The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  I told him I had never felt better, and wanted to drink another toast. “If you have any more to drink, you’re going to be feeling some divine punishment of your own,” he cautioned, but did not stop me. My toast was to him. My memory of exactly what I said is fuzzy: it seemed important to try to convey my appreciation for him, fumbling for words, finally calling him the best shipmate I’d ever had. Not that I had ever had any shipmates, other than Grandfather, but it was from the heart. Also, I blurted an idea I’d been nursing, which was nothing less than sailing away with him aboard Merry when he left. I yearned to make a voyage with him. If he left after June, I could graduate from grade school, then go. High school could wait a year. I would work without pay.

  “Please?” I begged. He considered.

  “I have to sail to Boston in June, and I’ll take you along on two conditions: first, you get your mother’s permission, and second, that you now go to bed. Tomorrow’s a school day,” he reminded me.

  “Damn school.” I felt the recklessness of a warrior who had survived a battle, telling him I’d go to bed when I’d finished my beer. He relit his pipe. I don’t remember our conversation after that, but I did drink up the pint in front of me, and when I eventually tried to stand, the floor heaved and rocked underfoot like the deck of a ship weathering a gale. Getting up the stairs to my room was an adventure that required some assistance from him; then I was on my back, in my bed, trying to stop the ceiling from spinning so.

  Alas, that was not the end of my evening, although I have no recollection of the subsequent events, until their painful aftermath. I later learned the captain had placed a large basin by my bed, but I missed it when I vomited, so he cleaned it up and left me. At some time after that, I tried to find my way out to the bathroom, losing my bearings in the hall, where I threw up again. Then I mistook the cleaning closet for the loo, and peed there, aiming for where I thought the toilet was. Unable to find my bedroom again, I lay down on a hall rug, which is where the captain found me when he came to check on my condition. I was not awakened by his carrying me back to bed. There he left me to sleep past school. He was just looking in on me again at mid-morning, around the time I should have been reciting my assigned three stanzas of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, when Mother came in, way ahead of schedule, closely followed by Robin and Aunt Karen. Her doctor’s appointment had been cancelled, so they’d gotten on the road early. I awakened to my mother’s face, a mask of shock and horror, and her voice: “What’s happened?” a shrill reverberation on top of the other poundings in my head.

  “I’m afraid he got a bit legless,” the captain answered for me.

  “And you let him?” she turned on him.

  “Ooohh,” I groaned, and promptly threw up again. After that, she found the mess the captain hadn’t discovered—the one I’d made in the hall, and the cleaning closet. To this day, I don’t like to think about it, though the memory of the incident remains vivid, and I have never regained a taste for aquavit.

  12

  A Load of Lead

  IT WAS A dismal beginning to the memorably bad February that followed. According to the astronomy chapter in my science book, the days had been getting longer and lighter by nearly a minute a day ever since the winter solstice, but in my life, any light was left over from darkness and shadow. First, there was my mother’s anger, which was like a thermal force that didn’t often erupt, but was fierce when it did. She attacked the stains on the rug I’d left in the upper hall (wearing her good dress), while I got cleaned up and Robin took Aunt Karen home, and the captain situated himself at his table, with pipe. I joined him there, and we both waited by the cold fireplace for whatever was to come. Mother put her buckets back where they belonged with an angry clatter, then came to us.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  I was rather hoping the captain would take on the issue, but he did not. “I got drunk,” I finally said.

  “I’d say. And where were you?” she asked him.

  “I was here. I regret your distress. I’d planned to get things sorted out before you got back.”

  “You gave my twelve-year-old son liquor?” Her jaw muscles clenched, and I jumped in, explaining that it was my doing; I’d snuck drinks and he caught me at it, and he’d said not to, so I didn’t, but got drunk anyway, and he’d tried to stop me. Her gaze remained fixed on the captain.

  “And you didn’t stop him.” Here she read him the riot act: aiding and abetting the delinquency of a minor, breach of trust as the responsible adult, allowing a minor to drink on a public premises that could lose its licence for the offence. And there were other items of indictment. He nodded, puffing on his pipe, offering neither rebuttal nor apology.

  “It’s my own fault,” I said again, sounding thin. She ignored me.

  “Captain Johnson, I’d tell you to find some other place to stay, but I’ve spent the money you’ve paid me, and don’t have it to give back to you. Also, you’ve been a friend up until now, and I’ll honour that. But you’ve used up your honours now, and then some, and I’ll thank you to sever your association with my son. You’re done with each other.” She regarded us both. “Are we clear on that?” We were.

  Everything was gone. The voyage I’d dreamed of was gone, and the rest of my dream, which was that I would go away with him, and then come back so that he could marry my mother, and I could paint pictures of the places he had taken me. Gone. Gone also was the precious six dollars a week he had been paying me to do mostly nothing; gone with his addictive stories and the cellar expedition—gone with everything. I was allowed to bus his table, but not to sit down with him, or to speak with him in any way that was not functional.

  “Functional, aye. Well then, functional it is, if that’s the rules,” he said to me later.

  “I hope . . .” I started to say.

  “As ye hope, so shall ye fear,” he interrupted me in a perfect imitation of Reverend Corkum’s voice. “Which is quite true, as it works out,” he added. “Let’s play by the rules. Functional it is.”

  And functional it was. At school, it was the usual curriculum, and I recited my assigned lines from the Ancient Mariner:

  “The ice was here, the ice was there,

  the ice was all around;

  it cracked and growled, and roared and howled . . .”

  As though on cue, the old steam radiators in the classroom started to growl and clank. Part of the playground was glazed with ice and swept of snow, so everybody who was of any use played hockey, except I did not, because I was tired of taking thwacks from the Moehner boys’ sticks, or being tripped by them, or crosschecked. It wasn’t worth the bruises. So I abided with the girls and other supernumeraries such as Job Wirth, called Worthless Job, who was no good at sports, and also mechanically untalented.

  There was Jenny to talk to, and I told her what had happened. First, she wanted to know what it felt like to be drunk, then she prodded my effort to describe the sense of reality to his stories. She had experienced a taste of the same, and concluded that he was definitely a hypnotist, and probably an avatar as well. She judged him to be a very dangerous being, and she wanted to know when she could come over and see him again. I told her that looked like never.

  That melancholy thought was uppermost in my mind as I slouched home from school at the end of the week. Without Grendel, I had no need for mindfulness, and I was able to devote my full attention to my embarrassment and general misery. With my eyes on the ground, I went through the gate, left it to click closed behind me, and was nourishing a particularly dark thought when it was blown out of my head in a sudden flash of real pain—a surprise crack from the captain’s walking stick on my backside.

  “Ow! Wow!” I said, rubbing the afflicted area, backing away from him. “Why did you do that?” I was not amused, but he was having a hearty old laugh at my expense.

  “You looked like you were looking for worms, but they don’t often come out this time of year,” he commented, wiping away laugh tears. “One must stay
alert,” he said, twirling his stick and strolling inside.

  Feeling betrayed, I did not look at him when I built his fire. If he noticed I was ignoring him, he gave no sign of it, being preoccupied with his macramé. It was the same the following evening, when he and Meg were the entertainment for the inn’s Saturday Music Night, as it was listed in the paper. There were only eight customers (including Noel Nauss, who had taken to coming around), but that was eight more than usual at this time of year, when most of Nova Scotia stayed at home. He played the theme he had invented, and Meg played to his variations.

  That night I had a dream I still remember vividly to this day. It was a nightmare. I was returning from school in new snow, and came upon Klaus Moehner. He now had three dogs. He smiled at me as he gave them my old sweater to sniff, then they all charged me at once. I tried to run, but my feet were clogged in ice; I looked back as the nearest dog lunged for me with bared teeth, and behind him, behind Klaus, stood the captain, laughing and laughing. I woke up with the blankets twisted around me.

  I squired Mother to church next day; the captain following at a respectful distance. Reverend Corkum had finished with the sins and virtues, and passed on to the godlessness of communism. Then the choir held forth; the captain now with a solo, with the female voices taking flight over his baritone. Back at the inn, there was Sunday supper, as usual, but without our guest. He was no longer invited. Mother had commanded his table to be set separately, so there he sat himself down, at a distance. He greeted the family in passing with friendliness, getting courtesy with frost in return. Few words were spoken during the meal. The captain finished in short order, and went out, with a polite nod in passing.

  To Aunt Karen, his not having apologised was worse than the original offence, which was the focus of my mother’s indignation. I was questioned by Robin, who cautioned me that he might have to file a report, and that I should be sure to tell him the truth. I did, including the fact that I had been sneaking drinks, and he had tried to get me to stop. I lifted the blame from him as much as I could, even though my own feelings in his direction were a lot shakier since he had attacked me with his stick. I did not mention that. In the end, Robin decided no misdemeanour had been committed.

  “But I will check him out,” he added. “I’ll run his name through the system and see what we get.”

  “That would be interesting,” said Aunt Karen.

  Surprisingly, it was Meg who rescued him and got the topic dropped. She turned to me. “What I’m hearing is that you just wanted to get flashed up, right?” I allowed that was an essentially correct assessment of the situation. “Right. Well, is it something you want to do again?” Most emphatically not. My sincerity was manifest. “Well, then, there’s that out of the way,” she said. This settled the issue but not my own mind. Everybody seemed agreed the blame was on him more than me, and I began to see the logic of it. I was ready to ignore him at breakfast on Monday, but he was not at his table to ignore, so out I went, resolving to ignore him at suppertime.

  Thwack! There it was again, stinging pain in the same place; I danced away from the surprise figure of the captain, who had ambushed me a second time, to his amusement. I told him I didn’t appreciate the joke. When I came home that afternoon, I proceeded carefully through the gate and down the walk. He was nowhere around, however.

  In fact, we were to see little of Captain Johnson for the rest of that month. He would breakfast, and go off to Tom’s, to work on Merry, returning with stops along the way back to chat, at the barbershop or the Sou’wester Beverage Room, where he was very chatty with various of the Moehners, even Klaus, who obviously had not learned much about who he was talking to. The captain had become a popular figure around Grey Rocks. He was a particular favourite with Barbara Boswell, who was postmistress, and knew more about the town than anybody else in it. The captain often stopped in to the post office to see her, although he never got any mail. Nor did he ever send any, as far as I could tell. He played his pennywhistle before turning in. Sometimes Meg played with him. It seemed to me their music was his last connection with any of us . . . except I kept a wary eye open when crossing the grounds.

  Toward the end of the month, we got other things to think about. The health department people showed up again, three of them this time, armed with clipboards and the thick code of rules governing public eateries. Again, no sanitation flaw could be found, but there were infractions having to do with ventilation, drainage, and other technicalities. They wrote a lot of notes, then went away, promising that we would learn in due course from them what alterations would be necessary to keep the inn compliant with the current regulations.

  “It means work that we don’t have the money for,” sighed Mother, telling Aunt Karen about it. Aunt Karen had taken a turn for the worse, and was staying with us on Robin’s duty days, for Mother’s care and companionship. “I smell Roy Moehner in this,” she said. “He knows who to talk to who can read the rules to cost us.” Aunt Karen could think of no advice, except to make the March 1 payment, giving us another three months before the next one to sort something out. We were actually making money in the winter for the first time, with a developing new clientele and prospects for a rosier future.

  “That’s what Moehner sees, too,” Aunt Karen cautioned, “so he’s stepping up the pressure. Calling a favour or two in city hall. Let’s hope this is all there is to it.”

  It was not. Two days later the clipboard people from the provincial bureau governing hostelries showed up and spent the better part of the day. Before going off to write up our infractions, their boss tipped off Mother that she should start planning extensive rewiring, modifications to all of the lavatories, and other things.

  It was defeat. Mother wept. Aunt Karen pointed out that they hadn’t ticketed us yet, and we would have some period of time for compliance; it was likely that Uncle Bill, the family legal champion, would be able to get extensions, maybe modifications. “Make the March payment,” Aunt Karen advised, “and we’ll worry about what comes after that when it comes.”

  March brought a series of southeasters that were back to back. The payment was made, with no dread official letter yet. Meg tired of Lenny the guitar player, and took up with a drummer who had a Buick. Aunt Karen’s condition deteriorated further, and I got the flu, along with the rest of the school.

  “You say the pirates made the first democracy?” Miss Titherington challenged me. She had read the beginning of my second-semester essay, and was clear about wanting a source for that claim. “That’s not been mentioned in any history I’ve ever read,” she noted, looking at me sharply over the top rims of her reading spectacles. She demanded a complete outline. “I want to know where you’re going with this, and if you have any other unusual notions. And I’m still waiting for your bibliography.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, with no idea about any of it, or when I would have any, if ever. I had stopped ignoring the captain, though he showed no discernible sign of noticing, as I cleared his table or tended his fire. He got me again with his stick one evening when I stepped outside to fetch him some more logs, enraging me all over again. Why was he stalking me? My first instinct was to let his fire go out, and never build him another. But he had paid for the wood, and had overpaid me in the past, so I swallowed my pride, and steamed, and tended his fire as he sat and sipped beer. I resolved to do to him what he had been doing to me. I would never have considered such a thing a month earlier, but his ongoing abuse had finally put my hackles up. Under my hands were the newspapers I was crumpling to go under the kindling, and I rolled one up for an attack weapon. I would ambush him on his way to bed. I would dart out when he’d climbed the stairs, whack him on his backside, and see how he liked it, and escape laughing, before he realised what had happened.

  I hovered, keeping an eye on him while he played his tin flute, and finished his nightcap; then I went above and positioned myself. I heard him go to the downstairs lavatory. As I re-rolled my newspaper, I had a spate of mi
sgivings about what I was doing, but kept my determination. Any moment he would come up the stairs, and I would strike.

  “If you’re planning to read that newspaper,” came his surprise voice behind me, “you’ll find it’s several weeks old. Good night.” He had somehow come up the back steps, which he never used, and approached from behind me while my attention was riveted in the opposite direction.

  Following that, I postponed asking him the questions that I was going to have to answer to Miss Titherington. I tried the local library again, combing the Dewey decimal system under pirates for something that would let me go it alone, but, aside from a lot on Peter Pan, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and pictures by Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth, there wasn’t much. After another prod from Miss Titherington, I had no choice but to seek out my former mentor. Although it would be only a functional exchange about schoolwork, I thought it best to talk to him somewhere Mother wasn’t, so after school on the day of the vernal equinox, I pedalled down through town to Tom’s boatworks.

  I found the captain clamping a plank to Merry, one of several new ones neatly fitted where the old ones had been removed. “Aha,” he said, glancing up from his work. “Ahoy.” He was very cheerful. I had rehearsed what I planned to say to him, but I was at once put to work helping support and push on the plank as he fixed the clamps, and by the time it was in place, I’d forgotten my speech. “What brings you here?” he asked. I told him about my essay concerns, starting with my teacher’s doubts about the buccaneers having the first democracy. What was his source on that?