Hook's Tale

by John Leonard Pielmeier

  2. Jeb Cookson, American-born and hailing from the Wild West, or so he said;

  3. Bob Mullins and Alf Mason, two friends so close they might have been joined at the hip; they even shared a sleeping hammock, as well as the redolent musky odor of sweat mixed with rum; and finally

  4. Young George Scourie, who, appropriate to his name, was in charge of keeping everything clean and tidy.

  Teynte and Starkey, as Father promised, were not hanged, but put in charge of emptying slops, cleaning fish, disposing of garbage, and performing any other job that might be deemed unhealthy and/or beneath their station. Father, I believe, was actively encouraging them to mutiny, which would give him a second chance to see them decorating the yardarm.

  As for me, my relationship with Father was difficult, to say the least. When I was fourteen and he was Raleigh, I could look up to him and try to emulate his courageous self; if only we had been father and son then! But now I was twenty-eight and he thirty-four (at least in appearance). I had uncovered his ungallant behavior toward my mother and Angela Darling, not to mention his pompous colonial attitudes toward Tiger Lily’s people. As a consequence, I found him rather despicable. True, he was a leader of men and not a bad captain at all; he had in truth saved my life more than once; why did I not love him? Perhaps I was merely the ungrateful son of an ungrateful son—I’m sure that’s how he would characterize it. Nevertheless the man who was my father was too easily reduced to a pirate cliché: he wanted to find the treasure, all else be d—ned!

  And so we set sail, exploring and reexploring the rest of the archipelago. He told the crew he was seeking a passage home, and if we happened to come across any gold or doubloons the discovery would be shared equally by all. This kept them quiet, for a time. Meanwhile, I served as his amanuensis, his right-hand man. I recorded everything in the ship’s log and kept a personal diary of our explorations. This was perhaps the job I was best fit for: my penmanship, after all, was exquisite.

  Before I continue, I feel the need to clarify, dear reader, a point which might cause confusion among those of a logical bent: how did the crew of the Roger come to accept that the older me was the same me as the younger me? They had tied a fourteen-year-old boy to the mainmast of a burning ship, and when next he appeared he was approaching thirty and fully mature. Do not forget, however, the superstitious character of most men of the sea. Once my mates saw me floating in the air with a fully grown flying crocodile on leash, the sudden shift in my age became a minor issue.

  We began our archipelagic exploration by revisiting Long Tom, where we left Daisy lying in the sun and gobbling the occasional bird that mistook her for a log. We continued on to map Starkland, which island I now realized resembled an enormous skull. Sailing east, we discovered several new islands (new, at least, to me), one of which contained aspects of civilization that Gulliver himself had described, another of which solved the puzzle of the mysterious Gunn, who left his mark in the Starkland eye socket—but my adventures there I will save for another book as they have little to do with the matter at hand. Suffice it to say that on none of these little worlds did we find any real treasure.

  I, of course, knew where the treasure was located and of what it consisted. I debated back and forth with myself as to whether I should reveal its whereabouts to Father. Then something happened which decided me, and changed my life forever.

  * * *

  You may recall, dear reader, my mentioning in an earlier chapter the Nights of Talent and Entertainment that were held on occasion under our late Captain Styles. These nights were extremely popular with the crew, and not merely because they involved the distribution of a great quantity of rum. They truly were enjoyable, even to a teetotaling boy of fourteen; the sailors sang and danced and mocked and mimicked each other in a spirit of generous fun and good humor. We had held none of these nights since our transportation to the Never-Archipelago, and—due to the supplies we absconded with from the Princess Alice—we now had an overabundance of rum. As a result, seeing that our crew was in need of both alcohol and entertainment, I prevailed upon Father to allow one of these delightful evenings to take place. And so it was, under a clear starry sky and surrounded by the vastness of the calm Never-Ocean, that we celebrated our Family-at-Sea once again.

  The performance was held on deck, and since we expected no trouble from any alien source, vigilance was relaxed so that all men could partake. The celebration began, of course, with a barrel of liquor. Smee started the Talent portion of the evening with a tune on his “squeeze-box”; his musical talents were quite limited but he could at least hold to a rhythm, and young George Scourie took center stage and danced a jig. This was heartily enjoyed, and the applause was well deserved.

  Jeb Cookson then sang several “authentic American cowboy songs” that mostly had to do with young men who were unnaturally fond of their “little dogies” and who, once they bade farewell to “Old Paint,” were eventually riddled with bullets and left to die “on the lone prairie,” where they were found by total strangers whom they begged for a decent burial. The entire manner of living seemed to me utterly absurd and unnecessary, leaving me little doubt as to why Cookson had left his Yellow Rose of Texas to sail on the Ocean Blue.

  Bill Jukes performed next, repeating jokes we had all heard before but which we thoroughly enjoyed hearing again. Few were in good taste, and so I shall not reproduce them here. The same was true of the music hall routine performed by Noodler to a few uncharacteristic blushes and uproarious laughter. Then Black Murphy stood and recited Portia’s Mercy speech from the Bard, though he did so in the lisping voice of Skylights. “The quality of merthy ith not thtrained,” he intoned, and everyone screamed with laughter, Skylights among them.

  Cecco followed, singing an aria from some Italian opera in an exquisite tenor that left us all in tears.

  During it all, Father stood in the back, sipping his rum and laughing as heartily as any one of us. Still, I could sense that something was amiss; he had been spending an inordinate amount of time in his cabin of late, and whenever I entered after our evening meal I could smell the alcohol on his breath and observe the unsteadiness of his gait. In other words, he had begun his drinking again and was showing signs—in deference to Slinque’s assessment of his younger self—of being anything but a “cheerful drunkard.” More than once he snapped at me over some trifle—my blotting a drop of ink with my sleeve as I wrote, or my asking him to repeat himself during the evening’s dictation into the ship’s log. I was becoming more sympathetic to my grandfather’s irritation with his son, and less admiring of my father’s spirit of defiance.

  Bob Mullins began by introducing himself as Cap’n Crook. This brought gales of laughter led by Father, who laughed loudest and longest. Mullins followed this by saying that what he missed most aboard the Roger was not “the drink, which was adequate.” (This was greeted with many a raised glass and roar of approval.) Nor was it good meals that he mourned, for he “adored the flavor of apple and could not imagine a dish without it.” (More cheers and raised glasses, all in Bill Jukes’s honor.) No, what he missed most on the Roger was “the rogering.” (This, dear reader, is a colloquial phrase common at sea, and refers to one’s enjoyment of the pleasant company of women. Bob’s last statement, by the way, elicited more cheers, toasts, hoots, and whistles than anything spoken thus far in the evening; it seemed that Mullins was quite the popular entertainer.) Mullins then said that the girl he most longed for was his “dear Daisy,” at which point a slim hand appeared round the corner of the poop deck, waving a lacy handkerchief and calling “yoo-hoo” in a high soprano. The hand was followed by a long tattooed arm, which in turn was followed by the appearance of a lovely lass, bonneted and rouged, whose tresses bore an unfortunate resemblance to the head of a mop. This was, of course, none other than Alf Mason wearing clothes that he had brought with him for just such an occasion; he delighted, it seems, in putting on women’s clothing and unabashedly flirting with his fellow seamen. His bosom,
on this night, was nearly as big as Josephine’s.

  Let me acknowledge at this point, dear reader, that I now understood that the Cap’n Crook whom Mullins was parodying was myself. Smee always referred to me as Cap’n; furthermore, the crew knew of, and shook their heads in amusement over, my devotion to Daisy. More than once I had overheard some seaman chuckling with his mates about the “danger of kissing a croc.” This bothered me not in the least; it was nothing compared to the cruelties I had suffered at Eton, for I knew these men were fond of me, despite their teasing jibes. I laughed and applauded at “Daisy’s” appearance, and threw her kisses, along with everyone else.

  Everyone, that is, except Father.

  Mullins and Mason, naturally, knew nothing of Father’s history. True, our names were identical, but James Cook was not an uncommon one. We certainly could never be father and son—I now appeared to be close to him in age, and other than making a few passing comments on our near-identical noses, no one believed we were the least bit related. (Father had grown his beard long again, thus masking many of our facial similarities.) Nor did anyone know my mother’s name, or anything of Father’s relationship to her. In all innocence Mullins and Mason were mocking me and my crocodile, not Father and his mistress. Had Father been sober, I daresay he would have seen this too. But he wasn’t and he didn’t.

  Mullins flirted boldly with “Daisy” Mason and squeezed one corpulent breast. When he did so a stream of rum squirted out, wetting the faces of a few men seated in the front row. Amid howls of laughter these men opened their mouths wide; Mullins now squeezed both breasts and the milk of island liquor arced through the air to fill these gaping targets. If laughter could kill, the entire crew would be dead.

  “ENOUGH!” a voice boomed, and all turned to see Father striding boldly through their midst toward Mullins and Mason. Both men took a step back, sensing the ire they had inadvertently aroused. Father stopped before Mason, slapped him across the face, then tore wide his dress, exposing the bladders in his false bosom. “How dare you, sir?” he muttered, then seized the bladders and ripped them from Mason’s chest. Mason covered his own breast now with the modesty of a maid and lowered his eyes. “We meant nothin’, sir,” Mullins muttered, but Father simply turned and stared him down. Then he shouted again: “Cecco! Bring the cat!”

  I was on my feet now, and hurried to Father’s side. “They were joshing me, not you,” I whispered, but I might have been pleading with a wall. He pushed me aside and grabbed the bag as Cecco presented it. From out of it he pulled the nine-tailed horror. He handed the weapon to Mullins. “Strip him,” he instructed, “and whip him.” “Please, sir,” Mullins began, but Father interrupted. “If you don’t, I will,” Father told him, “only I’ll see him dead.”

  All hands were silent. Cecco meekly bound Mason to the mast, then opened the back of the dress to expose his mate’s shoulders and midriff. Father, furious, tore the dress wider, pulling it down to bare Mason’s hindquarters. Then he nodded to Mullins. “Twenty lashes,” he ordered. Mullins stood back, and began.

  All of us knew of the close friendship that existed between these two men, and it broke our hearts to see one bloodying the other in a public display of humiliation. Clearly it broke Mullins’s heart too; he was soon weeping as he swung the cat through the air, again and again, opening up Mason’s back and buttocks. But even this, in Father’s opinion, was not enough. After fifteen lashes Father seized the weapon from Mullins and inflicted the final five himself. The whip cracked, Mason screamed (and Mullins along with him), and the poor man was sliced to the bone.

  Mason was unconscious by the end. As soon as Father turned and strode to his cabin, Mullins ran forward to catch his dear Alf as Cecco untied him from the mast. Cookson and Black Murphy carried him gently belowdecks, where Smee would tend him with his miracle salve. As for myself, I turned and followed Father to his cabin.

  “How could you?” I began, as angry as Father had been, but he didn’t seem to hear me. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, pulled out a bottle, and proceeded to pour himself a mug of his private stock of poison. “They were mocking me, not you!” I continued as he did this. “They know nothing of who you are and what you’ve done! But even if they did, even if they had been mocking you, you had no right to interfere! That’s the point of these evenings! To let go and have fun, with no consequences! You heard Black Murphy, lisping like Skylights, and Skylights was loving it! You were wrong! You should be ashamed! You need to apologize to everyone and you need to do it now!”

  He lowered his mug and looked me square in the eye. “You’re beginning to sound like my father,” he said.

  “I hope I’m sounding like your conscience, giving you some good common sense.”

  “I’d suggest you shut up about it.”

  I walked straight to him and grabbed the mug from his hand. He glared at me, then in defiance raised the bottle to his lips and guzzled. I smacked it away, and it sailed across the room, shattering against the wall above his bed. He struck me with the back of his hand; I in turn punched him in the face, then wrestled him to the floor. We were flailing now like a pair of schoolboys, but I was relatively sober. I pinned him to the cabin’s deck and spat out words of fury.

  “You should have stayed!” I shouted in his face. “You should have married Mother! You should have made her happy, which I never could do! You left her, you left me, you ran away because you’re nothing but a bloody d—ned coward!”

  “And she was nothing but a bloody d—ned whore! You are nothing but a bloody d—ned ba——rd!” he screamed back at me.

  I struck him again, once, twice, bloodying his lip. He was too drunk now to fight back with anything but words. Instead, after a moment’s pause, he chose another weapon: he began to cry.

  “I couldn’t save her, James. No one could. Don’t you understand? She was in love with the drug, not me. Slinque warned me but I didn’t listen.”

  “He killed her,” I pronounced simply, saying aloud for the first time the thought that had been festering in my brain since I last met with him. “He put her back on the drugs. He used her for God knows what fell purpose. And in the end he slit her throat.” His eyes blinked with surprise. “He knocked her out, Father, then he put her in a bathtub, put a razor in her hand, and cut her open.”

  “Why? Why would he do that?” Father’s voice was but a hoarse whisper.

  “I don’t know, Father. Perhaps he wanted to see what made her . . . tick.”

  I released him now, and stood. He lay very still, absorbing my words. Then he sat up and wiped his eyes. Without looking at me he raised a hand, indicating that I should help him. I did, lifting him to his feet. Then I shouldered him to his bed, pulled off his boots, and left him to his nightmares.

  * * *

  The following morning he remained in his Quarters. The crew was sullen and sad; their anger had yet to vent itself. Mason lay suffering in the sick bay. Mullins never left his side.

  I too stayed by my bed, in the tiny cabin I shared with Quartermaster Turley. As I mentioned earlier, I had begun to keep a diary of my day-to-day experiences in the Never-Archipelago, and I spent the morning writing down the terrible incidents of the previous night. I kept this diary hidden from everyone, not that most of my mates could read. Nevertheless I tucked the volume under my mattress whenever I was not making an entry, but on this particular day, just as I was concluding my personal comments, I heard the cry of “Land ho!”

  Since leaving Long Tom, we had continued to sail east, and now—as many of us had feared might happen—we returned to Long Tom, arriving from the west. Once again we had circled the globe of this mysterious archipelago. I rushed on deck only to hear the delighted roar of Daisy’s greeting, hallooing us from the island’s shoreline. She started into the water, and in my enthusiasm to greet her properly I jumped overboard and swam to her side, where I climbed onto her back and allowed her to paddle me to the beach. We spent a relaxing afternoon in each other’s company. My fa
ther’s watch continued its pleasant ticking inside her. She felt quite at home here; it was, after all, the island of her gestation.

  As the sun began to set I said my goodbyes, promising to visit her again on the morrow. I waded into the water and began a lazy swim back to the ship. She sweetly accompanied me. Teynte lowered a rope ladder to assist my ascent to the deck, and as soon as I had set foot on board he nodded in the direction of the Captain’s Quarters. “He wants to see you,” he said.

  I ducked below to my own cabin first in order to change into dry clothes. In addition, before I paid a visit to Father, I wished to make a notation in my diary regarding the afternoon spent with Daisy, and so I lifted my mattress to retrieve the book. It was not there. I then remembered that I had left it that very morning on my pillow, when I had raced above to say hello to my reptilian friend. I looked everywhere, and it was nowhere.

  Father was standing by his bed, looking out of a porthole, when I arrived in his cabin. “You took your time about it” was all he said. The air was redolent of rum, and I knew at once that he had succumbed again to that terrible vice.

  “Sorry, Father, but I was wet,” I said. “You asked to see me?”

  “Yes, I want to dictate an entry into the ship’s log. I know I usually do that after dining but I wish to do it now.”

  I sat at the desk and took up a quill, then opened the log. I wrote the date—a completely convenient one that bore no relationship to any actual date—and waited for him to begin.

  “You’re not a bad writer, you know,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I answered, unsure where this was heading.

  “I reread the log most mornings and I’m always quite impressed. Your entries are accurate, correctly spelled, and occasionally quite entertaining.”

  “Thank you. I do my best, Father.”

  “I stopped by your cabin earlier to pay you this compliment, and to apologize for the outrageous behavior on my part that took place last night.”