The Convicts (12 page)

We found the rest of the cane against the wall. We threw the two halves and some pieces of glass into the hole and replaced the panel. As the guards came pounding down the ladders, we put the framing in place. The lights from their lanterns were flashing through the ship when we fled from the chapel.

Midgely was faster than I. His irons rattling, he ran ahead while I struggled with mine. I tripped and rose again, then tumbled down a ladder. A guard came right behind, and I reached my hammock only just in time. I settled into it as the space filled with light and guards.

I turned toward Midge, eager to see if he was safely there. I reached across and shook the ropes that held his hammock. “Midge?” I whispered.

A face rose from the canvas. But it wasn't Midgely's. I looked straight into Weedle's dark eyes.

“I know where you go,” he said. “Don't think you're safe hiding in a chapel. I got a score to settle, I do. And it don't bother me where it's done.”

With that he turned away. His irons clinked as he rolled over in the hammock. I lay still, staring at the ceiling, thankful for the guards. They stayed with us till daylight, tramping up and down as a storm began to rise. It came in a whistle of wind, a shiver in the hull. The hammocks swayed in that long sort of ripple that had sickened me before. And hour by hour the storm grew worse.

I didn't see Midge until morning chapel. He slipped into the bench at my side, looking worried and worn. In a whisper, as the benches filled, he said that Weedle had taken his hammock before he could get there, “fle knows everything, Tom,” he said. “But, Tom, I didn't tell him.”

“I know that,” I said. “He's going to come after me, Midge.”

In the roof of the chapel, above the crucified figure, the rain tapped on the hatch like hundreds of tiny hammers. The chaplain had to raise his voice above the sound of the wind in the rigging. I could hear waves drumming on the hull.

By the hour it worsened. The ship groaned; it creaked. The rain fell so heavily that there might have been herds of hoofed animals trampling the deck above the workroom. Our reels of thread rolled back and forth, the lamps swung wildly, and I felt even sicker than I had on my first day. As we marched to our noontime meal I staggered like a drunken sot. And in my weakness, Weedle must have seen his chance.

At the mouth of the hatch, he came at me. With a cry and a leap he was there. Suddenly I was falling to the deck and he was on top of me, his fist in my hair. From his clothing he pulled a piece of glass that was long and thin like a dagger's blade. He raised it up and drove it down toward my throat.

I wasn't strong enough to throw him off me. I wriggled sideways and jerked my neck, and Weedle missed by less than an inch. The glass dug into the deck. I heard its tip crunch and crackle, a little grunt from Weedle as his hand slipped along its edge. When he held it up again there was blood dripping from his palm, streaming down the glass. His scar twisted across his face. “Cut me?” he said. “I'll cut your throat.” And again he stabbed that thing toward me.

I moved the other way; I turned my head. With a fizz of a sound, the glass sizzled through my hair. It broke against the deck and went skittering in little pieces across the wood. I felt Weedle's breath as he snarled and swore. At last the guards hauled him off, and down to the black hole went Weedle. There was no question how he had found that piece of glass. It could only have come from the guard's broken lantern. Straight to the hole he was taken.

I shouted after him, the worst thing I could think of just then. “You snow smugger!” I cried, and poor Midge turned as white as a pile of salt.

“Oh, no, Tom,” he said. “You shouldn't have said that. He'll know I told you.”

“It doesn't matter anymore,” I said. “He's finished.”

“You don't know him, Tom. You don't know him at all.”

Well, I thought I did, and I felt free just then. But still I couldn't eat my supper, not with the ship all ashiver in waves that boomed at the hull. Spray from the river flew in through the grates, and the wind was an endless screech. I sat feeling dry as dust in my innards, but with sweat pouring on my skin. The low ceiling pressed toward me.

Midgely said, “Think of Nelson, Tom. He was seasick all the time.”

“Anchored in a river?” I asked.

He almost giggled. “Maybe not
all
the time.”

Toward the end of the day, in our last hour of sewing, there was a sort of thump, then a rattle in the timbers. Midgely looked up. “Feel that, Tom?” he said. “She touched.”

My mouth was too dry to speak.

“The wind's driving her toward the bank,” whispered Midge. “If it's like this in the springs, she'll nearly be ashore.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Maybe a week,” said Midge. “Not more than ten days.”

“And how long will Weedle be in the hole?”

He shrugged. “No one's never been there more than a week.”

Our time was short. But that night I couldn't possibly shift -myselffrom my hammock. I held on as it swayed back and forth, nearly wishing for death to find me. Nothing could be worse than the seasickness. “Is there no way to stop this?” I asked.

“Nelson said you should sit under a tree,” said Midge. He laughed at the cleverness of his stupid hero. “It goes away, Tom. You just have to wait.”

It was the storm that went away. It passed with the dawn, and left the seagulls whirling in great squawking pinwheels of white. The wind fell away. The waves settled down, and my stomach settled with them, and that night we set to work with a will.

As Midge tunneled in the chapel, I took the guard's broken cane and carefully split each piece down the middle. I scraped them hollow with a shard of his lantern glass, then rejoined the halves. I bound them round and round with strands from my rope belt. I sealed them with tar that I scraped from the hull. When I put one end in my mouth and raised the other, Midgely grinned to see what I'd made. “We can breathe through those,” he said. “Oooh, that's lummy, Tom.”

The days passed quickly. Storm followed storm, but each one sickened me a little less. My mind wandered easily from the workroom as I imagined myself back in London, finding my father and setting him free, unearthing my diamond and spending its riches. I regretted more than ever that Midge would be left behind, and I was pleased that he never guessed it.

We still took out his books and traveled to his islands. All around us, boys played their games of pitch-button and French and English—that battle fought on pickaback—as we met the black-skinned natives in their villages of huts. The ship was a better place without Walter Weedle.

We sometimes heard him at night. The black hole was below us, and not far away, and we heard him at first shouting and cursing and hammering at the wood. As the days went by he began to wail, then howl like a hound. Sometimes, in the quiet of the night's middle passage, as the ship slept and I worked, I heard his voice shouting my name from the depths of his hole. “I know where you are! I'll kill you, Tom Tin.”

There were boys who delighted in Weedle's being gone. Even some of his little gang seemed pleased, for they had no one to rob them of their meals. But much to my surprise, Oten Acres found no relief. The big farm boy kept wilting, shriveling, until he could barely turn himself from his hammock. He never ate, and I didn't believe he ever slept. If someone addressed him, he didn't answer. He stared into nothing with eyes so vacant that I sometimes doubted he even knew where he was. I saw him one morning wandering on the deck, his irons dragging as he plodded in the line. He was so hunched, so bent and broken, that the rain fell on his back, barely wetting his shoulders. It was as though he had resigned himself to death, and was only waiting for it to come.

It was Weedle's fourth night in the hole when we reached the planks behind the frames. It was the night the moon came full, though clouds kept it hidden. The wind was high, the river wild, and we could hear Weedle howling below us. I felt the hulk swing toward the marshes. With a shudder and a bang, it settled heavily into the mud, then leaned slowly on its side. At breakfast we had to hold on to our bowls to save them from sliding off the table. Everywhere we walked we seemed to go at a slant, until, halfway through the morning—and with the most unearthly groans—the ship finally picked itself up from the bottom.

It did it again the next night, when Midge and I were in the chapel. Midge said the tides must be at their lowest, and that if we didn't escape within the next two nights, it would be half a year before they were again so much in our favor.

“Then we'd better hurry,” I said.

“Or maybe not,” said Midge. “I was thinking, Tom. Maybe we should sit it out.”

It was just like him to suggest such a thing. We were near the end of our night's work, collecting the shavings and splinters of wood. The winter nights had become so long we were doing even that in darkness.

“We have to try,” I said.

“But what if we can't get out?” asked Midge. “What if we makfc just one little hole all the way through?”

I saw what he meant. A hole too small would be worse than none. It would be discovered, our work ruined.

“The planks are rotten,” I said. The wood we had taken away was black and spongy, reeking of rot. “We must be nearly through.”

“But maybe not,” said Midge. “You can't tell in the dark. I wish I could see them, Tom.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll let you see.”

I took him to clean the chapel that morning. I loosened the frames and the panel. But the old chaplain, with the worst of luck, chose that day to come back to the chapel from wherever it was he went. If he had waited another moment, he would have found us with the panel open. But he had no idea what I was doing.

He sniffed, his nose wrinkling. “It smells musty in here, Tom,” he said. It was the rot he was smelling. “I wish there were a window; I wish there were an opening somewhere.”

He turned away, hemming and hawing, looking all around the chapel. Tilting his head back, he looked up to the height of the altar. Then he scratched his white hair. “Tom?”

“Yes, sir?” I said.

“Do you notice something strange about our Lord?”

My heart fell. I went to his side and stared up at the wooden man.

“His ankles,” said the chaplain. He was squinting like a mole, his front teeth showing. “Am I not seeing properly? Has our spike fallen out?”

“I don't think it has fallen out, Father,” I said.

“Hmmm. Curious!” said he. “The shadows, perhaps.”

He seemed satisfied with that, but not wholly. He bent forward and walked stooped around the room, peering under benches. I had to leave the panel as it was, very slightly ajar, until morning prayers came round, and the chapel filled with boys. The ship was resting partly on the riverbed. Its angle held the panel in place, and leaned the boys together as they sat along the benches. I was in my place, with Midge beside me and the clanking line of convicts passing, when suddenly one boy keeled over. Wan and sickly, he teetered on his heels for a moment, put his hand to his brow, and crashed to the floor. There he lay, twitching and shaking, with his eyes rolled up, his tongue a red bulge.

All the boys stood up to gawk, A pair of guards came bashing through them. And I grabbed Midgely by the shoulder.

I hauled him close and cracked the panel open. “Quick!” I said. “Take a took, but quick.”

It took him only an instant. He reached inside, then fell to his place next to me, and I could tell by his face that the news wasn't good.- “Tom, we're not halfway,” he said. “It's another three or four nights.”

I reached into the hole. The earthy smell came out, that sweetly pungent odor.

Right in front of me, Oten Acres stood up. He was round-shouldered now, and bony. He stood as all the others sat, turning around with his big, plow-hardened hands spread open. “Fields!” he said, in a terrible moan of longing. “I smell the fields.”

His eyes were hollow, his cheeks sunken. He turned full around and gazed at the open panel.

“The earth,” he moaned. “The fields.”

I pulled Midge aside and jammed the panel shut. But I wasn't quick enough that Gten didn't see the hole behind it. He was clambering over the bench, and already three guards were pushing towaM him. The little boy lay twitching on the deck j but it was Oten Acres everyone was after.

“The fields” he said again, in that haunted voice. “Let me see the fields.”

The guards knocked him down. Oten put up his hands to shield himself, but the guards battered him down to his knees. We heard their grunted breaths, and Oten's cries, and the wooden Jesus stared down upon us all.

I thought the beating would be the farm boy's death. He slumped on his bench all through the service, sinking lower and lower, as though settling into his grave. But as we filed from the chapel, he came to his feet like a bull, pushing toward me. He grabbed my arm with more strength than I had ever had. “Help me, Tom,” he said.

There was no pulling my arm from his grasp, no pushing him away. I couldn't even pry his fingers loose.

“I know,” he said, his eyes like a madman's. “If you don't take me with you, I'll turn you in.”