Kingston by Starlight

by Christopher John Farley

  But when he heard of my exploits, fresh anger burned within him. He saw that Ma, and Zed, still lived within me. And so he paid for my release. It was no easy task to bribe two bloodthirsty governors. The payment had ruined him— he now had no money for overseers, for crops, for fresh water, or even for food, and the ongoing insurrection was the result.

  “Where is Zed?” I heard myself say.

  “In the back acres,” said Da. “Beneath the sugarcane, in a place that is not marked.”

  So Zed was gone. The sounds from outside my da’s house were now inside my head. I walked to the window. When I looked forward, I saw myself staring back, stronger, older, darker, hair in tongues like fire, eyes bright as planets. There were voices from the outside, rough and talking in terrible tongues that I somehow understood or had at least heard before; there were screams, too, and exhortations, and the thunder of gunfire, the clatter of swords, the rumble of crowds of running feet. My sword was in my hand, my fingers gripped tightly around the hilt. I could taste blood in my mouth and I saw red, like a scarlet curtain had been pulled before my vision.

  So he was gone. Sweet Zed, who had taken me in that night after the Game of Bowls, when my father had not. Who had protected me from the wolf, when my supposed father had not. Zed, who had taught me the technique to throw balls, who had shared with me recipes from the West Indies, who had shown me how to hold a sword and how to stand up straight. I remembered now the songs he would sing me, when my father was away, and how he would point out the ordinary things of life— cows, trees, fields— and give them new names, strange names, names that mystified me with their sounds and thrilled me when they tripped off my tongue. Yes, I remember now, how it was when I was younger. How sometimes I would see Zed and my mother share a smile or a look or a whisper. What were they talking about? Did he tell her of his years on the run, living in hills and caves, until the local population came to trust and rely on his healing foods and potions? Did she tell him of Da’s rages, his wild gambling, his drinking, his wandering eye? Perhaps it was around that time that the old Moorish corsair, alone in this land, and the young Irish woman, a stranger in her own bed, came together. Maybe that is why, when I am exposed to the things that he loved— the sea, the sun, the salt-spray— my secret history comes out. Is my hair his hair? Is my skin his skin? Do we share the same dreams?

  “You abandoned Ma,” I said to Da. “You disowned me publicly in Charles Town. Why then did you pay my fine?”

  My question hung in the air, unanswered.

  “I paid for your release,” Da finally said, “because I wanted to kill you myself.”

  I turned to face him. His musket was aimed at me.

  “It is time to kill the past,” said my da. “I have cheated and I have lied. I have enslaved men and I have killed them. I have raised a child that was not my own. I created this thing you are now, half-man and half-woman. You were too young to remember it, but I dressed you up as a boy when you were a little girl. My first wife’s family accepted you as my lost son and paid handsomely. Now the world buys the ruse. It ends now. Tonight I bury the past.”

  There was a flash of a blade. Da’s gun slid across the floor. His right hand had been hacked off. He dropped to his knees. Read stood above him.

  “She is not the past,” Read said. “He is the future.”

  There was a crash, as something, a burning something, broke through the barricaded window and it shattered into a thousand shards. The shouts of former slaves could now be heard more clearly. The curtains caught fire, and bullets cracked and whizzed through the air. My father got up and ran, locking himself in a room that was already ablaze.

  I turned my back and left, with Read at my side. Even as I exited the front door, dark shapes rushed by me. The air was filled with smoke. The fields burned. My father, my true one, was buried somewhere beneath the burning crop.

  chapter 37.

  And so, my darling, my loved one, this, then, is the story of how you passed from this world. Read and I established ourselves in a small house in Kingston, with wattle walls and palm fronds for a roof. Steady employment was lacking, and within a few weeks I had exhausted what monies I had on hand. Read had grown even more ill, as the pregnancy had caused him much distress, and so I needed cash to maintain his care.

  Our cupboard was bare and Read’s anguish weighed heavily on my soul. Whores beckoned me to open my legs, accept my lot as a member of Eve’s strain, and join their company, but I cursed them and their keepers and said I would enter their places of business as a paying customer or not at all. But Kingston is a hard town, and there seemed no way for a woman to earn her keep without paying tribute to Captain Johnson. I would not take that tack. With nowhere else to turn, and looking to submerge my sorrows, I took to raising a mug at the many establishments in Kingston constructed for such a purpose. By my faith, that was a stroke of luck. I found that my tales of the sea so entertained the patrons of taverns in the region that I reasoned that there must be gold in there somewhere.

  I contacted the Boston Gazette about work but found there to be little interest in employing a creature of my sex, and my notoriety was seen as more of a hinderment than a boon. Several other publications offered me employ writing wedding and birth announcements and the like, but the positions described did not fire my blood and thus were of little interest to my way of thinking. All the while Read grew weaker.

  By chance, while draining a draught in the Double Snake, a representative of a publishing house in New York overheard one of my tales and asked for me to relay the story to him in fuller fashion. Initially, I thought his approach to be of an untoward kind, and drew my dirk to gut him from chin to belly, but he assured me his interest was genuine. Over the course of several nights we met at the tavern and, at each encounter, I recounted for him some salty story or another, and, at last, he presented me a fair sum to write a book about the sea-life, which would be entitled A General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates, or something of the like. He thought publishing under the name of a woman would be scandalous, and so I picked a false name— Captain Johnson, if you please— and I began my work, excited at the task.

  I would have composed the book for free, so thrilled was I to take up the agendum; I also appreciated the distraction. Read, at this point, was beyond the skills of medicine to bring him back to good health. My only hope was that, after childbirth, Read would recover some of his vigor.

  But it was I, in the end, who suffered the first physical calamity. I woke one morning to find that I had passed a clot, and, with that sad event, you died before you had ever lived. I had fought in many battles, but this stroke wounded me more than any blade or musket ball. No death, not that of a friend, or a parent, or a sibling, or a lover, is as tragic as the passing of a child. For with that small demise is wrapped up many murders: love dies, hope dies, and all children that child might have had, and their offspring besides, are lost to eternity— and so one plot became a graveyard of lost possibilities.

  And so I buried my future. I wept, but I did not immerse myself in my own melancholy; Read needed my aid and I turned to him. In due course, Read issued waters, deliver’d a child, and then died. I cut the cord with my knife, and even as the baby began wailing, the color drained from Read’s cheeks like the blush leaving the sky at sundown. Ahh— I cannot dwell overmuch on that event because it is too sad.

  “Sing me a song.”

  Breaking my oath ’gainst vocalizing, I sang him a song whose words I had first heard from him. I sang it in my maid’s voice, which is high and light. And I used Zayd’s melody, which was shadowy and sad.

  “Come with me

  “We’ll ride on the ink-dark sea.

  “Don’t you long to

  “Ride or die?

  “Fah-fah-fah-fah-fah-la-la-la”

  I fought back my tears with all the ferocity I ever did an opposing swordsman. Read smiled and, taking note of my distress, he gather’d himself and told me this tale.

  * *
*

  “So you have contracted to tell our story, and that of our fellow brethren of the coast. Well, listen close, you old sea-bitch, for I have one last tale to tell, so hear now my discourse on how I came to carry the child I have recently delivered. No, I will not save my strength, for there is nothing else I wish to apply it to, and there is too little time left to be miserly.

  “After our capture during our abort’d final mission on which we were all betrayed by Poop— curse him, and me, for sharing affection with him— and I was imprison’d in Bridewell Prison, the same facility in which you and our other fellows were caged. I called out to the air, hoping for a response, but whether the bulwarks were too solid or our shipmates too timid, I do not know, but no answer came. My cell was violent hot in the day, but at night came the true discomfort, for the walls of stone, and the melancholy of my predicament, made me shiver and moan with chill.

  “It was then that I heard a consoling whisper, coming from the adjoining cell. My neighbor would not identify himself, perhaps because of the shame of the wretchedness of his condition. So on the unidentified voice went, softly but unstoppably, like a river that, after long centuries, carves a path in rock for its bed. Even as the frigid breeze blew through the cracks in the stone, turning a tropic day into an arctic night, the wall whisperer told stories of the wind, of all the gales he had known, from gentle squalls to raging hurricanes. My mind was redirected from the suffering of the present and instead transported, by the feather’d wings of thought, to the four corners of the world.

  “Spoke the whisperer: ‘The Greeks, in their mythology, have Boreas, the north wind, and so also have Notus, the gale of the south. Off the coastal beaches of Mexico, which are warm and lined with swaying palm trees, there blows the Cordonazo, or, in common parlance, the Lash of Saint Francis, which summons the cyclones and drives even frigates to their doom. In France, in travels through the Rhone Valley, with its many castles, good wines, and pleasant rivers, I’ve felt the snap and sting of the penetrating wind that natives call the Mistral; and on the Aegean Sea, I’ve been kissed, lightly on the neck, by the Elesian, a summer breeze that carries off the Mediterranean, bringing good cheer. And so, too, are there places where the sea goes flat as a just-made bed, and those regions are called the doldrums along the equator and the horse latitudes to the north and south.

  “ ‘But in my estimation, after traveling this whole world, and many places more than once, the greatest and most formidable of all winds is the Harmattan, a hot, relentless gale that blows from off the Sahara onto the northwest coast of the continent of Africa. It is proceeded by dancing jinns, twirling spirits of smoke who conjure a kind of red fire that burns the eye and the face and lashes the hands. The Harmattan is laden with sand, but of a type whose grain is more minuscule than the kind found in tropical places. This sand is as fine as sugar, and it enters the nose, the ears, or any space that is presented to it, even soaking the skin as if it were liquid. It lingers in the air like mist, and is therefore taken into the lungs with every breath, and it does not disperse when the wind subsides. And rarely does the great Harmattan flag; it continues, without ebb, for days, weeks, and so the world around disappears because of its power, for one cannot see even an arm’s length to the side, front, or back. All is dust and wind and heat.’

  “Even as my stranger-friend murmured this description to me, and we continued in our anonymous discourse, I felt the winds of his words whipping around me. The walls fell away, like a leaf caught by a breeze, and I surrendered to the storm. Below me I saw the houses and constructions of the people of this world, until finally I soared out to sea. As I continued, I thought, how like the wind are the things of this life. We give the world names, but what distinguishes one wind from another? All are individual yet indistinguishable, invisible and yet somehow apparent. As I thought these things, as I flew on my imaginary current of air, my body was engaged in its own work and my hands found a block of stone that separated my cell from the stranger, and I pushed. I was filled with a sudden desire for this person, who had talked me through to midnight on the saddest evening of my life. The stone fell away and I crawled through into the chamber of my new friend, dearest storyteller.

  “It was you, my dear Bonn, it was you. We did not speak. Because of the lingering chill, I sailed quickly into your harboring arms and you into mine; because we did not know, given the prospect of execution hanging over one and all of us, how much time we were given, we dispensed with preliminaries and explanations and let our instinct and emotion rule us entirely. So I kissed you, as I had longed to do all these many years. Your lips were rough, but as our passion continued, they became soft and moistened, and were exceedingly well cushioned. Soon we disrobed and I kneaded the long sleek muscles of your back, which heaved like an unquiet sea.

  “Even as I enumerate the ecstasies we two shared that night, they spring alive again, in my mind, and I feel those pleasures again, coursing through my dying flesh. A veil seem’d blown away from the world during that evening, and like a curtain part’d by a summer’s wind through an open window, I saw through the fantasy that is flesh, all those sad illusions that assign us to ourselves. In that cell, on that evening, you and I shared the kisses we should have shared, stroked the strokes we should have stroked, and did all those things that chance and custom and a devilish serendipity prevented. An immense joy rose in me then, for I had finally tasted of a possibility for which I had longed, and, simultaneously, a huge disappointment bore down on me for I knew that the time was fleeting and that my waking dream would not last. But for that brief sojourn, the ramparts were as nothing, and despite my imprisonment, despite the walls circumscribed around me, I could see the fires of Kingston, and all the stars, and a cloud passing before the face of the moon. There was no you, there was no me, there was only an I and an I. Then it passed; I could see the town no more, nor the night sky, and your apparition departed, and I was alone again with the Moor on the cold stone floor.”

  * * *

  Read never spoke again, nor open’d his eyes. I held him in my arms as he went, and his body, hot with fever, grew cold ere he was plucked from my arms by the undertaker. Read asked to be buried with his sword, and I did him one better. Before dirt was thrown on that sweet form, I threw my cutlass into his grave as well, so that our twin blades would always be crossed, even in the next world, wherever that realm has its location.

  Even so, with that lachrymose event, I did not cry, for now Read’s progeny was in my hands, and, putting aside my own difficulties, I commenced my care for the child to see that it would grow into adulthood in happiness and in wisdom. Read’s child was dark, like Zayd, and shared his brooding eyes. A baby had freed them both: Read from prison and Zayd from oblivion. I named the baby Will. I cleaned him and I dressed him; I told him stories of the sea and of privateers. He would not sleep at night unless I lay down in bed beside him; he would not stop crying in the morn until I gave him a breast to suck. The first time he called me Ma was the first time that I felt needed in all the years I have been on this earth. After the death of my child, I thought motherhood was forever lost to me. With Will, I got my second chance at my last chance.

  I turned back to my writing. My book was published under a false name, and it was a sensation, resulting in the issuing of several editions, in both England and America. Not all the stories in the volume were true, and my editor, eager for sales, added sensation and sentiment to several of the chapters to further excite the gentle reader, but, on the whole, I was much satisfied and fulfilled with my efforts.

  But, ahhh, by my faith, I could never forget you, my precious one. Even tho’ you are not here, you hear; even tho’ you cannot be seen, I hold you in my mind’s eye. Every afternoon I see you dancing in that plot of land where I buried you; it is now overgrown with flowers, and I see you bend to breathe in the sweet perfume of the blossoms. Read’s child whom I have taken as my own is now in the meridian of life, and a parent several times over, and yet you, my joy, m
y heart’s blood, have remained ever a child, immortal and innocent, undead and unchanging. I wish you were at peace with your father, John. But it has been sweet, over these brief decades, to have you here with me.

  As I approach the end of my life’s journey, I see you more clearly, waiting at the end of the path, smiling and waving and beckoning me on. You have my emerald eyes, and my fire red hair; my sight has dimmed and my locks have turned to gray, but in you I see my youth and it is preserved. I imagine you, playing along the beach as I once did, feet splashing in the surf, pausing from time to time to pick sea-grapes, frowning and laughing at the sour taste, and then sprinting on, as fast as adolescence.

  Do not pause to look in the water, my darling! For we are not our reflections, we are not these false things we see in mirrors, in newspapers, or even in the eyes of others. Read saw himself true, and so could look. I tell you truly to look within to see yourself. For the flesh is false, and inheritance is not the sum of ourselves.