Kingston by Starlight

by Christopher John Farley

  “These bodies,” said Read, “are perhaps what we are, but not who we are.”

  Read, reaching from behind, traced his fingers along the line of my neck. I had unbound my bosom and loosened my shirt and my upper torso was exposed. A large bead of warm sweat dripped from Read’s face into the hollow between my breasts. The perspiration mixed with my own and trickled down my belly, disappearing between my legs.

  “I want to kiss you,” he said. “I want to kiss you as Rackam kisses you.”

  I leaned forward, away from Read, and his hands fell from my body.

  We did not speak for a time.

  “Where, by my faith, are the fabled privateers we are to meet?” I said, at last, when we had both recovered ourselves.

  “We will see them in the morning, at first light,” said Read.

  “Who are they?”

  “They are a duo of much experience, who have fought many battles and who will bring us guidance. Their labors are the stuff of legend, and of song.”

  “Why do you seek to convince me to remain in the life? Surely a noose awaits us if we tally in this profession past our time. I have convinced Rackam that the moment has come to turn respectable.”

  “Respectable! I was that once— and married too,” said Read.

  “You were married?”

  “To a Flemish lad, who, like me, was an officer in a Regiment of Horse. We retired after several engagements, and I made the tilt toward housekeeping, and together, as a means of finance, we managed an inn under the sign of the Three Horse Shoes.”

  “You were married, you served in the army, and you served as the maid of some comfortable country inn? I don’t know which of these things is the more surprising.”

  “My husband died soon after we opened our establishment; then, the Peace of Reswick being concluded, there was no resort for me in the service. Looking for adventure, or, at the least, relief from the boredom of central Europe, I took passage on a ship that was bound for the West Indies. When it was taken by privateers, they took me for a man and I was offer’d the sea-dog’s choice, and thus began my run in my current profession.”

  “How does all this relate to our current circumstances?”

  “Ride or die, that is my shibboleth. To stop moving is to perish. My time rooted in place at the Three Horse Shoes was the unhappiest and most calamitous of my life, costing me a mate, a profession, and nearly my life. But— thank the stars!— it did not cost me my youth. That is the very definition of when growth is possible, and all paths are clear. If one does not attempt actions that are reckless and revolutionary when one is still young enough to dare them, one might have well have been born old. And most men are born old.”

  “But not you.”

  “No,” said Read, “I was, like most, born old. But I will die young.”

  We sat in silence for a bit, and Read poked the fire with a stick. Hot embers floated into the air and merged with the stars.

  “Governor Rogers—” I began.

  “Will pursue you whether you stay in the life, or leave it.”

  “Why?”

  “Rackam and the Governor have had some business.”

  “What business?”

  “It is better not to speak of it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It is better—”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “Rackam and Rogers had some business. I know only that they served together on a vessel named the Duke, which traveled with a companion ship the Duchess, and embarked on a privateering voyage.”

  “What? The good Governor was a pyrate?”

  Read spat.

  “Nothing so common for the Governor. He was a lawful crook, his plunder was done with the permission of her majesty, Queen Elizabeth. A letter of marque he bore, to give official sanction to his slaughter. I know not the particulars, but on the voyage or afterward, Rogers and Rackam had some business and it ended badly. And Rogers’s lapdog, Governor Lawes, has sworn to bring about his master’s retribution.”

  Read spat again, this time into the fire, and sparks flew up into the heavens.

  “I know not the particulars. I only know this: Rogers will pursue Rackam until one or the other is dead.”

  “You harbor a secret.”

  “You know me too well, my love.”

  “Tell me your secret.”

  “I cannot, for it is not mine to tell. Either Rackam, or the Governor, must tell you this truth or it is not to be believed.”

  We paused in our conversation, and, in the quiet, the voices of other crew members of the Will drifted into our ears— our fellows were chanting and singing choruses. Our fire was dying now, and all along the beach other fires were going out. The voices were fading, and soon the soft, rhythmic slurp of the surf against the shore was louder than any song.

  “Kingston will be the end of it,” I said. “We will quit this life.”

  “Humor me only in this,” said Read. “Let us meet the privateers first. See them, and make your decision.”

  “And when will we meet these legends?”

  “At first light.”

  So when morning came, and the turtles had all left their eggs and slipped back into the waves, Read and I walked down to the water’s edge to meet the privateers. He told me, as we walked, that these privateers were bold and strong, able with the sword and accurate with the pistol; that they had braved many battles together and evaded capture at several turns.

  “So where are these privateers?”

  “Smell the air!” said Read.

  “What?”

  “The air!”

  I breathed in the morning. The scent of fresh mangoes was in the breeze, succulent and sweet.

  “There is no such air in London or in Paris, nor in New York besides,” said Read. “Perhaps you could have filled your lungs with the perfume of such freedom in Sale, but that city is forever lost! On some day many mornings hence, when you and I are old and these firm bodies give way to slackness and wrinkled flesh, you will remember the smell of mangoes and you will remember this time. Let no man change you! This air, this life, this is who you are!”

  “But I’m the one that wants to leave this life, not Rackam. I convinced him.”

  “No, he convinced you to convince him.”

  “What?”

  “Men fool women into thinking that they are following the second sex’s commands when, in secret and in advance, they have already mesmerized the women into issuing commands that the men wished to follow in the first place.”

  “I thought that was a stratagem that women employed.”

  “Women have a reputation for the tacit manipulation, but it is undeserved. Their spirits can be so malleable, they oftentimes unknowingly adopt the hopes and desires of their mates even when it is counter to their original interests. Their lover’s goals then become indistinguishable from their own.”

  “Enough of this talk.”

  “So when women tell men what to do, in some secret way they are actually following the man’s commands. In this interpretation of human behavior you may invest in me your trust. When it comes to emotional subterfuge, men are, by some wide distance, the biggest women of them all.”

  “Ahhh! Enough!”

  Read fell silent.

  I surveyed the horizon.

  “I do not see a sail,” I said. “Where are your bold privateers?”

  “Look at the sea. The privateers are there.”

  I looked into the water, which, in this light, at this time, like that fabled pool of Sidi Abdullah Ibn Hassun, had the sheen of mirror. I saw my face for the first time since I had set sail— it was bronzed, and perhaps as dark as Zayd’s, and my hair, unkempt and free, was a red tangle like a blazing bonfire. My journey, and the elements, had brought my secret history to the fore. There was some wild blood in me that I had not taken measure of before. Baltimore lived within me. All this time I thought of myself as an actor, a charlatan, some sad jester rendering an impersonation, an ap
proximation, a weak lampoon of other men. The anger I felt, the rage that ruled me, the glint of the she-wolf’s eye that bore down on me still— I thought all these things were buried within me somehow. But I have long believed that our faces, eventually, reflect who we really are, and the lives we have led. The soul is a kind of cartographer, sketching our life’s journey on the vellum of our visage. I looked closely at myself in the sea’s mirror.

  “Do you see the privateers?” said Read.

  A breeze blew across the face of the waters and my reveries came to an end.

  “I see only myself,” I lied.

  I looked down the beach. Poop had built a city of sand beside the surf, with high barricades fortified with seaweed and sticks for spires, and now, as the morning faded, the lapping waters eroded its foundations into silt and sea-foam.

  Hand in hand, Read and I walked back toward the longboat.

  chapter 26.

  In the voyage of our lives, there is a shadow-line, before which our thoughts are focused more on opportunities to be gain’d, and beyond which our concerns are ever after more concentrated on dreams that have slipped from our grasp. And so our ship sails on, carried by a sadder wind than it was before it transversed the divide. Ahh— the people we could have been haunt us like ghosts; we see ourselves with other lovers, in other countries, kings and queens of nations of our own imagination. There can be little joy in living when one resides in a graveyard of passed lives. All we need, by my faith, is this: to have a life that’s worth a story. For who are we but the tales we tell? Bodies wither, wealth erodes, the things we build inevitably fall to ruin, and the inventions we devise are eventually surpassed, for such is the nature of things scientific. Only stories last forever, or at least as long as there are voices around to tell them, which is plenty long enough.

  So where was I in my narration? I need a sip to refresh my spirits, my darling, my sweetness. Behind where you fetched the coffee there is a compartment— ahh yes, you’ve found it! A fine burglar might you have made, my sweet one! That’s Jamaican rum, saved from the store of the Spanish galleons we raided when I was young. Now that I have lost a step, the rum has but hit its stride. You can put the coffee back, my dear. Yes— pour a mug. That’s for you, I’ll sip straight from the bottle. Ahh, it does bring a flush to the cheeks, does it not? Trust me on this advice, my dear one, and keep it close to your heart— a good, strong bottle of rum, when the heart is shattered and lonely, is always ample substitute for a lover’s touch. How I wish I had a strip of turtle flesh and a roaring fire to go with my refreshment! But where was I in my tale?

  Jamaica! Ahh, the days slipped away in that tropic place. Yesterday was tomorrow and tomorrow was yesterday and each day passed like the day before. Jamaica! Every season is summer and all is everlasting emerald. There are no golden leaves tumbling in cool autumn air, no icy lace falling from above. Time, in that place, never seem’d to pass, and the summer seem’d huge and eternal. Every morning’s bed-rising repeated the last in its glory and its comfort. It was the very opposite of our life among the brethren of the coast. The Will had been scrapped and sold; John and I watched her three masts stripped naked. The crew had scattered to the four winds; John and I were content to let them blow.

  “Do you miss the sea-storms, Captain Rackam?” I would tease John.

  “Not a bit.”

  “Do you miss the taste of salt in your mouth?”

  “Coffee will do.”

  “Do you miss the combat and the roar of muskets?”

  “I have not thought upon it.”

  “Do you miss the stench of men in the crew quarters?”

  “Perhaps a little,” he joked, “but then the moment passes.”

  John and I lived snugly in a gray hut on the crest of a brown hill. The walls of the hut were made of bamboo, cut after it had ripened so it would harden as it aged and not rot. The roof was thatched with the tops of sugarcane stalks, the long narrow leaves plaited in a tight crisscross pattern to keep out the wind and wet. Those times seem ever present. Rising from my rest after a long gentle night, I gaze upon my surroundings as the mists of morning pull back from the land like a billowing sheet. The green hills, rolling, voluptuous, are revealed naked in the light, like lovers in a bed savoring the last of slumber. Purple-crested doctorbirds hover above the pale yellow blossoms of cashew trees, long-legged egrets ride serenely on the rumps of cattle. The shadows of clouds pass over the cedar trees of Fullow’s Wood, the white waters of One Eye River, the swaying grasses of Grave’s Valley. The sun rises higher, changing color and heat, passing from warm red to yellow hot.

  “Get up my love! Get up and greet the day!”

  John rises beside me, and makes his presence known with a soft kiss on the nape of my neck. He strolls to the front of the hut, as he does every morning, to check on his beloved gray rose bushes— they have yet to bloom in this unfamiliar climate, but he is optimistic that they will blossom soon. He laughs, and goes to the back of our hut. A pawpaw tree grows there and every morning he scales the trunk, climbs into the branches, and picks a fruit and a flower. He jumps to the ground, tumbles onto the grass, regains his feet, and comes up smiling. He eats the yellow-orange meat of the fruit with a squeeze of lime, offers me a bite, which fills my mouth with sweet juice, and then he gives me the yellow-orange flower he has just plucked for me to wear in my hair. He has work to do, and fields to till, but it is violent hot, and so we take a stroll along the coast, walking in the shade of the trees at the edge of a forest that overlooks the sea. The tips of the branches of the trees are dotted with blossoms of cream, pink, and emerald. The breeze is light and the cries of gulls carry in the air. In the waters below, schools of fish travel in darting clusters of gold and green and silver. Farther out from the shore, I can see dark, unexplored continents of coral beneath the shimmering blue waves.

  “There is a fair wind this day,” says John. “South by southwest.”

  “Our sails are folded, and stored away in the sail room,” I say.

  “So they are.”

  As the cool of the late afternoon comes, we return to our land; I pull up seven cassava plants, cutting off the roots— which look like fat fingers— and leaving the green stalks behind. I return to the hut and peel the rough brown skin off of each root, exposing the white flesh beneath. I slice the flesh of the roots into thin strips and then cut those strips into even smaller pieces and place the diced bits in the center of a square of muslin cloth. I twist the cloth tight, squeezing out the poisonous juice. Then I open up the cloth and knead the pieces of cassava root, along with a sprinkle of salt, into a lumpy mash. I am making a bammy. I light the cooking fire behind our hut and put the mash onto an iron plate. After the edges of the bammy begin to blacken, I pull it from over the fire. I bite into the bammy when it is still warm. The inviting, bready smell fills my nose. It pleases me, and I know it will also please John.

  “Remember Sugar-Apple and his dishes?”

  “Too well,” says John, his cheeks bulging with bammy. “His companionship was a treasure, but I do not miss his food!”

  So this is the life we lead. We reside in the parish of Clarendon, a few days journey from Spanish Town, also called St. Jago de la Vega, and the Blue Mountains tower in the near-distance. Our ship’s company had long since been disbanded and, with much celebration and less haggling than might be expected, the journey’s treasure was divied up with each man receiving an equal share, tho’ John, privateer that he is, saved a diamond brooch for me as a token to mark his affection. After the breaking of the ship’s fellowship, John and I, bidding good-bye to Read, Poop, First-Rate, Zayd, and the lot, pushed a little way into Jamaica’s interior, which is rich and loamy, and he purchased a modest tract of land on which to do his farming and live as a man retired from a life of turmoil and strife on the unpredictable sea. From time to time I would think of my father and wonder where in this land he resided. When travelers passed by, I would query them about his whereabouts, or whether they h
ad heard of him or seen a man who matched his description; but whether he was living in the open or under some pseudonym, I did not know, and, in any case, there was no news of him.

  Soon enough, John and I contracted with a team of men— whites, blacks, and mulattos almost the same shade as me— and they aided in clearing a sizable space of land of weeds and tree roots, and together we also began the construction of a great house. The new domicile was as grand as any home in which I had ever lived, or visited— its walls were of cedar wood, its roof wide and sloping, its many doorways seem’d to smile a happy entrance to all visitors. All around and on every side, growing naturally and well matured, there were fruit trees— ackee, jackfruit, banana, grapefruit, citron, and lime. But growing in most abundance were the mango trees, their leather leaves shining as if wet with rain, the red-gold fruit hanging, ripe and ready for plucking, tender and savory to the tongue.