My Name is Resolute (6 page)

As we finished and dressed in our soggy rags, I leaned toward her ear and whispered, “I hope I am all done eating pockets. I will not mind having more goat stew, I think.”

“Less talking here. Keep quiet!” an English sailor shouted at us.

We sunned ourselves, turning up petticoats to dry even as we wore them. I was careful to check all the places where Ma’s precious things lay hidden. All remained safe. Fresh air and buoyancy filled my soul as the rest and food worked its task. After a couple of hours on the deck spent thus, they lined us up and marched us below again.

Awaiting my turn I spied August among the men who had all been loaded onto another ship and ran to tell Patey.

Patience called to him, “August Talbot! Where’s our father?”

August called back, “Killed. Buried these four days.” Patience sank to the deck and frowned, moping. I heard his words repeated as if they existed in an echo or came from a noise in the back of a house. They made a little scratching sound in my head like a mouse raking through a corncob with a tiny clawed hand. I stood, watching him, waiting and hoping for him to say other words that undid what he had said.

I looked over the side of the ship, expecting to see Pa’s face in the green churn below. Buried there? Dropped below the waves, eaten by all manner of fish and bones picked clean by lobster and stingray? Washed up on some lost beach by a storm like the bloated remains I once found? I sank beside Patey. She took my hand, and as people moved around us, we listened to each other breathing for a while. Sadness o’erwhelmed me, yet I could not cry. I imagined our horrified mother, weeping inconsolably. I also imagined that without Pa, Uncle Rafe might never again be convinced to leave us alone.

After two more days of calm sea and warm food, many of the women had revived. Our clothes were ruined. Our hair hung matted against our gaunt faces, but we no longer stank of death from the hold.

With that much reviving, it seemed that all the prisoners save Patience and I began to take great heart. The third night they held forth with singing and some even danced jig steps to the songs. They sang and rocked, and stomped their feet. Some drummed on the casks and hogsheads in the aisles. Soon the women around us began to dance in a line. Two of them came to Patience and me, took our hands, and bade us walk with them. Patience walked but with no joy. I lifted my feet, trying to keep time. Around and around we went as the songs got louder. We circled and coiled through the small hold. The sailors heard from up above and did the same. They stamped their feet with thunderous noise, and the shouting became rhythmic. Reels from our island and from theirs blended together. African songs took hold, drowning out the English reel, and the drumming became loud and heavy and insistent as a beating heart. They held my hands and swept me into their rhythm, pounding, pounding my blood through my feet and arms. A smile crept across my face. The movement was earthy and fierce and lively.

Patience had pulled herself from the line and stood by the wall, her hands over her face. I jerked myself free and went to her. “Come and dance!” I called.

“No. I am not a slave that I should be dancing as they.”

“It is pleasant. It’s, it is diverting!”

“We are prisoners. I will not be diverted.”

“I am sorry, Patey.” I felt her sadness rolling over me, yet for no reason I could speak, I backed away from her and into the line of singing, dancing women. We coiled like a great snake through the tiny prison, until, sweating and ripe as old fruit left in the sun, the drumming stopped and we all sat where the drums stopped us. I panted against my arm. I knew that, as much as she could not, I
must
dance the sadness out of me, dance and dance. I raised my face from my arm and looked about me at the slaves in this prison. I thought of the nights I had lain awake in my bedroom, steamy nights filled with far-off drumbeats and the songs from the quarters, and I knew now why they danced. It made something in the chains and bars that held us demand our spirits to take flight. I would take that with me, I decided. That knowledge would abide. It made me feel larger than I had before. As if the bars did not, could not, contain me.

That night a quick rain washed the decks and drizzled upon us. I awoke and moved to a place where the water hit at my feet rather than my face, and saw Patience awake, too, her eyes focused on some distant dream. I leaned against her breast, she put her arms around me, and I slept.

After that time, the women talked more to each other. They included us, but just as often spoke as if we were not there. I learned things. I learned about what men and women do. Things I should not have heard, I suppose, yet they meant little to me and were so strange as to seem like tall tales and nothing more.

CHAPTER 3

October 17, 1729

The sailors treated the men on the other ships with the same food and physick that we had gotten. The privateers started dividing up the stolen goods. As I watched I could see that they had also divided up the Saracens. Some who had not been hung had been pressed or volunteered, and now served the privateers.

After loading the ships with food from shore, they lined us up, sorting us by age, I think, but in any case, Patience and I were placed in two different lines. Longboats unloaded a few of the men captives and took women from her line in their places. Patey and I looked from one to the other as Englishmen prodded some reluctant woman toward the railing where other women scaled the rigging down to the longboats which had come from the third sloop. The woman balked and spoke some language not English nor the patois I knew. While they fussed with her I sidled like a crab across the line and stood behind Patience. I felt the wind leave me as a blow I never saw coming pushed me back into the other line.

“Ressie!” Patience cried, rushing to my side. Women gave us wide berth.

“Patience!” I replied. We clung to each other and I buried myself in her skirts.

“Please, sir!” Patience said. “Please let us go together. We’re orphaned enough. Let her come with me or me with her!” She spoke to a man whom I had not seen before, one who sported a long, bushy beard and had come from the third sloop. He stood next to the man who had knocked the spine out of me. Patience said, “My brother waits in your ship, sir. I beg you by God’s grace. Will you let us go together?”

The two men turned from us and conferred for a few minutes. One left and came back with the man I had heard called “Captain.” Finally he said, “All right. Take ’em. But leave the other white ones with me so there’s equal.”

Then the bearded man whistled as shrill as ever I have heard, and his companion shoved Patience and me toward the railing. I found climbing down the rigging staggeringly more difficult than climbing up had been. With my foot searching and not finding hold, each web of rigging shifted under me and took my strength. Halfway down I began to tremble and my hands grew weak. My knees shook and dark spots welled up behind my eyes. I believed I was going to fall into the sea before I took a last step, but as I did, hands took hold of me and set me into the longboat. I crouched low and put my head on my knees, quivering violently.

Patience held me in her arms as they took us toward a new rig sitting shallow in the water. She climbed behind me, holding me upright as I progressed on shaking legs. The rope rigging took us over gun ports, and it made me shake with greater violence than ever. I put my toe in the mouth of a cannon to steady myself.

On the deck this ship seemed much smaller than our previous prison. Not more than forty or fifty tons. Her masts were leaner but tall as those before though raked at an angle like a shark’s fin. Everything I could make out about this vessel was sleek and lean, riding high in the water as if she were built for speed and nothing less. Above the jib the colors she flew were a long square of red and a yellow triangle, foreign to me except for the topmost one. The Jolly Roger.

I could not count the sailors. I saw a dozen but knew that some might have been plundering some other plantation onshore. There were forty-three of us prisoners on this ship. Men bunked before the mainmast, too, so the women’s ride in the aft was roughest. August restrained himself from coming to us, but he stood in his line of captives and nodded. I felt foolish, for all I dared to do was nod in return.

I gripped Patience’s hand. For a long moment I stared at her skin and mine together. I felt a great longing to hold August’s hand. Patey’s skin and mine were so alike, same freckles, same lines in the palms, same-shaped fingernails. August had my same tawny hair, almost a shade of red in the sun. It troubled me that I could not remember a sense of his skin. We three were all we had until we could get home somehow.

In short order they herded us belowdecks. As I stood in line for my turn to descend, I looked back at the other ship, so much higher in the water, pocked with cannon holes and missing a mast. None of the prisoners were still on the deck there. I supposed they had returned to that filthy hold already. At least—at
least
—I thought, I was here with Patience and August. A swell of distress filled my eyes with tears at the thought of having been left behind—though I knew where my feet carried me, down into this ship’s nether regions—just as I had cried over nearly having my finger crushed. I believed I would have died there. If not from cause, I would have died of loneliness.

“Ressie. Quit crying. You’re calling attention to yourself. Hush.”

“I will try.” That was when I learned to cry inside. Tears welled up and ran down my throat and through my nose, making it run. I gritted my teeth and sniffed hard.

We were prisoners, yet once a day about mid-morning we were marched up the steps and fed real soup. It was three days until I spotted August again. To my surprise he walked straight toward me, unshackled and hearty. He seemed uncommonly cheerful. “Hail, Resolute, old girl,” he said. He took my hand and bowed over it as if he were mocking a true gentleman.

“Hail a chicken’s hind foot,
old
brother,” I said. “I had no idea if they had kept the men and boys. You have new clothes, too.”

“We were lying before the mast, in a separate hold. That is until yesterday, when some of us became sailors, too.”

“What are you speaking of?”

“I’ve signed on. They read us the articles and I’ve signed on. I ain’t a prisoner no more. Coxswain second class. Ship’s boy. I get double what the prisoners get to eat and a
share
in all the plunder. All I have to do is row the captain around and sometimes climb the rigging—” Besides the crude manner, his voice had taken a lower register as if he had a bad ague of the chest.

“How you speak. Is your voice this low all the time now?”

“Of course. Why would it not be? I am grown, after all.”

“La, August. How you go on.”

“I fear, Miss Resolute Catherine Eugenia Talbot, that you mistrust my words.”

I pouted and stuck out my lower lip while I balled up a fist. “Mistrust? August Talbot, if you have signed on with a ship of pirates, you are bound to hang as a criminal!”

He grabbed my shoulders and inclined our heads together, whispering, “Not pirates, Ressie.
Privateers
. Your feet stand upon the deck of the
Falls Greenway,
as true a sloop as ever sailed, contracted by the Crown to lay waste to them that scuttle her goods and profits. And I shall be rich before long and take back all that was stolen from us and more!” A breeze ruffled August’s hair, sticking out like feathers from a knitted Monmouth cap, the type worn by many of the men.

“Well, then. Well. If you are one of the sailors, then, master seagull second class, I wish to go home.”

“Nah. We’re headed north to the American colonies.” As he spoke he looked about himself as if he were now the proud owner of his own rig called
Falls Greenway
. “That ship you left behind was bound for Port Royal. There you’d be sold like any common slave and it’s a rum time you’d have of it. The quartermaster is watching for a ship to take. These three and their longboats—I mean, we call them snows—work together, you see, for the common good. We’ll surround her—Spanish, I think, more’s the gold—and the three will take her.
I
am to truss the tops’l if it’s called to me.”

“Port Royal! It is the other side of the island. Over the mountain to home! I would escape and get home to Ma.” I raced to the side and held fast to one of the pins. “I want to go home!” I cried aloud. The ship rolled. A gull squawked overhead and landed on the railing next to the table where the food sat. The bird dared to take a dash at the soup pot and left a splat of filth on the table, barely missing the open pot.

August cast his eyes around us. “You would drown. Do not even think of escape.”

Not think of escape? I pulled the shore closer with my eyes. “How far away are we now from Port Royal?”

August said, “Port Royal? Why, this ain’t Jamaica. This be Hispaniola. I told you we’re lying in wait. Our scouts have just returned. A Spanish brigantine be bound here before long and they’ll surround her. I hope we see some guns firing.” A light came from my brother’s eyes when he spoke. Sea madness had taken him.

“Like they did to us?”

His face sobered. “Well, and aye.”

Tears came then, running down my face and chin. “You’ve struck your lot with freebooters and picaroons. What about me? What about Patey? How shall we get home?”

“There’s nothing left there. Did not Pa always say to make the best of things? Keep it in your cock-hat that we’re bound for the northern colonies.”

A sailor had approached us unawares and now his shadow engulfed August’s form. “Get away from there. Sop’s thataway.” He jerked his head toward the table.

I recognized the voice. I suppose because of that I hoped for a moment for mercy from the man. My eyes gathered the spectacle of him from his boots to his coat and tricorn hat and my mouth dropped open. His clothes were different, his manner, too, but I knew him. We stood in the shadow of Rafe MacAlister.