Pirate Talk or Mermalade (2 page)

Or sung the right song. People do stop their gossip for a miracle.

It’s worth living to see a miracle, isn’t it, Ma?

Miracles only bring trouble. I’ve had my own, and worse. Be off with your friend now, and look into the pockets of those who are gaping the most. And don’t forget the Cap’n’s kit. He’ll have something in it for me, if he’s not drunk it away already.

All he’s come in with is a wreck, and a whale washed up.

Then he’s blessed enough and won’t hit me so hard. Be off with you.

Don’t leave that bench, Ma. I don’t want you getting low while I’m gone, and trying the rope.

You’re not to worry. All the rope I had was in the soup, knowing I’d get fresh.

Go ahead, finish it. Your brother’s caught the death of a cold anyhow and didn’t take but two spoons of it, only a drink from the bitters.

A real sailor in him, like me, with a taste for bitters.

Real bitters.

The soup’s a pip, Ma. You’ve been stewing the heel of a boot at least, if it’s not the cursed albacore straight from the shell.

Eat the soup and tell me what you are doing ashore and not hauling the fish or the fur. Your boat’s not due to port for another three months and what coin will I use if you don’t sail in with it?

I need a woman for cooking and boiling and such and I’ve come ashore to marry her, Ma. I will marry a woman who will keep you from making over such soups as this.

The sea has made you bold. But a wife will be another mouth to feed before others in bottom rags come crying with their mouths stretched wide like the robin birds. Only fools marry sailors.

You’ve married them yourself, I believe.

Marrying a man of the sea is like marrying a boat. They never come home. Or they take to pirating and they had better not.

No pirating for me. I’m set to learn to whittle the whalebone. There’s plenty of money in it—I hope to do “The Shepherd’s Lad Standing against the Wolf” and “Samson Pulling down the Temple.”

Aye, there are many who like it, especially those who are not the seafaring kind, who think sailors go out to look after a pool of fish with birds’ feathers and lures and bobbers and spend so little time troubling them that they learn to carve the bone.

Brother can mind the shop, fetch me the customers and light the lamp.

He isn’t a boy to mind even his mother, always running about and complaining to me about myself. But how shall we eat while you are whittling thus? Have you drawn a purse from a dead woman’s girdle?

I’ve gained the means. I’ll tell you—

Shshsh—not so loud on your luck. Someone comes along the passage now, your brother, I hope, and no one else, with whatever Cap’n has hauled in for me.

To judge from the sound of his dragging, that kit of Cap’n Peters’ is ever bit as big as he is.

So I do hope. That’s a sneeze! Like a dry drunk with the snuff, that boy.

You’ll be killing him with his cold, having to haul such heaviness.

Is that what they say to sailors in a good blow? Is that what they said to my Jimmy?

Father is Jimmy now, is he? The one who died of a sailor’s pleurisy? Does this Cap’n Peters prefer to hear of Jimmy
over all the others, the snot-drowned sailor of the seven seas?

Where’d you hear of my Cap’n Peters—a’sailing?

It was on land I heard.

Ah, Peters is a brisk fellow, keeps a fine reputation on the docks. Why, many a boat would have him if he weren’t about in his own, many a farthing is wagered that he can outsail even the cutthroated pirate. He knows when a boat’s going down before she knows it herself, especially out by the neck.

Brother! You’ve eaten my lot.

She said to.

She would eat it herself anyway during my labors. Which is why you sent me out just then, isn’t it, Ma?

This bit of a heel and rope is not worth calling me a glutton, a thief, and a tyrant. A Caligula he thinks me, and that I’ll poison myself and him together.

After these many months gone, at least she’s the same in her bludgeoning talk. No more height on you, then?

Not unless I stand on a whale.

Ha—you’ve got your wits about you at least. Ma, take his bowl and fill it with the last boilings—I know you have it somewhere for yourself.

I keep a pot of seaweed worth nothing.

That’s the one.

See what the window looks onto now? Where we used to play? The rain tries to hide it.

There’s a lot of sawed wood in that.

It’s mostly them cleaning the holds of the Spaniards
and pirates—two today. We’re always hearing the Dies Irae.

Speaking of the Christian teachings, your brother’s come to have the banns said.

You made no mention—

He proclaims it, the sailor who’s out of a sail, a man made of romance even grander than yours of pirates. But the fair and first question is—did sweet Cap’n Peters ask after me? I’m the light of his light, what he turns his boat to first after tidying up the beach.

Not so much when I saw him. He has a woman in tow that he claims is his daughter.

Daughter? I’ll daughter him. That scum of the ocean—he never talked of a daughter. Did he have her on the breech? Did she come up out of the sea?

Don’t grip him like that, his shirt will rip and then where will you get the thread for it?

Daughter, ha.

Ma, don’t beat the bearer of news you must already guess.

Your brother cuts me down from my fate to tell me I’m crazy—and then tells me my true love has got up a daughter by way of a voyage.

Open the kit and see what he’s brought you.

He’s sure to have rope. And there it is. Lovely. From a shop.

I’ll soon be setting up my own shop with the bone Peters has promised from that whale.

You chose the bone instead of a share of the oil?

What oil? What bone?

If you weren’t always busy in the rafters with your noose-making, you’d hear the news. I found the beached whale that Cap’n Peters is hauling in.

We found it.

You did not tell your Ma.

He checked the ropes while I met the daughter and made Cap’n Peters promise me the bone, just what I need to start my life on land. Peters has towed the whale to a safe place.

It won’t be there long.

Keep your tongue in your head. He’s a dry captain and doesn’t touch a drop.

You need a roof to keep you dry from his drops.

The gibbet for you!

If that’s the story, then I’ll face Cap’n Peters myself over a glass and pull the bone out of him. I must have the bone to woo myself a wife.

He has this new daughter.

Then the bone be the dowry.

Peters never told you where that safe bone place is, is what I’m a-fearing.

Cut out your tongue and swallow it.

Why isn’t he telling me about this daughter to my face? I will string myself up and make a face for him to remember.

I’ll take that rope. I might have to tie Cap’n Peters and his daughter to their chairs whilst I go about in removing what is rightfully mine.

Snatching it out of my very hand! It was Cap’n Peters’
gift. Here, take this bit instead that I’ve been using for the thatching.

The very whelp of the house? The blimey Blessed Virgin Mary I’ll take it. I’ll take my Ma’s hullo, as sour as that, as take the thatch rope, I’ll take my leave.

He’s better off gone.

He’s in a hurry.

I tell you, it’s the Harold in him that wants the shore instead of the sea, that medaled officer who wanted a woman on land more than a woman aboard.

The one who built the gallows and then left for England on the press yard fees he stole? That Harold?

Aye, the steps and the string, the same. He was just collecting from Spain by way of England. Died of the gout before he could return, or so the letter that came said.

He left out the best of the gallows’ supports, it seems. It leans like the gout itself.

You know as well as I do what makes it lean—too much in the way of business. It was lucky that pirate got away or it would have fallen on the baker from overuse. Now sleep off this chill you’re feigning. I will turn over a piece of coal to rid the room of the cold your brother brought from his seven seas.

The bench of sleep.

The gibbetty bench of sleep and the love of a sailor-brother and the sound of the waves and all that land somewhere else that they slap.

He’s back for good?

For the good of a woman, not for us.

I’m going to sea with him, Ma. When he sets sail again as he will, because all sailors sail once they do.

You say that and I’ll put the poker down your throat, I’ll hang myself and drown in a dropper of water. You go to sea with your brother and I will—

Then I will have no reason to return. You will always be returning. That is the way of those born beside water, of all the water in you from your father, the Captain Edward of the great ship
Whizzen.
One lump or two of this coal that I’ve stolen out of the bishop’s own braziers?

Two, Ma, my true Ma.

I have examined all the varieties of jack-in-the-pulpit in the field, every one, and there are three, I believe, and none of them full-blooming which makes the naming of this variety that much more trying. I also bring a specimen of penny frog for you that I have caught here in the folds.

Girls don’t take off their bonnets to catch frogs in them. Not even girls using a cane.

You do if you are teaching Winthrop, the half-wit heir. Peters knows the game and has instructed me well. Have you seen the boy?

My brother says you can have too many frogs in a field. He said they push up Dead Man’s Fingers for one thing and I told him—

Alive, alive-o.

This one is squashed about the foot. What can I learn from that, that you, with your lameness, cannot teach?

It is a frog from the inside that is most worthy of examination, very like a person perhaps.

Dead Man’s Fingers are not so much a part of a person, are they?

A plant like the mushroom, their companions. Many of those fingers grow in the marsh behind, the one that is home to all these frogs.

Catch the frog, kiss the frog and like it.

I’m not going to play your silly game. These are lessons for the boy really—where is he?—and you’d best not be about at all.

Teacher, teacher. I can tie a Hugenot, I can lift a bull.

A bull-calf. I am sixteen too, you know. Almost old for a teacher.

I am your elder by a week and not ugly to you, Miss Count-Your-Pupils. The fiddler last night played only for your feet I suppose.

I made my way. But you cannot even sign your name to paper.

I am familiar with every family of seabird and all mathematics up to geometry, so long as I don’t have to write the sums out.

That is what you claim.

And you? How about the sum-making you puzzle over in your teaching, your froggy subtractions?

I have added all the varieties and those that I counted four paces from the tree bearing a name from Linnaeus that the boy studies. Of them all, the sum is 258, in other words, taking the three plantings of snowberries minus 136 makes 122 posies, added and subtracted both. But where, I am now asking, are all those posies now to make up such a sum? What’s become of them?

Here you are.

Oh, no! Oh, no! These are supposed to provide lessons in adding and subtracting for all of the next week. Now I will have to go back to the book, I will have to teach the boy from
the book. Oh, why did I ever leave the sea?

Don’t screech so. If the boy’s father hears—

Oh dear, oh dear.

Please don’t sob. Crying won’t obtain for you a way out of teaching. I will though.

Bother! You will fill me up with children before I’m grown. I am the first of my family to become a teacher, a family in which no one has ever read before, or even pretended to.

Cannot Cap’n Peters read?

He is less my family than you know.

Some say that, though the taking of orphans as salvage is common enough.

It is nothing shameful. I was combing my hair on a rock.

And Peters?

He treats me most cruelly.

It is the way of men.

Not all men. I saw your brother weeping at the whale.

You did not.

I am your teacher and your better, I know what I’ve seen. And I know where the bone of the whale is, those bloody bones.

Of course you do.

Don’t stand so close. My cane!

I wish to trap the small insect you described as comely where it has landed on your shoulder.

Oh—of the genus which includes the beetle of which there are thousands? But this is the only one with seven or
nine marks on its wing.

Nine marks. I make good progress but you will not bless the work.

Please—there should be more than ample room on this escarpment for both of us.

Room for twenty more dr y-eyed angels such as yourself?

You must practice the writing of your name. I have showed you the E. You must form it in the air every day, and on the ground if you are lacking paper.

A noble letter, E.

If you can’t write your name, you will be beholding to many.

Beholding to you, perhaps? In reading, the letters bend and float away and will not stay.

Reading is like a sea voyage, you either attend to it and see the world, or you stay at home.
Tristram Shandy
was tossed over many a ship, which is how I at last learned the skill.

You know nothing about the sea—you never teach it.

Nothing that is known about the sea is true.

So you say.

I shall teach you just the beginning: How the Sea Was Formed. A carpenter cuts a king’s worth of trees and lays them flat to each other, then nails them together with the teeth of all the birds that fly which is why so few birds have teeth now. When he has finished, the wood makes the bridge from this land to the next. Still, it must be painted. The carpenter has blue powders left over from coloring the sky. The strength of this paint to adhere to the air is very great but the power of
it to stick to the wood is so much more. What is left puddles before the carpenter can put down rags to stop it. In most places, where the blue collects, it shines darker than the sky but elsewhere it runs into the sky and joins it. Under the strength of this blue, the birds’ teeth loosen and fall out and then the teeth sink into the sea, only later to float up to the beaches as shells. The boards themselves, as blue and as lively as they are, come loose and change into the rafts that drift by the drowning who can’t find the bridge for all the blue color.