So what could he do? Your grandpa promises her then and there. And though some may call him liar and some may call him cheat, I ain’t never seen him go back on his word to your grandma.
I begged and pleaded, of course, till me voice were hoarse, but it weren’t to be. I moped a little and did what I could to keep my restlessness at bay, splitting the old ale barrels for firewood and waxing the countertops till I seen me own reflection in the wood a dozen times over, and all the while thinking about cannons, ships, and sails. With the sea so close to the inn, I couldn’t breathe without smelling that teasing whiff of salt spray, or hear the sound of gulls wheeling in the air, calling me out to fly with them, out over the bonny blue water.
Then one day, in the teeth of a gale, along come yer Mum, Bonnie Mary, with her father, Captain Tom Bright, an old friend of your grandfather’s. Their ship was near wrecked and half their crew lost to a storm. They stayed the whole winter and into the spring at the inn, swapping stories and making repairs.
Me and Bonnie Mary was instant friends. Together we rambled from one end of the island to the other, doing things we ain’t supposed to, and spending all our money on sweets what we hid in a cave by the sea.
It were your mother what first plants the idea in me head of stowing away on the Pieces of Eight. It were her what smuggled me aboard in an empty wine cask and it were her who got the new cook in on the scheme to keep me presence secret till we reached open waters of the Atlantic.
There I was, a stowaway at sea, with a hundred and fifty strangers and not a man of them to talk to for fear of them finding me out and your mum practically a world away, up in the captain’s cabin. I tell you, I ain’t never felt so friendless in me whole life.
Of course, once me existence became common knowledge to those onboard, things didn’t really improve. To tell you plain, the crew made quick sport of me.
It weren’t long before I learned to hide out in the galley at night, sleeping with me peg leg under me arm to keep ’em from running off and hiding it whiles I slept. Then, once I learned to foil that brand of amusement, they sets to inventing new ways to torment me, giving me bizarre commands t’were near impossible to perform. Fool I was, I ain’t knowed no better and thinking back to all them dangerous things they made me do, I wonders how I ever survived. That I did I counts as more to my luck than to skill.
But much as I hated them tars, they wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was at night, in the cold, cold galley, wretched, guilty, and alone. Angry, too, I was. This weren’t me dream of the sea! I rages in fury against whatever it was what had cheated and tricked me, twisting up me wishes into this mockery of my fantasy. Were it such a crime? I tells meself. To be wanting to go to sea like my Papa? But there weren’t nothing for it, but to hold fast and treasure what visits I could get from Bonnie Mary. Hold fast and wait it out, till I could get back home.
“Boy,” one of them other sailors commands me one day (for they ain’t never bothered to learn me name), “g’wan and take Reginald up in the crow’s nest his supper.” Now before then, I ain’t never paid no heed as to how Reginald in the crow’s nest got his supper. As you well knows, the crow’s nest’s the highest part on a ship, way, way up there at the very top, only got to by a rope ladder by men what don’t got an ounce of fear. I could climb up if I were careful. Me arms were strong and I were right agile in them days. The problem was the supper bucket. I tried carrying it in me teeth but the handle were too large and it spills all over me front. I tried over one shoulder, but it tips and spills again. The ropes is slippery as a greasy eel and the ship goes on pitching about on the waves and them’s all laughing down below, and I’m right scared, I am, and I looks up and sees the crow’s nest is higher, ever so much higher than the ceiling of the Spyglass ever was, and there ain’t no way I is ever making it up there. Then I comes down at last in defeat, knowing it ain’t worth the try and the bucket is empty, spilled over the deck, a good supper wasted.
“’Hoy there,” say a boy at the bottom who weren’t much bigger than meself, the cabin boy, I remembers. I peers at him and seems there’s sympathy for me recent ordeal somewhere in his own dark eyes.
“You don’t do it that way,” he says to me. “Look.” Then he shows me a rusty bucket attached to a rope on a pulley for the crow’s nest lookout to pull up from where he stands in the forecastle. That’s how Reginald was supposed to get his supper. I near cried with relief.
Them other sailors cussed the cabin boy out roundly for revealing to me the secret, “Blast you, Fetz! Ain’t your place to say!”
Which is how I learned the other boy’s name.
From that point on I starts paying more attention to Fetz when he comes into the galley, making sure to give him a little extra for himself when he comes to get the captain’s meals and such. Sometimes we talked a little, and aside from the visits from Bonnie Mary, it were me little talks with the cabin boy what kept me going. Then one morning, when the cook was out inspecting the chickens after a bad squall, Fetz come to ask me something for himself for a change.
“I need a Thalffff,” he says to me, looking right glum.
“Thalf?” I asks him, hoping it ain’t something I were supposed to know how to make.
“A thalve. A saaaaaaaalvvve,” says Fetz.
Then I notice his missing front teeth and fat lip.
“Oh, a salve — a poultice, like,” I says and asks him what happened.
He tells me, during the storm, the wind come up strong and messed his footing. Knocked him flat on the deck, it did, lost him his two front teeth when he hit, too. “I was the only one what fell down and all them others laughed,” he finished for me, crestfallen.
“You’re smaller than them other fellows,” says I, trying to make him feel a little better. “Wind don’t got to push as hard.”
“So are you, even smaller’n me,” he says, “and you stayed up, all through the storm, too, and you ain’t got but one leg to stand on. Lordy, I must be the worst sailor in the world,” he said and buried his head in his hands.
Well, it were an invitation, if I ever I saw one. Me father had swore me to secrecy about his sticky tar gum mixture, but desperate times calls for desperate measures and I were that desperate for a friend.
“I don’t know ’bout you being the worst sailor in the world,” I says slowly, “but there is something special I can show you ’bout keep upright in a high wind”
And so, that night, when the grown sailors was asleep in their bunks, I teaches him about me father’s foolproof concoction to put on the soles of his feet. From then on he never fell on deck again and we was tight as brothers.
Brothers. Long John winced as he wrote that word, but continued on:
But that were long ago. You ever see a seafaring man calls himself Fetzcaro Madsea, you mark me words and watch out for him, Little Jane. A skinny whelp, with a cough and black hair, that be him. You meet that man, you run, for he ain’t no man’s brother now. No man’s brother at all.
And you ain’t through paying what being “brothers” with him done cost you Jim Silver, he thought bitterly to himself.
He stared glumly at the splint Doc Lewiston had constructed for him. His stumpy leg stuck out between the two wooden boards like a bit of meat in a sandwich.
As if you ain’t given me enough grief already, he thought peevishly at it. Not that he’d dare complain to Doc Lewiston — too risky to get on anything but the man’s best side. We’re in a tight spot if ever there was one, he thought, looking down at Bonnie Mary. Any friend the winds blow our way is worth his weight in gold. If Fetz’s current state of health was any indication, he mused, the physician’s job was of the utmost import to the good ship Panacea. I won’t let you down by losing this one, he promised Bonnie Mary. I’ll butter him up if it’s the last thing I do.
Lewiston seemed like a good man. The kind of person a body could trust. Of course, Long John thought bitterly, he’d once thought the same of Fetz and look where that had gotten them
. And how dare Fetz accuse him of leaving the Golden Fleece to twist in the wind anyway! What right did Fetz have to act as both judge and jury over him?
I did everything I could to save him!
Did you? Did you really?
Long John watched the brig’s resident rodent polish off the remains of his dinner and thought about it.
Although he had believed Fetz and most of the crew of the Fleece to be drowned, even at the time of the disaster, he had guessed that a few of them might’ve possibly survived to be taken prisoner.
And did you go after them?
Of course he hadn’t gone after them! Saving Bonnie Mary right then was too important to risk mucking about with possibilities.
And not so much as a single search party sent out to inquire after your friend’s fate once Mary had regained her health? Not so much as half a party.
Splendid work, chum.
But what did it matter now? It was too late to change things. Aye, what would it have mattered, even had he known? He couldn’t very well have stormed a French prison garrison, no matter how many loyal men he had at his back! Not that such things as logistical nightmares and unreasonable tactical risks had ever crossed Fetz’s mind. Abandoning the Fleece to its fate had been the right thing to do, he was sure of it. The decision had saved the lives of other sailors, but in the honest dark of night he knew they never really figured into his decision. He did it to save Bonnie Mary. For her he would’ve condemned the lot of them.
Sitting by her bedside all those years ago, calling on every god he knew of, he remembered praying for her recovery with every fibre of his being.
But had his imagination even once ventured to the fate of his friend? Had he tried to find Fetz’s family? Or locate his bones when he thought him dead?
Long John touched the place Fetz had tattooed him with ink and a hot needle when they were young. Fetz had claimed he knew all about tattooing, though it was quickly obvious that the opposite was true. The amorphous purple blob Long John now sported was supposed to be an octopus, but the resemblance was hard to see.
The purveyor of a tattoo shop in Liverpool had once suggested he get it done over. “I could turn that muck into a fine parrot for you for sixpence,” the man had said.
But Long John had refused. Despite the appeal of having a parrot he’d never have to feed on his shoulder, he’d wanted to keep the blobby purple octopus. Fetz had been the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother and that tattoo was the only thing he had left of him in the world after the Golden Fleece went down.
It was Fetz who’d first bent an ear to his growing legion of stories, so long, long ago. Lying in their hammocks at night, he’d told his friend of fearsome sea battles and of an island of treasure that would’ve surely been his father’s, but for a small boy and a nearly empty apple barrel.
Yet even then, the course of their friendship had never run completely smooth, especially when it came to Bonnie Mary.
He wrote some more now, though he wasn’t entirely sure for whom:
Sometimes Fetz would be there in the kitchen when Bonnie Mary came in to visit. She were companionable enough when he was around, but I got the impression your mother didn’t care too much for him. The only time I asked her, she looked at me all strange and took her time in answering.
“Just something ’bout the way he looks at me,” she said.
“What’re you talking about?” I asks, not seeing it.
“He stares,” she says.
“Stares?” I wondered, confused. Back then I thought I knew every way folks staring or trying not to stare at a body could make a fellow uncomfortable, but this, this I gathered was something new.
“Like he eats me up with his eyes,” she said and I’ll never forget it, ’cause I saw she looked scared, and she ain’t much for being scared, yer mum. “Like I owes him something. Almost everyone here acts like that, like I’ve changed to a lady and they smile and tip their hats and expect … I don’t know what! But I ain’t changed, not inside! It’s just like me mum’s folks what tried to tell me how I ought to act and be. Them what always wanted to pinch me into a shape that weren’t my own. But I ain’t no lady, fine or otherwise, like they think. I’m just a person what eats and breathes same as the rest. I don’t owe them nothin’!”
As she talks, her eyes shine bright and wild, all passion and power, that energy just rollin’ off her like mist rolls off the ocean, bewitching me forever. I think that’s when I really started to love her, you know. And I thinks to meself, what stupid tar would want to shape the mighty ocean into a puny little pond, when any sailor worth his salt knows it’s the ocean herself what is truly sublime?
Sublime ocean or not, it were two hard years sailing afore I returns to Smuggler’s Bay with Old Captain Bright and the Pieces of Eight. By the time I made the steps of the Spyglass again, me clothes were worn to rags, me hair bleached in the sun, and me hands scarred and rough. But I had the love of Bonnie Mary and I were a real sailor at long last.
Your grandma were not an easy one for accepting defeat, though. Strange to say, but I were always more afeared of a single sharp word from her than a flogging by a captain.
Rough as I was, I presents meself to her and she don’t say a word. Once, twice, three times she walks around me, till I were sweating fit to burst.
Then she turns to me and says, real calmly, “So I hear you’re to be a sailor like your father, eh?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” I says, just glad to hear her voice.
“Well then, Jim, all I can say is this — I hope to God yer a lucky one.”
And I think, till now, at any rate, I have been
But as he wrote the n on the paper, the last of the lead in the pencil snapped off. It rolled sadly down the sheet, as if to prove this last statement false.
“I have been lucky!” he tried to convince himself.
Been being the operative word, he thought. Face facts. You’re too old, Jim. Your luck’s run out along with your golden curls and ability to shimmy up a rope. Your ship’s gone and without it you’re nothing. Here y’are, you and Mary, plotting your overthrow of Madsea with a knife hid in a scrap of linen! Realistically, you know you got no chance.
Briefly, he considered the story he’d just written out for Little Jane. For the first time, looking at his life in its entirety, he realized that the odds had always been against him! How was this time any different? If one thought about it at all, how ridiculously unlikely was it that he should have ever made captain? How impossible that he should have even become a successful sailor to begin with? What strange set of circumstances had led to his meeting with Bonnie Mary! When it came down to it, what were the odds of Thesely Silver finding him as a baby at all, or deciding to take him in as she had?
Reasonably, he might’ve just as soon been partially dismembered by a trained Australian alligator, for how “realistic” the events of his life had been up until then. Why, the ambitions he’d entertained as a youngster must’ve seemed downright absurd to most people! Yet in those days, he’d had no idea of what others deemed impossible. He never thought twice about it. And he’d succeeded. Despite everything.
So why start being realistic now?
All that was truly gone for good were some things made of wood and and a few chickens, he told himself. Shipwrights were still building ships, legwrights were still building legs (though probably not calling themselves legwrights while doing so). He and Mary could jolly well build another Pieces of Eight. A better one. Something sleeker and faster. With a grander figurehead!
And while he certainly couldn’t bring the old chickens and roosters lost in the ship’s fire back to life, he could get new ones! Speckly ones, like Little Jane had always wanted, and hang the expense!
Suddenly, somewhere deep within his terribly unrealistic self, he felt a tiny surge of optimism, a glow of hope that Little Jane and Ishiro were alive and perfectly all right. Hope that he and Bonnie Mary would overthrow Madsea and survive. If so many unlikel
y things could come to pass, then maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t so far-fetched to believe they would all survive and that one day, one day soon, they’d be together again.
Little Jane Silver Page 19