I can’t speak for Pop or Johnny or the others, but I’d rather be a guest at some underwater table with Davy and his missus. There’s no way I could crouch between rows of tobacco now that I’ve felt the foredeck swaying beneath my feet, tasted salt on my lips, and run before the wind in a little sloop under a sky blue enough to make me forget every storm I ever sailed through.
Mother Carey’s chickens usually warn of a storm she’s busy stirring. At least a storm would take both us and the Spanish warship down to the bottom, where Mother Carey herself would dice up our flesh onto dishes made of shells and use our bones to comb her long green hair.
“We cannot fight her.” The old man is pacing, toying with the spyglass. “If we cripple her, we might be able to run past.”
“Her mainsails are dropping!” shouts Black Tom from the rigging. “She’s coming about!”
The old man snaps the spyglass closed. “Can any man among you swim?”
Pop fidgets with his blade, and at his other elbow Johnny looks utterly greensick.
“C’mon, lads, speak up! There must be one of you who can sink that ship sneakylike, with auger and drill.”
No one says anything. Like as not because none of them can swim.
But I can.
There’s only so much a child can do in squalid ports with ten grogshops per man and not a church in sight. While Pop drank his ghosts to whispers, I whiled away long afternoons in quiet inlets, splashing and collecting shells — and paddling about the shallows and deeps till I could swim like a fish, even in a wind-whipped ocean current.
“There’ll be silver in it for you,” the old man says with an edge of terror I’ve never yet heard from any man who’s turned pirate. “My gold watch too.” He rakes a look over us, shouts, “My daughter’s hand in marriage! What the devil will it take?”
My father has saved my life nine times. He wanted no part of the Vanity, and I was the one who finally wore him down.
“I’ll do it.” I step before the old man. “I’ll sink that frigate if you’ll trade your shares for mine when we find and take the treasure galleon.”
Pop stiffens. That treasure ship is still out there, and a captain’s haul is always seven shares. Seven, when a single share from a prize like that would grant Pop’s hopes thrice over.
The old man shuts his mouth. Narrows his eyes. Looks to the warship. Then he says, “It’s yours, Joe. It’s yours if you sink that ship.”
Everything feels oddly quiet but for the creak of wood and the rattlesnap of damp canvas. I can hear every last one of my father’s indrawn breaths somewhere behind me.
The first mate takes off his belt and Johnny holds out a leather sheath, wide-eyed and solemn. I thread the sheath through the belt and cinch it tight under my jacket. When the bosun hands me an auger, I brandish it like a pistol with more piss and vinegar than I feel before tying it into the sheath.
Johnny laughs nervously, then paws my shoulder in an awkward sort of half-hug.
“Back to your labor,” the old man calls. “If they see us crowded at the rail, they’ll know something’s amiss.”
With both auger and dagger about my waist, I feel a full stone heavier. I can swim well, but I’ve never tried it weighted. I climb up to the rail and peer over. The water below is not a sparkling sky-blue lagoon where little waves lapped around my baby feet, where I dipped and surged with naught on my back but my smallclothes. It’s green-black and choppy, and at the bottom are the bones of sailors who did not have a care for its will.
The wind is sharp from the starboard beam. It won’t be a turn of the glass before we’re pushed close enough to the frigate to force a reckoning.
Pop is drawn tight like a mainstay line. He badly wants to say something but he’s not going to. I’m not even sure what there is to say.
I can’t take my offer back. And I can’t let us be taken.
I face the water. I slip out of my jacket and dive in.
The water is bonechill-cold and the shock of it hits me like a cudgel. I kick my feet and force myself upward and forward, but my shirt and trousers splay out like a jellyfish, clinging and dragging and slowing every limb I thrash.
So I choke and gasp and struggle, fighting out of my clothes. I break the surface and the cold hits me again, rakes over my stubbly head, but I suck in a mighty breath and tread water long enough to steady myself.
Cold. Oh, Father Neptune but it is cold in nothing but smallclothes and the linen I keep wrapped about my chest.
Black Tom’s in the rigging. The old man has the spyglass. One of them’s bound to notice.
I’ll reap that whirlwind once I’m back on board. For now, I’ve got a ship to sink.
I tighten the mate’s belt and make sure I still have both auger and dagger, then I slice my arms through the water in a nice steady rhythm. I start to feel warmer. Every twenty strokes I look up and mark the warship just to be sure I’m on course.
At first it feels like I’ll never get there.
Then she’s within a stone’s throw.
Then I’m right beneath her.
I tread water once I reach the warship, fighting to catch my breath. It’s been a while since I’ve swum this much, and my arms are weak and melty, my eyes burning from the salt. The ship is moving only with the tide, and I unfasten the auger from my waist and feel along till I find a spongy, worm-eaten patch below the waterline.
There’s no way to auger without a grip to hold me steady, and there’s nothing to grip but barnacles. They cake the whole shipbottom like drifted sand, and each is a tiny razor.
I’m too tired to hesitate. I grab a clump of barnacles, and they slice me open clean and thoughtless. And those cuts burn. They burn and burn and I whimper, not an ounce of piss and vinegar left to fight it.
But my right hand is free, and I set to work with the auger. I crank it round and round, round and round. It’s all I do. It’s all I think about.
Before long I’ve bored half a dozen holes clear through the hull. The barnacles have already done the job halfway, quietly eating the wood till it all but ripples beneath my palms. Already I can hear the slurpsuck of water punching through my holes and the panicky shouts of men inside, the clomp and clatter as they flee, the futile clang of the ship’s bell ringing the general alarm.
My arms throb and my whole left hand is numb from scores of tiny half-moon cuts across my fingers. When I fumble the auger against the hull to start a new hole, it wheels out of my hand and drops like an anchor down and down and gone.
I watch it disappear. The job is only half done. All I have left is my dagger.
I force my stiff fingers around another clump of barnacles. New cuts crosshatch the old ones. I pull the dagger from my belt and stab at the pulpy wood like a murderer.
A raw, violent hole appears beneath my blade. Then two, then many.
The warship is taking on water. The shift in pitch is sobering. I’m killing these men. They can swim no better than the lads on the Vanity.
I’ve lost count of the holes I’ve put in, but I’m spent. The warship’s list is bad enough that she’s in no position to fight us or give chase. And if she goes down, I want to be nowhere near.
I’ve earned my prize. Pop’s prize. And half the rum ration of every man on the Vanity whose life I saved sinking this Spanish tub.
I cram my dagger into its sheath, push off the side of the listing warship — the barnacles open up my toes like meat — and thrash through the waves toward home. Each stroke takes all my effort, and halfway there I start to crawl-paddle and sputter out seawater hard enough to set my vitals throbbing.
I won’t make it if I think how bad I hurt.
So I think how to explain to Half-Hanged Henry that I don’t want his daughter’s hand in marriage.
I think of the first time I made it all the way up to the topgallant yard on the Sally Dearest, how I felt light enough to spread my arms and take wing like a bird.
And I think of Pop, who only ever wanted a place
of his own and a houseful of babies.
My blind, splashing hands clatter against something hard and wet and splintery. The Golden Vanity. I grab and scrabble for a barnacle handhold, but Captain Royal Navy actually careens them off proper on occasion, and I must weakly tread water.
Up on the foredeck I see faces of the crew peering over, tiny ovals of color against a flat gray sky and sprawls of dingy canvas and a tangle of rigging.
I dredge an arm out of the water in salute. Any moment now a rope will fall over the side. Somewhere in me is the strength to hold that rope, and I will find it.
One by one, the faces at the rail disappear.
Only the old man is left.
“She’s sunk!” I shout. “I sank her. Pull me up!”
The old man doesn’t reply. He doesn’t throw a rope either. He merely shakes his head.
Over my shoulder, the Spanish warship is tilting like driftwood and the whole quarterdeck is in chaos as men push and fight for dry ground. Seeing her on her way down reminds me how hot and weak my arms are, how much of a struggle it is to keep my head above the waves.
“Captain!” I howl, but it’s a mistake because I choke on a sudden harsh mouthful of water.
“Can’t do it, Joe,” he says, and disappears from the rail.
I’m gasping with every flailed stroke and kick, but I manage to free my dagger from its sheath. I punch it out of the water and shout, “I know well how to sink a ship, Cap! If this is how you’ll serve me, I’ll take you to the bottom with me. We’ll all be on Mother Carey’s table together!”
And that’s when Pop appears at the rail, fighting the first mate and the bosun, who have him by either arm. There’s a length of ratline in his hand and he almost gets it over the gunwale before they haul him away, out of sight.
He’ll go to the bottom too.
I open my hand and let the dagger fall, down and down, to Davy Jones.
Pop is roaring like a madman and cursing every Goddamn one of them and shouting at me to stay strong, his last little baby, the only one he could save.
I flail one final stroke and go under.
I’m colder than I’ve ever been, but nothing hurts anymore — not my arms, not my feet, not my eyes, not my guts.
Above me is a dull shadow set against shades of rippling, glinting motion. It’s the size of my thumb, oval but pointed at both ends.
Like the bottom of a ship.
I’m standing before a table on the quarterdeck of an ancient, rotted merchantman. Her mast is a ragged stump and stray chain shot is lodged in the gunwales. At the head of the table is a woman whose face is hidden by shadow and wavered by the movement of the currents around us.
“Jocasta,” she says, and all at once I know who she is. I know it even though I have only a whisper of a memory of her. This is the voice that would lilt through fire-warmed, comfortable darkness when I was small enough to be tucked into a willow basket. Then would come her gentle hand, rubbing my back, smoothing hair from my eyes, pushing away the dim of the room and the grit of the floor and the gnaw in my belly.
I have to swallow twice before I can answer, and it’s no more than a whisper. “Mama.”
“That’s right.” She swims one long graceful arm at an empty chair before a bare, waiting dinner plate. “Come, sit down. I’ve been expecting you. Supper’s ready.”
Pop would never say much about Mama. One day she was there before the fire in our cabin, the next she wasn’t. He’s always saying I was too little to remember her anyway, but he’s wrong.
I remember her voice. I remember her warmth. I remember crying quietly because she hadn’t taken me with her, wherever she went.
And here she is before me.
She leans to set a dish on the table, nudging several others to make room. The table is overflowing with platters, all covered with domed abalone shells.
I reach for the chair and pull it out. It glides through the water like my arm, like my backside as I start to sit down.
Then she smiles at me.
Her teeth are all pointy like a cat’s.
I freeze, my rump hovering above the seat. “Y-you’re not my mother.”
“Mama. Or Madre. Or Mater. All of you with salt for blood are mine.” She slides her lips over her teeth, her voice all Mama once more. “Come now, Jocasta. Sit down. I’ve missed you.”
Out of the darkness, out of everything cold and miserable would come that voice. And somehow things would grow lighter, starting with her and ending with me.
She’s back at her work, carving meat and dicing seaweed and piling everything onto platters made of shells all lined up along the table. This table on the deck of a dead ship.
“Sit.” Her voice goes sharp and she aims her knife at me.
The same knife I buried to the hilt in weak, barnacled patches of a Spanish warship, sending her and her crew to the bottom of the sea.
To Mother Carey’s table.
I flip over one of the shells covering a platter. It’s heaped with severed fingers and slabs of flesh and the odd swimming length of bowel.
I struggle backward, but it’s a maddening swish of water and my arms churn, trying to push away, trying to get clear. Mother Carey grins with her pointy cat-teeth as she lifts a goggle-eyed, limp-swaying Spanish sailor from his seat and cleaves his arm from his torso while he burbles Mamita.
“You will sit,” Mother Carey says as she slits the sailor from neck to navel, “and you will stay. It would be a pity if you didn’t enjoy the fine feast you’ve provided me.”
Spanish sailors with empty, slack faces are taking seats one after the other in chairs that hold them fast as Mother Carey prepares a feast of the dead for herself and Davy Jones.
“You wouldn’t leave me, would you? Sit down, Jocasta. Sit down and be with your mother.”
Mama’s voice keeps coming out of Mother Carey’s mouth as she stands at the head of her table and pulls helpless Spaniards out of chairs much like the vacant one before me. As she cleaves the poor bastards bone from bone and piles their guts on abalone dishes.
I learned to stop asking about Mama. Pop said it was easier that way. That we love people when they’re here, but when they go, they’re gone.
Pop. Who never once thought to leave me behind, whatever the cost.
I don’t sit down. I kick my feet. I start to rise.
Water moves around me and over me and through me, through my hair and my skin, and flutters the scraps of linen that still cling to me. I wing out my arms and glide.
I am growing lighter.
The wind changes shades. The sunlight changes color.
Most of us huddle up close in the sand. But five of us, we feel it. We know what to do.
I become light. I catch the updraft, sway over the waves. The nests on the dunes are distant but safe for now. Out we go, and out.
A storm builds to the north. A storm my mother is stirring, for she and her man grow hungry once more.
Sails beyond the barrier island, rigged for pursuit. When the sky is this color we are drawn to ships, to those who are as we once were.
I angle my wings, slide along the ship’s waterline, pluck up some tiny-shelled creatures to crunch. Dabble my toes against the water, then glide up on a wick of wind.
I am up and into the rigging, toward a brown man with graying hair who sits all alone on the foremast yard, swinging his legs while the wind catches his jacket.
Soon they will go. Capstan chanty, anchor up, ship in sight, beat to quarters. He will be among them. He will grip his blade, swing over harsh water. He is still waiting for his prize. He waits for her even as he curses her.
Around the edge of the sail. Up, and toward him.
The water sings and beckons. The wind wants to nudge me toward the dunes and my nest, and soon enough I will return there, but right now I need to be on this yard with this man. I need to see him.
I need him to look north so he’ll stay on this side of the water and not below, where my mother would put
his bones on her table.
He holds out a hand and I cannot help but take wing. Too sudden for the shell of me, too much, even though the soul of me would curl up in his pocket, feel the warm beat of his heart one last time.
I make a pass through the rigging, then sweep down to the waterline. I arc over the quarterdeck, where dark clouds are beginning to mount.
I hover there until he sees.
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are sometimes called the Golden Age of Piracy, although if you were trying to live through it, you probably called it something less rosy. The New World at that time was dynamic and its culture in flux, and issues of freedom, order, and loyalty were anything but settled.
The Mother Carey legend is part of a vast body of nautical lore. Her name is a corruption of mater cara (Latin for dear mother), which was one way early Spanish and Portuguese explorers referred to the Virgin Mary. Folk music fans will recognize elements of “The Sweet Trinity” (Child Ballad 286), but the bones of the story developed as a result of my discovery that about 25 percent of sailors on pirate or privateer vessels during the Golden Age of Piracy were people of color. We know of several notable female pirates, and considering that we know the most about pirates who were caught and tried, there’s a strong possibility someone like Joe existed without being known to history.
MY MOTHER NAMED ME YAKONE, after the red aurora.
Some said the red aurora was bad luck, the image of blood painting the sky. But my mother believed it meant good fortune, that the spirits dancing in the sky were pleased. She told me she had only seen the red aurora twice in her life. The first was on the night after my father, still barely a man, killed his first whale. The second was fifteen years ago, on the longest night of the year, when the sun did not rise at all. I was born that night.
So I suppose my mother was both wrong and right: wrong, because she could never bear children again after me, and right, because our seer said the fire in me burned strongly enough for all the sons in the world.
A Tyranny of Petticoats Page 2