by Gene Wolfe
After that, we had to find an island where nobody would interfere. It took two days, which gave me plenty of time to think back to things my father had said about knife fights. (A cutlass is just a long, heavy knife with a big hand guard, really.) I had found a little money in the captain's cabin, and I left the gold with Novia and put the rest in my pocket-all the copper and some silver.
We got in the longboat together, Yancy in the bow and me in the stern, and the crew rowed us out to a little bit of an island where nobody lived.
The quartermaster got us to stand ten long steps apart just like I had told him. "When we have gone, shipmates, you must settle things between you. Only one of you will return to the ship. We will remain within hailing distance. When the winner halloos, we will come back for him."
I nodded to show I understood. Maybe Yancy nodded, too. I do not know.
When they had pushed out the longboat and gotten on board it again, I said, "Look, Yancy, I'm your captain whether you like it or not. You're a tough fighter and I'm not looking forward to losing you. What do you say we call it off right now?" My left hand was in my pocket getting the money while I said all that.
The longboat's crew started backing water on one side and rowing on the other to turn it around, and he rushed me. I threw the coins in his face and stuck my cutlass clear through his chest. Back when we took the Magdelena, I had seen a Spanish officer do that with one of their straight swords, taking a long step forward with his right leg. I did not do it as well as he had, but I did it good enough and I caught Yancy's wrist with my left hand.
By the time they got the longboat turned so that the bow was toward the ship and the crew facing me, Yancy was lying dead on the sand at my feet. I yelled for them to stop where they were, and I would wade out and climb in.
Probably I should have prayed for Yancy that night, since I had been the one who did for him. I meant to, but I got busy with other things, kissing and tickling and all that, and I did not. I have prayed for him since, though, and I will say mass for him today.
He was about as tall as I was, and probably a hundred pounds heavier. Maybe he really was a good fighter, too-I know he thought he was. I have fought quite a bit in my life. I do not think I am a real good fighter, only a pretty fair one. Just the same, I have learned two big things about fighting and I will pass them along. The first one is that if you rush somebody you have to make good on it. Rushing works best when the man you are fighting does not expect it. If he knows you are coming, maybe you better think of something else.
The second one is even more important. It is that if everybody knows you are a good fighter, you do not have to do it much. People who go around picking fights do not want to lose them. It means that every fight you have is more important than it looks. You want to win it, and you want to tear the other guy up so everybody knows who won and there is no doubt about it. Never listen to guys who talk about fighting fair. Half the time they are just trying to tie one hand behind you. If you box or play cards or shoot dice, you ought to play fair. Those are games. A fight is not a game.
Now it is late and I ought to lock up the Youth Center and go back to the rectory, so I will just tell you what my father told me about knife fighting. The one who wins is the quick one with something in his other hand. It can be just about anything-keys he can throw like I threw those coins, a rock, or a stick. His coat. Anything. He uses it to get the other man's attention just for a quarter of a second. If you can make a long cut without getting cut yourself, you are going to win. If you can get your knife in deep without breaking the blade, same thing. I have been hearing confessions. It is something we do not do here anywhere near as much as we did in the monastery, even though the people here have a lot more to confess than I ever had when I was there. So I would have more confession if I could, but I am not the pastor.
Of course we cannot talk about anything we are told, but a British accent I heard today reminded me of Capt. Burt. There are not many Catholics in England and we do not get a lot of English people in this parish, which is more Latin than anything else. So I listened as much to the way this person talked as I did to what this person told me.
Capt. Burt never got to go back to Surrey like he planned, and I used to think that even though he was dead he had been better off than I was, because I had no Surrey to go back to. Not really. But I heard a girl waiting outside the confessional laugh at something some guy in the line had said, and that was when it really came home to me that I do. My Surrey is not a place, but a person. I am going back to her, no matter what.
So I should say here that when we had been together a few days she said something that should have bothered me a lot more than it did. I have written it in this, and later on I will talk about it more. There was trouble about the pool table again, and I had to make it clear to everybody that I am not Fr. Phil. I am Fr. Chris, and if you push me I know how to push back hard. I always forgive the boys, but I have found that it is better to knock them down first and forgive them when you help them up. They need to bounce off the floor if they are to repent.
The boys' fights about the pool table are a long way from Capt. Burt and the Caribbean, so I will stop here and not talk about the maps at all. If you ever read this, maybe you will wonder what happened to those coins I threw at Yancy, whether I picked them up. I did not. To tell the truth, I never even thought of it then. I left him lying there on the beach, with coins all around him in his blood and on the sand.
11
The Island and the Auction
I have been on a good many islands, some of them nice and some not so nice. The one we picked to scrape the bottom was never my favorite island, although it was okay. Just the same, it has my all-time favorite name. It is Fat Virgin Island. We never think of Mary the Mother of God as being fat; but it is entirely possible she was, in later life particularly. Fat Virgin Island is there to remind us that fat women can be good women, and often are. It is one of the things God knows that we should know too.
Fat Virgin Island welcomed us. We found a nice little bay on the east side of the island that had a creek of sweet, clear water. There was nobody around and no sign that anybody had been. The beach looked great, so I said that was it.
Getting the guns out of the ship and up on shore was the hardest part. Guns are heavy, and no matter how heavy you think they are, they are heavier than that. You can take them out of their carriages but the weight is in the iron barrel, so that does not do a lot of good. Ours were only twelve-pounders, but they weighed a lot just the same. It could take a couple of hours just to get one into the longboat. Then it had to be lifted out of the longboat with a crane we had rigged up, and after that it had to be dragged up the beach far enough to get it out of the way. The Magdelena had twenty of those guns, plus two long nine-pounders, one forward and one aft. The long nines were not as bad as the twelves. They were worse.
About the time we had most of the guns out, a farmer rode up to see what we were doing. Right then is when I ran into the language problem. He spoke Dutch, and nobody in our crew knew it. The map said the island was British, so I spoke English and tried to tell him we were English privateers, figuring I could fake up a letter of marque if I had to. I am not sure he ever understood, but he drank a couple of shots of brandy with Rombeau and me. The part he did understand was that we wanted food and would pay for it. When he left, we ran up the Cross of Saint George just to play it safe.
Pretty soon we had him and another farmer bringing things they thought we might want to buy-a couple of steers, fruit, and so on. (That was when I wished I had picked up the coins I had left scattered around Yancy.) We did not have a lot of money so we bargained hard, but we ended up buying both steers and a lot of oranges and limes. Later we got rum and tobacco from the same two guys.
Once the guns were out, everything got a lot easier. We dumped our water and floated the empty barrels to shore. We could float the tar casks, too, the extra spars, and a lot of other stuff. Nothing else was nearly as
hard as the guns.
After that we took down the yards, waited for high tide, and hauled the ship up the beach far enough that we could get at the whole larboard side. We had known it would be foul, but it was worse than we imagined-worse than I had imagined, anyhow, and Jarden said it was worse than he had thought it would be, too. Every square inch had to be scraped, and all the damaged planks fixed as good as we could fix them. Once it was done, we recaulked her and tarred her, floated her out again at high tide, turned her around with the longboat, and hauled her back up so we could start over on the starboard side.
That was where we ran into a big problem. We had used up more than half of our oakum and tar already. We could unravel old cordage to use in place of oakum, but there is no substitute for tar. You have got to have it, or the sea worms will be in your planking as soon as you have your ship back in the water.
Our maps said there was a place called Spanish Town on the west side of the island. I did not like the idea of going around in the longboat, but I picked the steadiest men I had and took Jarden and the quartermaster with me to keep an eye on them and the boat when I was away from it.
Novia was the problem, and a big one. She would not say she was afraid to stay behind, but she was and I do not blame her for it one bit. I had been trying to keep her under wraps (which was not as easy as it sounds), figuring out of sight out of mind. There was no way to do it in the longboat. The crew all knew she was a woman by then, and they got a good look at her while she was sitting in the stern beside me. She had her knife open in her lap the whole way, but there was not one man there who would not have tried to take it, and most of them would have pulled it off, too. I took her with me- you bet I did!-when I went into town to buy supplies.
It meant we had to buy three different kinds of cloth, needles, thread, and so forth so she could make herself gowns. After that, more paper, wax pencils, and pens, so she could draw. We had to buy those things first, and arrange for them to be delivered to the longboat.
Which turned out to be a good thing, because a nice Englishwoman came into the shop while we were in there looking at various kinds and sizes of paper and told me about a man named Vanderhorst who might have tar and oakum.
If the town had been bigger, we would have been lucky to find Vanderhorst at all. Spanish Town was as small as a town can be, with houses that told you right off that most of the people there were really Dutch, and it took us about an hour to run him down anyway.
When we did, it was the farmers all over again. I tried English, and he just shook his head. Spanish the same.
Finally I said, "If you know any language besides Spanish, give it a try, Estrellita."
She knew a few words of Italian (which I should have thought of myself) and got nothing. Catalan did not work either, although she knew a lot more of that.
Finally I broke down and tried French. I had not wanted to let anybody hear me speak French because I had been pretending we were English.
He did not understand French either, but he brightened up when he heard it and seemed to be trying to tell us that he would take us to somebody who talked like that.
The three of us got into his wagon and rode out to his house, maybe a couple of miles outside of town. By then I was wishing I had sent the longboat and its crew back to the ship, but once we were in the wagon there did not seem to be any way of doing it. I was nervous about it and talked a lot, telling Novia about the monastery and Brother Ignacio, how good he was and how I had talked English with him sometimes.
Vanderhorst had a nice house and a big garden, fields, and three blond kids. We met his wife, a blonde quite a bit bigger than he was who could not speak anything but Dutch, and she went back into the kitchen and brought out a slim black woman with a bandana over her hair. She had on a faded housedress and was wiping her hands on her apron like she had been washing dishes. If it had not been for those things, it would not have taken me nearly as long as it did.
But I looked at her, and she looked at me, and both of us started to say something and stopped. And after that we yelled names and hugged, and she started talking bad French faster than I could follow her. It was Azuka, and it was really, really good to see her again.
Well, her French was not a whole lot worse than mine, but her Dutch was not much better than mine, either, and I did not know even a little bit. We finally got our point across, though: we wanted to buy tar and oakum, and did Vanderhorst have any?
Yes, it was in town in his warehouse. Did I maybe also want to buy Azuka?
Nope, I said, I have no interest in that. She looked like she was about to cry when I said it, which made me feel bad. Novia held me tighter, though, and that felt good.
I wanted to find out what had happened to her-why she was on Fat Virgin Island working in this guy's kitchen-so I kept on talking about her, with her interpreting to him. I said we were hard up for money, and I knew a fine girl like Azuka would cost a lot, and so forth.
That was too bad, he said. He had three men slaves, another woman, and Azuka, and he was going to auction them on Saturday, but meantime he had them working around his farm, and Azuka had been helping his wife. He got auction across to us by pretending to be an auctioneer with a hammer. There was a bunch of stuff like that, but I am not going to write it.
Well, I said, I have hardly any money and we have to buy the tar and oakum, but it might be fun to watch your auction just the same. What time?
Azuka smiled big enough to light up the room when I said that, so I was not fooling her for a minute. To tell the truth, I do not really think I was fooling Vanderhorst, either. I was going to buy her if I could, after I got the stuff we had to have.
Azuka and his wife fixed a swell dinner for us. There was chicken pie with a yam crust, which I had never had before, fried bananas that made me think of the monastery, homemade bread with butter and three kinds of cheese, and a lot of other stuff. When we had eaten we went back to town and bought a new jolly boat and as much tar and oakum as we needed. The quartermaster wanted me to buy more, so we would have some on the ship, but I said no. The Spanish captain's money was about gone, and by then I had the feeling I was going to need what was left on Saturday.
When we got back to the Magdelena, I had to tell Novia all about Azuka. You bet I did! I explained over and over that she had belonged to Lesage, nobody else could so much as touch her, and I had not wanted to anyway. Novia tagged me a couple times before I got her knife away from her. After that I showed her I could break her arms easy if I wanted to. Then I kissed her, and once we got the bleeding stopped we went on from there, trying a few new positions. I have never thought she really wanted to hurt me. I would have been cut a lot worse if she had. It was just her way of showing me that she was dead serious when she said she loved me. In a way, she was right. I never had exactly believed her. Not all of it. I mean, who would love a guy like me? But after that I did. WITH THE NEW tar and the new oakum, I had been hoping the ship would be ready by Saturday. When I remembered that we were going to have to put the guns back, I knew it would not. It would have been nice to figure out some way to postpone the auction. I worked on it, but none of my ideas seemed like good ones, even to me.
All our men had muskets already, and we had a pretty fair number of Spanish cutlasses, too. When we went back to town Saturday morning, I wore the Spanish captain's sword, a long one with a fancy silver hilt, and his boots. With two pairs of stockings on and some thick wool we had cut out in the shape of a footprint, they were a pretty good fit. (After that I wore the sword and the boots just about any time I needed to impress people.)
"Crisoforo, darling, look at these."
It was a fancy case we had taken off the ship with the other stuff from the cabin. Inside it was a pair of little brass pistols, right hand and left hand. There were powder flasks, bullets, and so on in the case, too. I had found them myself when we first took the ship, but I had not paid much attention to them. I had a good pair of iron pistols, big long-barreled pistols t
hat would really get somebody's attention.
"May I have them, Crisoforo? I need them much more than do you."
I said sure, and taught her how to load them. After that, I took her away from the beach half a mile or so, and let her shoot each of them a couple times. That may have been the first time they were ever fired-they looked that new. I checked the flints, and they were in real good shape.
Those pistols had belt hooks, so when we went back to town for the auction, she had them hooked in her belt. I had my pistols, too, but mine were in canvas slings I hung off my shoulders. Every man in the longboat's crew had his musket and a cutlass. I had left the crew with the boat the first time, and I had made sure they would stay there. This time it was the other way. I left the quartermaster to watch the boat, and led the rest to the square. We tramped through that little town like an army, and you could hear the shutters closing and locking as we went by. The auction had not begun when we got there, which gave me plenty of time to get my men into position and make sure they understood their orders.
This was not Port Royal by a long shot. There were only five slaves- three men, another woman, and Azuka. I went up to the auctioneer and told him to take Azuka first. He did, and announced a minimum bid of one guinea.
I yelled "A guinea!" and drew my pistols.
In the silence that came after that, I could hear the musket hammers going from half cock to full cock. There was no other bidder.
I was supposed to pay Vanderhorst then and get a signed paper saying I was Azuka's new owner. I admitted that I did not have a guinea and gave him a gold Spanish doubloon instead. He did not like that, but I pointed out that I had been a good customer already and promised to trade more with him the next time we got to Fat Virgin.