest surely walking and talking now; did the child even know her tall sister gone to the New World? And what good is the New World and its riches if no ship would ever come?

  On his feet, Chard played the tyrant. “Hove, you dirty bastards. We must find some hiding place to store our treasure, and should Somers or some other English rescue come—or worse, the ungallant Spaniard—we will smuggle the goods aboard. This is mine—our discovery—and not the Virginia Company’s. Come, dogs, and make haste, let’s carry off the fruits of this isle and keep the bounty, for by this amber grease we shall one day be covered in gold.”

  They found a dark, dry cave in which to stow the whale’s perfume, and there it remained through the long summer, tho not undisturbed. Once a week or more oft, they made an expedition to assure no harm had come to it nor any man alone had dared move the ambergris. Always in the company of one or the other, and no man alone, for each suspected his fellow castaways, and none could be trusted. Edward Chard thought of little
else, and when he spoke of the treasure, said “I” and “me” when he intended “we” and “us,” or “mine” when “ours” was preferred. As well, he seemed to have forgot Jane and took no interest in their dalliance, nor offered so much as a kiss, an embrace, a telling look, or even one kind word. As the fog hides the morning, the idea of riches obscured his nature and rolled o’er him until he had but vanished. He did not notice, as time wore on, how Jane drifted to Waters or how Waters had become enchanted with Long Jane. As she lay unbound, she became more bound to him.

  “When we are safely home and our fortune secure, I shall make an honest woman of you, for methinks I love you.” They nestled in a bower of palm fronds, sweet talking their dreams. Jane rested her head upon Robert’s arm and stared at the moon awink in the August sky. “We will sail back here if you like and build the finest house and be lord and lady of these islands when an English colony is here set. You shall have a proper bed—long enough for you to stretch head to toe—and a kitchen, too, and perhaps some Moorish girl to help govern our children, for I wish at least four of ’em, each taller than the next, and they shall not want for anything. We’ll have old Carter marry us, should he become a vicar from carrying the Good Book so.”

  She sighed at the prospect and draped her bare leg over his. “And I can bring my mother to live with us here and make a home in paradise for my sisters, too.”

  “Aye, bring the whole Long clan, and we shall make a forest of ourselves. We are rich, my girl, beyond the dream of richness.”

  With a kiss, she sealed the matter. “Robert Waters, you are my secret love.”

  “Aye, and you mine.” He rolled off his back and lay atop her, a cracked smile on his face. “The boy who was a woman, and the woman who swallowed the whale.”

  Thus, many a happy hour they spent dreaming and plotting as the calendar turned awhile Mr. Chard chewed on how to get the ambergris—and himself—off the isle. Day by day he attended to the horizon, desperate for sail, and nights he took to building blazing fires on the shore lest any passing vessel creep by unnoticing. Admiral Somers had left behind a small fishing boat when the Patience and Deliverance departed, and Chard toyed with the notion of crafting a mast and cloth to sail the six hundred miles to Jamestown, but he dared not risk the treasure to the mercies of the Atlantic, not alone at least, and there was no one with whom he wished to share the voyage or the spoils. His speech grew thick with curses and in his temper, he lashed out to man and beast and God at the cruelty of fate and circumstance. He would feign to kick old Crab when he could, tho dared not chance a bite in the ankle. To Mr. Carter he was most uncivil, tho his cruelty was benign against his holy shield. Chard saved his most bitter rancor for the two lovebirds who had come to exclude him from their intimacies. For Waters, nothing but sneering disdain as Cain looking upon Abel, and for Jane, most deep contempt, her mere presence an itch, a burning coal in his breeches. Vats of palm wine he brewed and drank alone, and many a morning, he would be found muttering to himself to untangle a riddle that plagued his addled brain. Too late he realized he had given up one prize to speculate upon another.

  On Michaelmas, being a day to celebrate the harvest and eat the fatted goose, they proposed to Chard an excursion to Smith Island, so it was named, to find fit repast for their evening supper, a turkle perhaps, or a few cahows. The isle was also the spot whereon Mr. Carter had once found an old Spanish gold coin, and Chard accepted at once on the chance that more might be buried there. Off they set in the little fishing boat, Chard and Waters at the oars, Jane turned in the bow to face them, her collar loosed, the day fine and the sea calm. Their excursion reminded her of happier times when the three had been genuine friends. Beneath the bright sun, Waters broached the subject that was torturing them all. “Do you ever think, Mr. Chard, had I not happed upon the ambergris that our present enmity may have been avoided? For it seems the promise of riches, sir, hath caused a great change unto you.”

  At once Chard drew in his oar and stopped rowing, obliging Waters to do the same lest they commence traveling in circles. The little boat bobbed on the swell as Chard fixed his glare upon him. “You? You happed upon the whale? ’Twas I what saw it first.”

  “Come now, Edward, let us be friends,” Waters implored. “We have good news to share this morn—”

  “You cannot say so. I found the amber grease, and by rights, I own the whale’s share of the whale.”

  “Jane and I, we have decided, we shall be wed—”

  “Mine!” he shouted. “And what’s this, wed? You cannot have her, Robert, nor the money either. I found her out first, just as I discovered the treasure.”

  “Mr. Chard, please,” Jane said. “We are in love.”

  “Love, is it? Love? You are mine, too, Jane Long, and I’m ne’er done with you. How dare you lay claim to what is mine, girl or amber grease.” With the butt end of the oar, he poked Waters in the ribs.

  “Leave off,” Waters shouted. He fingered the knife belted at his hip. “Once more, and I’ll cut your t’roat.”

  Leaning forward in the boat, Jane set it rocking upon the waves. “Good sirs, I entreat you.”

  “Entreat me not, thou jot. You are no better than a thief and a whore, you scarescrow.” He spat in the ocean. “He may have you, all I care, but that fortune is rightly mine, as I saw it first, damn you.”

  She reached to lay a hand upon his knee and calm him, but then drew back. “A quarter is yours, Mr. Chard. And half belongs to us.”

  The oar struck her so quickly and surely that Jane had no moment to raise a hand in defense. The blade of the wood hit the bone of her brow and split the skin like an overripe melon, a string of blood dribbling from the wound, and the blow knocked her upright where she sat. ’Tis said that in the moment of death, all of life passes through one’s final thoughts, and she did think in that split second of her mother with the youngest brat at the breast, thought of how she grabbed the wheel and saved the Sea Venture from drowning in the houricane, thought of Ravens smiling o’er her like a father, the men and women waving good-bye from the decks of the Patience and Deliverance, thought of Chard’s first kiss and the dream of life with Waters, all these contained in one moment, itself cleaved in two and both halves split further still, for what measure of time cannot be thus divided? There was no pain but the shock of the clock suddenly stopped as Long Jane Long slipped from the rowboat and into the Atlantic, and the world turned upside down, the sky now below her head, the waves above her feet. When she opened her mouth to cry out to the men in the boat that now looked as if it were beneath her sinking body, “Come save me,” she drew in the whole sea to her lungs, felt herself swole and pressed for air, as if both men and Carter, too, and the whole Virginia Company were upon her chest, and hoped some great fish would swim by and swallow her, the Lord save her, in the hour of her death, as she quit this world by one man’s fit of anger and by his most grievous envy.

  By the end of her story, she had trapped us in the pathos of our own imaginations. The curtains framing the narrow window stirred a breeze redolent with salt-heavy sea, smelling of fish fries and steamed spiced crabs and oyster shells baking in the heat, though the sunrise, judging by the bruised color of the sky, was an hour or two away. Water gurgling in the sink broke the peace, and I peered into the bowl to find a little rowboat circling in a whirlpool that soon sucked down all: boat, water, a small island complete with miniature palm trees and what appeared to be a barking dog the size of a flea. Craning my neck and placing my head in the bowl, ear turned toward the drain, I thought I heard the distant refrains of some sea shanty, the voices thinning into a dreadful emptiness. The disappearance of Crab, in particular, filled me with a profound sorrow of the vicissitudes of fate that spare nothing, the innocent and the guilty swept away in one tide. This seems deeply unfair to me, an accident of design. The others huddled together on the porcelain edge of the bathtub, Dolly and the old man on either side of Long Jane, their arms draped over her wide shoulders, offering comfo
rt as she quietly sobbed, her chin resting on her chest.

  “But it was an accident,” I said. “Probably.”

  They lifted their heads. Three sets of eyes stared accusingly awaiting explanation.

  “That is, he—Chard—was probably aiming for Mr. Waters and hit her instead. Clearly, Waters made him lose his temper. He didn’t mean to …”

  Jane glared as if I had just fractured her skull with an oar. A thin red scar appeared on her forehead, pulsing like an artery, and then abruptly disappeared. She bent her head and thick coils of slubbed hair hung like ropes toward the floor. I silently withdrew the manslaughter defense and offered no new theories, and we again retreated into the dark thoughts of our own minds. After a while, the old man asked, “Out of curiosity, what ever became of the fine young man who beat the girl to death?”

  “Two years they waited for rescue, and only through the intercession of Mr. Carter did they not murder each other over the ambergris. He hid the gun the admiral had left behind and hid their knives and made them swear oaths after the ‘accident’ and gave them promise of salvation. If not in this world, then the next. All hope had been but abandoned when they espied the redcross sail of an English ship on a fine day in July of 1612. ’Twas the Plough, with sixty on board under the hand of Governor Moore, sent by the Virginia Company to make a settlement in the Bermudas from those survivors of the Somers expedition who had made it safely to Jamestown. To those on board, the three men were a strange sight. Nearly naked, brown as Indians, bedraggled, and hairy as apes, the mariners were a kind of legend, living proof of the grace of God.”