The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  “The church of the sea. But services there are irregular.” He smiled. “Today, my church is your church, and you can vouch for my having gone nowhere else, should the Immigration officer ask. I doubt he will. I’ve already been allowed ashore, and a visit to the house of the Lord shouldn’t ruffle anybody’s feathers.” It seemed a reasonable bend of the rules, and Mother immediately took on the project of getting his suit in good enough condition for him to present himself before the eyes of God and the congregation of the First Anglican Church of Grey Rocks. I shined his shoes.

  When the captain came below, he was transformed into a gentleman of a former generation, with a slender-cut tailoring to his old suit and waistcoat. In place of a tie, he wore a neck cloth; instead of an overcoat, he wore his old boat cloak, and he carried a substantial-looking walking stick. He was a tall man, and altogether imposing. His outmoded wardrobe might have looked like a costume on somebody younger, but on him it somehow seemed natural.

  “My, aren’t you elegant!” Mother exclaimed, and off to church we went, squired by our new guest. Meg had gone ahead to get into her choir robe and warm up her vocal cords. The sun had come out, and all over town the ringing of bells began to summon the faithful, not just Anglican, but the parishioners of the United Church, and the Lutherans (including most of the Moehners), and the Baptists, and the Catholics to Mass at Saint Michael’s. In that time and place, everybody who did not want to be seen as morally dissolute went to church whether they felt particularly spiritual or not. Those who didn’t go were more noticed than those who did.

  As usual, Mother set a brisk walking pace, chatting with the captain, telling him about the town while I kept an eye out for Grendel. I didn’t expect him to be set on me when other people were around, but watchfulness seemed prudent. I noticed the captain noticing my preoccupation. We arrived as folks were still standing outside, so Mother introduced him around, until Robin’s car pulled up and she went to help with Aunt Karen, unloading the wheelchair, then getting her into it. Turning his back to Robin’s line of view, the captain asked me about Grendel and his range of operations. I told him that was anywhere between the inn and the school, another five-minute walk from where we were. My real worry was how I was going to avoid him when the snow came, or freezing rain, when I couldn’t ride my bike. On foot, I didn’t see how I could get away. I told him I was going to get a heavy stick so that at least I’d have something to protect myself when, inevitably, he nailed me.

  By this time everybody had gone inside, and Deacon Sidebarrow started to close the doors, so we scooted into a rear pew just as the opening hymn was starting. While I fumbled with the hymnal, the captain hummed along. “I’m afraid I never learned that one,” he commented as we sat down, “but it sounds like they’ve got a good choir.” I told him to just wait until they sang on their own, and he was in for a surprise. With a half-dozen empty pews in front of us, we could comfortably whisper to each other without bothering anybody. Deacon Sidebarrow sat down across from us, waiting to take up the collections in due course, but he was stone deaf.

  “I think a stick is a bad idea,” the captain opined.

  “Sure, a gun would be better,” I told him, but my only realistic option for a weapon was a good stick, something that could also be a club like the one he was carrying. I asked him what his objections could be to it.

  “Two objections, actually. First, if you start carrying a stick to school, you’ll be known as the boy with a stick.” Here he paused. The liturgies had ended, all prayed, and the Reverend Burton Corkum mounted to the lectern to deliver his sermon. This week it was his slant on sin overall, and how little sins all together make big sins, seven to be precise, which he started to inform us about in his best radio announcer’s voice.

  “What is the other objection?” I whispered.

  “It’s the more important one. From what you’ve told me about this dog, you’re not going to stop him with any stick, even if you were trained to use it properly. And if you did manage to whack him with it, you’d just make him madder. What to do, then? Evasion’s all you’ve got, sounds like. He’s faster, and he’s got you outgunned. Show me where your school is on this.” He produced the copy of the inn’s brochure that I’d given to him, and opened it to its town map. Together we went over it, and Grendel’s ambush spots, while Reverend Corkum led the rest of the congregation down the seven paths to perdition. Finishing, he raised his voice and his arms simultaneously, like a big bird.

  “‘Ye who enter here abandon all hope,’ reads the inscription on the gate of hell!” he intoned.

  “They always bloody well get that backwards,” the captain growled. “It’s heaven that has that particular inscription on it, not hell.”

  “Then what’s hell got on it?” I asked.

  “Embrace hope.”

  Before I could ponder that, it was the choir’s turn to stand and hold forth, which they did very beautifully, considering that Earl Eisnor’s loss of voice had deprived them of their baritone. Then came Meg’s two solos—two because she sang so sweetly that one hymn from her wasn’t enough. Her hosannas rang to the heavens in a soprano that the angels must have envied, not to mention her looks. Meg was an Irish redhead, with big green eyes and a spray of freckles, and she had turned more heads than my own.

  “She has a voice like a burst of butterflies,” the captain commented as everybody rose for the doxology. This he knew well, and he sang it in a vibrant baritone that found its way to the front of the church: “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow . . .” The choir glanced in our direction, finished their lyrics, and let the organist take over while Deacon Sidebarrow passed his plate, first to us two, since we were sitting at the back. I put in the weekly quarter I was issued for the purpose; the captain put in a dollar, and the deacon moved on.

  “Tell me about Meg,” the captain said. I didn’t know how well I could do that question justice in any short form. Meagan O’Leary was the child of an unmarried Irish immigrant mother who had abandoned her in Halifax in order to sneak into “the Boston states” and vanish. In fact, nobody local knew much about Meg’s history until she was placed with a Grey Rocks couple when she was about ten, still a ward of the state. John and Betty Langille were paid to take her in, though by no means enough to make them want to keep her for a second year, so she’d gone to another family, then another one after that. She had been known as a handful, bright, eccentric, always rebellious, musically gifted not only as a singer, but just about the best fiddler in Lunenburg County. The late Reverend Trelawny had taken her on as a violin student, and she’d so melted the heart of her teacher that he’d given her his second instrument. With it, she made magic. “Witchy Meg” was one of the names she’d gotten, but her most usual nickname was just “Mad Meg.”

  “Why mad?” asked the captain, just as the service came to the closing prayer, and we had to put our knees onto the prayer rail. Then came some long announcements from Becky Eisnor, speaking about the activities of the Women’s Auxiliary.

  “One summer night with a full moon,” I told him, “Meg went out on our wharf and played her fiddle in the nude.” This private sacrament had unfortunately coincided with the arrival of several Grey Rocks fishing boats; they passed her close and put spotlights on her. I said that was only one of the odd things she’d done that had gotten her a dubious reputation. She’d had a few boyfriends that she hadn’t kept long, who had retaliated for being dropped by saying bad things about her.

  Meg had first come to work part-time at the inn. After Father’s death, she’d moved in to stay. When she turned eighteen, there was no more money for her from the government, but she was earning her keep, and had become part of the family. She wanted to go to music school somewhere, anywhere, but there was no money, and her help at the inn had become indispensable. “I’m doomed to spend my whole life in this boring town, mopping floors, folding laundry, and pouring beer,” she told me once, when I found her playing her fiddle to herself, crying. Nevertheless,
with us she had found a family and a home for the first time in her life, for herself and her trusty cat Cleo, who’d been with her through thick and thin. Five years had passed, with pressures building up in her as we found out last July, when Meg had a bad week, with grouty customers, no tips, another boyfriend gone sour, problems in the choir, and finally a blowup at my mother over some trivial thing.

  So Meg quit. She stayed until Mother could hire replacement help, then left on the bus to Halifax with two suitcases, a huge bag with a shoulder strap, her fiddle case, and Cleo. By then she and Mother had made up, of course, and there were a lot of hugs and moist eyes, but it was plainly time for Meg to follow her destiny into the universe beyond Grey Rocks. She had the phone number and address of a man in the music business who had told her he would help her start a career.

  Here Reverend Corkum concluded the service with a resonant reminder to ponder well the transience of mortality, and the consequences of accumulating small sins. Again the bells tolled, and the captain and I emerged from the church before anybody else. The day was clouding up, turning smurry and chill.

  “If we clear out before your policeman uncle sees me, it will save him the trouble of having to take any official notice of my leaving the inn,” he said, suggesting that I show him my school on the way home. “Obviously Meg came back,” he prompted me as we strolled. Indeed she had, just last month, and in a desperate condition. Whatever happened to Meg during her three months away was nothing she wanted to talk about to anybody except Mother, who tended her bruises and kept what she’d been told to herself. Cleo was gone. So was Meg’s violin, and some other things, and we were all treating her very tenderly.

  “Hmmm,” said the captain, swerving the focus, “is that your school over there?” It was. “Let’s examine the terrain.” This we did, walking around it while he correlated our surroundings with the little map. “You have here three basic routes between the inn and the school,” he observed, tracing them with his finger. “Here’s one, two, and three. Now, every day take a different one. Never let the enemy know where you’re going to be. That’s for starters. Next, let’s have a look and find the safety spots.”

  These turned out to be various familiar places that he led me to view in a tactical way—sheds and garages with unlocked doors, even houses, and more than a few fences, which were good because I could jump them, get on the other side, and when Grendel ran around to my side, I could jump back, gaining ground. Also there were various climbable trees, and some parked vehicles I could maybe enter if they were there, and blow the horn. “If he trees you, or runs you into somebody’s house, then you’ll probably get a witness, which will force the cops to deal with the animal. Meanwhile, chart your course from one safe anchorage to another. That’s how the pirates had to evade the frigates of the Royal Navy, and how merchant ships evaded pirates, with a bit of luck. So there’s a small start to your understanding about the subject.”

  We were approaching the gate to the Admiral Anson Inn, with his painted portrait overhead. “Now there was a pirate if ever there was one,” said the captain, stopping under the sign to have a look at it. I reminded him that Anson was First Lord of the Admiralty. He nodded. “And the biggest pirate of his time, some who knew him would say.” He was amused by the portrait’s crooked wig. “And he’s a bit pink, but the funny thing is, he did look just like that after about his eighth glass of sherry.” He said this as casually as if he had recently dined with the man. I pointed this out. “Quite. And so I did, although not so very recently.” It was an odd thing for him to say, and odd in the way he said it. He turned his gaze from the sign to me. “I speak as a student of naval history. I’ve spent many an evening studying Anson’s career, looking at copperplate engravings of him and such.”

  Here, we were interrupted by Robin driving up, with Aunt Karen, for our family’s weekly Sunday dinner. Again there was the process of her wheelchair, and an introduction to Captain Johnson. Aunt Karen had been catastrophically afflicted (soon after her marriage to Robin) with a crippling kind of arthritis that had ravaged her body, making her too fragile to even shake hands with people.

  “You’re the sailor I’ve heard about,” she said to him.

  “Very likely,” he bowed.

  “And how did you like Reverend Corkum’s sermon?” she wanted to know, as Robin rolled her through the gate.

  “Madam, I took it to heart, because in order to go hear it, I was committing a transgression, a little sin which I trust our Lord will forgive on the grounds that I was visiting His house on the Sabbath.”

  “I reckon He’ll forgive you,” she said, “and I think you’ll also be forgiven by the local authorities.” Robin had nothing to say about the captain’s delinquency from quarantine, although obviously it had been well noted. Robin didn’t miss much, and Aunt Karen missed nothing at all. She had an eye like a scalpel, as Tom once put it, and dissecting the world around her was just about the only thing she could do for entertainment, other than reading. Inside, Mother invited the captain to join the family table for Sunday dinner, our traditional noontime meal. Here, he came under Aunt Karen’s further scrutiny, which was stringent.

  “Where were you coming from before Bermuda?”

  “Carriacou, an island . . .”

  “In the Grenadines, south part of the Lesser Antilles, in the Windward Islands,” Aunt Karen finished his sentence for him. She had been a schoolteacher, and knew many things. “Vacationing?” This got a nod.

  “Just that. A vacation from a vacation. I’m retired from the sea professionally, but sailing remains my lot. The reward is getting to come to a place like this, and to meet good folk such as yourselves.” He was very gracious, but Aunt Karen was by no means done with him.

  “And before Carriacou?”

  “The Cape Verdes; Las Palmas before that; Spain before that; from England at Bristol, which is where my motor was last working.” He turned to Robin, asking his recommendation for a good marine mechanic. Robin told him to ask Tom.

  “What kind of a historian are you?” Aunt Karen wanted to know. “What have you written?”

  “Oh, odds and sods. This and that. Bits and pieces here and there.”

  Here I piped in: “He’s going to teach me about pirates for my essay.”

  “You’ve studied piracy?” Aunt Karen pursued him.

  “A bit,” the captain responded. “It’s so much a part of everything. And it’s particularly part of this coast, which is where the pirates came to recruit, and to careen their ships and repair, in an out-of-the-way corner with a lot of out-of-the-way places where the Royal Navy didn’t go, if they could avoid it.” Here, he’d turned the tables on Aunt Karen.

  “For instance, take Mahone Bay, which was named Mahon by the French, because that was their word for pirate at the time, and because it was a choice place for pirates to come. They could work the Caribbean in the winter, New England in the summer, and come here to tuck in behind an island and work on their ships, scrape the barnacles off their bottoms, pick up some local lads to fill in their crew, and then be off again. That was all along the coast between here and Newfoundland, which was their favourite recruiting ground of all, primarily because there were a lot of poor people there who couldn’t escape, having been painted a rosy picture by their governments, seducing them to emigrate to a stony wilderness. There they were enslaved, stuck cleaning fish. To many of them, a pirate ship was their only gateway to freedom. Many a religious man chose that door.”

  “That’s something not much taught in school,” Aunt Karen observed. “Are you an apologist for piracy?”

  “Madam, if I’m guilty of being an apologist for anything at all, I would deserve a slap from the teacher.”

  “Who were your teachers?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start. And yourself?” He turned the conversation to her. “You’ve taught history? What’s your own area of study?”

  “My own study? Primarily, living with the pain of my disease.” Aunt Kare
n was no whiner, but she was very straightforward. “Trying to make friends with it. Beyond that, all I’m able to do in my little life—what’s left of it—is to observe the things that Providence puts in my path. I, too, am retired. You’re an interesting man. I apologise if I’ve been too direct. It’s my way. At least tell me who has been your main teacher.”

  “I would have to say the sea,” said the captain, standing. The meal was over. He expressed his thanks for it, and the company, and excused himself on the grounds that his own small ship needed some tending and pumping, and he had to change clothes and go do it. On his way out, he promised to meet with me at four o’clock in order to get me started on my paper.

  “Now there is a gentleman who’s hard to read,” Aunt Karen remarked when he had left. “He’s cultured, but with a rough edge; his English wanders around between Oxonian and West Country dialect, with some Americanisms thrown in. He has no interest in telling us what he has written, which could mean he hasn’t written anything. The thing that I can do through the library services is to find out anything that’s been published under the name of Charles Johnson, or perhaps Captain Charles Johnson. He’s got me curious.”

  I was waiting for Granddad’s ship clock to ring four o’clock, and when it did, I presented myself at the captain’s table, notebook and sharpened pencil in hand. The fire I had been tending was crackling. Outside, a light fall of snow had begun. He wasn’t there, however, although he had been only a few minutes ago, scribbling away. “Where did he go?” I asked Meg.

  “Don’t know; don’t care,” said Meg, “but with the number of rums he’s had, I reckon it’s the loo.”

  I sat down to wait, listening for the distant sound of a flushing toilet, which would tell me whether he had gone to the downstairs gents, or one of the upstairs facilities, but there was nothing. When the clock went to twenty minutes past our appointed hour, I went up to his room, listened at his door, and heard music on the other side.