The Castaways (7 page)

“It’s the weather brace, is it?” said Midgely.

Mr. Beezley smiled for the first time. “Why, Mary’s my mother!” he said in surprise. “That’s just what it is. At least there’s one of you with his wits about him.”

Last of all he came to me. “You’ll go aloft,” he said.

I didn’t have to obey, and I knew it. I could sit on the deck, refusing to work, but the ship would still be sailed where Mr. Beezley chose to sail it. He had taken it over, just as Mr. Mullock had taken over the longboat, as men would always do to boys. So I went to my chore, though not eagerly. I had been up in the rigging of a ship only once, and that time I had fallen from the maintop, straight into the sea. The thought of going again made jelly of my legs.

I looked up where Mr. Beezley pointed, at the high stick of the topsail yard, and let him think I understood his sailor’s babble. “The brace is fouled with the Flemish horse,” he said. “Mind it doesn’t pitch you from the yard when you free it.”

I began to climb the ratlines. I told myself that it was better to go north than do nothing, that there was much I could learn from Mr. Beezley. But I was only putting on a brave
face, and that fell away as soon as I felt the roll of the ship, the sway and tremble of the ropes. My old fears got the better of me. I would have gone no higher if Mr. Moyle hadn’t chased me. With a cry he came crawling up the rigging, nimble as a spider, shaking the ropes like a web. I looked down at him, and all I saw were his horrid teeth as he opened his mouth and shouted.

“Get up there, you trollop!” He came in a quick dart, hand over hand. “Get up or I’ll bite you!”

It was no game he was playing. Mr. Moyle seemed furious, and I feared that if he caught me he would do just what he threatened, or worse. So up I went, and he chased me higher. I moved from fear, and from shame as well, for I heard the others laughing. Mr. Moyle chased me to the wooden top, through the lubber’s hole and up again. Each time I looked down it was to see his piglike face a little closer. I scrambled up the topsail shrouds, and at last I reached the slender yard where the canvas hung.

I was then many feet above the sea, clinging to a teeter-totter mast. Sails flapped all around me, and the tangle of ropes writhed like so many snakes. Buntlines and braces and halyards and footropes were all wrapped around each other. I would have to shinny out along the yard to free them, and that stick of wood was swaying and plunging in the most alarming fashion.

Far below, the deck planks made a pattern of black seams and white wood. I saw Weedle’s red sash, and the gray water coursing past the ship. Everything was moving three ways at once—up or down, back or forth, and side to side—and it all began to swim and blur as dizziness overtook me.

“Move yourself!” shouted Mr. Moyle, clawing his way up the rigging. He opened his mouth and gnashed his broken teeth.

In a flash I was out on the yard. I knelt astride it and inched my way along the wood. With the sail pressing at my legs, and the ropes pulling at my arms, it was all I could do to hold on. I stretched out along the end of the yard and pulled at the tangle of rope.

Without warning, it came loose. Something whipped at my shoulders, then all fell away with a great groan and a snap.

The yard twisted. The canvas opened with a shuddering crack. The whole ship leaned to the side, and with a small shout I tumbled from the yard.

It was Mr. Moyle who saved me. He was there as quick as a wink, one arm at my waist, a hand on my sleeve. He caught me in the moment that I fell, and swung me round so that my chest settled on the solid yard, and I stood in the bend of the footrope.

But there was nothing tender about him. As soon as his hand was free, he gave me a clout on the head. “Clumsy boy.” He breathed his foul breaths into my face. “Hang on. She’s coming about.”

Then Mr. Beezley—his voice faint from the deck—called orders one after the other. The mast swung us high above the deck as the ship began to turn. Sails flopped
across, and the yards shifted, creaking in their metal gear. The topsail shuddered and the whole mast shook, and I thought Mr. Moyle and I would be flung together out across the sea. But he held me tight—more tightly than I cared for—and the ship settled onto a new course. The sun came slanting through the sails now, making patches of gray and dazzling white, and the shadows of the ropes lay across them. Everything was moving, but slowly and grandly, like the soft rippling of albatross wings. My heart beat quickly, giving an extra shudder at the beauty of the wide sea all around, and the white curl thickening at the bow as the ship gathered speed.

“You saved my life,” I said to Mr. Moyle. “Thank you.”

He eyed me very strangely. “If you save a fellow’s life, his life is yours. You know that, don’t you? But no worry, lad.” He smiled with the most gruesome leer. “I won’t collect just yet, my boy. Collect I will, only not just yet.”

He pinched my arm, but not from friendliness. With a push and a curse he sent me down again, and chased me all the way. I couldn’t move fast enough for his liking, and twice he trod on my fingers as he followed me down the ratlines.

By the time I reached the deck, the ship was sailing nicely. We were reaching to the north with the yards braced back, the canvas taut and pulling. Mr. Beezley had given life to the wood and canvas, creating a creature that seemed full of joy to be charging along.

My companions, too, were in fine spirits. Old troubles forgotten, a new adventure ahead, they were ready to follow Mr. Beezley to the ends of the earth. “Where’s the gold?”
they asked. “Does it lie all over the ground, Mr. Beezley?” Already their eyes were agleam, as though they’d been blinded by gold dust.

By nightfall our castaways had taken up quarters in the stern cabin, which had not been visited since our first morning aboard. From that moment on, as if the ghosts had left in fear, we heard nary a tap nor a breath as we pressed along.

In the rubble of abandoned things, the castaways found clothes that might have been tailored to fit. They shaved their beards, though Mr. Beezley left a strange strip along his jawbone, a hairy frame for a homely face. Mr. Moyle, clean-shaven, looked more than ever like a grunting swine.

Mr. Beezley lived up to his word, making sailors of us all. Under his guidance we overhauled the rigging from rail to truck, learning every term for every object in between. We took such a pride in handling that great ship, that every one of us—even I—was made better by it. Weedle proved himself handy with a marlinspike, and I often saw him sitting with Mr. Moyle, splicing rope in the sun. He was known by all as Captain Kiddy, which he took with good humor as he sported about in his piratical clothes. Benjamin Penny made a fine helmsman, though he had to stand on a wooden box to gain the height he needed. The giant Gaskin Boggis came to love going aloft. He would sit on the fore-topsail yard, high above the deck, drumming his heels against the wind-filled canvas.

Happiest of all was Midgely With his
Flying Dutchman
so easily tamed, he had to give up the notion that we sailed a phantom ship. He thought it a fair trade, for Mr. Beezley
made him the cook and, within the week, little Midge was at home with his chores. To watch him work was something of a wonder. He knew where every pot and pan was kept, and one would swear he had the eyes of a cat as he went bustling about, turning our maggot-ridden supplies into hearty meals. It gave him hope, and a belief that his life hadn’t been ruined with the loss of his eyes. “That might be the best thing what ever happened to me, Tom,” he told me once. “There weren’t no one what was going to take no urchin out to sea. But now it’s a different kettle of fish, ain’t it, Tom? Now I’m an urchin what can cook.”

Even I, at times, enjoyed those days, and especially my turns at the wheel. They began before dawn and ended in daylight, so that I marked the rising of every sun. I found an enormous beauty in the ship’s windborne passage, a great comfort to be going north at such a steady rate. I began to imagine that I was really on my way home after all. From Georgia, I thought, I might easily find a ship to take Midge and me to England, if I could beg the fare from our castaways. That didn’t seem like much to ask, though there was a lurking dread in my mind that it would never happen, that some terrible fate had come aboard with our strange sailors. Certainly, it was hard to believe I was “doing the handsome thing” as long as I left myself in the hands of Mr. Beezley.

And so the miles went rolling past, and I spent much time alone. Often I thought of my mother and my father; sometimes I could bear to think of them no more. Then I studied the ship, learning how it worked, and
why
it worked. It was no puzzle how the wind could push it along from
behind, but a great mystery how another wind could
pull
it from ahead. I never tired of gazing at the sails, trying to learn the secret.

With every change in the weather, my seasickness bubbled up. Or more. But
my fear
of the sea all but disappeared. I never again had to be driven aloft, and one stormy day I found myself balanced on the topgallant yard without a thought of falling or fainting. The horizon was pitching and slanting, the yard tossing like a horse, but the only thought in my head was of tying a proper reef knot.

That moment I made it my ambition to climb even higher, to reach the very top of the mainmast. I went at it in spurts, scrambling up through the shrouds until I dared go no higher. It took me days to reach the top, but at last I did it. I stood on slender ropes, with the great gulf of sea and sky below me, and—trembling like an insect—I touched my palm to the very tip of the mast.

To prove that I had been there I tore away the shreds of the old flag. The wind had tangled them into one long braid, and the sun had bleached the braid to white. I held it in my teeth as I descended to the deck. With much delight I set it out for Midgely on the counter of the cookhouse.

He smiled when he touched it. He unrolled the braid with his small fingers, working the tangles from threads and shards of cloth.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if this was really the flag of the
Flying Dutchman?”
he said. “People would ask, ‘Where did you get that old flag?’ and we would say, ‘Oh, only from the
Flying Dutchman
, that’s all.’ Wouldn’t it be grand?”

I wasn’t really listening. I was too intent on the pattern
that was appearing under Midgely’s fingers. I saw green and purple, and fragments of gold. Much more cloth had been blown away in the wind than remained for me to see, but I pieced it back together in my mind. The last time I had seen such a flag was on the ship that carried us from England toward Australia. It was the pennant flown by all of Mr. Goodfellow’s ships.

What a turn that gave me. I had escaped from one of his ships only to get aboard another. It was as though Mr. Goodfellow had hounded me nearly to the shores of the frozen continent. I thought I could never be rid of him.

I tore the flag from Midgely’s hands. I squashed the cloth in my fist, set it aflame in the stove, and watched it burn. I didn’t imagine that my discovery was really the first of three incidents that would, again, put a twist into the river of my life.

The next came only a day later. It was my turn at the wheel, and dawn was breaking. As they did every morning, Beezley and Moyle came up from below with the rising of the sun. Mr. Beezley, as always, took a moment to stand at my side and study the compass.

He was turning away to join Mr. Moyle at the stern when a strange sound came over the sea. It was a cry of loneliness, a plaintive mewling in the vanishing darkness.

“What the devil’s that?” said Mr. Beezley, stopping in his tracks.

“Do you think it might be mermaids?” asked Mr. Moyle, with all seriousness.

“Humbug!”

The cry came again. Mr. Moyle and Mr. Beezley hurried to the side of the ship.

“If it’s not mermaids, then what is it?” said Mr. Moyle.

Ahead of the ship a bit of ice appeared. It was the first we had seen in many days, and the last we would see on the voyage. It had been carried very far, and was nearly fully melted.

The sounds changed to frantic barks and yelps.

“It’s
dogs,”
said a wondering Mr. Beezley “How on earth could dogs be there?”

We passed within fifty yards of the ice. It seemed to turn to solid gold as it took on the light of the rising sun. Spotted across it were small gray shapes that looked very doglike indeed, until they reared up from the ice. If these were dogs they were legless; but of course they were only seals.

Perhaps my eyes were better than those of the castaways, but I would have thought that a pair of sealers might have known their quarry more easily. The two peered over the rail for the longest time before Mr. Beezley laughed. “Why, they’re seals,” he said.

“Fancy that,” said Mr. Moyle.

The third incident followed within the week. As the nights grew warm, and then hot, a richer stench began to rise from the closed-over hatches. Again we heard the buzzing of flies.

By chance, Midgely uncovered another page from the journal—or a fragment of a page. It was rolled into a taper, charred at the end from Gaskin’s fire-lighting. It had been burnt and water-dipped, so that only two paragraphs could be read. From those, one sentence leapt out at me.

“He cares nothing for what lies below the breadfruit.”

Little Midge and I sat and wondered. All that evening we did nothing but ponder. What could lie below the breadfruit?

In the dark of the midnight watch, while Beezley and Moyle and Penny were sleeping—while Weedle had the wheel—I took a lantern and went off to find out. Midgely and Boggis helped open the dogs on the hatch. Then Boggis lifted the heavy lid, and I slipped under its edge, down through a horde of flies.

The flies were so thick that I breathed them in. I felt them on my teeth, in my nose, in the back of my throat. So I took off my shirt and tied it like a mask round my mouth. And with my lantern held high, I went down.