Pirate Freedom

by Gene Wolfe

  Tomorrow I move to Holy Family. Fr. Wahl will come for me. I am all packed, except for this. New people and new duties, and farms and farm animals, which I know I will like. Yet tonight I find I cannot think about much of anything except Valentin and Francine, and the time I spent with them on Hispaniola.

  Valentin and Francine, dead in the cave.

  When we got back to the ship, Bouton had signed up three buccaneers and was proud of himself. I congratulated him like you have to do. Then I went into my cabin and sat looking out the window without seeing anything. When Novia tried to talk to me, I told her to go away, and by and by we put out without any orders from me.

  I sat there drinking rum for most of the night, I think. Not chugging it, just sipping it now and then. The long nine at my elbow was all the company I had, and all I wanted. When I had drunk half the bottle, I threw the rest into the sea and went to bed. I will not do anything like that tonight, although a lot of priests are hard drinkers, and Fr. Houdek hits the bottle now and then.

  But I feel like it.

  Is Holy Family any closer? I hope so. I have my plan worked out. Every detail. Soon-within a year, I think-the government will change.

  22

  The Vincente

  It was not time for us to meet up with Capt. Burt yet, so I told Rombeau we would split up and meet at Ile a Vache. (It means Cow Island.) I had heard it was a good place to careen a ship, and I wanted to have a look at the bottom of the Castillo Blanco, because there was one time when we scraped the bottom a little running from the Santa Lucia. A merchant at Tortuga had told me it would be a good place to sign up new men, too. There were quite a few buccaneers there, and the cattle had been shot over so much nobody could make much hunting them anymore.

  Rombeau and I flipped to see who would get the wind, and he won. He would head west and go around the Spanish end of Hispaniola, looking for prizes. I would head east and check out the western end of Cuba before going to Ile a Vache. To tell the truth I was glad I had lost, because I wanted to see Cuba again. I would have liked to go back to Habana if I could, but that was too far.

  That was a pleasant cruise in some ways, although it was not a lucky one. We stopped fishermen a few times. It was mostly to ask for information, but I always bought from them when they had anything, just to break the ice and show we were not out to rob them. That got us some nice fish and crabs, and especially turtles. There is no eating like a green turtle, in my experience. English sailors like Red Jack will not eat fish, but our Frenchmen had more sense, and we were mostly French. I had made Mahu our cook, and he and Ned pitched in like they had been born to it. Mahu said hippo was the best meat in the world, but I got him to admit that green turtle was almost as good.

  I have gone off writing about food tonight for two reasons. The first is that I am pastor of Holy Family now, and everybody around here grows food or raises it or both, so everybody is always talking about it-pigs, hams, home-cured bacon, chicken, tomatoes, preserves, and everything else. People bring pies and cookies to the rectory. It is nice of them, but there is too much. Fr. Wahl and I wish there was some way we could share it with poor families.

  The other is that it was right after a great dinner that somebody found the second body. I am just about sure it was the day we bought rock lobsters from a fisherman. Mahu had boiled them alive the way you have to, and we had cracked them for ourselves and doused them with salt butter and lime juice.

  We were just finishing up, when a guy who had gone down to get more butter came running back. The dead man was French, and that is all I remember about him now. He must have been one of the men we signed in Port Royal. I am almost certain that is right.

  It was after sundown, so there was no use carrying him up on deck, but I got more lanterns and had Pete come down and look at him. Novia came, too. Pete said the dead man had been strangled like the other.

  "Neck's broke, too, Cap'n. Neat job, that is. I hope the man that does for me does it equal good."

  Novia said, "How did he do that, Pete?"

  "Twisted it is all. No different than you'd wring the neck of a chicken. Wanted to make sure he was dead."

  I said, "He must be strong."

  "He is, sir. I could do it, but there's not a lot could."

  While I was still trying to think of a good way to ask the question I wanted to ask, Novia said, "How do you know you could, Pete?"

  "'Cause I've done it, ma'am. Hangin' don't always break the neck. If the drop's not enough, or he don't weigh enough, it won't. So what I did sometimes is break it myself, after. I ain't a man that likes to see folks suffer unless I'm goin' to get some good out it. Animals the same. I'll kill ' em an' eat 'em, you know I will. But I don't never kill 'em for fun, 'cept rats."

  Novia glanced at me and shook her head. I nodded, just a little bit. If Pete had killed them, he was the best actor in the world and we would never get him.

  I talked to everybody and got nowhere. There is no point in my writing much about that. Just about everybody had been up on deck eating. And everybody eating had been with a bunch of friends, all ready to swear he had never gone below. If this were one of those crime shows, it would be Novia or me, or maybe Bouton or Pete. It was not, this was real, and it was not any of us.

  When I had finished my first lobster, I had taken the wheel so that the man who had been steering could get a bite to eat. Novia had come with me, and she could not have done it anyway. She was not strong enough.

  Bouton had taken the wheel from me, and had been eating with me until I took it. The group he and I had been eating in, with him and a couple of others, was just in front of our toy quarterdeck. Okay, maybe somebody could have sneaked off-it was getting dark toward the end-but I was ready to swear nobody had. Novia did not think so either.

  What it came down to was that nobody-nobody in our crew, that is- had been below except Mahu and Ned down in the galley. The dead man had left the group he was eating with and gone below to fetch a bottle. He had not come back, but he had not been gone long enough for anybody to get worried about him.

  That night I thought a lot about it, and it seemed to me there was only one way it could have happened. There was A meeting of all the clergy last night. Fr. Wahl and I drove into town for it. Priests molesting "children" was the big topic. Bishop Scully tried not to show how he felt about it, but it leaked through.

  "It has happened," he told us, "and happened right here in our diocese. More than one priest has sinned in this way. What is worse, priests who have confessed and been forgiven have sinned again. Every one of you must unite with me in opposing this sin, and report it to me whenever it occurs. Believe me, you are doing your brother no favor by concealing his sin."

  After that, he detailed four cases without revealing the identity of the priests involved. When he asked for questions, those he got were pretty obvious. "How could we know a brother priest's sin unless the sanctity of the confessional were violated?" "Shouldn't a report be made to the police?" "How much was needed to settle these cases?" "Shouldn't a guilty priest be punished as well as counseled?" "Might not some priest be falsely accused?" And so on.

  Finally I stood up. I said, "When you began, Your Excellency, I thought I was going to hear about little girls being forced by priests, girls in kindergarten or first grade. That was what I expected. I used to run the Youth Center at Saint Teresa's. All the victims you talked about were boys, and it sounded like they were teenagers. I'm not used to thinking of teenaged boys as children, so it took me a while to get on top of what has really been happening. Isn't it our job to tell boys they shouldn't put up with anything like this? I don't believe there are many priests who would keep trying if the boy he was after yelled and swung a few punches."

  After that I caught it from everybody-all right, to be fair it was not, but it seemed like it. I was blaming the victim. That was one of them, and both the priests who felt like that piled it on strong.

  I was encouraging violence. That was the other one and the
most popular one. I was blamed for encouraging so much violence that I felt like I might be lynched. I never got a chance to defend myself in the meeting, so I am going to do it here. I was not blaming the kids. I was blaming us grownups for teaching them to be victims.

  If you teach a girl to act like a sheep, you do her quite a lot of harm. But if you teach a boy to be a sheep, you do a lot more. If the girl is lucky, there will be boys around to protect her. But they have to be real boys, not sheep. A boy who has been taught to be a sheep will not protect himself or anybody else. If he is molested and does not fight, the people who taught him to be a sheep are at least as much to blame as the molester. Maybe more.

  As for encouraging violence, I have to wonder how many of those priests who molested boys thought the boys wanted it and enjoyed it, even if they would not say so. Many of them-maybe all of them-must have thought that if the boy did not like it, he would yell and fight. The boys were the victims of those priests, I am not arguing that they were not. But those priests were the victims of the people who had taught the boys that even a little bit of violence is the worst thing in the world. The priests had only one victim, or that is how it seems to me. Those people had two, because the priest was another. The tough kids who came to Saint Teresa's Youth Center would have coldcocked anybody who tried what those priests had done. AS WELL AS I can remember, it was the week after somebody found the dead man that we caught up to the San Vincente de Zaragozza. She was a fine, big ship, and mounted more and bigger guns than you usually find on a merchant ship. As soon as I saw them, I decided I did not want to risk them. If we had just gotten close, run out our guns, run up the black flag, and demanded that she surrender, there was a good chance she would fight and do a lot of real damage.

  I kept away from her instead, and basically acted like we thought she might be a pirate. Right here was one of the places where the men surprised me, and it was something I liked a lot. I had been afraid they were going to start yelling that we could not let her get away and we should go for her straight off. They did not. They knew right away that I was up to something and took in sail like they meant it while they traded guesses about what it might be.

  What I had in mind was nothing very fancy-just what Melind had done when we took the Magdelena. I knew that if the Vincente was what she looked like, she would heave to at night. If she did not, she was really Spanish Navy or was a pirate, too. The sea had a little chop to it, but it was not too rough, and for a ship as small as ours we had a lot of men. The sun went down, and she hove to like I had expected. After that she did something I did not expect-she ran out her guns. They were hard to see in the dark, but the noise of the trucks carried to us across the water, and there was no mistaking it.

  Dirty weather would have helped. We did not get it, but I decided to wait until moonset and go in anyway. I left Boucher a skeleton crew and stuffed as many men into the longboat, the piragua, and the jolly as I could. I had the longboat, Bouton the piragua, and Red Jack the jolly.

  We left during the middle watch, with me praying that most of the Spanish sailors were asleep. As I told all the men, the main things were for all three boats to come in at once, and for everybody to holler like a maniac as soon as the fighting started. I took the tiller and Novia sat in the stern with an arm around me, but I got her to promise she would stay right there and take care of the longboat for us. Of course she did not, but I will get into all that later.

  The piragua and the jolly took the larboard side, which was closer, and us the starboard. I was going to fire a pistol as the signal to attack.

  That was not exactly how it went. Somebody on board sang out, and I could see him against the dark and the stars, leaning over the gunwale yelling and pointing. I fired my pistol at him, and as soon as I did one of the starboard guns went off with a bang. I do not know what they were aiming at, or thought they were aiming at, but she fired. Probably it was just to wake up everybody.

  Some of our men had their muskets, and they started shooting through the gunports. That was good, but I had no idea what Bouton and Red Jack would make of it. As soon as we were close enough, I threw a grappling hook, thinking I would be first up.

  Novia beat me to it, scrambling up that rope like a monkey the minute the hook caught. I have never been so scared in my life as I was when I saw her do that. I went up after her as fast as I could, but by the time I had started up, she was over the gunwale. I heard shots and figured she was dead. It was as bad a moment as I have had in my whole life.

  I went up thinking I would see her body, but by the time I got to the top I did not have time to look for it. The Spanish sailors were all armed and full of fight, and there were naked men and men in nightshirts fighting, too. Our guys were coming over the larboard gunwale yelling and shooting, and bullets were coming in through the gunports, hitting the iron cannon barrels and zinging all over. I fired my other pistol at a naked guy with a long sword as soon as I got on deck. When the smoke cleared, I had my cutlass and an empty pistol, and they were what I used after that.

  We won, but it was a stiff fight. It would not be far wrong to say that everything that could go against us had gone against us. To start with, the Vincente carried a bigger crew than most merchant ships, and all of them were armed and out on deck when we came over the side-their captain had been even more worried about us than we had been about him. Next, there had been passengers, mostly young hidalgos bound for New Spain to improve the family fortunes. Every one of them had a sword, and most had other stuff, too. There were traveling pistols, fusils, fowling pieces, left-hand daggers, and you-name-it. Some had brought manservants, and their servants fought, too. One of those had a musket with two short barrels, the kind of gun that my father would have called a lupara. There were two hammers and two triggers. I kept it, and it was the gun I used at Portobello and so on.

  The one thing that had not gone against us was that they had not spotted us until we got close. If they had, they would have been shooting cannonballs at us. One good gunner with a little bit of luck would have knocked the longboat to kindling. Fire that shot, and they would have won, not us.

  Novia had been hit good and hard with something, maybe the guard of a cutlass. She did not know, and I could only guess from the look of her face. When she came to, she was not sure how long she had been out or what she had done before she had gotten hit. I knelt beside her and talked to her a little bit until she could stand up. She had been lying on a long dagger she had bought in Port Royal, and it was blooded to the hilt. Red Jack and a few of his boys hunted around the deck later and found her brass pistols, both empty.

  I had gotten banged up some myself, creased by a musket ball and so on, and quite a few others were hurt worse than I was. If I remember right, we had three dead. They had lost a lot more, fifteen or twenty.

  As soon as the fight was over, I ought to have torn into Novia really good for shinnying up that rope like she did. As it was, I said, "You promised to stay in the boat."

  And she said, "That was when we did not think we would be seen, Crisoforo. They saw us, and someone must get up most quick. It was I."

  Like I said, I should have torn into her really, really good for that. But she was hurt and so was I, and all I did was say, "You're going to get yourself killed someday."

  We herded the prisoners together, and I made the usual speech about taking volunteers. Anybody who wanted to join us would be welcome and would get rich. Nobody did.

  "All right," I said, "now listen up. You put up a stiff fight. We usually kill anybody who puts up a fight, capeesh? Any fight at all. My guys are itching to get at you, but I'm going to save your bacon if I can. Go along with me, and I'll stick you in the longboat and point you toward Cuba. Give me zulla and you're dead."

  I let that sink in while I drew my cutlass. "All right, there's a doctor on board. I want him. Now!"

  I had been pretty sure there was because I had spotted a guy at the back bandaging somebody's arm, and he had looked like he knew wha
t he was doing. The others pushed him up front, and I grabbed him. I told him to treat our wounded and do it right or there would be trouble, and gave him a shove.

  "A carpenter. I know you've got one. Let's see him."

  He came forward, I think just because he knew the rest would make him if he did not.

  "Carpenter's mate! Let's see him, too."

  Three or four sailors said he was dead and offered to show me his body. I made the carpenter pick him out for me, and he was dead all right.

  "One more, and you can go. Sailmaker! Come forward."

  They had to shove him, but he came.

  We launched their longboat and got the rest of them into it. There was bottled wine in the hold. Giving each wounded pirate a drink, with one for Novia and one for the doctor, emptied two bottles. We filled them with water, and gave the men in the longboat those with two loaves of ship's bread. A few minutes after they put out, I saw the little boat-mast go up and a gaff sail run up and trimmed. There were some pretty good sailors there.

  I told the three men I had kept that nobody was going to make them turn pirate. "We're heading for Cow Island," I said. "Do your work and keep your mouths shut and I'll put you ashore there safe and sound, with my thanks. There are three of you, so each of you will have two others to swear that you were forced. Make trouble, and you're dead. We won't fool around with you. We'll kill you, capeesh? For now, you two are doctor's helpers. Do what he tells you."

  There is a lot more I could say, how we threw the dead Spanish overboard and buried our own at sea, and who they were, and so forth. But time is getting tight.

  Back on the Castillo Blanco, I did what I had been planning to do before we sighted the Vincente. I had some of our wounded stand guard on our food and water. Back there I said we had a lot of men, but after leaving Bouton on the Vincente with enough men to work her, we barely had enough sound men to handle the Castillo Blanco. So you could say it was a waste, if you wanted to. The thing was that those wounded men would not be much help at making sail or taking it in, but they could handle sitting in front of a door with pistols in their laps. It gave them something to do, and I thought it might save a few lives before long.