Brethren

by W. A. Hoffman

  Feeling woefully inadequate, I sat in the gathering twilight, drank water, and watched him work. He was intent upon his task, and moved with fierce determination, as if he disliked every shovel of sand and wanted it gone as quickly as possible. He did not falter or slow; this after slaughtering hogs for hours the night before and then not sleeping while dealing with me in my delirium.

  It occurred to me that even if I was superior to him in skill, a thing I doubted, he would still win in any duel we might have, due to his being far more powerful than I and possessing a great deal more endurance. I felt a boy again, watching a man and realizing what I was not. I sadly recalled how I used to feel while watching Shane practice. There had been the constant feeling that I would never equal him. What I had been thinking of Gaston was a disturbing echo of those memories. In not being able to be them, I wanted to possess them, or be possessed by them. The thought made me shiver, and not with pleasure. I had never experienced that with the other men I had known: not even Alonso.

  Night fell upon us, and the men gathering supplies were forced to stop when they could no longer see. The pits were finished by lantern light, because they did not require a great deal of precision. They merely needed to be roughly square. After some discussion, we decided to stop for the night and get a start at first light. One of the men brought us roast pork from the cookfire. We sat about and ate, and Liam entertained us with stories of the Haiti and crocodiles.

  Gaston noticed my damaged hands when I winced while taking the water bottle from him. “What is wrong?”

  “Nothing of concern, I blistered my hands.”

  He took my right hand and explored it with his fingertips. I winced and cursed as he probed.

  “You fool,” he snapped. “Come with me.”

  I was not pleased with his tone, as he had not been teasing at all. Yet I let him pull me to my feet and lead me to the sea.

  “Wash them,” he commanded.

  I knew it would hurt, but my preparation for the pain was wholly inadequate. It brought tears to my eyes and I knelt in the sand and cursed vividly, slinging several insults his way. He bore it without comment until I was through.

  “What were you thinking?” he asked. He was angry, truly angry, with me.

  I was still in a fine pique. “I feel inadequate. I am damn near useless. I know nothing. I can do little. And I have the constitution of a girl.”

  He sucked wind at this and walked a little from me. “You have a fine constitution. If you did not, you would already be dead. And do not assume girls are weak in that regard.”

  I wondered what had prompted that last remark.

  “For your first year here,” he continued and abruptly dropped beside me to stare into my eyes in the moonlight. “You are as a child again, and you will need to allow people to care for you. There is no shame in it, Will.”

  His eyes were ferocious, and it took an act of courage not to look away.

  “I understand.” Though I did not.

  He backed away a little: no longer angry, but now distraught. He clutched at the sand.

  “I do not want to lose you,” he whispered without looking at me. Then I understood, and I was awash with shame.

  “I am sorry. Truly. I am stupid when it comes to… It has been said that I will probably be the last to recognize my own death, as I will not realize it is upon me and argue with the reaper out of confusion and indignation.” Alonso had yelled that at me once after what he considered a harrowing encounter with a band of robbers. I had been amused. I had also been drunk. We had not been harmed, and as a result I had literally seen no harm in the matter. Regarding the event from the light of sobriety, I had come to understand how dangerous it had been, and why he had been afraid. At the time I had viewed it as a lark, and if sober would have viewed the outset of it the same.

  “And even you have noted I am not always a cautious man,” I added.

  Gaston took a deep breath and calmed himself somewhat. “You do not see the dangers here at all, do you?”

  “Non… Not as you do, obviously. Gaston, I have courted death all my life, at least since I left home.”

  “Why?” he asked fiercely. “Do you wish to die?”

  “Truth? I have not feared it. And there have been times when I wished it.”

  “And now?” He was intense again and his eyes were brutal and glittering in the moonlight.

  “I do not,” I whispered.

  He pounced, knocking me back into the sand and sitting astride my chest. Panic began to overtake me; and I fought it even as I tried to resist him pinning my wrists beside my head. He was as strong as I had guessed. I could not move.

  “Swear it!” he hissed, his nose an inch from my own.

  “I swear I do not want to die,” I whispered. “Now get off me,” I said with more conviction. “Now!”

  Something snapped in his demeanor, and he was no longer fierce. He released me to sit back. His fingers hovered and then stroked my face.

  “Do not…” he whispered, almost too low for me to hear. “I cannot… Not again…”

  I was torn between comforting him and getting out from under him. I was not sure what the next moment would bring in terms of his demeanor. I stroked his arms up to his shoulders and guessed as to the correct words. “Hush now. I will not leave you. I will not die.”

  He threw himself onto my chest and buried his face in my neck. I held him, as there was naught else to do. In time, he had calmed enough for us to return to camp. He did not speak, but followed meekly as I led him there. I curled around him protectively, and he slept. I was awake for hours, and not just because of the insects swarming about.

  A small fear was growing, now that I had witnessed his madness, or at least a taste of it. I could begin to understand the monster I faced. I wondered what the others had seen the night before. Had he been so unbalanced and ephemeral of temperament then? If so, it was no wonder Bradley feared him.

  I fought the fear. I alone could not succumb to that. I would be betraying him to do so. He was my matelot. He had warned me to the best of his ability. Others had warned me. I was the one who had not been able to comprehend.

  Now that I understood, I set about thinking of ways to handle him in addition to what Pierrot had suggested. I realized Pete’s help would probably be required under certain circumstances, as I could not control Gaston physically.

  I woke alone, and looked around to find Gaston already working on the platform for the pit he had dug. He appeared calm and deep in concentration, as he used palm fronds to bind sections of wood to the notched posts he had driven into the bottom of the pit. I relieved myself, found water, and went to join him.

  “So was that a small example?” I teased lightly.

  He stopped to regard me with searching eyes. I smiled at him and let my regard for him show in my gaze. He closed his eyes as if in pain and looked away; but a small smile traced his lips.

  “Very small,” he whispered.

  “If it is any consolation, I am glad this occurred here, just betwixt us, and in small measure. I now have a greater understanding of Pierrot’s advice and your own dire warnings. I am glad I was not introduced to you in that state amongst a whole herd of antagonists. I shall be better prepared now. Can you tell me what brought that on, or do you know?”

  His hands stopped working, and he thought.

  “I was reminded of my sister’s death.” He looked at me, his eyes holding mine. “Will, I cannot discuss that.”

  Questions whirled about, but I nodded my acquiescence to his unspoken demand. I would not ask. I allowed myself to note that his sister had probably passed away due to a sickness of some sort, but where and when this occurred would have to remain a mystery until he chose to reveal more.

  “What can I do to assist?” I asked.

  He smiled thinly. “Show me your hands.”

  I presented them. I was surprised to see the amount of damage. The blisters across the base of my fingers had all broken open, and
the skin beneath was raw.

  “I should wash them again?”

  He nodded.

  “And bandage them to keep them from receiving more injury?”

  He nodded. “Bring the bandages here, and I will help.”

  I went to do as instructed. As he bandaged my hands, I noticed him stopping and clenching and unclenching his own in a distracted manner. I studied his hands carefully and noticed nothing amiss with them, until I spied a disturbing ring of scars around his right wrist where it joined the hand. Then I saw a similar ring on the other. My bowels cringed, as I could only think of one thing that would cause such damage: his hands being bound tightly and for a long enough duration for the rope or strap to cut into his flesh. It did not explain the clenching behavior, though.

  “Why do you do that?” I asked casually, when he had stopped and shook his right hand again.

  He seemed confused by the question; and then he looked at what he was doing, as if he had been unaware of his actions before.

  “My hands go numb.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I am engaged in a task that flexes my wrists repeatedly, such as binding this frame together, my hands go numb and tingle. Sometimes it occurs if I sleep on them in a certain way.” He shrugged and looked mildly uncomfortable discussing it.

  “Have they always been thus?” I asked carefully.

  He was looking at his hands carefully now, and he sighed. “Non. They were damaged. I do not wish to discuss it.”

  “As you wish. May I assist you with the task that is causing them difficulty?”

  He nodded, and once he finished bandaging my hands, he taught me how to bind the fronds to secure a joint in the slats. I proceeded to assist him in wrapping and making knots as he directed, at least as much as my damaged hands would allow.

  The other two platforms were coming along as well as ours, and the men not involved with that had been amassing firewood. Once our platform was ready, it was judged time to begin the slaughter. I was sent to herd one pig at a time from the pen to whichever of the butchers was ready for it. This is not as easy as it may sound to those as uninitiated in swine as I was at the start of the endeavor. I learned a great deal about the animals over the course of the day, and after getting rammed and almost bitten numerous times, I was pleased to send many of the animals to their reapers.

  Once a hog was killed, it was butchered into large slabs of meat, which were in turn cut into thin strips. These were laid across the platform of sticks in layers. Fires were kindled below and fed with wood, as well as bone and bits of hide from the animals themselves. Gaston, Cudro, and Otter were our butchers; and they worked tirelessly to render the animals down to slabs, so another could cut it into strips. As the hogs weighed many times what a man would, and we had no means of raising them, the process required a great deal of manhandling of the carcasses in the broiling midday sun. The men stripped down to their breeches, and were soon covered in blood and sweat. All except for Gaston, who was just as hot and covered in offal, but chose not to remove his tunic.

  I wondered at this. I could not recall him removing his clothing in my presence. Then Cudro spoke while taking a break between animals and some light was shed on the matter, though not in a way I would have preferred.

  “You look miserable,” Cudro taunted Gaston in French. My matelot did not deign to regard him. “Why don’t you strip down? Oh that’s right, you wouldn’t want to do that, would you? Somebody might see.”

  “Do you truly blame him for not wanting the likes of you ogling him?” I countered.

  This elicited several snickers from the other French-speaking men, who had grown quiet and tense at Cudro’s taunting. Gaston was ignoring all of us.

  Cudro regarded me with a smug smile and I hoped I had not stepped into some trap. “I think he’s hiding from you.”

  “And why would he hide from his matelot?” I asked, as I was determined to play it out.

  “Because his matelot is a gentleman, used to pretty things,” Cudro said.

  I frowned and raised an eyebrow. I glanced at Gaston. He appeared embarrassed. If he was already in that state, I reasoned, I could do little to make it worse. “I think he is a pretty thing.”

  “Then you’ve a stronger stomach than most,” Cudro said. “Or hasn’t he let you see?” There was challenge in his eyes.

  I have bluffed men with little in my hand and taken their money many times. I let nothing show upon my face except contempt for my opponent. “I do not make purchase sight unseen.”

  He shrugged. “Then I was wrong. I am not the only one who can overlook it.” He turned to the pig I had brought for him, and the matter was closed for the moment.

  I looked around and found Gaston watching me. His eyes flicked from my gaze. Now I apparently had another secret to uncover. Cudro’s implications troubled me. Was Gaston scarred or marked in some way? Or did he have a condition of the skin or something else of a hideous nature? I told myself it mattered not, but I was lying. On occasion I have found myself deeply bothered by physical imperfections or anomalies. By evening, we had reduced all of the swine to strips of pork, and the platforms sagged under the weight. We fed the fires again, and Cudro and the other men went to clean up in the sea. Liam, Otter, Gaston and I remained to watch the pits until they returned, at which point it would be our turn to get away. My matelot had been silent since my exchange with Cudro, not that he had spoken a great deal prior to that. When the other men returned to camp, he stood and took up his musket.

  “Come.”

  I followed, my own musket in hand.

  He led me a ways up the beach, outside Striker’s perimeter. We were very much alone when he stopped. He studied the sea in silence.

  “You do not have to show me anything,” I said quietly.

  He shook his head sadly and propped his musket against a tree, and removed his belt and other weapons. “Will, I am severely scarred, enough to evince shock and pity in those who witness it, if not revulsion.”

  I held myself steady. I was sure I could learn to accept scars. I have scars. He was indicating these were far more serious, though. Even as I looked at him fully clothed, I could see a few. There was the one on his forehead, and the slash across his right forearm near the elbow, and several more just below his knees, and the ones at his wrists. With a growing sense of horror, I wondered if they were all related and of a kind somehow. I forced the fear away and said lightly, “Well, as of yet, you have managed to engender curiosity and not revulsion.”

  He met my eyes. “Will, I do not choose to discuss what happened, with anyone. This did not occur here. No one in the West Indies knows the details of my life before the Line. Do not ask. Do not comment. I beg you.”

  “I will do my utmost to honor your request,” I said solemnly.

  He closed his eyes and doffed his tunic and breeches. I was thankful he relieved me of the necessity of keeping my reaction from my face, as I do not know if I could have.

  He was covered, with practically not an inch spared betwixt shoulder and knee, with the white stripes of whip scars. These were not the thin lines and pocks I had seen on the backs of sailors or the occasional man exposed to the gaoler’s lash, but wide, white-ridged tracks that I guessed could only be made by a horse-whip. And they were not restricted to his back, but wrapped all around him. As I struggled to comprehend it, I was able to reconstruct how the damage could have occurred: not the how and why of it, but the physical aspects of the scenario. He had been bound and suspended with his hands above his head, so that the whip had access to his entire body. He must have shielded his face as best he could in his arms, and that was why there was little evidence of the carnage in his visage and about his neck, and the top of his shoulders or the top of his arms. The tender flesh of the underside of his arms had been quite torn, though. Likewise, he must have made some attempt to protect his privates. It was quite evident from scarring in that region that he had been naked. There was no patch of unmarred skin
to even indicate a loincloth, and yet his manhood was only marred by a scar near its base, which connected across the top of his thighs. All of the rest of his flesh had seemingly borne the damage somewhat evenly, and I could not even think to count the number of times he must have been struck. The scars crossed one another and combined and split apart, in a pattern it would take hours to trace.

  And yet, underneath it all, he had the most exquisite body I had ever beheld. Much like Pete’s, Gaston’s form reminded me of the classic Greek sculptures, with every muscle defined and an overall conformation approaching perfection. Only Gaston was compact, whereas Pete was long and lean.

  Gazing upon him, my manhood stirred in response; and I bit my lip in frustration. I was sure it would never possess this object of my desire.

  I now understood a great number of things. I knew why his voice was broken. He had screamed until it cracked, and it had never recovered. I knew why his wrists were damaged. His weight had surely been suspended upon them for a great deal of time. I was sure that even if this event were not the full reason, it was at least partially responsible for his madness. And I understood why whips and being restrained could drive him to the edge of his sanity. I was not sure about bleeding or his sister’s death, but I had the strange thought that it might all be related somehow. I knew I would know in time. I knew he was an enigma I would spend my life unraveling if he would give me the chance.

  I wanted to hold him or bellow in rage for him. His eyes were now open and he was watching me with a guarded expression. I swallowed the anger and sympathy and composed my thoughts and words. If I was indeed his friend, he was counting on me now.