Hugh Glass - Bruce Bradley

by Bruce Bradley

  That was a big deterrent. Shortly after setting up their base here, the pirates had sent a party of men over to the mainland to hunt for game. After several days, when they didn't return, a second party was sent to look for them. They managed to find and rescue only one man from the hunting party. The party had been captured by the Karankawas shortly after leaving the island. The indians had taken the men from the hunting party, one by one, and had killed them and eaten them, until only one man remained. He had been, literally, only hours away from the roasting pit, when the others arrived to save him. No, as much as Hugh Glass hated the pirates, life with them was still preferable to ending his days as part of a Karankawa feast.

  He wondered again why Charlotte Travers had bothered to warn him about Weasel. Women had the worst of it in Campeche. Stolen from every strata of society, they were brought here, many as slaves, to serve the needs of the men. Only Charlotte Travers had come willingly. Hugh had heard that she'd left a successful business in New Orleans to come here and set up shop, catering to Lafitte's men. In Hugh's mind, that made her more suspect than those she served.

  From inside the tavern came the sound of laughter. Hugh decided to walk back through the rain, to find out when a boat would be heading back to the ship. Rain suited this place, he thought. He doubted that all the rain in the world could wash it clean.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE SHIP was a Spanish merchant. She sat low in the water, a half-mile off their weather beam, growing closer by the moment.

  Aboard the Madalaine, excitement was high. The crew looked forward eagerly, anticipating what treasures they might find aboard her. Hugh gave thanks to the fact that it was not an American ship. According to their license, Renoux was well within his rights to attack. Not that it made the idea any more appealing to Hugh, but he dreaded the day that Renoux attacked a ship that Hugh was familiar with. He hoped he would never be forced to go against men whom he had once called friend.

  The ship grew closer. Hugh felt his anxiety grow.

  Bad things happen, he told himself, you accept them and go on. Here was a bad thing, about to happen. He could think of no way to prevent it. Hugh had seen what the pirates could and would do. That his own government condoned and even promoted those actions disgusted him.

  For a moment he toyed with the idea of going below and setting a charge in the hold of the Madalaine and blowing her to Hell before they could attack the Spaniard. The odds were he would be killed in the blast, but it would save the lives of many innocent men...

  Hugh discarded the idea when he saw that Weasel was watching him.

  Renoux was flying the Venezuelan flag, under which his privateering charter was held. Hugh could see the concerned looks of the crew of the Spanish ship. He felt for them. He managed to stifle his feelings, knowing he would soon enough be aboard that ship, and that he would probably have to kill some of those men or be killed himself.

  Their looks of concern turned to panic when the shelling began.

  The ship was the Dona Elena. In her hold were spices and coffee, cotton, tobacco--and gold. The crew of the Madalaine were overjoyed at their luck. Apparently, the Dona Elena had been provided with a Spanish naval escort, but had become separated from it in a storm a few days earlier and had not yet found their way back together. The threat of discovery by a Spanish warship only heightened the excitement of Renoux and his men, and this was taken to even greater heights by the discovery of passengers.

  Hugh had taken a bad cut on his arm, which was beginning to throb. Clint was dressing it for him. They stood to one side as the prisoners were brought on board.

  Sometimes, in the case of Spanish ships, the passengers were held for ransom due to their wealth or position, but only on rare occasions. Hugh immediately knew that would not be the case here. The pirates had made a good haul. There was no need to risk trouble by sparing them.

  The passengers consisted of a middle-aged man, his wife, and their young daughter, whom Hugh judged to be no more than twelve or thirteen. It would have been better for them, Hugh thought, if they had been killed outright during the heat of the battle. Especially the girl.

  ***

  Moving the cargo from the Spanish ship onto the Madalaine took hours. When it was finished Hugh's back ached and his injured arm was nearly useless to him. Fires were set aboard the Dona Elena, and a charge set in her hold. The charge went off with a loud WHUMPHH! The Dona Elena split in two. In moments, she slipped beneath the waves.

  Hugh looked at the passengers. The Spaniard was a frail man. He sat to one side, hands on his knees, staring at nothing. His fine clothes were soiled and disheveled. He looked broken. His wife, Hugh guessed, must have been the power in this family.

  Had been.

  Taking a deep breath, the man stood suddenly. Proudly, he walked over to Renoux.

  "You!" he said. "Capitan!" He spoke imperiously, addressing Renoux in a tone obviously reserved for underlings. Renoux smiled.

  "Yes?"

  "I want to know what you intend to do with us!"

  "That remains to be seen," Renoux told him. "We..."

  The Spaniard made the mistake of reaching inside his coat. Before he could withdraw his hand the muzzles of two pistols were thrust into his face and the tip of Renoux's sword was at his throat.

  "I, er..." the man gulped. "I have a dispatch, for the King of Spain. It is important that it reaches its destination. You will be paid handsomely if..." Renoux smiled again.

  "Your dispatch isn't going to make it," he said. Renoux drew back to strike. The move surprised Hugh, then he realized it was only for show. Hugh had watched Renoux in battle. Renoux was all grace, total economy of movement. To kill the Spaniard he had only to thrust forward a couple of inches.

  "NO!" It was the Spaniards wife. Renoux stopped. Smiling, he turned to her.

  "No?" he said. "No? And why not?" He turned back to the woman's husband. "You," he said, "are everything I hate in this world. With your pompous ways and your superior attitude--you think that you are better than others because of an accident of your birth. You are nothing! You take from others; walk over them with nothing less than contempt as you go through life. Yet, for you, the slightest prick of your finger is a monumental concern. You see, I know you all too well. I was brought up with your kind--and trod upon by them. You do not deserve life. As far as I am concerned, you are feces..." he leaned forward with the blade.

  "PLEASE!" It was the woman again. "Please..." She came forward, pleading. She really was an attractive woman; big, dark eyes; black hair that was just beginning to show gray at the temples; a good figure. If she was given to excesses, they didn't show.

  "Please," she repeated. "I will do anything you want. Anything. Just spare my husband and my daughter. Please ... there must be something. Do not harm them."

  Renoux hesitated for a moment.

  "Very well," he told the woman. "We will go to my cabin and discuss it." Then he gave the Spaniard a big, knowing smile. The Spaniard looked angrily away. Renoux nodded to Cobb, the Third Mate, then he and the woman disappeared below. Cobb and four others immediately took hold of the Spaniard. Without ceremony they led him to the port railing, cut his throat, and threw him over the side. The girl, meanwhile, was taken forward and stripped. The rest of the crew, with the exception of Hugh, Clint, and a couple of others, all took turns at her.

  Hugh never saw the woman again. The girl, ravaged again and again by the crew, went into a kind of shock. Three weeks after the sinking of the Dona Elena, she died of pneumonia.

  ***

  The morning after the sinking of the Dona Elena, the chief mate called, "All Hands!" Hugh was puzzled by this. Aboard a ship there were two watches, starboard and port, or larboard. Normally, only one of the watches was on duty at a time, while the other rested below decks. As a rule, "All Hands!" was only called if foul weather occurred, or if a special meeting was to be held, for disciplinary action or whatever. Aboard a pirate vessel, discipline was extraordinarily lax, so th
e call was rarely made for that reason. The reason for this call was made clear soon enough. Four men had been lost in capturing the Dona Elena--three from the larboard watch and one from starboard. To balance this out, one man had to be taken from starboard and transferred to the other watch. The Mate chose Clint. Thereafter, Hugh saw little of his friend, as they were on opposite sides of the clock.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SEA ROSE and fell, ever changeless. The days rolled one into another into another, each the same as the next and the last. Occasionally, there was a storm, but Hugh had faced many storms. For the first time in his life, Hugh found himself thinking about his own death, wondering about it. Moreover, he found himself wondering that it already overtaken him.

  How can it be, he wondered, that a man can so despise the moments and facts and even the mundane matters of his life, and still continue? When every breath drawn is heavy with loathing and despair, every bite of food concentrated with anger, guilt and shame, sorrow and pain--how can it be that disease and tragedy are not consumed as well? Yet day after day he went on, nor was his condition weakened or physically reduced by it in any way.

  The little girl died, he thought, yet I live on. I am surrounded by evil. I bathe in it and eat with it and sleep with it, and still live on. If anything, I am stronger than before... What am I? What sort of being thrives on iniquity?

  "You're like Moses in the desert."

  "Hunh?" The words startled Hugh and brought him out of himself. He'd been sanding a section of deck, then varnishing, unaware of his own labor and sweat, or the smell of sawdust, or the varnish that stuck to his fingers where the brush had slipped.

  "You're like Moses." It was Billings, the carpenter. Hugh had seen the old man at work many times but had paid him little mind.

  "The sea and this ship are your desert," Billings continued. "You think they should kill you, but the work only makes you stronger."

  Hugh eyed him for a moment, then went back to sanding. "What do you know about it?" he said sullenly.

  "More'n you think. I been watchin' you, all these last months since you joined up. You're a troubled man. You did what you had to do-you stayed alive. Now you're a-thinkin' you deserve to be dead because of it. I've seen it afore. Believe me, Hugh Glass, many a day will come and go before you take your last breath. You think you're the only man ever didn't want to become a pirate?"

  Hugh looked up at him.

  "No," he said "I don't. But some men take to it a little easier than others."

  "Aye, they do. Some men take to this life right well. Some never will. Stop whipping yourself. If a big Spaniard puts her mark on us tomorrow, you'll be hung right along with the rest of us, conscience or no."

  The old man moved off. Hugh watched him go. Moses, huh? Moses would never have stood by and watched that little girl face brutality and rape day after day, until it finally killed her. Hugh had.

  He had...

  ***

  If Clint harbored any such feelings of guilt, he managed to bury them under the simple fact that he had no choice in the matter. The men he and Hugh killed were, in truth, dead men already, for pirates seldom attacked when there was even a slight chance of losing. As for the girl, he could not have saved her and probably would have gotten killed, had he tried.

  As far as Hugh was concerned, Clint felt concern for his former Chief Mate. Clint had served under him for a year and a half, and had always known Hugh Glass to be a good, even-tempered man, not given to moods, self-pity, or fits of guilt. There was no question in Clint's mind that they had done the right thing in staying alive. In his opinion, Tom Halpern and the others had been foolish in choosing to die as they did. Had they stayed alive, the six of them might even have found a way to one day take control of the Madalaine.

  Clint knew the effect that Tom Halpern's words had upon Hugh, and he earnestly hoped that Hugh recovered from them soon.

  It was wrong to think or speak ill of the dead, but Clint had always thought that Tom Halpern was a little too pompous for his--or anyone else's--good. Halpern had proved him right.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  "BLACK AS A POCKET" the saying was. The decks of the Madalaine were awash with brackish green water. The bilge pumps, which pumped water from the bowels of the ship, and which took four men to operate, had been constantly at work for two days. There was no sign of letup. The crew of the small brig, able to sleep only in two-hour shifts, were at the point of exhaustion from wet and cold, and from the amount of work required to keep them afloat.

  Hugh was just returning from his two hour "break" in the foc'sle. He was hardly rested, nearly as wet under his oilskins as he had been upon entering. He had been a sailor all his life, though. He knew he could expect no better. He had seen many storms, some worse than this.

  The Chief Mate, Peatman, was at the weather-rail. Hugh smiled at that. He had wondered how long Renoux would last there. The Frenchman had stood at that post for more than thirty-hours--a respectable stint for any sea captain. He was probably in his cabin now, dead to the world and deservedly so.

  "LAND HO!" The call came from somewhere amidships. Hugh looked to the starboard side and saw nothing but blackness. When he looked to port he saw a rocky coastline, looming dangerously close.

  The crew looked at Peatman and waited. The man stood, holding onto the weather rail, rocking with the ship. His mouth was open, but no words came out.

  Hugh looked back at the coastline. He had no idea what body of land this was, or how far the reefs might extend, or how shallow it might be here. At any moment the Madalaine could be upon them lurching and screaming with the sound of timbers crushing against rock, spelling doom for them all.

  Peatman wasn't moving.

  We don't have time for this, Hugh thought.

  The rocks seemed closer by the second. Peatman's mouth had begun to move, as though he were trying to speak, only no words were coming out.

  "The Hell with that!" Hugh said out loud. Then, turning, he began shouting orders to the crew.

  "DROP THE MAINSAIL!" He managed to scream above the storm. Two men, anxious for orders, sprang quickly aloft. Hugh turned to the helmsman. "Haul into the wind!" he shouted. "We have to sail the hell away from this--IF there's still time!" He looked back at Peatman, who stood holding the rail and looking down at the deck, rain dripping from his beard. Lightning flashed. Slowly, the Madalaine began to come about, moving away from the rocks.

  The storm lasted one more day, then subsided as quickly as it had come upon them.

  ***

  Having been tossed and twisted and turned in every conceivable way, the Madalaine had taken a terrific beating in the storm. As the weather cleared, repairs began. Hugh was at work driving oakum--a tarred rope that was forced between the decking with the use of a mallet and caulking iron--while another man followed behind and finished the job by pouring molten tar into the cracks, sealing them. In storms as violent as the one that had just passed, most of the oakum was forced out from between the planks, causing the decks to leak.

  A shadow fell across Hugh's work. He looked up and saw Peatman. The First Mate looked troubled.

  "The Cap'n wants to see you," Peatman said, "and I-I wanted to thank you. That other day, during the storm..."

  "Forget it," Hugh shrugged.

  "I can't. It shoulda been me shoutin' those orders... Somethin' happened. I saw them rocks, and my insides...! just went weak. Nothin' like that ever happened to me before."

  Hugh watched him for a moment.

  "I think," he told Peatman, "that every man has his own, private fear, whether we're aware of it or not. If we're lucky, we never have to face it. Stop whipping yourself. You'll do better next time."

  Peatman nodded. Brushing himself off, Hugh went to see Renoux.

  ***

  A sailor's life aboard ship is always austere. He has his trunk and a bed. He gets his meals, but the fare is often less than desirable, and quite often monotonous. For the Captain it is different. His quarters ar
e spacious and well-fitted. The food he receives is always better than that of the crew. The advantages of rank are never denied.

  Renoux's cabin was like other Captain's cabins he had seen. The furnishing were a little finer--silk curtains, gold place settings, tiny, delicate gold chains holding the curtains in place--but it was a good deal less ornate than Hugh might have expected. Renoux was a wealthy man, many times over.

  Renoux offered him brandy--something that would never happen aboard a regular merchant ship. Hugh thought for a moment, then accepted.

  "It seems," Renoux said in crisp English, "that I owe you my ship." He handed the brandy to Hugh in a crystal aperitif.

  Hugh accepted the drink and said nothing.

  Renoux watched him for a moment. Then, breathing with disgust, he said, "I get the feeling that you disapprove of me."

  Hugh remained silent. Noting his reticence, Renoux tried to reassure him. "It's all right for you to speak freely. There will be no repercussion. I want you to tell me what you think."

  "Why?" Hugh asked him. "Why should it matter what I think?" Renoux thought for a moment.

  "I've been watching you," he said. "You are a very capable man. If anything should happen to Mr. Peatman, I would like you to take over as First Mate."

  "No."

  Renoux looked at him with surprise.

  "No?"

  "No," Hugh repeated. "I've been at sea my whole life, but I was an honest sailor. This..." He gestured, indicating the ship. "You are right to think that I don't approve of you, Captain. What is there, here, that I could possibly approve of?"

  Renoux's face became red. He held his temper.

  "Isn't that a little pompous?" he said. "After all, you are a member of this crew. You, too, have been a party to all that we have done."

  "Not exactly," Hugh told him. "I've not been a party to everything, and what I've done, I've done under the threat of death."