Kingston by Starlight

by Christopher John Farley

  “Does your song sing of what he looked like? His flashing blue eyes? His blond hair, like the locks of some god?”

  Zayd laughed.

  “Is there some hidden jest in my words?” I asked.

  “De Graff was born in Holland, but his hair was not blond, rather dark and woolly, like my own. His eyes were not the blue of the sea, but the black of the night. He suffered in servitude on the Canary Islands under the Spanish before winning his freedom and joining the brethren of the coast.”

  “But the stories . . .”

  “The stories are untrue. The Spanish, the English, and the French spread tales so the slaves still under their control would not be inspired to revolt. If De Graff’s true identity were known, would not the eyes of every slave look out to the ocean and see freedom bobbing on the waves? Would not the hands of every bondsman reach for a blade or a blunderbuss? Would not the hearts of every servant beat the rhythms of revolution? Surely I need not explain such things to you. Surely you, too, once saw liberty in the sails of every ship you spied from the shore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “De Griff is an old term for a person of three-quarters African ancestry. Is there not some of De Griff in you as well?”

  “W-w-why . . . why do you say such things? How do you know such things?”

  I did not wait for his answer. And I do not know why I did what I did next. By my faith, I do not even know how I did it, as my body seem’d entirely out of my control. With Zayd’s song ringing in my ears, I crossed the quarterdeck and walked straight to the captain’s cabin. I paused not even to knock— I opened the door and walked in. Rackam was in bed, caught in some dreamless sleep, and sat up startled when I entered, a cutlass in his right hand.

  “I have been considering our previous encounter,” said Rackam. “Indeed, no sleep worthy of the name has come to me tonight while I wrestle with its meaning.”

  I said nothing in response.

  “Heaven’s work is truly extraordinary,” said Rackam, “that two such creatures as yourselves should be on board a single ship.”

  “Perhaps there are more of us than even we can imagine,” I said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps all the ships at sea, and those at dock as well, are teeming with us.”

  “Perhaps, but I think not. ’Tis a thing, even with this double proof, hardly to be believed, except that it is true.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “’Tis only common sense that two hands in similar circumstances would find each other and, having been located, investigate each other’s natures.”

  This time, Rackam was silent.

  I noticed that on the table to his side, our chess game was still laid out, and it was my move. His last turn had put me in a tight position. But, after contemplating the positions open to me, I formulated a response.

  I took a step forward and moved my piece.

  “Queen to king seven,” I said.

  Then, Rackam, without considering the board or making a move in response, sprang up from his bed with great violence, toppling the entire board and all the pieces upon the floor of his cabin. He took me into his arms roughly and kissed me hard; so filled with violence was his embrace that my lips bled, for he press’d them so, and I tasted blood in my mouth. I pushed him back and wiped the blood from my mouth and soon discovered it was not mine, but his. In my passion, and I know not how, I had opened up a gash on his cheek, which now ran red and unchecked.

  Memory, not modesty, prevents me from detailing the ecstasies that followed these initial embraces. But I would have it known, even if the light from that first flame has dimmed in my mind’s eye, neither time, nor distance, nor lovers since, have cooled that fire’s heat. My life-long study of men, conducted, up to that point, for the most part, from afar, and with some sense of dispassion, reached a new stage, and, I thought, some sort of a conclusion, tho’ I would later learn it was yet another beginning. There is a kind of commingling of souls that takes place when the flesh is join’d, or so it seemed to me in the blossom of my experience, which I now, with age, know to be the romantic illusion of youth. Like a dance between two partners, or a duet of musical instruments, or the planets in measured orbits ’round one another, one seems to sense another soul for the first time, and in the darkness in such transactions, one sometimes seems to hear the other without speaking. Language peels away, like the skin off a grape, and the sounds given to us before the Divine Providence granted us language— the sighs and grunts, the exhalations and moans— suddenly carry with them tides of meaning, as if they were the form of language themselves.

  Those who have progressed past the virginal to the knowledgeable know that in all but perhaps the case of True Love, if that poetic thing exists, the real second self we sense in the bedchamber is but our first self counted twice. We create the perfect partner, and we have congress with it, we imagine that person’s soft thoughts, and we accommodate them, we read meaning into the imagined self’s touch, when really the meaning in question is just one of our own imagination. We close our eyes when we kiss, I think, so even as we love solid flesh, our souls can dream the true love of our hearts into being.

  There is a story that Ovid tells— and that great man relays the myth better than this rendition by his poor servant— the tale of Tiresias, a man who, while following the flights of bees and birds, comes across two copulating snakes and ventures to kill them both but, having launched the blow and failed in his double murder, finds himself transformed by the beasts into a woman. After his seventh year of womanhood, desiring to return to his former sex, he strikes the snakes again, and finds himself turned back into a man.

  One day Jupiter, king of the gods, idle and drinking ambrosia, launches into a discussion with jealous Juno, herself blissful with divine nectar. In Jupiter’s reckoning, as the conversation went, women invest but half the labor in the affairs of the flesh, and yet receive more than their fair share of pleasure, which, by his calculus, was numbered at nine tenths. Juno mocked his godly math, and declared that only a soul who had lived in a woman’s body could truly understand that gender’s particular condition and pleasures.

  Jove, laughing, announced a solution: he called for Tiresias to be found and the question put to him. The mortal, soon discover’d, and perhaps ignorant of the sad fate of humans who come in the middle of divine contests and arguments, readily presented his answer: woman, he declared, received nine tenths of the pleasure when it came to matters of the flesh. Hearing this, angry Juno struck the mortal and blinded him. But kingly Jupiter, winner of the wager, took pity on unlucky Tiresias and, tho’ blinded forever, granted him the gift of insight— and made the events of the future known to him, as if he could see them with his failed eyes. And so that story ends, tho’ it continues in other ways— it is Tiresias who first predicts Narcissus’ tragic fate.

  Even as John enter’d me, deep as powder and ball rammed in a musket, I thought of my fair Read and I remembered Ovid’s ancient tale.

  chapter 21.

  The days passed by like white-winged seabirds; all through the afternoons, I longed for the evenings; I counted the whistles ’til the end of my watch, prayed for the sun to find its place in the horizon’s bed so I could, once again, find my place between my darling Rackam’s sheets. By my troth, I had never felt more entirely like a man than when I lost my maidenhood. A new vigor coursed through my veins, and my ship’s chores were performed more readily. I felt more than the equal of all around me now that the mysteries of their gender had been revealed to me in intimate form. Even when my love was not immediately in my sight— and from my perch on the masthead I saw most and heard much— I could taste him on my tongue like a just-completed meal; I could smell his heavy man’s musk on my fingers, see his dark gray eyes in my own mind’s eye. I would, at times, open my mouth to catch the sea-spray and imagine it was sweat licked from his chest; by my faith, salt never tasted so sweet.

  Yet there was a cloud on his brow. He would
not discuss it and he would not make any grim portents known to me, but I could sense he was carrying with him some burdensome concern. In our games of chess, he would press his advantage and then grow distracted, as if he was engaged in other games in his head. He exploded into sudden anger one morn at Poop over some petty indiscretion; he later grew calm, and threw an affable nod at Poop as if by way of explanation or apology, but his outburst, however brief, was a striking break of character. I wondered if his distress bore any relation to Read, but Rackam refused to speak of the matter, feeling it best to continue as before and to regard Read as another sea-dog and member of the crew. I, too, decided to renew my camaraderie with Read and to carry on as before.

  One night after our encounter in the sail room I walked up to Read as he leaned over the railings on the quarterdeck and looked out into the ink-dark sea. Sea-foam sprayed our faces, the stars effervesced overhead, and an invisible night wind tickled the hair on our arms. The deck was quiet save the sound of nature. I found my place beside him.

  “There were more weevils than usual in the biscuits this evening,” I said.

  “Close your eyes and pretend they are cashew nuts.”

  “And that works for you?”

  “No,” said Read, “for I have a supreme distaste for the cashew nut, and, if I had to partake of one or the other, I would prefer to eat a weevil. But it may work for you.”

  So we leaned into the dusk together, flank to flank, and, after a time, Read abruptly turned away.

  “I must take my leave,” he said. “I’m set to work the deck on the morning watch.”

  “One question before you go . . .”

  “What?”

  “Oh, ’tis nothing. Forgive me, and go your way.”

  “What? Out with it!”

  “’Tis a strange sea malady: every month, I bleed.”

  “Where?”

  “Between the legs.”

  Read laughed loudly, and continued for a great while.

  “Why do you laugh? Is there a simple cure? Some medicine?”

  “I have heard of women who take Manus Christi— a mixture of powdered pearls, gold leaf, sugar, rose water, and the yolk of an egg— to induce such bleeding. But I have heard of none that have either sought, or succeeded, in doing the opposite— in curing it!”

  “Why would a woman want such an affliction?”

  “’Tis the curse of Eve, my friend. In Germany, they call it a visit from the red king; in France, they say one has gone to Montrouge; in your Ireland, they say a lady is in season. ’Tis nature’s way of saying you are ready to bear children, and thus must bear the burden of all women, brought down by Eve’s ill-advised apple bite in Eden.”

  “I am with child then?”

  Read laughed again.

  “No, but if the bleeding stops for more than a month, then that is a sign you are with child.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Do what I do. Stuff rags between your legs to absorb the discharge— tho’, by observation, unless you have grown a new organ, I see you are doing that already. Two things more: when the bleeding comes, clean yourself in the head, and throw the soiled rags overboard with the other refuse. And, lest the red king visit you unexpectedly, wear black breeches.”

  With that, Read kissed me on the forehead, and strolled away, whistling.

  * * *

  The time had come to open Sugar-Apple’s trunk. I went down to my secret space below deck, taking care that I was not observed or followed. I removed the shroud I had placed over the truck and found— and should I have been surprised on a ship full of felons?— the lock had already been picked. Perhaps Xbalanque or one of many of the rogues on board had already gotten to the contents. I open’d the trunk. The lid was heavy, being made of iron; the rusted hinges groaned like sick grandparents as I pushed the top back. I peered inside. The trunk was filled with papers.

  Whatever thief had peeked in first was no doubt disappointed— few of this lot could read. I began to sift through the contents. The story that they told was this: Sugar-Apple, in his other life, had been a record keeper in County Cork. From the appearance of things, he had been a privateer long before he took to the seas— transferring lands held by wealthy families to poorer ones by altering wills, deeds, and the like. Some of the funds no doubt ended up in Sugar-Apple’s own pocket. There were other records in the trunk as well— he seem’d to have grabbed what he could before he was run out of town— including papers documenting the arrival and departure of ships and what cargo they transported in their holds and so on.

  A few of the documents made reference to the DeDanann Land Holding Company, the business venture that had supposedly helped make my father rich. The company’s real estate was primarily in Jamaica. DeDanann, judging by the records, had been operating for years, primarily with the funding of wealthy backers in Ireland.

  It suddenly struck me. Da had probably never been bankrupt. He had merely been relocating his money. His whole life was a swindle.

  If I found Da in Jamaica, there would be a reckoning.

  * * *

  And so the days passed. We sailed the waters of the Caribbean and made our way to the current off the coast of Jamaica, and yet, tho’ we drew close, we did not take port. We had gone some days without taking another prize and, once again, our supplies had diminished and were in sore need of replenishing. There were several scuffles among the sea-dogs and Zayd kept busy dressing wounds and bandaging them. After a time in which the crew did much speculation as to the nature of our next endeavor, Rackam called the lot together on the quarterdeck and let them know his mind: his boast, made in the bar of New Providence, was true, and he did have a great prize in mind, which carried with it great risk. He was of the opinion that we should lead a raid on the Madrid galleon.

  “Yes, there is a Madrid galleon—’tis more than rumor and myth, it is a real thing, and, indeed I have indications of its course,” said Rackam. “Before, it might have well have been a lie, so difficult a task is it to make its capture. But now we have sail’d into desperate times, and, in such days, hard things must be attempted. So what say you?”

  At this announcement, there was much murmuring among the men; First-Rate raised an eyebrow and seem’d to embark on making calculations in his head. Read, for his part, caught my eye, smiled, and winked— he was clearly ready for action, no matter the peril.

  Bishop, however, gave a loud snort at the announcement.

  “’Tis a mad attempt, and ill advised,” he said.

  “Why say you?”

  “The black galleon is a vessel of the first rate, said to boast a hundred to a hundred and twelve guns, with fighting men numbering eight hundred or more.”

  “The numbers are well known to me.”

  “She has never been taken, tho’ bigger ships than ours have tried.”

  “What you say is true.”

  “There have been seven attempts, if reports are to be believed— all have met with failure.”

  “Verily, you say.”

  “We are but seventy souls,” concluded Bishop. “I say again: this is a mad attempt and will meet with ruin.”

  There was, following Bishop’s statement, much talk and debate among the men about the correct course of action and the merits of each choice. I thought briefly about Rackam’s father, and his flights of fatal whimsy, but said nothing. As the discussion continued around me, Read stepped forward and, putting two fingers to his mouth, let loose an ear-rending whistle that caused many of the men to cry out, startled, and prompted Poop, who was standing nearest to Read, to yelp and wince in discomfort and cover his ears.

  Read addressed the crew in a strong voice.

  “A fine idea has been put forward,” Read said. “Men of the Will— who will follow?”

  Several of the men called out in the affirmative, but others were silent and some shook their heads.

  “It is a mad attempt,” said Bishop.

  “Madness is required for such times! The
good Governor Lawes expects us to restrain ourselves, and to hold to smaller prey. No doubt, in these waters, every sloop and schooner will be manned by agents of his employ.”

  “So with the minnows guarded, we attack the whale?” said Bishop. “The Madrid galleon is the prize of prizes. It carries, below its decks, the treasure of the New World— the bulk of the gold and silver brought forth from the mines of South America for this year.”