Cinnamon and Gunpowder (5 page)

FLATTEN SPOON TO BEST LOCK.

I must try this at the first opportunity. You’ve a friend, Wedgwood!

This afternoon, Mr. Apples was taking his gunners through their paces again, as he did every day, firing imaginary balls at invisible foes. The men went so far as to cover their ears, though the guns were dumb.

The bosun meanwhile had a crew caulking the seams of the deck near the forecastle. These men hammered wads of oakum and animal hair into the grooves, then poured boiling pitch over them. The smell would have driven me back below deck if a stark demonstration of Mr. Apples’s power hadn’t stopped me where I stood: One of the bosun’s boys went to fetch a fresh bag of oakum and, no doubt in a hurry to be done, took a shortcut right behind the cannon crew in the midst of their fantasy battle. As he passed, Mr. Apples turned and drove his open hand under the man’s chin with such force that the runner was lifted off the deck. His feet followed their momentum, and he twisted in the air to land facedown, sprawled like a scarecrow.

Pitching his voice so all hands could hear, Mr. Apples said, “That’s just a kiss. If a gun kicks you, we’ll scrape you into a snuffbox to bury you.”

With that he freed his crew to line up for their grog. I was relieved to see the scarecrow pull himself up and weave his way back to his fellows, who seemed to forgive him for forgetting the oakum.

I found myself gazing at the cannon and considering the many shapes of violence. The hollowed sockets of those guns brought to mind the Cyclops staring blind with rage at the horizon after Odysseus had gone.

Mr. Apples broke my reverie. “You could cook meat with that scowl alone,” he said, pulling yarn from his ditty bag. “What’s the matter, Spoons? I didn’t hit
you
.”

“It seems to me,” I said, “strength like that is a gift that could go to a better use.”

“That swat’ll save his life.” He held up the gourds of his fists. “I was a pugilist. Is that the better use you’re thinking of? I stood in a ring and crushed heads for the pleasure of a crowd. A bear can do that. That’s what I was when Mabbot found me. These sailors could sign with any other crew, get monthly pay and chocolate to drink for the holidays, but here they eat mush and go months with no prizes. They hunt the Brass Fox, which is like trying to catch smoke in your hat. Why do they put up with it?”

“Why indeed?”

“Once you meet Mabbot, you can hardly go back to being a bear. You have two choices: fight her or fight for her.”

A full week aboard and I’ve made no progress toward the meal that will save my life. I have a better chance of building a cathedral out of vermicelli. In my despair, I can hardly lift myself from the sack of sawdust I sleep on and which I have grown alarmingly fond of. I try to imagine recipes, but my mind has the tinny echo of an empty flour bin.

I will spare myself the needles of remembrance. My survival depends on being present, focusing all of my energies on dodging the captain’s threat. I must not linger on the sweet memories of my beloved Elizabeth, rest her, laughing with a jasmine candy in her cheek, nor of good men sharing a glass of port; nor will I linger on the softness of my down pillow back in London, nor on clean undergarments, nor on the view of the orchard from my kitchen window, nor on eggs—oh, eggs! Nor on the reassuring firmness and eager weight of my knife whistling so cleanly through a head of cabbage. I will not let myself catalogue the other friends I took for granted: my slim whisk, copper-bottomed pots, marble pastry table, and rows of yeast batters in various states of arousal. I shall not think once of my Rumford stove, my cast-iron castle, my coal-fed kingdom. For now I shall attempt to pretend that the things on hand here are the only tools that have ever existed. I must become like Adam, taking what is offered and inventing the rest.

The
Flying Rose
is modified, I’ve learned, in a few mischievous ways. For one, her stern is reinforced to support the two sleek black cannon, which the gunners have affectionately named the Twa Corbies. These long-range stern chasers are poised to destroy anyone in pursuit. Further, a good portion of the lower deck has been divided into small chambers, the better to hold stolen goods or prisoners like myself.

The vessel is always abustle. A seaman stands near the mizzenmast, ready to strike a large gong emblazoned with white enamel cranes. It is his job to generate the various rhythms by which the crew know their time and duty. While the sailors do indeed work hard and the ship is polished to a sheen, they also spend a stunning amount of time playing music, wrestling, whittling, or simply lolling about the deck, laughing and joking in a pidgin language that sounds like the bark of a sea lion. The ship’s surgeon is a shameless drunk who refuses to rise from his hammock until he has had two liters of straight wine in his gut. God forbid I should ever need his attentions. Further, as far as I can see, Mabbot does not use compass or astrolabe but relies instead on Pete, a shriveled old savage of mysterious origin, calloused as bark, who sits upon a specially rigged chair out over the bowsprit and stares at the sea sunrise to sunset. While it is clear to me that poor toothless Pete has entered his second infancy, Mabbot says he is “counting the waves” and trusts his direction as God’s word.

Mabbot takes a twice-daily walk, touring the ship as she goes, sometimes giving a two-word order. I have seen, as she passes, something moving in the deep pockets of her long coat. It is unsettling. The men in the berths whisper absurdities: that she keeps the plague in her pocket like a pet, that she has a wolf’s maw where her generative organs should be. Such is the grip she has on their minds.

Her rounds bring her always to Pete, the little man at the forepeak. They speak, he points, sometimes they consult a map, then she returns to her cabin. It is a wonder the ship is not rotting in the deepest crevice of the seafloor, and yet she has made herself a menace to the Pendleton Trading Company for nearly fifteen years; indeed, her ambushes are the stuff of legend. The rumors of her resurrection after execution by firing squad and drowning are ridiculous, but I could be convinced that the woman has a pact with the devil. It would explain much.

Too, this ship is so full of Mohammedans I find myself wondering why God does not simply push it under with His finger as He did Gomorrah.

The men eat in the forecastle mostly, sitting on their lockers and holding their bowls on their laps. As a prank they invited me to sit at a small table, only to guffaw when my porridge slid across on a swell and dropped with a splat on the floor. In the future I must remember to think twice before accepting courtesy from a pirate and to keep one hand on the bowl at all times. Still, bit by bit, I allow myself to make simple conversation with the sailors here. Though I stammer sometimes at the sight of their pierced faces and lewd tattoos, I tell myself:
They’re just men. Held together with wire and spit, but only men, after all.

With one exception, I have not regretted these conversations. I have been obliged to linger in the galley, assessing my tools and resources, scant and rusty as they are. This has meant tolerating Conrad’s long tongue.

A word on Conrad: I cannot call him a cook. Nor, having eaten so much of his fare, am I comfortable calling him a Christian, though he claims to be. He is a man, I grant. Many of the foulest things of the earth come from men.

His sores are in need of calendula. Happily we need not look at him while eating, for he wisely avoids the men at mealtimes. But having heard his wet cough, having smelled in the narrow passages the cheesy ropes of his braids, having witnessed, even once, his hobby of staring out at the horizon while his hand scuttles about his neck like a crab looking for some promising lesion to pick, one finds it hard to locate one’s appetite.

How does this man, who would lose his post to a donkey on land, achieve such a position at sea? “Ship’s cook,” it turns out, is not properly a position but a punishment. Not only does he spend his days cramped in a steam-filled chamber, churning with a shovel enough food for an army, but worse, Conrad must bear the derision of the crew who look to a meal as one of the sole respites in a long hard day. Finding sand between their teeth and even the hardtack sour, they turn their frustrations upon poor Conrad. What pleasure they can’t get by appeasing their tremendous appetites, they find instead in taunting the man who takes their hoots and howls with stoicism.

I have already learned that being at sea breeds romance and fantasy. Whether it is the monotony of the horizon, the confined perambulation, or the intoxicating ethers that boil from the deep I cannot say, but here men’s imaginations bloom. Their women back home are, all of them, Helens, breasts like sleeping doves, petal cheeks, voices like glass bells; their inns serve not beer but nectar; their gardens grow peas the size of fists. These fantasies are ferociously strong, and, compared to them, Conrad’s grey porridge is an insult. The man no doubt would have been cast overboard long ago save one of the captain’s commandments: He that molests the cook becomes the cook. Stronger even than their anger at Conrad is their fear of becoming Conrad. Thus he is left in peace to make his bubbling abominations.

When not eating his “burgoo,” the sailors tolerate him well enough. There are worse things in a pirate’s life than a man who cannot cook and who talks too much.

As I am compelled to linger in the galley, Conrad takes the opportunity to fill my ears with his prattling. He considers me a compatriot, and I haven’t the heart to correct him.

A central theme of his monologues is his admiration for the captain, which, from his tone, is not without a touch of the prurient. This afternoon, for example, he said, “Well we’re on our way, aren’t we? She don’t lose a minute, the cap’m. Making up for time lost killing Ramsey. A mere holiday for her! But we’re on track again. The grand pursuit!” He chortled above his cauldron of porridge. “Oh, but she’s dogged as she is fair. She’ll find him soon enough. She’ll figure it out. Smart the cap’m, she took Ramsey by surprise, didn’t she?”

“If it’s all the same to you, we will not talk about Lord Ramsey,” I said.

“The man was a dog.”

“I’m quite serious, sir—”

“Strike me, then—do! Won’t hit back.” He lifted his chin, and I was surprised by the strength of my urge to wallop him. Instead I said, “You call her wise, but she put you here in this steam box.”

“But I put myself here, didn’t I? Punched the other cook in the eye, which fairly blinded him one side. Well, it was lashes for me, and now I’m the cook. How can I complain? If God were this fair, the world wouldn’t be such a shit pile!”

“We will not speak of God nor of Lord Ramsey.”

“Well, you’ve got your druthers, hain’t you?” He made a rude farting sound with his mouth. “What’ll we talk about, then?”

“Have you ladles? Tongs? A rolling pin? Where are the pie tins kept?”

He laughed again, which led to coughing. “I don’t have your ’fisticated wit. Pots and spoons, that’s what we got. Pots and spoons.”

I took note of what I could find myself. There are some iron skillets, wholly unused by Conrad, rusted and in need of curing. Pots—we are flush with cheap pots. One fine rasp and several knotty and oversized wooden spoons …