Weapons Grade
Trailer Girl and Other Stories
Black Glasses Like Clark Kent
Tin God
Treason
A Drink Called Paradise
Cannibal
Mere Mortals
Laughing Africa
All Aberration
Cleaned the Crocodile’s Teeth: Nuer Song

Heare the mermaides singing

—John Donne

…her body as big as one of us; her skin very white; and long haire hanging down behinde, of colour blacke; in her going down they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a Porposse, and speckled like a Macrell.

—Henry Hudson, skirting the polar ice, June 15, 1608

For Bill Raymond and Linda Hartinian

1718 - Nantucket Beach

I’ve seen boats as big as this whale. I’ve seen gryphons the same size, with teeth growing in even as they were taking their last breath.

You have not. And not a live one.

I’ve been to sea, I’ve seen all you’re supposed to, being at sea. I am sixteen, after all.

If you’d stayed at home, you would’ve seen to Ma. I’d be a pirate twice, with two voyages under me, if I didn’t have that.

Quit your carping. Go stand on its middle. Maybe it will release its wind if you jump on it.

For sure it will stink to heaven if I jump on it.

Let’s poke out its eye.

It’s a wonder you’re not tired of poking whales, a’roving on the ocean like you do, with all the new sail.

Here’s the stick—let’s do the eye.

Cap’n Peters says there’s luck in a whale’s eye. Some men use saws on such as the eye, to examine the socket and take away the skull too.

You told this Cap’n Peters about this whale?

Cap’n Peters can see it himself. He’s anchored out beyond the neck, nearly done scouring the fresh-wrecked Abingdon. He’ll come.

Our greasy luck! Then the sooner it dies the better, and not for anyone but us to collect it.

It’s alive all right. Look at the eye.

Help me with the stick. A donkey could haul it out, where could we get a donkey?

If we had a donkey I wouldn’t be walking the beach looking for rope to catch the mussels on, would I? If we had a donkey, you wouldn’t be shipping out every time the wind blew and leaving me here with Ma, myself only in short pants still and no cutlass.

We need a donkey. The smell alone will bring Peters.

Do you believe in whales? I mean, that they talk?

Two fiddles can talk. One calls, the other says Yes and then some.

Whales dance when there’s boats coming with harpoon.

The way pirates do on the gallows.

Not all of them.

They’re crying whales, not singing. Poke here.

They swallow the pennywhistle and dance on the tips of their tails on top of the water. And sing.

Whales cry about their future like all creatures worth killing. There’s a tear now, with Peters coming. Look—I can make it dance without singing.

Let it be, it’s starting to bleed.

I’ll let it be with a cut of the knife. If only I had a good one, if only Ma hadn’t sold that bit of a blade while I was gone.

She’s sold all her brooches, down to the tin-and-garnets.

She sold the true baubles after you were born—or gave them up, cleaned out by whoever she had after you had a father, cleaned out clean as a pike in a trough.

They use beetles to clean the skulls when they’re empty. Cap’n Peters says so.

Peters, Cap’n Peters—would he be the one seeing Ma now?

He’s seen all of her, if that’s your actual meaning. How huge those skull-cleaning beetles must be, so big they can’t walk after all that eating, beetles that could eat all of every one of the colonies.

Slippery here, whoa.

Cap’n Peters has got his glass on us now. There, over the wave.

No.

Tease me like you don’t know he’s watching. Play foot-in-the-water. He’ll think we are but careless boys and won’t beat us when he sees us.

We are but boys. If I only had a knife—

If you grouse and slaughter the whale before him and he balks and whines, Ma will tie herself to the rafters and I will have to cut her down. It’s a poor revenge for her living from one man to the next, though she swears Cap’n Peters is her utter last.

I told you to get her set right, to take Ma to someone while I was off at sea, a woman with a cure.

She wouldn’t go, she said she’d have no business with someone like that, she didn’t need no one other than Father. She talks to Father from the rafters where you can see the sea
out the little window, she talks to you out that window too.

She doesn’t know who Father is.

This be true, but still she talks.

This fish is leaking like a ship come ashore.

Whale, it’s a whale, not a fish. And if you would quit your poking at the eye, it wouldn’t leak so much. Poking it like that makes the sound it makes worse.

You talk like a sea captain with your “Don’t this” and “Fish that,” a bloody captain, the kind I don’t take to.

It’s the life of the sea, you said. Yo, Ho, Ho, you said.

I will give you another punch to match the first.

It breathes—hear it? Cap’n Peters says they are cousin to us.

I can’t hear anything while you blather on about Cap’n Peters.

I say we leave it alone because Cap’n Peters will pay us to chop it up. They’re bound to want the steaks and oil even if it be old, and some of the bone to hang their hats on, and bone for those who truss up the women.

That’s real work, all that chopping.

Aye.

The bone is all I want—I can carve “The Apostle on the Desert” into the bone.

I can carve that—one cut meeting another.

You are a stupid boy. Look—it thinks it is a creature of the land now, it wriggles so. It wants to walk about on its tail.

With the next big wave, let’s push it in with our backs.

Let’s kill it.

Die, die.

What’re you whispering?

Nothing. Die, die, or they’ll get you, you whale of us all, you fool whale.

You are whispering.

I’ll whisper if I want to.

The whale’s dead anyway. Why else would it be on the beach?

Not breathing like this it isn’t dead. Not yet.

Look, Peters is bringing his hooks and axes. And a cutlass! There’s a knife.

It’s soapy-feeling on the outside.

Pitchforks and pries. Let’s poke it through to the brain before they get here, let’s poke it to make it dead before they poke it, so we can claim it and get the bone. I am grown, after all.

Die, die.

Why do you cry like a girl?

I’m not a girl.

Whale-lover, then. Crybaby.

Listen to it breathe.

I can’t hear anything but Cap’n Peters and his men beaching loud like six blacks banging dishpans.

It’s breathing big.

There—I’ve got the stick through, no thanks to you.

It still breathes.

If I hang on it here and pull down, the whole side will rip and they’ll know it’s ours. Give me a hand—

Home, an hour later

Ma, there’s rope in my soup

Eat it or you can’t watch the hanging.

I can’t, not a drop more, Ma. All the chewing hurts my teeth.

It’s bone, that’s all. Bone against bone. Chew it up, then spit it into your hand. See—a pig clavicle or a horse bone, not rope. Sit still and stop your wheezing and sneezing and snot-dribbling.

The drumming’s so loud today, my head hurts.

Old Hubble is getting his practice, best at the dirge in all the colonies I’d say.

There—at the bottom of my bowl—see?

It’s a bit of chew. If we sit just right, maybe we’ll see the beardtips flame again. I do love the rope.

Ma.

Any less punishment and the ocean would be crowded with rogues.

Put up a rag to curtain it. Father must’ve been a pirate, I hate these hangings with such a fever.

Eat your soup. And the bones too. I sold yesterday’s rope for those bones. And wipe your nose on my skirt. Your father, a pirate—what will you be thinking next? I’m on the
lookout for a better man than that, boy, even Peters only takes boats that broke.

Makes a person want to go to sea, your soup.

You’d be your brother then, and curses to you. Hark—here’s the catch ‘o the day, the pirates walking.

Brother is not so much at sea now.

Brother had better be, and making coin for us too. Such black hair on that pirate—sure to use indigo as anything, in disguise.

Ma.

Stop your sneezing. Were you out standing in the sea this morning? Stay out of the water, you’re supposed to pull up the ropes, not go in after them.

The ropes were caught.

Water will kill you, one way or another. Is that the priest waving now?

I could tell but for fat Morgan Little.

He’s got to both say the condemnation and the Praise Lord. The magistrate broke his leg this morning climbing a stile and no one else will do it.

Let me go off, Ma.

You don’t want that food, it’s rotten, only good for throwing. Sit down and eat your soup.

But Ma.

Hush, they’re singing now—the pirates are singing. I heard these were merry folk, that they boarded ships singing songs with their knives out full and not between their teeth. That
was their mistake, not having their hands free to grip the boat.

They wanted a good cutlass.

Singing makes you brave. Hear how many verses they have? The baker hiding in his hood can’t stand still for all this singing.

The baker will dance with his bread.

Look, he’s using an old rope today, Master Mason’s, the one he dipped his sheep with and can’t get out the smell.

You know all the ropes.

I have taught you well enough. Not so much the writing of letters or the sum gathering, but all of ropes and their histories.

Plenty of rope here.

They’ve soaked his beard in gum. You can hardly see the faces for the smoke.

I wonder how many more are not caught, like mice in hay.

The baker’s banged the heads together, jigging them up so close.

I feel it.

The mortal dance ought not to be done without someone watching. Look, look, I say. Fierce they are, and fierce be their Nancies. A sour look or two at choking.

They dance in my soup.

We ought to sell seats here. People like to sit and watch.

People like to press close and not sit, they like to hear everything clear.

It’s a shame, having to cut the bit that holds them up,
with the price of rope as it is. But there’s a nice length left and I’m sure to get it.

You can never catch your breath after. It’s a kind of pleasure for you.

Hold your tongue. I see your friend is picking pockets again, collecting the coppers while they watch it to the end. He’ll take his turn.

The far pirate’s still shaking.

Where’s his family to pull on his leg and break his neck? The baker’s cut his rope too soon.

I told you they all don’t hang. He must’ve swallowed a pipe.

BOOK: Pirate Talk or Mermalade

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