The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  The show started up again where it had left off and, with no further interruption, quickly recaptured everybody’s attention. By the time Jason McGridley and his group performed with Meg, they were playing to a packed place and the room took on its own authority. Lots of toes got tapping in time, and Jimmy Eisnor danced with his fiancée among the crowd around the bar. There, Tom was working flat out.

  “It is truthfully said,” came the captain’s surprise voice from behind me, “that it is the ability to make music and dance that makes men like gods. Don’t you think? Look.” He pointed out the Moehner boys leaving, closely attended by Noel. Their tables were instantly taken. I turned to ask him about what had just happened, but he was gone again, and when I next saw him, he was back on stage with Meg, haunting a hushed house with “The Dismal King of the Ghosts,” then bringing the place to its feet with jigs and reels. At some point the captain addressed the room, raising a toast to the Admiral Anson Inn, then to many more evenings like this one in the future, which got a strong ovation.

  After that, Jeremy and Stewie Gallant did their banjo and guitar “Orange Blossom Special” with Meg on fiddle, starting some serious dancing, crowded though the place was. Tom alerted us to the next crisis.

  “At the rate we’re going, we’ll be out of beer in a half-hour, maybe less, and rum.” It meant early closure to the best event the inn had seen in living memory, one that was still going strong.

  “What do you need?” the captain asked.

  “I guess about four kegs of draught, and maybe a half-case of rum would do it, but there’s no place where we can get it.” But there was. Off into the night went the captain with Noel Nauss in Noel’s pickup, returning a half-hour later with the required supplies.

  “How did you get this?” asked Robin, who’d come back from his fire.

  “I’ve gotten to know the manager down at the Sou’wester Beverage Room,” the captain explained, “and he was glad to sell it to us. Right, Noel?” The captain smiled at him, and Noel nodded, looking pleased to have a friend. He and many other guests, some of them pretty flashed up drunk, stuck around for the midnight “lunch,” after which Meg and the captain played a last set of slow waltzes and Robin got Mother out of the kitchen in order to have a dance with her. After that, she closed the bar, turned out the hangers-on, paid off the crew, and collapsed in a chair.

  “That was good,” she said.

  Everybody learned just how good it was at the noon meal the next day, where we gathered after the morning cleanup, and Mother announced the tally of combined revenues from food, bar, and door charges. “Holy old dynamiting Jesus,” Meg said, whistling. After expenses, the inn had made enough to cover the dreaded March loan payment, plus a bit more, which would deal with some overdue bills. Another profit from the concert would be renewed local interest in the place, no doubt. “A triumph,” Aunt Karen called it, and she was not given to hyperbole. We were aglow with self-congratulations all around, and abuzz about everything that had happened.

  The whole multipronged attack by the Moehners was discussed in detail, starting with Robin’s call from Chief Wirtz that took him away during the invasion by Klaus and his thugs. The fire was in a derelict farmhouse (on Moehner property), and Robin had to stay around because the chief said somebody might have been in the place. Nobody had, but the ploy had worked.

  “Of course, it’s all quite unprovable,” Robin observed. “I’d love to investigate it, starting with how much insurance they carry on the place, but when Wirtz said there was no arson, he took it out of police jurisdiction.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of harassment charge that we can lay?” Mother asked him, not for the first time.

  “Not until they directly break the law in some way that I can prove. The minute they do, I’ll file charges that even Chief Moehner can’t block, because if he tried to do that, I’d take it to the RCMP, and he doesn’t want that kind of scrutiny.”

  Robin was indomitable. He was not just our family’s protector; he was everybody’s, except crooks’. But, as second-in-command in a force of five, with all the others being of the Moehner faction, he had no friend on the job. All his pay and his off-duty hours were given to Aunt Karen: driving her to the hospital in Halifax, wheeling her around, being her hands on the bad days when her own hands didn’t work, and endlessly playing cribbage with her on the good days, when she could handle the cards if he shuffled and pegged for her. At this moment, his interest was in how well the Moehner’s onslaught had been dealt with in his absence.

  “Was that your doing?” he asked the captain, who credited Noel Nauss for it.

  “We’ve come to be friends,” he explained. “I thought it safe to invite him to come by and listen to the music, and he appeared to take exception when it was interrupted. In all, I’d say he was very well behaved. And he had a very good time, by the by.”

  “He’s rightly thought of as a dangerous man.”

  The captain nodded. “Quite, but not to anybody who’s not bothering the universe.”

  “I owe you both,” said Mother. “Robin, as always, and Captain Johnson for hatching the idea for the concert, bringing your music to it, keeping the bar from running dry and, let’s hope, getting rid of the Moehner boys once and for all. How can we repay you?”

  The captain smiled his new and lustrous smile. “With a key, ma’am. The key to your cellar so that I can make the measurements I need from the old iron bits of the cannon’s original carriage. I want to work down there on a duplicate of it. Jim’s going to help, and so is Tom. For wood, we’ll use black locust. I want to see the old piece mounted properly out on the gun deck, again commanding the harbour, so it can fire a salute to Merry when we sail away.”

  “What a lovely idea,” said Mother, and all agreed.

  “But there’s a problem I must mention,” he said with a frown, producing a satchel he had brought. From it, he drew a dazed-looking kitten, a furry orange ball made up mostly of eyes, ears, and four paws, held on high by the scruff of its neck. “I found this small animal wandering about the place, apparently orphaned, and feel obliged to call it to your attention.”

  Meg went to it like an iron filing to a magnet. “You don’t hold her like that,” she said, taking the little creature from him. And so Cleo was replaced, as all could see.

  9

  On Dealing with Dogs

  THE FULL DARK of winter settled over the community of Grey Rocks, Nova Scotia, population 1,337—and 1,338 as of some time in the wee hours of New Year’s morn, when Margaret Maclean gave birth to a daughter at County Hospital. The inner harbour got a glaze of ice, and the Christmas lights all vanished, leaving the little town to darkness without gaiety by night; by day, the sky was darkened by wind-torn clouds.

  New Year’s Eve brought an ice storm and no customers, so the family celebrated alone, without even the captain, because he was bedridden with an attack of gout. I tried to look after him, but he didn’t want any looking after. When I brought him a glass of rum with everybody’s compliments, he regarded it longingly, but said he now had to lay off the rum for a week or two. “It’s been too much of that, and too much of your mother’s good food that’s done me in,” he growled, sending me away.

  When, the day before school, he hobbled down to sit by his fire, I was more than ready for another pirate story. With his peculiar talent for putting me into his narrative, he had left me relaxing on a Riviera patio, looking out over treasure-laden galleons silhouetted by silvery moonlight. I had been starting to enjoy the gentlemanliness of piracy, what with a ship’s orchestra, fine wines, Spanish gold, etcetera, and I pleaded for more.

  The captain grimaced, shifting his left foot, which wore only a sock, and had to be rested on a chair in order to stay elevated. He stirred the honeyed tea that Mother had given him, sipped it, and grimaced again.

  “Quite,” he rasped. “Very genteel, all those aristocratic pirates. Fame and fortune, eh?” I nodded, all anticipation. He smiled at me with narrowed eye
s, and his smile was not altogether pleasant. “Where would you like to go?” he asked. I thought the Caribbean might be nice. “Oh, aye, to be sure. Quite nice. Coconuts. It’s certainly the place where most of the European pirates chose to go when Mainwaring and his lot chased them out of home waters. In the Sea of the Caribs there were no rules. For that reason, merchant ships sailing there needed all the protection they could get, and the new Royal Navy got the job of giving it to them. So let’s say a navy ship on convoy duty is how we get you to the West Indies, eh?”

  This was not at all what I had in mind. “Why would I want to go that way?”

  “You don’t. But you’re out on a London street one day, going about your business, and by a bloody bad piece of luck you get scooped up by a bunch of toughs off a Royal Navy ship that’s there to conscript a crew for it, and they take you away. No good-byes.”

  “But,” I protested, “as a free man, I’m protected . . .”

  “Not from the conscription,” he interrupted me, “then or now. Although today they give a chap a bit more notice. And as to being a free man, you weren’t. Aren’t. You were pinned down by your poverty and without the education you needed to get out of a life where you were going to be worked to death, or turn to crime and wind up hanged.”

  “Sailing off with the navy sounds a lot better.”

  “In point of fact, it was worse. Far worse. Whatever squalor, privation, and degradation you’ve ever suffered as a working lout ashore, it looks like a garden party compared to your new circumstances. They give you a hammock—actually, they’re selling it to you—and about twenty-four inches of space to swing it in, so when your neighbour farts, it’s right in your face.” This got a giggle out of me. “Ah, you see the humour in that? Good, because you’re going to need every bit of humour you’ve got. You’re living in a packed crowd of unwashed men, and any contagious disease among your mates will get you, as well as their lice, fleas, and scabies mites. But you have more immediate concerns.

  “Your squadron makes a fall departure, gets around Ushant, then gets smacked by an early winter gale that lasts all across the Bay of Biscay. On your second day out, in a driving sleet, you’re made to climb the rigging for the first time in your life while you’re still puking your guts out, and you nearly get blown off the foreyard. Somehow you make it back safely to the deck, where you get a hard whack from a rattan for having been useless. By this time, you’re soaked and shivering, with no way to get warm or dry. The ship is unheated, and the deck over you leaks. You get the shakes, hypothermia, one of the sailor’s great enemies in the high latitudes.

  “You’re young, and you weather it, but the poor bloke in the hammock next to you shivers uncontrollably, until at last his teeth stop chattering, because he has died. As I recollect, the North American squadron lost a lot of men to the cold during the winter of 1759, right off this coast here, and there’ve been many more before and since. And may the gods help sailors on a night like this,” he added. The wind gusted against the inn’s east-facing windows with pane-rattling force. The captain reached for his rum, and realised it was tea. “Bloody hell,” he said.

  “But at least I’m going south,” I put him back on course.

  “South, aye, giving Cape Finisterre a good offing, and Portugal, then the African coast, to somewhere south of the Canaries, more likely the Cape Verdes, until you find the easterly trade winds. By then you’re warm, but you’ve had several weeks in which to come to a riper appreciation of your new life’s great charms, starting with a level of discipline you cannot imagine.”

  “I’ve read that it was severe,” I put in. His eyebrows lifted.

  “Severe? No, I think not. Severe is much too dainty. Brutal would be a better choice of words, but even that fails to convey. There’s a list of rules so thorough that it’s hard not to break one, and when you do . . . well, for minor infractions, such as being a moment too late out of your hammock, or into the rigging, you’ll simply be beaten with a rope’s end, or the rattan. For more serious crimes, such as spitting on the deck, stealing food, or talking back, you’ll be tied to a grating and whipped with a cat-o’-ninetails until your back is sufficiently torn up to scar you for life. And for the really serious crimes, such as refusing a direct order, or trying to desert the ship, you can be flogged to death—given so many lashes they literally strip all the flesh off your back, to the bones. This is thought to be a very good way to deter your shipmates (who are required to watch) from repeating your mistake.

  “Or there’s keelhauling, where you are bound hand and foot and dragged on two lines along the whole length of the keel, from fore to aft. Chances are, you drown along the way. If not, you might wish you had, because you’ve been horribly cut up by encrustations of sharp barnacles making very painful wounds that quickly fester. And there are no dressings to prevent blood poisoning. Ironically, if you commit the worst crime of all, mutiny, you’ll merely be hanged, which is a peaceful way to go, by comparison. Witnessing punishment is a fairly regular entertainment. The only other ones are drinking your daily grog ration, and music.”

  “Music?”

  “They let you sing while you’re working the capstan or hauling on halyards. Your whole life is work: working the sails, the lines, tarring the rigging, tallowing the tackle blocks, oiling the spars, chipping chain, holystoning decks. Your clothes quickly become filthy, and you’ve got only one change—which you’ve bought from the ship for a scalper’s price to be deducted from your pay at the end of the voyage. If you survive it. Hernias, ruptures, and fractures are frequent, along with a lot of other nuisances for which there’s small treatment, if any. Then, on top of all that, there’s the danger of a sea battle, which could happen at any time. In your case, it comes as your convoy is approaching the Leeward Islands, after a long passage. You’re attacked by two frigates, full of men and guns and showing no colours. You’re the only thing between them and your fat, slow convoy, and it’s a hot action.

  “Remember our discussion about what cannonballs do, and the splinters they set flying? Well, besides that you see men smashed by spars and heavy gear falling from aloft; a careless gun captain’s foot is crushed to a pulp by the recoil of his own piece; there are powder burns, and wounds from grenade fragments and musket balls. If those don’t hit something vital and kill you quick, they have a way of cluttering up a simple flesh wound with bits of the clothing they clipped off on their way in, causing infection, then gangrene, then death. Which is why the surgeons amputate so many arms and legs straightaway, before that can happen. They have a regular production line going. There’s blood everywhere, above and below. It runs into the scuppers, and streaks the side of the ship. Do you think I might trouble you to fetch me . . . oh, another tea I suppose. Heavy on the honey.”

  When I returned to the table, I was startled to find him baring his teeth at me, until seeing that was because he was easing his foot into a different position.

  “Who wins?” I asked.

  “Nobody. You send them away licking their own wounds, but your hull has been badly shot up. You’re leaking from some holes at the waterline, and your decks are a charnel ground littered with wreckage. Aloft, you’ve had your fore topmast and bowsprit shot away, so your ship hardly handles, and you drift. If there are winners, it’s the ships you’ve protected. They all fled like a covey of quail while you were fending off the attack so that their owners can make a nice profit.

  “What’s been demanded from you previously is a picnic compared with what you get in the aftermath of the action. You are of course exhausted, but there’s a diminished crew, and the entire ship to be put back in order: jury spars and rigging to set up, debris to clear, shot holes to plug, and all the pumps going constantly. There is no rest. For a musical accompaniment, you have the sobs and screams of the wounded, punctuated by splashes from corpses thrown over the side. No time for prayer services. You collapse from exhaustion, but are whipped back to your feet.

  “During the couple of days it t
akes to get the ship sailing again, you drift north, so far that your captain can no longer lay a course for Nevis, or even the Anegada Passage, so he heads west again, misses the Mona Passage in a gale, and winds up off the north-facing coast of Hispaniola. After the hard, long passage, your water supply is green in the cask, and it’s almost gone. What’s left is clouded with living, wriggling organisms, and it stinks. The ship’s biscuits are full of white weevils with black heads; the salt pork has soured; the cheese is desiccated, and there’s been no fresh food for so long that most of the crew has scurvy, including you. It further weakens you, loosens your teeth, and does other unpleasant things.

  “In the circumstances, your captain has no choice but to anchor off the Island of Tortuga in order to get water, even though the place is French. Of course, France and England have been quarrelling for centuries, but out here, everybody’s biggest and ongoing quarrel is with the Spaniards, who are such an enemy that they often lead enemies to make friends against them.

  “In any case, your ship is soon welcomed by some dugout canoes manned by Tortuga’s pig hunters, who bring out fresh stores for sale, including their famous boucan. There are a couple of Englishmen among them who offer to guide a watering party from the ship. You are ordered to go out with it, and out you go with a boatload of empty water casks, a few sailors, two marines with muskets to guard you, and a couple of the pig hunters for guides. And so you meet the boucaniers, the originals.”