Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  “So what if I did?” I rubbed my head. The constant headache had grown insufferably worse.

  “Now, look here, sir,” he said, snatching up the Herald. “You’ve gone and crumpled the sheet all up. Someone else might wish to read that, you know.”

  “You’re right.” I took the paper back and smoothed it out on the tabletop. It didn’t get all too flat, but it was enough to mollify him. When he’d gone away I reread a passing mention in the closing paragraph of a reprint of one of Commodore Gaswell’s letters to the Navy Board:

  “Lost. Sloop ‘Breeze,’ of 8 guns, Lt. Wickett. At Sea the 14th ultimo, her People presumed drowned.”

  SEVEN

  My letters to the Navy Board went unanswered. Catching the packet to Washington got me out from under Phillip’s eye, but waiting two hours for an interview with the Secretary, only to see his back as he stepped out, didn’t do much for my sense of well-being.

  I buttonholed a passing clerk. “Did Mr. Stoddert get my note, sir?”

  He reared his head back and give me a look like he was of a mind to crush me with his brains. “He’s a very busy man, sir,” he said. “Much too busy, I expect, to bother with an unemployed midshipman.”

  I did not kick him. I smiled at him. Sunshine and bluebirds weren’t in it. I had seen the Secretary, and I guessed I’d probably better accustom myself to a sternmost view of him if I wanted to get my career underway again. In the meantime I needed to find me some productive employment that wouldn’t take me too far afield of the navy’s fold.

  There wasn’t any lack of privateers coming and going on Chesapeake Bay. Two even lay right there across the Potomac at Alexandria, but they both of them was shabby tubs with dirty officers and roisterous crews, and I steered clear of them. I found four more at Hampton Roads. They were fast-looking Virginia pilot-boat schooners, sharp at the bow and with deeply raked masts; but two were outward bound when I got there, and a third was getting underway. So I went aboard of the fourth one and said I’d like to see the master.

  Josiah Pratt, master and one-eighth owner of the six-gun Luther, was happy to see me when I mentioned that I might be induced to invest in the proper venture. Then I asked him did he need a mate as well.

  He brought his eyebrows together like bull caterpillars at rutting time. “Hell no.”

  “Say, listen,” I said, “I got to eat and I ain’t shipping before the mast. I been an acting first lieutenant, and I can handle all the things you don’t care to handle.” His eyebrows was raring up for another go, so I said, “What about supercargo? I can keep books and find the buyers for whatever we pick up while we’re cruising. I’ve done all that for my brother, Phillip Graves in Baltimore.”

  “So you’re one o’ them Graves, are you? And if you’re so itchy to get to sea again, why don’t he make you master in one of his bottoms?”

  “I like a scrap, but he ain’t much in the fighting line.”

  He stroked his chin. “That might be one way of putting it, I reckon. You like to fight, do you?”

  “Yes, sir, I purely do.”

  He shook his head. “I tell you, son, I ain’t needing a mate. But maybe as supercargo, as you say, with a proper share of course. And how much was you figuring on investing?”

  “We picked up a fair amount of gun and head money when I was in the old Rattle-Snake,” I said. “I got me eighty-seven dollars and fifty-three cents left. Cash money.”

  “Oh, cash money, hey?” says he. His eyebrows commenced to gouging and biting each other like a couple of backwoods hoo-roarers. “All eighty-seven dollars and fifty-three cents of it in bullion, hey? Well, well. Son, I tell you what,” says he, “your reputation precedes you. I read about you in the papers, and I jawed about you, too. So did a lot of the fellows round here. And it’s out of respect to your handsome behavior in that fight with the picaroons in the Bight of Léogâne that I ain’t laughed in your face and throwed you in the drink yet. But I got to be straight with you. Normal buy-in is more in the order of several hundred dollars a share. And I tell you what. When they talk about you, they call you ‘Little Matty’ Graves, and just between you and me, son? You’re a mite puny. Now, I’m sure you’re a holy terror—your reputation precedes you, don’t be taking it the wrong way, now—but privateersmen is a roughand-tumble lot and I don’t expect you’ve much experience keeping discipline with your fists. No, son, I think you’d best stick to the navy.”

  And with that he showed me where the side was.

  “There ain’t nothing for it, then, I guess,” I whispered to myself. The Insurgent frigate lay nearby, splendid in her new yellow paint and sparkling brass. I sent a note to Patrick Fletcher, her new commander, who surprised me by sending a midshipman and a boat to fetch me aboard.

  Fletcher sat in his cabin, unshaven and shirtsleeved and looking lost behind a desk adrift with documents. “As it happens,” he said, “the Insurgent is short a midshipman. But a friend of a friend up the bay has a son that’s in need of a berth. He better get here soon, though. I got a fair wind and plenty of shot and powder.”

  “Well, sir, I don’t guess you would’ve been so kind as to send a reefer for me if you wasn’t considering me for master’s mate.”

  “That’s so,” he said, smiling for the first time. “I allow I wanted to set my eyes on you. Natural curiosity.” And then he sat there looking at me with his face all closed up, as if to say he’d seen me and reckoned one look was enough to satisfy him.

  “May I wait on you tomorrow, sir, in case your boy don’t show?”

  “Certainly you can wait on me tomorrow.” He picked up a handful of documents and shook them at me, as if to show me what a true burden was. “And the next day and the next after that, too, if you want, and you may take a long walk off a short pier as well, if you care to.” The lines in his face softened a little. He set the papers back on his desk and straightened the edges between his palms. “But should you call again in a week, you’ll have your answer. No, you needn’t show me your credentials. Our mutual friend Peter Wickett, rest his troubled soul, often spoke well of you in his letters. ‘Steady in action,’ he used to say, ‘a reliable navigator, an amiable companion that knows his letters from Agamemnon to Zeus.’ Now tell that boy that brought you that he’s to take you ashore.”

  What a wonderful world this is, and all things in it! I chuckled as Fletcher’s mid fetched me back to Norfolk, and I laughed all the way up to the Connaught House, where I was staying. With a friend in common with the captain, especially a dead friend, surely the berth was mine; indulging myself in a long dinner and half a bottle of wine, which became a whole bottle and then another, I tried but didn’t entirely succeed in disguising my joy. And why should I disguise it? I was aware of meeting some amiable fellows, and calling for whiskey, and then I disremember what happened for a while. Then there was a midshipman who looked like Dick. He talked just like him, too, speaking so mild and sensible and all-fired reasonable while tugging on my coat sleeve that I hauled off and popped him one. He swam out of my sight, and I forgot all about him. The amiable fellows laughed, and I laughed, and we got to singing songs and carrying on.

  If I was under the hatches from drink the next morning, my joy held it at bay. I had completely almost forgotten my headache and the muddy boots of the two men who’d also rented shares in the bed, when the landlord interrupted my breakfast. He held out a letter that looked like it had been tromped on a time or three.

  “What’s this?” says I.

  “What that fellow from the Insurgent brung.”

  “What fellow from the Insurgent?”

  “The one that wanted you to step along, but you wouldn’t go with him without he had a dram with you, and then another, and then you wouldn’t go at all. When he pressed the matter, you blacked his eye for him.”

  “No! I didn’t.” I looked at the back of my hands. The middle knuckle on my right hand was split, but a sailor’s hands are always banged up. “Did I?”

  “You did, s
ir. And you forgot the letter and left it on the floor. I guessed you’d want it come morning, though, and here ’tis.”

  I took a walk along the waterfront before I read that letter. A western breeze blew just strong enough to wrinkle the surface of the roadstead and hound the few fleecy clouds out into the Atlantic.

  The Insurgent had left her moorings. Obviously Fletcher had completed his stores and had taken his ship farther out into the roadstead in case some new recruit figured on absconding with his enlistment bounty. Any prudent captain would do that.

  I strode along the Elizabeth River past the fort till I come to Tanner’s Point at the north end of town, where I could see farther out into the roadstead and up the James River. No Insurgent. I begun to grow alarmed. I couldn’t see east, though, out into the Chesapeake, where there might be a hundred ships and vessels at any one time. A broad slough stood between me and the north end of the peninsula, and I had to pick up my heels and run off a good deal of southing before I could cut back across the neck of land and fetch the Chesapeake side. I sloshed and staggered across the low ground till I come up against the bay, but I already seen all I needed to. Away on the horizon, a good five miles out and halfway to the Capes, the Insurgent was shaking out her topgallants and royals as she stood out to sea.

  I went back to the inn and read Fletcher’s letter in the soothing dimness of the taproom:

  Fri., Aug. 8, 1800

  U.S. Frigate Insurgent

  Hampton Roads

  Dear Mr. Graves,

  My regrets at the haste of this Message, but Tide and Wind are fair and I am to proceed to the West India Is at once. My way-ward Midshipman having come aboard, but another having gone ashore, I find I can accommodate you should you come at once.

  Yr. obd’t servant, &c

  Patk. Fletcher, capt.

  p.s. To speed you on your way and that you might sooner wish him joy, I send this by way of yr. new and former Ship mate Mr. Towson.

  EIGHT

  When I got back to Baltimore I was fit to be hanged. Slogging through the August afternoon out to Phillip’s house in Fayette Street was like trudging around inside a dead turtle. The sky was the color of a boiled lung, and the pewter locket slipping around on its chain beneath my shirt weighed on me like an overripe conscience.

  The heat was worse indoors. I could feel my innards baking as I wandered through the rooms upstairs and down in search of someplace cool. At last I found Constance and Greybar out in the kitchen yard with the pig. Greybar had stretched himself out along a narrow strip of shade along the fence; the pig lay with his head in a draggle of kitchen scraps in a patch of mud in the corner by the alley, watching Constance through little red-rimmed eyes as she shoved clothes around a steaming cauldron with a long stick.

  “Hello, Greybar,” I said. He flicked his tail sleepily. “Hello, Constance. What for’s that pig watching you so?”

  “I imagine ’tis the lard in the soap.” She swiped her forearm across her brow. Dark strands of damp hair hung down from her mobcap. “Smelling it makes him hungry.”

  “Pigs’re always hungry.”

  “So are boys, I find. Is thee hungry?”

  “Not particularly, thank’ee.”

  “That’s as well, as thy brother has not returned from the market—”

  “Half-brother.”

  “Half-brother or no, he is still thy brother.”

  Greybar sauntered over and rubbed against my leg till I scratched his head. Constance stirred her pot for a while.

  “Not that I am ungrateful for what the Lord provides,” she said, “but sometimes I think our pig eats better than we do.”

  “We’ll change that come hog-killin’ time.” I looked at the pig. He’d fallen asleep on his garbage. “I guess he’ll eat pretty good then.” I meant he would be good eating, you understand, but it was an undersized joke and she passed on it.

  “It won’t be cold enough for that till months yet,” she said. “I am glad I never named him.” She hoisted a shirt on the end of her stirring stick. “Is that clean?”

  “How would I know? I never b’iled a shirt in my life.”

  “Well, what makes thee think I have?” She slopped the shirt back in the cauldron and thumped it a bit with her stick. “Will thee stand there all day?”

  I looked around, but the back step was full up with baskets of wet clothes. “There ain’t no place to sit.”

  “I meant will thee help me.”

  “Sure I will.”

  “I should have asked direct, rather than assume thee wo—”

  “I said I’d do it.”

  “Will thee tie a line for to hang the shirts on?”

  “Didn’t I just say I would?”

  “The one Phillip did for me came down when I tried to use it, and now I’ve had to wash his shirts twice.”

  “I guess I know how to tie a knot.” I rigged her up a four-line clothes rack out of reach of the pig. I looked at her sweating over the cauldron and felt some disgusted with myself.

  “Connie, I repent of my anger.”

  “I know it,” she said; and before I knew what she was about, she had me twisting the water out of the clothes and draping them across the lines.

  “Say, Connie, ain’t you supposed to have a wringer?”

  She put her hands in the small of her back and stretched. Suddenly she laughed. “I suppose there must be one in the cellar,” she said. “I have never been down there, and when the girl left, she didn’t tell me where things were. But never thee mind about that. I shan’t burden thee with my troubles.”

  I laid a shirt out on the line. Little pink and green bubbles shone in it and the inside of the neck-band was dingy. I started to give it back to her, but then I thought if someone done it to me it’d make me sore. Besides, it was cleaner than it had been.

  “It’s no burden,” I said. “Is things really as bad as that, Connie?”

  Through the open kitchen door I heard the front door open and shut, and then men’s voices in the hall.

  “Here are the fellows who would know,” she said. “Why does thee not ask them?”

  There was a clomping of feet in the kitchen, and here was Phillip, smiling as he stepped wide with his long shanks to clear the baskets on the back step, paying them no mind except to avoid them as he called out, “See what I have brought!” In his hand he held a reticule filled with leafy summer stuff, and the smile died on his lips when he saw me.

  Behind him in the doorway stood a well-dressed gentleman farmer, taller than I remembered, and older. Like Phillip, he was bearded, with the mustache shaved, ropey in the neck and lean as jerky-meat in the arms and legs. His gray hair hung straight to his collar. He held his broad-brimmed hat in his hand, but I think it was only happenstance, as it wasn’t a usual posture for him. He looked at me the way he’d always looked at me, like I was a runt piglet and his sow was one tit short. I’d have knowed him if he was a hundred and twenty years old, and forty of them in the grave.

  “Hello, Father,” I said.

  Constance brought us tea in the downstairs parlor, like we were guests. She served it in the old chipped delftware service. I thought maybe we didn’t rate the silver set till I realized she’d probably sold it. She cut the piece of cake she’d brought into two pieces and put them on the blue and white plates.

  “No, thank’ee,” I said.

  “Suit thyself.”

  The old man dunked his cake into his tea and filled his mouth. “Light as a brick, Connie,” he said from around it. “You’ll excuse us now.”

  She topped off his cup and went to the kitchen. I heard Phillip say something about extravagance and vanity, and then she shut the door and I missed her reply. He came out a moment later and went upstairs. The old man ignored it, like it was flies buzzing. He stuffed his maw with another wad of cake and worked it down.

  “She’s a good ’un, your sister-in-law,” he said. “Phillip did well.”

  “I like her. This here’s the last of
the tea, I bet.”

  “There’s plenty of tea in the world, and more will come this way eventually. You’re a burden to your brother, Matthew.”

  I took a slow sip. It just about burned my lips off, but I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing it. “I haul my own freight,” I said. “I don’t guess we’d have eaten at all this week without I kicked in. That’s probably tomorrow’s breakfast you’re eating.”

  “That ain’t the kind of burden I mean.” He took the other piece of cake and engulfed that, too. A light snowfall of yellow crumbs drifted across the front of his vest. “I got a few letters from my old friend Cyrus Gaswell these past six months, but none from you. You must’ve run out of ink, I expect.”

  “How is the commodore?”

  “You tell me.” He brushed the crumbs off onto the floor. “You seen him more recent than I have.”

  “He’s throwed me over. He sent me and Dick Towson off to answer for Billy’s duel. I’m Captain Tingey’s man now, whether I like it or not. Which I don’t much.”

  He sloshed tea into his saucer and blew on it. “I’m surprised to hear Cyrus has throwed you to the lions. Are you sure you read him right?”

  “Tingey busted me back to midshipman and put me on the beach. Said I was free to ship out if I could find a captain to take me on.”

  “Ain’t what I asked.”

  “There it is anyway.”

  “Have you found a captain to take you?”

  “I have an idea of going out west.”

  He slurped from his saucer, holding it with his thumbs and first two fingers, with the other two sticking out on either side.

  I shrugged. “You’re right, I’m a burden to the family. I don’t understand how, but I sure feel it. I could make something of myself out west. I’m through with the service.”

  He nodded, like the way he did that time I told him I was going to go live on the moon. He’d asked how was I going to get there, and I’d told him I’d just wait till it got close enough and use a ladder.