The Buccaneers (9 page)

He sat in the loops of a Spanish bowline, and we lowered him from the rail. With the sea at his feet, and then at his shoulders, he prodded and banged at the planks. “Forward!” he shouted. Or, “Aft!” And we shuffled him back and forth until he let us know, with a cry, that he had found the damage done by the
Apostle's
cannons.

I watched for sharks as he worked down there, hidden by the curve of the hull. Then, “Up!” he shouted, and a moment later he was sitting exhausted on the deck, his old face alarmingly red from his effort. We stood round him, solemn as priests.

“They hit us twice,” he said.

“I counted three,” I said. “Maybe four.”

“Well, they
hurt
us twice. Far as I can see,” said Abbey. “In one place the planks are stove in. And just below here”—he slapped the deck—”there's a ball stuck in the hull like a cork.”

“Can we repair it?” asked Butterfield.

“We can patch it.” Abbey coughed. He spat out a dribble of seawater. “But we'll have to do more than that before we load at Trinidad.”

Again he went over the side, and he plugged the holes with canvas and tar. But still the sea came in. We were pumping for an hour in every watch by the time we sighted the old Spanish Main ten days out from Jamaica. Butter-field went down to uncurtain his windows, and with trees and green hills at our side, we worked our way east. By day
we beat into the trades, and at night we rode breezes that smelled of rivers and jungles.

But the leak quickened in the hull until, pumping both night and day, we worried that we'd sink before we ever got to Trinidad. Abbey said, as though the thought were his own, that a third shot must have hit us. “We'll have to dry her out,” he said.

Horn knew a place, a broad beach at a river's mouth on the shore of Venezuela. It had been used for centuries, he said, by the Spaniards and the buccaneers. Then he clapped me on the shoulder. “You might even find doubloons in the sand,” he said, grinning ear to ear.

It was a lovely bay he took us to, the sort of place I'd always conjured in my mind whenever I'd thought of the Indies. Coconut trees leaned over a strip of silver sand, their huge fronds spread like parasols. At the head of the bay, mangroves lined the shore, standing on their roots as though they sought to climb above the water. Beyond them was a chaos of green: trees and vines and ferns all tangled in a mass. And the river twisted from the vegetation, brown as dirt, like a living snake coming from the dank, green thickness.

A burst of bright-colored birds rose at the dropping of our anchor. We furled the sails, then flocked ashore like children. Some swam, some took the boats, but all of us went. Or all but Horn. He rigged a hammock for himself between the shrouds and the foremast, and put an awning above it. There he slept, in the shade, planning to dream— he said—of native girls.

We played bowls with coconuts; we splashed in water
warmed by sun. I dug in the sand but found no doubloons. It would have been a paradise if it hadn't been for the hordes of flies.

I had never seen anything like them in England. Long-legged things, armed with spikes that sucked our blood, they flew with a high and irritating whine in clouds about our heads. Abbey called them mosquitoes. They drove us from the beach in the end, and we set to work to heel the
Dragon
down.

We shifted the cannons all to one side, then stretched a line from the capstan to the masthead and down to a mangrove that was as thick as a barrel. The tree's trunk was ringed by scars, the marks of ropes, like those I'd once seen round the neck of a man who had been hanged. Most of the rope marks were ancient but some were very new, and we spaced our own lines between them. Then we hauled round the capstan, and the
Dragon
lay on her side like a great wooden beast.

Uncle Stanley took it into his head that he would like to catch a parrot to take home to England. So he set off up the river in the dory, with dimwitted Mudge to row, as I and the others scraped the schooner's hull.

We peeled away acres of grass, tons of thick-shelled barnacles, mussels, and squirting sponges that popped under our feet. Abbey found the source of our leak: a shattered plank far below the waterline. “Well, you were right,” he said when he took me there to see it. “Only a cannonball could have done this.” He knelt on the round of the hull and pressed his fist against the plank. He could nearly push right through it.

“You see?” he said. “They hit us three times.”

“Or more,” I said.

“No, only three.” He looked up at me, his good eye closed against the sun. “Unless there's something on the other side.”

“No,” I said. All our hits, I thought, had been to starboard.

“Well, we'll have a look,” he said.

Abbey tore away his patches, then chiseled out the broken planks and fitted new ones into place. He hammered oakum down the seams, the clang of his iron ringing through the trees, so that the birds never rested, but flew round and round the jungle in a huge and glittering wheel. Then a bit of paint, a bit of tallow, and the
Dragon
— or half of her, at least—was as strong as the day she was built.

The next day we careened her on the other side and scraped the growth from there. Abbey tapped at every plank, but we could see at a glance that the hull was sound. And the
Dragon
was already floating when the captain and Mudge returned from their second trip up the river.

I couldn't help smiling to see them coming. The boat could seat two oarsmen, but Mudge lolled in the stern while my uncle Stanley did the rowing, as lazily as a man ever rowed. Between them was what seemed at first to be a parrot but was only a collection of feathers stuck into half a coconut, arranged to look like a bird. And they came so slowly—barely faster than the river itself—that they looked like a pair of boys at the end of a grand adventure. They
were the best of friends; I could see that now. Though Butterfield cursed poor Mudge at every turn, he was very fond of the sailor.

They came aboard laughing, scratching themselves, nearly eaten alive by mosquitoes. Mudge carried the coconut parrot as carefully as he would have held a real bird. He smoothed its feathers as Butterfield looked on. Then he gave it to the captain, with a little show of embarrassment and the kindliest smile I'd ever seen.

“What are you grinning at?” Butterfield asked me. “Hoist the boat aboard and make sail.”

The
Dragon
leaked not a drop as we sailed along on our way. “Tight as a drum,” said Abbey, eager to lord over me that he'd been right and I'd been wrong. He was still gloating when we fetched the shores of Trinidad.

At Port of Spain, on the northwestern tip of the island, we loaded our cargo of sugar and coffee. Sacks weighing half a hundredweight filled the holds, packed on a bed of coconut husks. The carved dragon at the bow sank lower and lower, as though trying to drink from the harbor water. Then the hatches were sealed, and we cast off for the long voyage home.

Where we'd struggled before, we now ran with the wind, the glorious trades sweeping us on under sunshine or glittering stars. We passed Grenada and the Grenadines, up the chain of islands at the edge of the Caribbean Sea. Then Mudge came aft, early on a morning, to take my place at the helm. And the next in a chain of troubles fell upon us.

He was shaking, sweating. His eyes were full of fear.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I don't know.” He shook like a wet dog, and held himself about the shoulders. “I'm cold as death. My head's about to burst, I think.”

He swayed on his heels, then grabbed my shoulder to steady himself. His hand felt hot as fire.

“Fetch the captain, John,” he said. “Fetch him fast; I think I'm dying.” He reeled sideways and fell in a faint to the deck.

I turned and stared through the skylight. Butterfield sat at the table, hurrying to get through his breakfast. When I stamped on the framed glass, he looked up, startled, with a bit of buttered biscuit pinched between his fingers.

“Come up!” I shouted. “It's Mudge. He's fainted.”

“Fainted?”
Butterfield mouthed the word so plainly that I heard his voice in my head. Then he shot up from the table and vanished from the skylight, rattling up the companionway an instant later, with the biscuit still in his hand. He dropped on the deck beside Mudge as others came from the waist and the fo'c's'le, drawn by the sudden commotion, to stand in a circle around us. Horn was last, but he cleared a path with his arms, right to the front of the small crowd.

Butterfield took his old friend in his arms. “Dana,” he said, and lifted Mudge s head from the deck.

I saw bumps on the sailor's neck, balls of flesh standing out.

“What's wrong with him?” asked Butterfield.

“He said he's dying,” said I.

My uncle looked at me bleakly. “Dying?”

Horn laughed. “He's not dying.” He nudged his foot at Mudge s ribs. “Get up, man. Pull yourself together.”

“Leave him,” said Butterfield. He pushed at Horn's foot. “What do you know of it?”

“I know he's got the fever, is all.” Horn, too, knelt on the deck. He pinched Mudge's cheeks—rather roughly, I thought. But Mudge came awake, and blinked up at the faces all around him.

“It's all right,” said Butterfield. “You're not dying, you muttonhead.”

“But he'll hope he will,” said Horn. “He'll get the shivers and then the aches, and he'll be out of his head for days. That's what comes from mucking about in swamps.”

An odd look came over Butterfield's face. There was relief there, but dread as well. He had also been “mucking about in swamps.”

We packed Mudge down to the captain's cabin. The curtains were only half closed, as the islands were still pale shapes in the east. Mudge lay in the shade, with Butterfield for his nurse. Just as Horn had predicted, the fever took hold of him.

A rash spread over his skin. Every joint in his body ached to the point that it hurt him just to lie still. The bumps of flesh appeared in other places, and he dreamed troubling dreams that made him thrash about, then wake screaming from the pain.

A second man came down with it, then a third, then another. By evening all three men lay moaning in their fo'c's'le hammocks, and Mudge in the stern. The sounds of despair filled the ship from fore to aft.

Our crew reduced by half, we stood extra tricks at
the wheel. And at sunset, as I steered the
Dragon
north, I felt every little twitch and twinge in a way I'd never felt before, sure that I'd be next to succumb to the fever.

It was nearly dark when Horn came to take my place. He brought us up a point to windward, and I felt a sluggish rolling in the hull as the
Dragon
gained a knot of speed. He put a peg in the traverse board to mark the change in course, then raised his head to choose a star to steer toward.

“The fo'c's'le's like a furnace,” he said. “And your gunner's down there, all in a sweat, wondering why he's hot.” Horn laughed. “He's scared he's got the fever.”

His humor annoyed me. “Why shouldn't he be?” I asked.

Horn shrugged. “I might be too, if I were an old gunner with my brains blown away. I've seen ships drifting, all sheets to the wind, with not a man aboard fit to tend a sail.”

“That could happen to us.”

“It won't,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You don't catch the fever from your shipmates, Mr. Spencer. You catch it from the swamps and jungles; it's in the air, you see.”

“We were
all
in the jungle,” I said.

“Well, not quite.”

“No,” said I. “Not you.”

He looked up at his star. “The helm feels heavy,” he said.

I ignored him. “Why didn't you go to shore? What kept you on the ship?”

“The fates, I suppose,” said Horn. He smiled in the darkness. “I've told you before: I'm blessed.”

I heard a groan from the cabin below, then Butterfield's voice: “Hush now, hush.”

Horn kept his hands on the wheel. “I'm like your guardian angel,” he said.

H
orn was still at the helm when I came up from my berth in the hours close to dawn. The wind had fallen, and the sails drew lazily as the
Dragon
ghosted along. Horn, I fancied, could keep her moving in no wind at all.

“Have you been steering all night?” I asked.

“It's no bother to steer,” he said. “She's a lovely ship, Mr. Spencer.”

I had a sense of having been there before, as though we'd spoken the same words at a time I couldn't quite remember. But then I heard the groaning from the fo'c's'le, and it seemed to me that more men had been taken by the fever.

“She seems heavy tonight,” said Horn for the second time during his watch. “I sounded the bilges, but they're dry as dust. It's odd.”

I stood still beside him, listening to the sails and the rigging, trying to feel the motion of the schooner.

“Here.” Horn stepped from the wheel. “See what you think.”

I took the spokes in my hands. I turned them and felt the
rudder pushing at the water. Was it just the thought that she was heavier that now made the helm feel different? I wasn't convinced.

“I don't know,” I said, looking back.

Horn had moved away. He stood at the rail, leaning so far over the side that I could easily have tipped him overboard. The thought actually occurred to me. I even saw myself doing it; just a push and he would tumble over. Then I gripped the spokes as hard as I could, for it scared me to see that picture in my mind. I didn't
want
to tip him over, and had never even dreamed of it.

The man's an albatross
, Abbey had said.
He's a Jonah.
But I hadn't believed it then, and didn't believe it now. I remembered the gunner's sighting of a coffin, and his dream.
We'll see a rain of iron, a flood, a pestilence, and a fire.

My arms began to tremble, so hard did I hold the wheel. Abbey's dream was coming true: we had been shot at, nearly sunk, and attacked by a plague of mosquitoes. All that he had foretold had come to pass. Except the fire.