The Convicts

by Iain Lawrence

  The chaplain closed his Bible with a thump. “Come, ye children, I will teach you the fear of the Lord,” he said, raising his hands. “On your feet now. Catechisms, boys.”

  We stood as one and followed him through the wretched catechisms. Many a bum-brush I'd gotten in school learning those endless things, but I knew them by heart. The chaplain asked the first qttestteti, and we bleated out the answer like a herd of talking sheep. He asked the second, and the third, staring down from his pulpit to see who was talking and who was silent. In that way of all boys, most only mumbled bits of nonsense to add their voices to a babble.

  I looked at the panels of wainscotting, wondering how to remove them. I wished for tools I could never have, so lost in my thoughts that I didn't hear the chaplain conclude his service. Suddenly the boys were standing, and he was staring down, pointing right at me. “That boy,” he said. “That boy win stay behind.”

  When the room was empty he came down from the altar. His face was long, his forehead high, framed in white hair and white bushes of whiskers. All he needed was a red dot on the tip of his nose to be an old Silly Billy from a London fair. It wouldn't have surprised me to hear him burst out in one of those clown's little songs: “Eh, higgety, eh ho!”

  But when he smiled, the image of a clown deserted me. He seemed only kindly, a small man with big wrinkles and sad eyes. “You know your catechisms well,” he said. “Where did you learn them, son?”

  “In church, Father,” I said. “In school.”

  “Indeed?” His eyes brightened. They were pale and squinted, as though he needed spectacles but refused to wear them. “I meet few boys who've had schooling. Tell me; what led you astray?”

  I didn't hesitate. “Mr. Goodfellow.”

  “Ah,” said he. “Did you rob him? Did you beat him?”

  “No, sir. It's what he did to me.”

  “Now, now. The first step to salvation is confession, my boy.” His fingers raked through his whiskers. “Would it help you to come here in the evenings?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.” I could hardly believe my luck.

  “I have a small library. You can read, can't you?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Father.”

  “Splendid. I will hope you use it often.” He stood up and called for a guard to take me to breakfast. “The boys are set in wicked ways, and I feel sometimes that my work is wasted here,” he told me. “But you give me hope. I'd like to help you on your way.”

  “I believe you will, sir.” I smiled back at him, but felt rather rotten inside.

  When I arrived at the breakfast table the boys were on their feet for the blessing. With one look at Oten Acres, I knew who the nobs had been after in the night. His hands trembled as they held his bowl. His face was puffed and bruised, one eye blackened, lips split open. And more than that, he was broken through and through. Without a word of complaint he passed up a share of his food, then lowered his head as though he might never lift it again.

  Midgely whispered at me. “He's a meek now, ain't he, Tom? He'll inherit the earth, sure as spit.”

  I gave up my own share as easily as Oten had done, and Weedle gloated in his power, his eyes shining. Now and then they fixed on me, and I shuddered to think what he might be planning. But I ate all that was left of my food. If Midgely expected some, he neither asked nor complained. I spooned up the slop without looking.

  “Smasher,” said Weedle.

  I nearly answered to the name before I realized that was what he wanted. In his stupid cunning he'd hoped to trap me, to prove a truth that didn't exist.

  “You're him, ain't you?” he said.

  I pretended not to know that he was even talking to me.

  “I'll give you what you gave me, and more,” he said. “Cut my face? I'll cut your ears off, nosey. I'll slice your lips away, you'll see.”

  He put fear in my heart; there was no denying it. And the fear made me desperate to be gone from the ship. So it was Weedle's own fault, in a way, that I stole a needle from the workroom table. I thought it would help me dig through rotted wood, but I didn't think whose it was. I tucked it into my rope belt as I rose for our noontime meal, and learned what I'd done as soon as we sat for the afternoon.

  Oten Acres picked up his needle; Midgely picked up his. Carrots and the others started sewing again, aiid only Weedle was left empty-handed. He sorted through his piles of cloth— lazily at first, and then frantically. He hurled the pieces aside. “Who's got my needle?” he said. “Who nicked it?”

  No one even looked at him.

  “Bumpkin!”

  “No,” said Oten, in a pathetic tone, that I would hardly have known was his. “It weren't me, Weedle, I swear it.”

  “Give me yours,” said Weedle. “Carrots, hurry. Take it from him”

  It was too late for that. A guard came running, and the fuss that was made over a missing needle would have shocked me just days before. Weedle was caned on the back, then marked for punishment in the morning. “Someone's going to pay for this,” he said. “Someone's going to wish he wasn't never born.”

  His needle stayed in my belt until the evening, when I went to chapel with the noseys, a lot of pale and scared-looking boys. Every table in the ship, I realized, must have had a Weedle to keep the weaker boys downtrodden. They were half starved and scurvy-ridden, coughing with the fever, all as thin as death. They fell aside like so many sticks as I pushed my way to the rotted wood. I brought out the needle when the chaplain made us kneel to prayers. I poked it into the rotted wood, half its length in an instant. With a bit of effort I pushed it nearly to its eye.

  Chanting my prayers with the others, I worked the needle in and out in the same spot. Then I bent forward, as though in great reverence, and with my cheek nearly on the deck I looked for a gleam of light in the hole I'd made. I was sure the hull was no thicker than the length of my needle.

  I left it there when prayers ended, its whole length buried in the wood. Only the tip was showing, a bump of brown metal nearly impossible to see. “All but invishible,” I remembered Midgely saying, and surprised myself with my fondness for him. But as I was leaving the room, the chaplain stopped me. To my relief, he wanted only to thank me. “It's not often that a boy shows interest in prayer,” he said. “You must have a probing mind.” I almost felt sorry for the old codger.

  Midgely was waiting when I went into the ward. Weedle was there too, in his usual place with his usual group, and every one of them watched me pass with the noseys. I looked at them once, and then away, going straight to Midgely's side. He was studying the pictures of his South Sea islands, so deeply immersed in the etching that he started when I touched his shoulder. Then he smiled and asked me to sit beside him.

  “I decided it don't matter,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “If you want to go to chapel with the noseys. It ain't no odds to me.” He shrugged, then held the book toward me. “Read to me, Tom?” he said.

  In the crowd of boys we made our own small space. I had no worries with the guards around, and sat shoulder to shoulder with Midge, the book balanced on our knees. I found a passage about a ship and its sailors, and Midge closed his eyes to listen. Tome it was jibberish. “We dropped the bestAower and veered off on a jcable and a half,” I read. “Struck yards and topmasts Rove out cable for the cooper.”

  “Ooh,” $aid Midge, with a shiver that shook the pages. “It musht have been a shtormy night.”

  “It doesn't say that,” I said. “You're not listening.”

  “You're not hearing” he said, and explained it all. I didn't know that bowers were anchors, that a cable was both a rope and a distance. I didn't know that yards were the sticks that held the sails, or that sections of masts could be lowered and raised. But Midge made me see. He turned the dull words into pictures of excitement, with sailors bustling about like so many bees.

  “How do you know all that?” I asked.

  “From the dockyard,” he said. “Every night the s
ailors came to see me mam. She loved to have the sailors come and visit. They took turns going into the bedroom to talk to her, Tom. So I sat in the parlor with the ones what waited, and I listened to their stories. Ooh, what stories they told.”

  It was the time in the evening when the guards let us talk. But we did it in whispers, our heads close together.

  “Where was your father?” I asked.

  “Oh, he was long gone,” said Midge. “But he was a captain, I think. I remember he had a sword.”

  “So did mine,” I said. “My father's a captain, too.”

  “Go on!” he said. “You're just saying it ‘cause I said it first”

  “No, it's true,” I said. “But the navy has no place for him now. He hasn't had a ship in years, and—”

  “Tin? You don't mean Redman Tin?” said Midge. “Not Redman Tin what had the Starling?”

  It was my father's name, but the rest was a mystery. “Was the starling a bird or a ship?” Tasked.

  “Wal-ker!” he said, just like old Worms. “She was only a sloop. Only ten guns. And Redman Tin weren't really a captain; he was a commander. But when Nelson seen what your dad could do with them ten guns, he called that sloop his darling. And listen, Tom, he was here,” Midge tapped the wooden deck. “Your dad was on this ship.”

  “No! He was never on a hulk,” I said.

  “Oh, Tom!” he cried with a laugh. “The Lachesis weren't always a hulk. She was at the Glorious First of June, Tom. Your father was a young midshipman on her, and she chased the French right back to Brest. He was a hero in the wars, Tom. All the sailors, they still remember Redman Tin.”

  I knew little of my father's years at sea. After Kitty's death, my mother had hushed him quickly whenever he had begun to talk of it. “Look where the sea brought you” she'd say. “To rack and ruin. Don't turn the boys head.” After a while, he never talked of it at all. And my friends never thought of wars that had been fought long ago.

  “Your dad knew Collingwood,” said Midge. “He might have met Nelson.” Then he stared at me from the corner of his eye. “Why, he might have come and talked to me mam.”

  When the guards locked us down we cleared out on our own, away from the seething Weedle. I didn't want to go to the chapel that night, afraid that his nobs would follow me, or find me there. Instead, I followed Midgely through the ship to a place that he wanted to show me. It was dark and cramped, with the ceiling very low. In the wars, said Midge, this was where the midshipmen had lived among their sea chests, where they'd slept and dined and studied.

  We settled in the darkest corner, and heard the nobs go roaming. Huddled on the bare floor, Midge and I slept the night through, on the same ship where my father had slept thirty-four years before.

  Weedle's punishment was swift and terrible. I watched him being led from the workroom in the morning, and not ten minutes later I heard him cry out in pain. Twelve times came the whistle and crack of a whip, and then that sound like a frightened dog. I winced at every one.

  So did Midgely, at my side. His hands twitched; his needle leapt in the cloth. “The cat,” he whispered. “He's getting the cat”

  The cat-o’-nine-tails; even I knew of that. It must have torn the flesh from Weedle's back, but he was brought straight to the table within the hour, and put to work again. He sat then, and for the days to follow, in an awkward fashion, so that his back never touched a chair. The look in his eyes was of savage hatred, and they bore on me more than any other.

  It occurred to me that I was more than a match for him then. He was so weakened, and in such pain, that I might have thrashed him if Pd dared to try. But it wasn't in me to fight with anyone. Pd been raised to be a gentleman, with a horror for fisticuffs.

  At least I was free from Weedle. He sweated and groaned through the day, then took to his hammock as though he would never leave it As Carrots and the other nobs huddled round him like wet nurses, I led Midgely to the chapel. I took my spoon and bowl, and made Midge take his, and we crouched by the rotted wood, below the crucified Jesus.

  Midgely wasn't happy to be there. “Do you think it's right, digging in a chapel?” he said. “It ain't like burning a Bible, is it?”

  “Not for me,” I said. “I shouldn't be on the ship anyway, Midge. Pm innocent.”

  “Yes, me too,” he said, with a sudden cheerfulness. “Or Pm halfway innocent. Where's the harm in buffing dogs?”

  “What's buffing dogs?” I asked.

  “Only a dodge, Tom,” he said. “You sell their skins, you see. You stick a wire in them. Here.” He jabbed his finger at my chest. “It goes right to their heart and does them in as gentle as you please. They lick your hand when you do it, Tom. Like they're thanking you. They lie there and lick your hand, then off to sleep they go. And you know, Tom, they're lucky, I think. No more begging, no more beatings. Sometimes I wish someone had buffed me three years ago.”

  “Is that how long you've been here?” I asked.

  “Three years at Christmas.”

  I didn't want to think about any of that, not the poor dogs licking his hand as they died, nor Midgely wasting his life in a hulk. I patted his hand, and turned away. “Lopk,” I said, showing him the nails I had loosened, the rot at the foot of the panel. He had to peer and squint in the darkness, but his eyes widened when I pulled the needle from its hiding place. “Oh, Tom. You'll catch it now,” he said. “If Weedle sees that, you're a goner.”

  “I'll be a goner long before thefts I said dryly. “I'll be gone from here in just a few days.”

  We took off the framing, pulling each piece—nails and all—from the oak. We pried the panel away and set it aside, baring the rot underneath. Midgely whistled softly. “The poor old ship,” he said. “She don't deserve to rot like this.”

  The planks were soft arid mushy, with that warm smell of mushrooms and earth like a wonderful perfume. Using our spoons, we dug the wood away, scraping a hole as wide as my shoulders. We piled the pieces in our bowls, but soon overfilled them. The wood was so soft that if fell away in chunks.

  “How thick are these planks?” I asked.

  “Tom, they ain't planks,” said Midge. “It's called the quickwork, and if s—”

  “I don't care what it's called” I said. “How thick is it, Midge?”

  “Three or four inches,” said he. “But, Tom—”

  “Shut up and dig,” I told him.

  Poof Midge. He fell silent then, and sulked until dawn. Even without his help I was more than pleased with my progress that night. When we fitted the panel in place and tapped the framing on top, we hid a hole that went a third of the way through theplanks. We gathered the scraps—a great pile of black shreds—and dumped than out through a grating. But in the daylight, at morning chapel, I was shocked at the sight of scores of black flakes scattered across the wood like so many dead flies. I scraped them into a pile with my feet, then pushed them close against the wall.

  The chaplain never noticed. Again he unwittingly helped me along when I asked if I might clean the chapel instead of scrubbing floors. He was delighted, but not so much as I. There, under his very nose, I swept away all signs of my work.

  The very next night we broke through the planks. I could scarcely believe it happened so quickly, but I pried with my spoon, and out came a piece of wood the size of a small book. Its sides were as jagged as all the others, but its back was flat and smooth—the outside of the plank.

  “Midge!” I cried. “Look, Midge, we've done it!”

  I thrust my hand into the hole, but my fingers only jammed against more wood. “What's wrong?” I said. “Is there another ship tied up to this one?”

  Midge laughed. “That's the frames back there,” he said. “This is just the quickwork, Tom; I told you that. There's still the frames and planks to go.”

  It was a great disappointment. I'd thought I'd be off the ship that night or the next, but it seemed I had only begun. “How thick is the hull?” I asked. “The whole thing, I mean?”

 
; “Only thick enough to stop a cannonball,” said Midge.

  “And how thick's thaf?” I snapped. “From inside to out, how thick is it, Midge?”

  In the darkness he held his hands apart. He moved them back and forth to measure the distance, and I groaned when he stopped. Maybe ten inches; maybe a foot. And the wood in the frames seemed hard as stone. “It's as thick as your head,” I told him.

  “Don't say that, Tom.” He bit his lip, then started sobbing. “I think Weedle'sh maybe right. What he saysh might be true. You really are the Shmasher.”

  “Oh, Midge,” I said. “I'm sorry.” But I had no patience for him. I went to work with my needle, poking at the frames of the ship. It scratched the wood, but nothing more. I saw that I would sooner bend the needle than split the timbers, and, disheartened, I threw it down. It plinked against the deck, then plinked again more faintly in the distance. In the darkness of the huge chapel it might as well have landed in a haystack.

  Midge hurried to fetch it, but I'd lost hope. I sat there like an old hermit in front of his cave, my aniis around my knees, the heavy irons piled between my feet. I couldn't dig through a ship with a needle and spoon; I'd been stupid to try at all.

  “Found it,” cried Midge, in a whisper. He came scuttling back. “Here's your needle, Tom.”

  “It's no good,” I said. “I need something bigger, something…”

  I looked up, toward the hatch, toward the wooden man below it. His face was barely touched by starlight, his eyes like black holes. I couldn't see his feet or his hands.

  I got up and shuffled toward the altar. Midge, still holding the needle out to me, said, “Tom? What are you doing?”