Then it’s gone—gone, thank God or Old Horny, either one—and I’m back to old ordinary, and Henry Lee’s watching me, not a word, and when I can talk I say, “There’s more. I know you, and I know there’s more. You want me to come in with you, Henry Lee, you tell me the part you’re not telling me. Now.”
He don’t answer straight off—just keeps looking at me out of those nursery-blue eyes. I decide I’d best help him on a bit, so I say, “Right, then, don’t mind if we do talk about merrows. Last time I saw you, you was risking your life for the ugliest one of them ugly buggers, and him having to hand over every farthing he’d got sewn into his underwear, because that’s the frigging rule, right? So when did that happen, hey? We never seen him again, far as I know.”
“He found me,” Henry Lee says. “Took him a while, but he caught up with me in Port of Spain. It’s important to them, keeping their word, though you wouldn’t think so.” He keeps cracking his knuckles, the way he always used to do when he weren’t sure the captain were swallowing his tale about why we was gone three days in Singapore. “I had it wrong,” he says, “that rule thing. I expected he’d come with his whole fortune in his arms, but all the merrow has to bring you is the thing that’s most precious to him in the world. The most precious thing in the world to that merrow I saved—I call him Gorblimey, that’s as close as I can get to his name—the most precious thing to him was that recipe for salt wine. It’s only some of them know how to make it, and they’ve never given it to a human before. I’m the only one.”
Me head’s still humming like a honey tree, only it’s swarming with the ghosts of all the things I knew for two minutes. Henry Lee goes on, “He couldn’t write it down for me—they can’t read or write, of course, none of them, I’d never thought about that—so he made me learn it by heart. All that night, over and over, the two of us, me hiding in a lifeboat, him floating in the ship’s shadow, over and over and over, till I couldn’t have remembered my own name. He was so afraid I’d get it wrong.”
“How would you know?” I can’t help asking him. “Summat like that wine, how could you tell if it were wrong, or gone bad?”
Henry Lee bristles up at me, the way he’d have his ears flat back if he was a cat. “I make it exactly the way Gorblimey taught me—exactly. There’s no chance of any mistake, Gorblimey himself wouldn’t know whether I made it or he did. Get that right out of your headpiece, Ben, and just tell me if you’ll help me. Now,” he growls, mimicking me to the life. He’d land in the brig, anyway once every voyage, imitating the officers.
Now, I’m not blaming nobody, you may lay to that. I’m not even blaming the salt wine, although I could. What I done, I done out of me own chuckleheadedness, not because I was drunk, not because Henry Lee and me’d been shipmates. No, it were the money, and that’s the God’s truth—just the money. He were right, you can live on a seacook’s pay, but that’s all you can do. Can’t retire, and maybe open a little seaside inn—can’t marry, can’t live nowhere but on a bloody ship . . . no, it’s no life, not without the needful, and there’s not many can afford to be too choosy how they come by it. I says, “Might do, Henry Lee. Forty percent. Might do. Might.”
Henry Lee just lit up all at once, one big wooosh, like a Guy Fawkes bonfire. “Ah, Ben. Ah, Ben, I knew you’d turn up trumps, old growly truepenny Ben. You won’t be sorry, my old mate,” and he claps me on the shoulder, near enough knocking me over. “I promise you won’t be sorry.”
So I left that Indiaman tub looking for another cook, and I signed on right there as Henry Lee’s factor—his partner, his first mate, his right hand, whatever you like to call it. Took us a hungry year or so to get our feet under us, being just the two, but the word spread faster than you might have supposed. Aye, that were the thing about that salt wine—there were them as took to it like a Froggie to snails, and another sort couldn’t even abide the look of it in the bottle. I were with that lot, and likely for the same reason—not ’acos it were nasty, but ’acos it were too good, too much, more than a body could thole, like the Scots say. I never touched it again after that second swig, never once, not in all the years I peddled salt wine fast as Henry Lee could make it. Not for cheer, not for sorrow, not even for a wedding toast when Henry Lee married, which I’ll get to by and by. Couldn’t thole it, that’s all, couldn’t risk it no more. Third time might eat me up, third time might make me disappear. I stayed faithful to rum and mother’s-ruin, and let the rest go, for once in me fool life.
Year and a half, we had buyers wherever ships could sail. London, Liverpool, Marseilles, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Athens, New York, Rome . . . no, not Rome, not really, more Naples—we did best in seaports, always. I didn’t travel everywhere the wine went; we hired folk in time, me and Henry Lee, and we even bought a ship of our own. Weren’t no big ship, not so’s you’d take notice, but big enough for what we put aboard her, which was the best captain and crew anyone could ask for. That were me doing—Henry Lee wanted to spend more on a fancier ship, but I told him it weren’t how many sails that mattered, but the hands on the halyards. And he listened to me, which he mostly did . . . aye, you couldn’t never call him stupid, poor sod. I’ll say that, anyway.
Used to look out for that merrow, Henry Lee’s Gorblimey, times I were keeping the wine company on its way. Not that I’d likely have known him from any other of the ones I’d see now and again, chasing the flying fish or swimming along with the porpoises—even nastier, they looked, in the middle of those creatures—but I’d ponder whiles if he knew what were passing above his head, and what he’d be thinking about it if he did. But Henry Lee never spoke word about merrows nor mermaids, none of all that, not if he could help it. Choused him, whiles, I did, telling him he were afeard Gorblimey’d twig how well we was getting on, and come for his own piece, any day now. That’d rouse him every time, and he’d snap at me like a moray, so I belayed that. Might could be I shouldn’t have, but who’s to say? Who’s to say now?
He’d other matters on his mind by then, what with building himself a slap-up new house on the seafront north of Velha Goa. Palace and a half, it were, to me own lookout, with two floors and two verandas and four chimneys—four chimneys, in a country where you might be lighting a fire maybe twice a year. But Henry Lee told me, never mind: didn’t the grandest place in that Devon town where he were born have four chimneys, and hadn’t he always wanted to live just so in a house just like that one? Couldn’t say nowt much to that, could I? Me that used to stare hours into the cat’s-meat shop window back home, cause I got it in me head the butcher were me da? He weren’t, by the by, but you see?
But I did speak a word or two when Henry Lee up and got wed. Local girl, Julia Caterina and about five other names I disremember, with a couple of das in between, like the Portygee nobs do. Pretty enough, she were, with dark brown hair for two or three, brown eyes to crack your heart, and a smile to make a priest give up Lent. Aye, and though she started with nobbut hello and goodbye and whiskey-soda in English, didn’t she tackle to it till she shamed me, who never mastered no more than a score of words in her tongue, and not one of them fit for her ears. Good-tempered with it, too—though she fought her parents bare-knuckle and toe to toe, like Figg or Mendoza, until they let her toss over the grandee they’d promised her to, all for the love of a common Jack Tar, that being what he still were in their sight, didn’t matter how many Bank of England notes he could wave at them. “She’s a lady,” I says, “for all she’s a Portygee, and you’re no more a gentleman than that monkey in your mango tree. Money don’t make such as us into gentlemen, Henry Lee. All it does, it makes us rich monkeys. You know that, same as me.”
“I’m plain daft over her, Ben,” says he, like I’d never spoke at all. “Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t do a thing but dream about having her near me all the time. Nothing for it but the altar.”
“Speaking of altars,” says I, “you’ll have to turn Papist, and there’s not one of her lot’ll ever believe you mean it, no m
ore than I would. And never mind her family—what about her friends, what about that whole world she’s been part of since the day she were born? You reckon to sweep her up and away from all that, or try to ease yourself into it and hope they won’t twig what you are? Which is it to be, then, hey?”
“I don’t know, Ben,” says Henry Lee, real quiet. “I don’t know anything anymore.” He said me name, but he weren’t talking to me—maybe to that monkey, maybe to the waves out beyond the seawall. “The one thing I’ve got a good hold on, when I’m with her, it’s like coming home. First time I saw her, it came over me, I’ve been gone a long time, and now I’m home.”
Well, you can’t talk sense to nobody in a state like that, so I wished them luck and left them to it. Aye, and I even danced at the wedding, sweating like a hog in a new silk suit, Chinee silk, and kicking the bride’s shins with every turn. Danced with the mother-in-law too, with her crying on me shoulder the while, how she’d lost her poor angel forever to this soulless brute of an English merchant, which no matter he’d converted, he weren’t no real Catholic, nor never would be. I tried to get her shins, that one, but she were quick, I’ll say that for her.
So there’s Henry Lee and his pretty new missus, and him so happy staying home with her, hosting grand gatherings just for folk to look at her, he weren’t no use for nowt else, save telling me how happy he were. Oh, he still brewed up the salt wine himself—wouldn’t trust me nor no other with the makings—but for the rest of it, I were near enough running the business without him. Took in the orders, paid the accounts, kept the books, supervised the packing and the shipping, every case, every bloody bottle. Even bought us a second ship—found her and bargained for her, paid cash down, all on me own hook. Long way from the Isle of Pines, hey?
Like I say, I didn’t make all the voyages. Weren’t any degree necessary for me to make none on ’em, tell the truth—and besides I were getting on, and coming to like the land more than I ever thought I would. But I never could shake me taste for the Buenos Aires run. I knew some women there, and a few men too . . . aye, that’s a fine town, Buenos. A man could settle in that town, and I were thinking about it then.
So we’re three days from landfall, and I’m on deck near sunset, taking the air and keeping a lookout for albatrosses. No finer bird than an albatross, you can keep your eagles. A quiet, quiet evening—wide red sky streaked with a bit of green, fine weather tomorrow. You can hear the gulls’ wings, and fish jumping now and then, and the creaking of the strakes, and sometimes even the barrels of salt wine shifting down in the hold. Then I hear footsteps behind me, and I turn and see the bos’un’s mate coming up on deck. Can’t think of his name right now—a short, wide man, looked like a wine barrel himself, but tough as old boots. Monkey Sucker, that’s it, that’s what they called him. Because he liked to drink his rum out of a cocoanut, you see. Never see no one doing that, these days.
He weren’t looking too hearty, old Monkey Sucker. Red eyes and walking funny, for a start, like his legs didn’t belong to him, but I put that down to him nipping at the bung down below. Now I already told you, I never again laid lip to that salt wine from that first day to this, but folk that liked it, why, they’d be waiting on the docks when we landed, ready to unload the cargo themselves right on the spot. And half the crew was the same way, run yourself blind barmy trying to keep them out of the casks. Well, we done the practical, Henry Lee and me: we rigged the hold to keep all but the one barrel under lock and key. That one we left out and easy tapped, and it’d usually last us there and back, wherever we was bound. But this Monkey Sucker . . . no, he weren’t just drunk, I saw that on second glance. Not drunk. I wish it had been that, for he weren’t a bad sort.
“Mr. Hazeltine,” he says to me. “Well, Mr. Hazeltine.” Kept on saying me name like we’d just met, and he were trying to get a right fix on it. His voice didn’t sound proper, neither, but it kept cracking and bleating—like a boy’s voice when it’s changing, you know. And there were summat bad wrong with his nose and his mouth.
“Monk,” I says back, “you best get your arse below decks before the captain claps eyes on you. You look worse than a poxy bumboy on Sunday morning.” The light’s going fast now, but I can make out that his face is all bad swole up and somehow twisty-like, and there’s three lines like welts on both sides of his neck. He’s got his arms wrapped around himself, holding himself tight, the way you’d think he were about to birth four thousand babies at one go, like some fish do it. And he keeps mumbling me name, over and over, but he’s not looking at me, not once, he’s looking at the rail on the starboard side. Aye, I should have twigged to that straightaway, I know. I didn’t, that’s all.
Suddenly he says, “Water.” Clear as clear, no mistake about it. “Water,” and he points over the side. Excited, bobbing on his toes, like a nipper at Brighton. Third time, “Water,” and at least I were the first to bawl, “Man overboard!” there’s that. In the midst of all the noise and garboil, with everyone tumbling on deck to heave to, and the captain yelling at everyone to lower a boat, with the bos’un crazy trying to lower two, ’acos he and Monkey Sucker was old mates . . . in the midst of it all, I saw Monkey Sucker in the sea. I saw him, understand? He weren’t splashing around, waving and screaming for help, and he weren’t treading water neither. No, he’s trying to swim, calm as can be—only he’s trying to swim like a fish, laying himself flat in the water and wriggling his legs together, same as if he had a tail, understand? Only he didn’t have no tail, and he sank like that, straight down, straight down. They kept that boat out all night, but they never did find him.
We reported the death to the customs people in Buenos Aires, and I sent word to Henry Lee back in Goa. The captain and the mates kept asking the crew about why Monkey Sucker had done it, scragged himself that way—were it the drink got him? Were it over some dockside bint? Did he owe triple interest on some loan to Silas Barker or Icepick Neddie Frey? Couldn’t get no answer, not one, that made no sense to them, nor to me neither.
Heading home, every barrel gone, hold full of Argentine wheat for ballast, now it’s me turn to chat up the crew, on night watch or in the mess. I go at it like a good ’un, but there’s not a soul can tell me anything I don’t know.
I were first ashore before dawn at Velha Goa—funny to think of that fine Mandovi River all silted up today, whole place left to the snakes and the kites—and if I didn’t run all the way to Henry Lee’s house, may I never piss again. Man at the door to let me in, another man to take me hat and offer me a glass. I didn’t take it.
I bellow for Henry Lee, and here he comes, rushing downstairs in his shirtsleeves, one shoe off and one on. “Ben, what is it? What’s happened? Is it the ship?” Because he never could get used to having two ships of his own—always expected one or t’other to sink or burn, or be taken by the Barbary pirates. I didn’t say nowt, just grabbed him by the arm and hauled him off into the room he calls the library. Shut the door, turn around, look into his frighted blue eyes. “It ain’t the ship, Henry Lee,” I tell him. “It’s the hands.”
“The hands,” he says. “I don’t understand.”
“And it ain’t the hands,” I say, “it’s the buyers. And it ain’t the buyers.” I take a breath, wish God’d put a noggin of rum in me fist right now, but there ain’t no God. “It’s the wine.”
Henry Lee shakes his head. He reaches for a bottle on the sideboard, pours himself a drink. Salt wine, it is—I knock it out of his hand, so it splashes on his fancy rug, and now I’m whispering, because if I shout everything comes apart. “It’s the wine, Henry Lee. You know it, and now I know.”
That about him knowing, that was a guess, and now I’m the one looking away, ’acos of I don’t want to find out I’m right. And because it’s hard to say the bloody words, either way. “The salt wine,” I says. “It frigging well killed a man, this time out, and I’m betting it’s done it before.”
“No,” Henry Lee says. “No, Ben, that’s not possible.” But I
look straight back at him, and I know what he’s fighting not to think.
“Maybe he didn’t mean no harm, your Gorblimey,” I go on. “Maybe he’d no notion what his old precious gift would do to human beings. Maybe it depends on how much of it you drink, or how often.” So still in that fine house, I can hear his Julia Caterina turning in the bed upstairs, murmuring into her pillow. I say, “Old Monkey Sucker, he never could keep away from the cask in the hold, maybe that’s why . . . why it happened. Maybe if you don’t drink too much.”
“No,” Henry Lee answers me, and his voice is real quiet too. “That wouldn’t make sense, Ben. I drink salt wine every day. A lot of it.”
He’s always got a flask of the creature somewhere about him, true enough, and you won’t see him go too long without his drop. But there’s no sign of any change, not in his face, nor in his skin, nor his teeth—and that last time Monkey Sucker said “water” I could see his teeth had got all sprawled out-like, couldn’t hardly close his mouth. But Henry Lee just went on looking like Henry Lee, except a little bit grayer, a bit wearier, a bit more pulled-down, like, the way quitting the sea will do to you. No merrow borning there, not that I could see.
“Well, then,” says I, “it’s not the amount of wine. But it is the wine. Tell me that’s not so, and I’ll believe you, Henry Lee. I will.”
Because I never knew him lie to me. Might take his time getting around to telling me some things, but he wouldn’t never lie outright. But he just shook his head again, and looked down, and he heaved a sigh sounded more like a death rattle. Says, “It could be. It could be. I don’t know, Ben.”
“You know,” I says. “How long?” He don’t answer, don’t say nowt for a while—he just turns and turns in a little tight circle, this way and that, like a bear at a baiting. Finally he goes on, mumbling now, like he’d as soon I didn’t hear. “The Tagus, last year, that time I took Julia Caterina to Lisbon. A man on the riverbank, he just tumbled . . . I didn’t get a really good look, I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing, I swear, Ben.” I can’t make no sound. Henry Lee grabs me hands, wrings them between his until they hurt. “Ben, it’s like you said, maybe Gorblimey didn’t know himself—”
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep Page 23