Only Life That Mattered

by Nelson, James L.

  Mary picked up the dress and slipped it over her head. It was light, like gauze, and felt wonderful against her skin. She stepped over to the mirror above the basin, looked at herself.

  Judging from the garment’s size, it had been Abuelita’s, and it hung on Mary like a burlap sack. She grabbed her wide leather belt, slipped the sheath knife and the pistol off, and fastened it around her waist, drawing the dress snug against her. The loose fabric, taken up in that way, accentuated her feminine figure, the curve of her hips, her breasts. She nodded at herself in the mirror.

  The white garment set off her skin, which was tanned to a bronze color. With her dark hair she looked very much like a Cuban peasant girl, and she liked the look.

  She reached behind her, untied the ribbon that held her hair clubbed, and unwrapped the sharkskin that bound it up in a tight cylinder. She let it fall loose, worked her fingers through it, fought through the tangles, straightened it as best she could, and finally draped it forward over her shoulders, then examined the results in the mirror.

  “Mary Read, you are an attractive woman,” she said to herself, smiling, but she meant it. As objective as she could be—and she was not a particularly gentle critic, not with herself—she had to admit that she did look good.

  She ran her hands down the dress, smoothed the cloth out, felt her hard body under the thin material. No linen shirt, no waistcoat, no long wool coat, no slop trousers, no shoulder belt with cutlass hanging from it, no sheath knife. She felt practically naked and it felt wonderful.

  She adjusted her hair again. I must show Annie, she thought, and hurried from the room.

  Outside Anne’s door she paused, gave a soft rap. “Come,” Anne called from inside, and Mary swung the door open.

  Anne was lying on the bed in the darkened room, her arm flung over her eyes. She looked up as Mary entered, mouth open to say something, but she paused and her eyebrows came together, confused, and for an instant Mary could see that she did not recognize her.

  Despite herself, Mary giggled, and even as she did she thought, Dear Lord, when was the last time I giggled? She was feeling a sort of release such as she had rarely known. She had not felt this way, she did not think, since the days of the Three Trade Horses.

  But whatever she was feeling, it was not shared by Anne, pregnant and all but abandoned. She fell back on the bed again, and again covered her eyes. “So, you really are a woman. I was starting to doubt it.”

  Mary frowned. Anne may have meant the words as a joke, but they came off cutting. Anne is not having a good time of it, Mary reminded herself, and when she spoke, she forced herself to be cheerful. “Come, Annie, let us go for a walk.”

  “No.”

  “No, truly, Annie, it will do you some good.”

  “No. Goodbye.”

  For a moment Mary remained. She expected Anne to say something else. But Anne did not speak, did not move, so Mary left Anne’s room and walked along the little courtyard. She bid good day to Abuelita De Jesús as she passed. Mary was impressed with the old woman; Abuelita gave no more than an open smile, a nod of the head, a few friendly and unintelligible words in Spanish. No hint of a reaction to the drastic change in her houseguest.

  I wonder if Abuelita saw the truth of me right off . . . Mary thought.

  Mary opened the bright red door and then stepped out of the house. The shadows were long, the air warm and still in the early evening.

  She walked slowly up the gently sloping road to the town square. The square was like the hub of a wheel, with various roads like uneven spokes running in different directions in an unplanned, haphazard sort of way. There was the main street of the town, which ran right down to the water. Also the wide, uneven road that connected Caibarién to the larger town of Santa Clara, fifty miles inland. That road, and the sea, were the only avenues of communication between Caibarién and the rest of the world.

  In the middle of the square a low brick wall formed a circle which contained within it a small flower garden, and in the middle of the garden a statue of the Blessed Virgin, who, despite her somewhat gaudy paint, looked serenely out over the town of Caibarién.

  Mary sat on the low wall, looked in the direction that the Virgin was staring. At her back, the big church, and beyond that, the jungle with its wild sounds. The thick perfume of the vegetation engulfed her. Somewhere in the town someone was playing a guitar; the music came soft on the air, like the smell of the flowers.

  “If we are to be abandoned, I reckon this is the place for it,” she mused.

  For Anne it might be a personal hell, but it occurred to Mary that she could spend the rest of her days there, that she would not be heartbroken if Calico Jack and the others never returned at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  FOR A WEEK after Pretty Anne sailed, the women enjoyed a reprieve from work or consideration. It was a lovely, quiet time. Mary reveled in it. She remembered now the extraordinary release she had felt, back in Breda, when she had revealed her true sex. Deception was such an integral part of her life that she did not notice it, and was not aware of how much it oppressed her, until she was free of it. Cuba was paradise to her in every way it could be.

  It was not that to Anne, who chafed and grew more sullen by the day. She snapped at Mary and Abuelita. Their conversation dwindled, and then died.

  She has never seen real hardship in her life, Mary thought as she watched Anne staring out to sea, silent and pouting. She is a girl, she does not understand the luxury of quiet, the gift of such peace.

  Sunday morning and Mary woke to the sound of the church bells, tolling nearby. She sat up. Someone rapped on the door.

  “Sí?” Mary was making an effort to pick up all the Spanish she could.

  Abuelita De Jesús opened the door. “Quieres ir a misa?” she asked, but Mary did not understand. She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders.

  “A la iglesia?” Abuelita asked again. She pointed in the general direction of the bells, made the sign of the cross, and said, “En nombre de Padre, del Hijo y el Espíritu Santo . . .”

  “Ahh!” Mary said. She is asking do I want to go to church! Mary had never been one for church. Soldiers and sailors tended not to be. She certainly had never attended a Roman Catholic church.

  But presented with the question, she found that there was something appealing in the notion. She nodded. “Sí, sí.”

  “Y la Señora Rackam?”

  Anne. Anne had to be dragged from the muck of self-pity in which she was wallowing, and again it fell on Mary to do it.

  “Sí,” Mary said. We’ll make Annie go as well, she thought. Do her soul some good.

  Mary dressed quickly, covering her head with a black velo provided by Abuelita De Jesús, and then went to Anne’s room, knocked on the heavy door.

  “What?” Anne’s muffled voice came through the wood. Without invitation, Mary opened the door and stepped in.

  Anne was lying on the bed, the blanket and sheets rumpled around her. The room was dark with just a hint of light leaking in around the shutters. Anne’s arm was flung over her eyes, which was becoming her most familiar position. She did not look at Mary.

  “Abuelita has asked if we wish to attend church. I am going. I think you should as well.”

  “Do you, now?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  Anne lowered her arm, looked over at Mary. She heaved herself up on her arm, swung her legs off the edge of the bed, and Mary smiled, thinking that Anne was at last taking proper direction.

  “You reckon I should go to a popish church? Are you asking me to accompany you, or ordering me to attend?”

  Mary’s smile faded. “I think it would do you good.”

  Anne nodded. “I’ll bloody bet you do. And you my self-appointed guardian.” Anne looked away, stared off into a dark corner of the room.

  “I don’t know what offense I’ve given you,” Mary said, the words like a growl in her throat, “but I’ll not suffer your childish tantrums!”

 
Anne turned, looked back, held Mary’s eyes. “Oh, no? Well, see here, Mistress Read, I’ve had a bellyful of you. I was pleased you wished to stay with me. You were my friend, or so I thought, and I needed a friend when Jack deserted me. But now you seem to style yourself my mother, or husband, or captain, or some damned thing that I neither need nor want. When you are done being those things, then perhaps I shall give a damn what you have to say.”

  Mary scowled. All of the replies that came to her mind crowded together, all trying to leave her mouth at once, and none could get out. “Well, then, damn you for an ungrateful wench!” she said at last, then turned, slammed the door, and stamped across the courtyard and out the big front door to the street.

  Stupid, stupid girl. Stupid, pigheaded girl.

  Mary stepped furiously up the street, smarting and silently cursing Anne and cursing herself for wasting time with such a thoughtless bitch. As she walked, she joined the stream of people converging on the town square. Before she realized it, she found herself filing into the big church.

  In the two weeks they had been there, Mary had not been inside the church, and what she saw surprised her, so much that, for the moment, Anne Bonny flew from her thoughts.

  The nave rose forty feet over her head. The roof was supported by a crisscross of plastered beams that made an elaborate geometric pattern. The stained-glass windows twenty feet high, the intricately carved bas-relief statues of the Stations of the Cross, the paintings of saints, paintings of scenes from heaven, Latin words picked out in gold, it was all magnificent, entirely surprising in that little fishing village, a monument to their devotion.

  Mary knelt with her hands pressed together and her arms on the back of the pew in front of her because that was what everyone else did. She tried to think of God and Jesus and perhaps even conjure up a prayer, but her anger at Anne had flared again and she could get nothing else into her head.

  Stupid, selfish girl . . .

  Mary had pegged her for a silly tart the first time she had seen her, and now she wondered that they had ever become friends, of a sort. What basis was there for friendship between them? Mary, with all she had suffered, and Anne, who thought it was all a great game. Wounding people or killing them meant nothing to Anne, because no one mattered to her but her.

  The mass began, and Mary’s thoughts became more calm and settled with the hypnotic rhythms of the ancient liturgy. She felt her anger change into something else. Pity. Sympathy, perhaps. Anne would never be anything but a silly, spoiled child if she remained so obstinate, if she could not understand the things that Mary tried to teach her.

  Mary opened her eyes, stared off at nothing.

  You seem to style yourself my mother, or husband, or captain, or some damned thing that I neither need nor want. She heard the words in her head.

  Oh, dear God . . .

  Might it be that Anne possessed more insight than Mary had ever realized? Was it possible that silly, naive Anne Bonny understood something about her that she herself did not even see?

  “Me lo das,” Mary said, reaching for the basket of laundry in Abuelita De Jesús’s hands, trying to get the woman to surrender it.

  “No, no, está bien. Puedo hacerlo,” Abuelita protested.

  “No, yo puedo . . .” The closest that Mary could come to “I will do the laundry. I insist” in Spanish was “I do . . .” accompanied by the forceful removal of the basket from Abuelita’s hands, but it made the point.

  “Sí, sí, gracias . . .” Abuelita said, genuinely grateful, as she always was, for the help.

  Mary held the basket at her side, resting it on her hip for support, and walked down the corridor along the courtyard to Anne’s room. She paused at the closed door, took a deep breath, and knocked.

  “What?”

  Mary paused again. “Might I come in?”

  A short silence, and then, “Yes.”

  Mary opened the door. The room looked the same as it had the day before, when she had asked Anne to join her at mass. Dark and unkempt. But now it was starting to smell of old sheets and Anne’s unwashed body.

  Anne was sitting on the bed. Her eyebrows were pressed together. She looked as if she was bracing for a fight. Mary maneuvered the laundry basket through the door, stepped into the room.

  “What now?” Anne said. “Will you order me to the stream to beat shirts with a bloody rock? Would that be good for me?”

  Mary did not respond. The past day had been one of great introspection, strolling on the hot-sand beach, examining her life. She felt that she understood more about herself than she had in a dozen years. She felt that some truth had been beaten out of her by Anne’s lashing tongue.

  “No, I will not try to order you. Nor will I give advice, ever again, unless it is asked of me. I am going down to the stream to do laundry. If you would come with me, I would admire your company.” She paused and then added, “Without you I have no friend in the world.”

  Anne’s expression softened, and her face took on a look very like relief. For a moment the two women remained silent, regarding one another. Then Anne nodded her head. “I should be delighted to accompany you. I reckon some fresh air would set me up well.”

  She stood and pulled her sleeping gown off and walked awkwardly to the wardrobe.

  Mary had a notion that most women would have broken down in tears, would have hugged one another and apologized over and over for their behavior. But she and Annie were not like most women, far from, and that was ultimately the bedrock foundation of their friendship. This reconciliation seemed just the right measure for who they were.

  A month and a half, festering away in goddamned Caibarién, Anne thought, sitting on her bed, running a brush through her hair. If Mary had not stayed, if they had not come to a genuine understanding, then Anne was certain she would have shot herself already.

  They had settled into a routine, since the time they had made up. They promenaded in the evening. Three times a week they did the wash. Sometimes they would go down to the beach for walks by the water, sometimes to the river, and if they were alone, they would go to the place they had discovered where the thick jungle obscured the river and they would strip down and plunge in themselves.

  They talked and rarely ran out of things to say, and when they did, the silence was never uncomfortable. Time slipped by like a boat on calm water. Anne felt herself grow bigger and more awkward and she hid her secret fears of childbirth and felt the identity that she had so carefully crafted for herself slipping further and further away.

  Now she heard Mary’s feet on the tiles outside her door and then she appeared in the doorway, a basket under her arm. “I am off to do laundry,” Mary said. “Will you join me?”

  “Laundry? You jest, I am sure. I doubt that I can fit through the door any longer, let alone waddle down to the stream and bang shirts with a bloody rock.”

  Anne was quite large, her belly button inverted, the skin on her stomach tight as a drum. Abuelita said it would not be long now, and Abuelita knew about such things.

  Anne sat on her bed, brush in hand, watching Mary and the basket of wash, and thought, She likes this. Dear God, she likes this housekeeping horseshit.

  “I won’t expect you to bang anything with a bloody rock, dear,” Mary said, “but I should like your company.”

  “Very well.” Anne put her wide straw hat on her head, tied the ribbon around her chin. “I shall follow your leader, my Captain General.”

  Mary led the way down a side street that led to the thick jungle that bordered the western end of the town. The last of the dusty streets trailed off into a broken and rocky riverbank, at the bottom of which ran a respectable stream, twenty feet across and five feet deep, tumbling down from the high mountains in the center of the island and emptying into the ocean two hundred yards away.

  The river was everything to the town: fresh water, washtub, moat to keep the western jungle at bay. It was the reason the town was built where it was.

  Anne sat heavily on a
big, smooth rock, wiped her brow with her hand. Even a short walk was becoming a real effort. She wondered if she was carrying twins.

  Mary trudged a few feet into the river. She pulled out a shirt, submerged it, spread it out for pounding with a rock.

  They were the only two there, which was unusual, but Anne was glad for it. She did not care to make fumbling conversation in her rudimentary Spanish.

  “You like this,” Anne said.

  “What? Doing wash in a river? Not particularly.”

  “No, not just the wash. All this. This keeping house. Given all the adventure you have seen, I am surprised you can endure such monotony outside a week.”

  “Hmm,” Mary said. “Well, it is a new thing for me. I can say that. Even as a young girl I did not do so very much of it. I reckon if I had been bred to it, I would not be so enthusiastic.”

  They were quiet for a moment, the only sound the click of Mary’s rock working on the shirt and the rushing sound of the water, the occasional screech of a bird. Anne wanted to ask more, tried to get a sense for Mary’s mood. If her mood was not just right, the questions would be rebuffed.

  “When . . . you were married, did you not set up housekeeping?”

  Mary paused in her washing, looked up at Anne, squinting in the brilliant sun. For a few seconds she said nothing, just held Anne’s eyes, as if trying to determine what to say, how much to reveal. Then she went back to her washing.

  “No, I did not, not really . . .” Mary said at last. Anne sat silent, listening, not wanting to interrupt or break the train of Mary’s thought. She knew her friend had been married once, had lived in Flanders, but she knew nothing beyond that.

  “Believe it or not,” Mary continued, “I had servants to do it.” She gave a little chuckle at the memory.

  She looked up again. Anne was silent, did not move. “I met my husband while I was riding with Walpole’s Light Horse. His name was Frederick. Frederick Heesch. And he was the kindest, gentlest man that ever lived. And he was brave, brave to a fault . . .” Her eyes looked far away; she did not seem to be looking at Anne anymore.