The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

The sailors rowed out beyond the skerries at what seemed a lightning speed and they set the lugsails to take the wind westward when they were in open water. Ada keeping halfways behind her brother until the boat was out of sight.

  * * *

  —

  The caplin were beginning to shoal offshore and were only days away from rolling on the western arm and there was work enough to occupy them as they waited for the sailors’ return. But they spent hours the next two mornings hooking crabs. The crustaceans had overrun the waters along the shore that spring and they picked half a hundred from the shallows, filling a puncheon tub halfway with salt water to keep them until the bully boat came back to the cove.

  Ada was walking down from the farm garden the afternoon of the third day when she saw them sculling up the coast. Evered was on the water handlining beyond the shoal grounds and she watched the sailors pull up beside him briefly before carrying on toward the skerries. There was a massive tree tied to the lugsail masts that extended ten feet beyond the bow and ten feet beyond the stern.

  Evered hauled in his line and set for the cove after them though he trailed further and further behind. And Ada was suddenly shy of greeting them on her own. She went to the tilt instead, starting a fire and setting the kettle, going about the makings of enough fresh bread to feed the crew. She heard the sailors as they came ashore on the landwash and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door.

  “Miss Ada,” Warren said with a little bow of his head.

  She ushered him in and set him in a chair with a cup of tea as she carried on kneading the dough.

  “They thought you were a lad,” Warren said to her, “when you came down to see us off. In your jacket and trousers. A pretty lad mind,” he said and he smiled at her. “They all wanted to know how old the pretty lad was.”

  Ada felt herself blushing and she slapped viciously at the loaves to break any air bubbles still in the dough before she left it to rise. A little uproar reached them from the landwash as Evered came ashore and was greeted with some raillery that they couldn’t make out.

  “They’re all fine sailors,” Warren said. “Good-hearted. But the roughest kind of men. When I first went to sea I was placed in charge of the ship’s fowl and I was rendered most uncomfortable from the swearing and loose talk of the men in the tender. Father raised us to use the strictest conversation, prayers night and morning. It was a relief when I was appointed cooper and shifted to mess with the steward.” He leaned forward on his thighs. “I said my prayers and read my Bible in private in those early days. But truth makes me confess I became more and more remiss through the years. And before long I was a sailor like the rest. Though my mind is uneasy to have fallen so and I make many weak attempts to amend even now.”

  His face took on its high colour again. It was like a lamp, Ada thought, lit and douted at regular intervals.

  “Miss Ada, I would ask you,” he said. “As a favour to me. I would ask you not to go among the crew without myself or your brother for company.”

  Evered came through the door as if on cue, smiling stupidly, buoyed up by whatever foolishness had been visited upon him below. Warren stood to shake the youngster’s hand and they fell into an affable back-and-forth that seemed to Ada peculiar to the company of men. She’d never seen Evered engaged in the easy banter but he seemed born to it.

  She sat quiet while they carried on in their way, mulling Warren’s request. Thinking she was right to have been afraid of the men on the landwash though it was a mystery to her how she knew. How specific and certain the knowing was. She considered maybe it was something a woman was born to.

  Evered was telling Warren about the puncheon full of crab that was to be cooked for their supper and the cooper raised his hands.

  “The men will tuck in and happily,” he said. “But you will forgive me if I sup on bread alone.”

  He could see the look of raw disappointment on the youngsters’ faces. “I apologize for being a difficult guest,” he said. “But when first I sailed to the West Indies I took the country fever while we lay at St. Kitts. I was taken to hospital where I was like to have died for most of a week. And for days afterward I was only well enough to crawl about the hospital. I’d see men from my ship brought in sick one day and buried the next in graves only deep enough to hold the body, an inch or two of earth to cover them is all. And the graveyard was overrun by land crabs, about the size of your hand they are, I’d watch them burrow into the ground where those men lay. And they ate up every bit of flesh below.”

  Ada and Evered stared at him, incredulous.

  “It was the same in every graveyard down there. And you know the black fellows eat those crabs. I used to ask how they could stand to make a meal of such loathsome creatures. And to a man they would say, ‘Why, they eat me!’” Warren laughed. “I haven’t been able to stomach a morsel of crab since.”

  “You seen half the world in your time it sounds like,” Ada said.

  “Half and then some,” he said. And he stayed the rest of the afternoon in the tilt, describing his experiences at sea and the countries and creatures and people he’d encountered, one story following on another like knots in a rope he was hauling hand over hand from a bottomless well. The Tartar girls in Hong Kong who washed the sailors’ clothes in exchange for whatever rice they left at mess. The torpid heat in the hills of Peru where everyone moved as if they wished someone to carry them. Voyages so rife with disease and bad luck that every morning they threw overboard a dead sailor or a dead sheep.

  They had never met anyone other than Mary Oram as relentlessly talkative but his tales were so strange and diverting they only whet the youngsters’ appetite and they pressed him for more. Evered poured them each a glass of rum as Warren drew maps in the sand at their feet, tracing the voyages of the various ships he’d sailed on, the naval vessels and traders and South Sea whalers. Ada placed the risen loaves into covered iron pots and set them over the coals as he described the action on the Surprise during the American war, serving powder to the guns with shot and splinters flying past. “Half our crew were Irishmen,” he said. “They fought like the very devils and they were great favourites with our captain on that account. We were engaged with the Jason out of Boston and I heard them calling from one of their guns, ‘Halloo, Bungs, where are you?’ And when I looked I saw the two horns of my anvil across the mouth of it. I’d hidden it when the action started, you see, hoping to keep it from them. The next moment it was fired through the Jason’s side. And when the Irishmen saw what a dreadful hole it made they all sang out, ‘Bungs forever!’”

  Evered refilled his own and Warren’s glass but Ada demurred for fear of saying or doing something foolish before company.

  Warren described the Indians in Nootka Sound who blacked their faces and powdered their hair with the down of birds. The Frenchmen in Canada who spoke the parley-voo and ate their fill of serpents that abound in the woods.

  “Serpents?” Ada said.

  Each new detail picked at the scab of the youngsters’ ignorance and Warren answered their endless questions with a nurse’s patience for the infirm. He sang a song he’d learned while drinking three-bit mauby with the slaves in Grenada, ting a ring ting, tarro, and he tried to explain how some people came to be owned by others the same as if they were a horse or a piece of land.

  “We were the first Christians to visit the Sandwich Islands after Captain Cook was murdered by the natives,” Warren said and he answered them the location of the islands and who Captain Cook was and what he was doing there. He described hills that smoked like torches and beaches of white sand and a sea as tranquil and blue as heaven’s eye. The dances the women performed, the battles the men fought in pantomime to entertain their visitors. They were mad for the Englishman’s iron, he said, and he spent his days cutting coopering rings into ten-inch lengths and filing the ends to points, trading those for all manner of materials.

  When the bread was ready Ada turned the loaves out to cool.

 
Warren said, “The weather was sudden on those islands. We were caught ashore at Onehow by a gale that forced the ship to cut her chains and stand out to sea. There were sixteen of us sailors left behind and almost three weeks before our vessel was able to make its way back to claim us. And the natives set us up two and two to a dwelling and fed and watered us and gave us liberty to ramble as we wished. We never lived so well in any Christian village. But there was one grumbletonian among us, an old bo’sun who thought we were any minute about to be killed. If he saw two or three of the native men in conversation he would shake with fear, convinced they were plotting against us. ‘Now,’ he’d say, ‘this is the night we’ll all be murdered in our beds.’ He was a perfect annoyance to us all.” Warren laughed. “It was a kind of paradise we were in,” he said. “And the old sinner was too blind to see it.”

  Voices started calling “Hallo, Bungs!” from below and the three of them went down together to the landwash where a fire was burning on the beach and half a hundred crabs were boiling in a riveted copper pot nearly the size of a puncheon tub as the day went to dusk and night came on.

  * * *

  —

  Evered was feeling his rum when they reached the fire and another cup of liquor was placed in his hand, the blood-red full moon of a crab passed along by its claw. Ada had carried down fresh bread and he tore a hunk from a loaf as it made the round. He saw Warren sat close to Ada and that was the last sober thought he gave to his sister for the evening.

  Most of the crew were already rammaged and ready to make a night of it knowing they were staying put for a time. They were face and eyes into the crab, cracking the shells with stones and sucking the flesh into their mouths, cheeks and chins awash and firelight glinting in the souse. They were almost indistinguishable one from another in the falling dark, Evered thought, though they were nothing alike in age or size or appearance. They were of the one demeanour and bearing, their voices and shouted conversation interchangeable.

  “Have he got you two rinded to the core?” someone called.

  “He’s a bit of a bagpipe our Bungs is.”

  “Did you tell them your exploits fighting the Americans, Bungs? In the reign of Queen Dick?”

  The man sitting closest to Evered said, “Talking bilge about Scotland, was he? He’ve enough tongue for two sets of teeth when he gets onto ole Itchland.”

  A voice from across the fire said, “Did he tell ye about his position as duck fucker on the Proteus when he was but a lad?” And the circle erupted with laughter.

  Evered had just turned seventeen. He felt all at sea among the raunch and candour and artless generosity of these strangers, their vulgar cant so unfamiliar it was almost a private language. And the welcome they offered so genuine he managed to feel nearly at home regardless. They had christened him Sixpence for his pate of silver hair and they called out to him by that name now and then, they threatened to shave the currency from his head as Delilah had shaved Samson’s locks and to spend it all in the grog shops of St. John’s.

  “Now Sixpence,” a voice shouted, “your sister has gone adrift.”

  He looked around the fire but there was no sign of Ada or the talker who had been sitting beside her. What was his name?

  “Was our Bungs flashing the gentleman for the pretty lad?” someone called. “Was he putting on airs?”

  Evered tried to get to his feet and almost fell face-first into the fire. Four hands reached for him and hauled him back to his arse. The man next him put his arm around Evered’s neck and he had trouble shouldering that drunken halter.

  “No worries now, lad,” the man said. “Once our Bungs has a drink or two he’s rabbit hunting with a dead ferret.”

  The fire roared ha ha ha ha.

  Someone told a story about a sailor who had enjoyed a bit of relish with a fetching fire ship in London and caught a case of the clap so bad he had to be shaved smack smooth, his man Thomas and tarrywags and all.

  “You are Josephus Rex,” a voice said.

  They were each in their turn called Josephus Rex in the wake of an outlandish story or dubious claim and Evered began to think of them all by that singular moniker. He found it increasingly difficult to distinguish one sailor from the next and himself from the company that surrounded him. He felt himself disappearing among Josephus Rex as the light of day had disappeared into the night and it was an entirely pleasurable sensation.

  Someone crawled a little ways away from the circle of men to puke in the darkness.

  “He’s calling up his accounts now,” a voice announced. “He’s shooting the cat.”

  He might have fallen asleep for a time.

  There was a ructions close by, a sudden clinch of sailors mauled by drink, the lot of them cursing and shoving and hauling at each other like crabs trying to build a ladder of crabs to escape a copper pot. Josephus Rex walked over Evered’s legs and stepped through the outskirts of the fire. Someone’s trousers were set alight and there was a general panic to put out the flames, Evered on his hands and knees to slap at the burning fabric. Evered and two other men picked up the sailor with the still-smoking trousers and threw him into the shallows of the cove. The two men picked Evered up and threw him in after for good measure. He crawled soaking wet back to the fire where someone kissed him on both cheeks and handed him a mug full of something he couldn’t taste.

  It was the best night of Evered’s life. He thought it might never end, please God.

  He fell asleep for a time.

  It was iron-grey light when he woke and he could not tell if that blade was in the air or only pulsing in his head. He sat up from the bare stone. Bodies of the sailors and smashed crab shells around the dead fire like flotsam thrown up by a high tide. His mouth stuffed with tinder. Everything hurt. His body was an iron cage and he clanged against the bars whichever way he moved, his head rang if he so much as lifted his face. He looked carefully up the rise to the tilt, squinting against the cold gleam.

  His first cogent sober thought: Ada.

  * * *

  —

  She’d left the fire and walked to the tilt with Warren before it was properly dark. She was sorry to leave her seat front row to the simmering riot on display. The sailors were roary-eyed and foolhardy and obscene. They cursed and sang and threatened violence upon one another with casual affection. They wandered out of the fire’s circle to piss into the cove, still carrying on conversations with the sailors at their back. They told stories about storms with waves running higher than the ship’s topmast and the native women they took for wives in the Sandwich Islands.

  “We should go,” Warren had said then and she nodded yes but didn’t move.

  “Every man aboard had a wife the whole time we were at anchor,” a sailor said.

  “You are Josephus Rex,” a voice called.

  “God’s truth,” the sailor insisted. “A man had only to offer a couple of iron nails and he was as good as married. The women would arrive at the beach every evening and call for their husbands by name. And they would come aboard after dark and stay till morning.”

  A second sailor said, “The fattest woman ever I saw our gunner chose for a wife. Her thighs were big around as my waist. We had to winch her aboard every evening. And not a hammock in the ship could hold her.”

  “And the gunner was gaunt as Job’s turkey,” the first sailor said. “He had to tie a picket across his arse to stop himself falling body and bones into her water-mill.”

  Ada could feel Warren’s raw distress as he sat po-faced beside her, having admitted he was a sailor like the rest and would be in the throes of it but for her presence. He leaned toward her ear. “Miss Ada,” he said over the laughter. He was sober and ashamed to look upon himself cup-shot and profane through the young girl’s eyes. “We should leave them to their diversions,” he said and Ada couldn’t bring herself to inflict more punishment on the man.

  At the tilt he apologized for the display and she shook her head to say no apology was necessary though
it was plain he did not want her to protest. She couldn’t see the earnest cooper offering an iron nail to take a wife as the other sailors had or making a farce of it in the aftermath. But she was anxious now finding herself alone with the man. He seemed on the verge of an avowal, some personal declaration that Ada wasn’t sure she was prepared to hear. It had been hours since she’d had her single glass of rum but the mercurial sensation of drunkenness was still with her. A vague impression of being set adrift.

  Warren lit the lamp and announced he would sit at the hearth for the night while she slept. Ada took the blanket the Captain had fashioned into a divider and drafted Warren into hanging it between the beds to answer his concern about modesty and that seemed enough to satisfy him. He jammed a chair against the door and they went to their bunks on opposite sides of the blanket without saying more than their good-nights. They could hear the sailors’ jubilant feuding as it barrelled up the rise for hours afterward.

  Ada was paging through what she’d retained of the voyages Warren had described that afternoon, the maps he’d traced in the sand. Still trying to make room in her head for the size and variety and strangeness of the world he revealed. She’d long suspected there was more to creation than the cove and its mingy handful of satellites but she was shocked by the manifest truth of it—the earth’s vast labyrinth and the teeming lives within it, numberless as the stars. The sailors’ racket like the sharp edge of a ferment that roared endlessly beyond the quiet of the cove.

  * * *

  —

  The sound of Warren at the hearth woke her. It was still dark outside and she dressed in the near black. She filled the kettle from the water barrel and set it over the fire. She took a seat beside him.

  “You’re an early riser,” she said.

  “Long since,” he said and he smiled at her, the same sense of gravid anticipation about the man that she had avoided the night before. She thought to move from the chair to escape it now when he said, “I have a daughter, Ada.”