The Dust of 100 Dogs

by A. S. King

  “Will I help you down, then, sir?”

  “No, we should be all right from here, thank you,” Seanie said, knowing for sure, right then, that something had been going on between the two of them.

  They arrived at the bed in her room, and Seanie made Emer sit down and hold her boot out to him. He gently shimmied it off and removed the thick bandages that were now soaked with blood. “I’m going to fetch the doctor.” He walked out of the cabin.

  When neither Seanie nor the doctor returned, Emer reached for a bottle of rum and gulped. What a day this had been. She’d finally punished the Spanish, and yet she didn’t care what jewels the searching men found or what gold she’d just stolen. All she thought about was Seanie and the questions that surrounded him. What would they do now? Where would they go? Would they go back to Ireland? Was she able to become a proper Irish woman again?

  Seanie returned. “David wanted me to tell you that the fleet is splitting now. He reckons we’ll all meet in Port Royal over the next week, if that’s all right by you.”

  She nodded, and the doctor arrived. He washed her foot with salts and warm water. He located the bleeding wound and treated it. “That could be septic, Captain. You’d want to rest awhile now and stay still.”

  “I see no reason to go anywhere today anyway,” Emer replied. “Come and check on me tomorrow.”

  Seanie locked the door behind him and sat down on the bed. He made sure Emer was comfortable and fixed her a tray of food. They had a bed picnic, snuggled safe beneath the warmth of blankets, and giggled a lot. When they were finished eating, neither took a minute to say much before they undressed and disappeared into each other’s skin for the first time. It was as easy as performing an underwater somersault for Emer, and made her stomach feel similar butterflies. As the sun set on the day Emer Morrisey finally sunk the Spanish fleet to the bottom of the sea, she and Seanie made love eight times. Once for each of her remaining toes.

  As the Vera Cruz sailed southwest toward Port Royal, her crew took turns drinking and dreaming aloud.

  “I reckon I’ll settle down. Buy some pigs. My Pa kept pigs,” one said.

  “A ship of my own! Arg!” another replied. “And a fine wench in my bed!”

  Only two other ships from their fleet were still visible. The rest had gone in different directions after moving the bulk of Spanish plunder into the hull of the Vera Cruz.

  Emer woke up quietly and turned to face Seanie. She stared at his sleeping face and tucked him in tightly with her blanket. She rose, testing her foot, then put on her trousers and limped out the door through the men’s quarters. She produced a large key from her pocket. Once inside the cargo hold, Emer locked the door and lit the lamp that hung next to it. The room sparkled.

  “Spanish fools,” she thought, shaking her head. She leaned down over two open boxes and touched a few shimmering things, then found a crate to sit comfortably on. She pulled out her dagger.

  The first four boxes she opened were filled with standard gold doubloons, more than she’d ever seen before, but somehow they didn’t excite her. She leaned toward one of the locked chests and dragged it forcefully over the planks. Try as she might, she couldn’t get the chest open, so she moved to the next one and tried it, concentrating on two loose hinge pins. When it opened, Emer felt a lick of surprise to see nothing but black fabric staring back at her. She dug her hands in beneath it and found three tied sacks.

  Getting up, she moved to the door for the lamp, brought it to the pile of crates, and placed it on a hook above her head. Then she picked up one of the sacks and untied the knot at the opening. Polished gems poured out of the bag like fast water, onto the black fabric. Most were red or burgundy—rubies, a few garnets or amethysts, some small and round, others as big as her big toe, or bigger. Emer soon found that the sacks of gems were divided by color. The second one held mostly emeralds, jade, and malachite, and the last one mostly opals and a few sapphires. She searched the bottom of the chest and found similar black fabric, but no more treasure.

  She went through a few more crates of gold doubloons and one filled solely with gold seal rings, cast in different designs. She tried on a few of them, admired her hand held flat in front of her, then took them off and put them back in the crate.

  Emer went back to work on the locked chests. Surely this was where her real riches would be, so she dug into their hinges with great fervor and determination.

  When she opened the nearest one and removed the top layer of fabric, Emer saw that it was filled to the very top with jewelry. Gemstone rings in gold settings, elaborate necklaces strung with precious rubies and diamonds, various-sized jewel-encrusted crosses, and a single sapphire pendant necklace so big Emer could barely figure who was meant to wear it. It seemed it would look best on an animal the size of a horse rather than a human, and a vision ran through her mind of a rich Spanish man whose carriage horses wore jewelry.

  She pulled the huge pendant over her head and moved over to the next chest, which was filled with native artifacts. What sort of culture had made these evil-looking figurines? Two were the size of a forearm, solid gold creatures with two heads. One little figure had only one head but a long rolled tongue and searing eyes. Beneath them were four matching solid gold daggers, with smoothed emeralds set in the handles, and below them was a heavy surprise for King Philip’s birthday—which Emer unwrapped quickly. Then she sat staring at it in the lamplight as if she’d just unearthed a spaceship.

  This emerald was twenty times the size of any gem she had ever seen, brighter and clearer than cut glass. But it wasn’t its size or luster that Emer marveled at most. It was its color. Only once in her life had she seen this shade of green before—and as she peered into the emerald, it showed her an image of her early home, her little verdant valley by the river. She wrapped it again, gently, and put it into an empty crate.

  The next chest was full of a mish-mash of things—snuffboxes, more Inca and Aztec trinkets, a few prize pistols, and a small sack of carved jade pendants. The last chest held forty perfect black pearls, larger than musket balls. Emer returned to the chest that held the figurines and removed them. She found the four matching daggers and removed them, too, adding these things to the crate with the emerald.

  The crate was now full, so Emer reached for a second, smaller one and emptied its sparkling contents onto the floor. She had little interest in mixed gems or pistols, so decided to pick out a few beautiful pieces of jewelry—the four-string rose-sapphire-and-ruby necklace, two large jade rings, several crosses, an enameled snuffbox, a handful of larger gemstones. She removed the sapphire horse necklace from around her neck and put it, with the jewelry, into a sack, which she tied and placed in her second crate.

  Emer looked around for anything else she might want, adding the small sack of red gemstones to her collection. She placed lids on her boxes and stood up. After putting the lamp back on its hook by the door, she extinguished its flame and left the cargo hold. She carried the two crates to her room—where Seanie sat eating a grapefruit—and then returned to lock the cargo hold door. Three marines were standing there now, peering in, their jaws hanging open in amazement.

  “You could buy a lot of pigs with that, Whitaker, I reckon. A lot of bloody pigs.”

  “I reckon I could buy all the pigs in the world with that much loot, aye.”

  “Stand aside men,” Emer said, key in hand, hurrying. The men stood in drunken attention. Emer locked the door.

  “There’s plenty there to go around, lads. You’ll have your share by the time we get to port.”

  “Whitaker reckons he could buy all the pigs in the world with that, sir. What do you think?”

  “I suppose he could,” she said. “Or at least all the pigs he could want, no doubt.”

  Whitaker saluted. “Aye, sir.”

  When Emer returned to the room, she kissed Seanie and peele
d a grapefruit. “Good morning.” When he looked at her as if to ask where she’d been, she answered, “I had a look at the Spanish booty.” She motioned for him to get the crates. “Go on. But save that one for last,” she said, pointing to the large crate. Seanie lifted the lid from the other and pulled out the sack. He weighed it in his hands and looked puzzled.

  “Open it,” Emer said. Seanie peeked inside. “Oh come on! Open it up! Have a good look! These are as much yours as they are mine!” He dumped everything onto the bed and shook his head with disbelief.

  “Now,” Emer said, “let me show you what’s in the other one.”

  She took out the figurines and the daggers, adding them to the pile of jewelry on the bed, then sat up and reached for the emerald, asking Seanie to close his eyes. When she had freed the stone from the cloth, she gave the signal. Seanie fell forward several inches with awe.

  Emer held the emerald up in the lamp light, where it shimmered and glistened them both back to Ireland. Seanie reached for her free hand and she squeezed his fingers, like she used to when they were mute children.

  “I wonder what Connacht is like now,” he daydreamed.

  “I wonder, is Mary still alive. And the others.”

  “I hope my mother is. I hope everyone is.”

  “Listen to us! Out to sea for a few years and acting as if one hundred have passed!”

  Seanie took the emerald from Emer’s hand and held it out in front of them. Something about it made them both sigh and feel happy. Something universal, like music or love. Without words, without even looking at each other, their plan was forged.

  As I waited for everyone to go to bed, I packed and walked through my plan. After I did that a hundred times, I sat and looked at the two bags I’d bought that morning, which would soon be full of treasure. How could I possibly pull this off? How could I possibly get away with it? I felt such a mix of fear and anxiety that I found myself stuck in the same old wish. Oh, to be a dog again! Oh, if life was as simple!

  On top of everything, Emer Morrisey’s feelings ate me whole. I longed to kill everyone. I longed for someone to love me. I longed for treasure. I felt like a sniveling idiot.

  When the time came to leave my room, I was shaking. I waited until the roots were turned off, for the cook to close the kitchen for the night, and for Hector’s bedroom door to close. Then I heaved my small backpack over my shoulder and quietly slipped down the stairs and along the dark road. A thumping bass, from the tiny dancehall bar next door, echoed off different landmarks as I walked, and I felt scared and full of jumpy adrenaline. As I neared the glass house, the high-pitched buzz from frogs in the nearby pond deafened me.

  When I got to the fan-shaped bush, I took a long, deep breath and tried to relax. I jumped the fence, snagging my foot in the wire at the top, but wiggled free. By the time I reached the tree line only fifty paces from the road I was sweating harder than I ever had. I wiped my face with my shirt, crouched down, and walked slowly—counting—through the grape trees. I found my other landmarks and continued on into the dark forest until I could see the light coming from the house. It was television light, flashing and twisting the background of the grove into a psychedelic hallucination. I stopped and caught my breath.

  I aligned myself with the patio door and with a tree I remembered from that afternoon, but somehow I was in the wrong spot. I walked slowly toward the house, careful not to make a sound, but the Doberman heard me and barked. Then, I heard his big pointy nose sniffing toward me. When he got there, I stroked his chest and he licked my ear.

  “Where is it, boy?” I asked.

  He kept licking my face. I cleared leaves from the ground where we were and moved the sand with my hands. The dog understood. He got up and trotted toward the correct spot, five feet away. He sat patiently while I started to clear the ground and pull out the first sapling. Trying to be quiet while pulling whole trees from the ground was tricky, and I stopped a few times to make sure I could still hear the television sounds coming from Fred Livingstone’s house.

  I finally pulled the shovel head from the ground, and stopped to marvel at how well it’d kept. Then I put it to the side, unfolded my father’s army shovel, and started digging as fast as I could.

  After a few minutes, the dog seemed to understand what I was doing. He centered himself along the opposite edge of the hole and started digging, too, tossing pawfuls of beach through his legs into a pile behind him. We maintained a rhythm—his paws, my shovel, and our piles growing behind us. For each of his eight beats I made one, and we continued on for a span of time until I felt I needed to rest, by which time we had already cleared two feet of sand and dirt.

  I stopped and leaned against a tree, inspecting our progress. The dog’s side of the hole was like a ramp. My side was more like a cliff.

  By the time the hole was deep enough for me to stand in, time had passed in bucket loads. I had two blisters and a sore wrist, and the light flickering from Fred Livingstone’s house was gone. The sky brightened to a predawn azure and I panicked. I had never thought about running out of time. Now I would have to fill in the hole and start all over again.

  I was muttering jumbled disappointments, just about to give up, when I heard Mairead’s voice in my ear. Keep digging, Saffron. Dig!

  And then my shovel hit something hard.

  And wooden.

  Something hard and wooden. Like a crate.

  “Holy shit.”

  Emer spent her last day aboard the Vera Cruz packing. There were only a few things she wanted to keep from her evil life on the high seas. She pulled her neatly folded stack of embroidered capes from the shelf, rolled them tightly, and placed them into a satchel. She retrieved her small sewing box and her ivory and silver thimble, a spare pair of flare-legged trousers, her two pistols and a snuffbox she’d retrieved from a sailor killed on the Emerald and tried to get them all into the satchel, too, but it was too small. So she turned to her crates of swag and removed all the bland black packing fabric, replacing it with her capes.

  Emer stopped and admired her best cape before wrapping it round the oversized emerald and then placing it in the box. It was over now. The running, the killing, over. When she was finished, Seanie nailed the lids on tightly and they stacked up their luggage next to the door.

  They all decided that once they got to Port Royal, they would cash the treasure and split it. David insisted on some time alone in the sparkling cargo hold first, to pick a few rare things for himself before they sold it.

  “For my future wife, aye. She won’t know what to do with a ring the size I give her!” he explained. He looked toward Emer, but she didn’t seem a bit bothered.

  She handed him the key. “Take what you like.”

  The next morning, when they docked in Port Royal, Emer turned to David before he went ashore. “We’ll buy a new frigate for the trip to Europe. You’re welcome to anything we leave behind. The Vera Cruz, the whole fleet if you want it, the maps we got from that Dutch frigate last year, the rest of what’s in my cabin. If I were you, I’d start with those maps! You never know what’s buried at the red X. And you should get far away from here for a while. Safest, aye.”

  “So this is goodbye?” David’s mind wandered back to the first day he’d met her, on Foley’s sugar run.

  “Can you blame me?” she asked.

  “I reckon I can’t,” David answered, looking at Seanie on the dock standing next to the two crates and the satchel.

  Emer hugged him and whispered a million thank yous into his ear. It was like saying goodbye to a brother. And in thinking that, she was reminded of Padraig and fought back tears.

  Eight hours later, she and Seanie boarded their new ship. Seanie went to work choosing a few lads to sail it toward Ireland, and Emer retired to their cabin to rest her foot. She fixed a warm salt bath and soaked it for a half hour, the way the doctor
had prescribed.

  As they sailed from the Port Royal docks into the sunset, Emer went above deck to wave goodbye to her last Caribbean port—her last stinking hive of whores and drunkards—and recognized a face on the dock. She ducked down and turned away from him, but not before he had a chance to recognize her as well.

  “Curses!”

  Seanie heard this. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s that goddamned French bastard!”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “So did I,” Emer said.

  Having substituted cannons with food and marines with rum, Emer knew her ship was inferior. Her perfect getaway, she feared, was about to be foiled. She slipped back below deck and peeled an orange.

  At bedtime, Emer ordered the man in the crow’s nest to alert her if any ship approached from any direction at any time of the night. She hoped to fool the Frenchman by going the long way round Jamaica, when most ships would head for the Windward Passage. It was her only option, once she’d left dock, to lose him.

  A knock came at the door in the middle of the night.

  “A ship behind us, sir,” a voice said. Emer rose and dressed. She limped up the steps and stood at the stern with a telescope. It was as if she were gazing into a mirror—the Frenchman stood at the bow of his ship, looking right back at her with his telescope.

  At the rate he was gaining, there was only one possibility of escape. She and Seanie would have to make a run for it in a rowboat and hope that the Frenchman would continue to follow the frigate. She turned to her new first mate. “Prepare the rowboat. I’ve got to get ashore without that bastard seeing me.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Steer as close as you can. I’m going to collect my things,” she said. Before she went below deck, she fetched the first crutch she could find—a short-handled shovel—and used it to relieve the pressure on her aching right foot.