My Name is Resolute (10 page)

Even though the English sent parties to shore and brought back fresh food, Patience began to be sick even when the ship was still, or at least when the rocking seemed a melancholic swing caught in a breeze, rather than the high gavotte of the stormy days. Nothing would calm her stomach, and if I tried to comfort her she shrieked at me so that I wondered if she had gone mad. After all those days aboard a ship, being a prisoner seemed inconvenient, rather than a hard punishment or captivity, for though we needed perhaps a doctor and rest and good broth for her, for me boredom had been my chiefest complaint other than hunger. Now it was cold.

These days there were no songs sung belowdecks. The earthy joy of African rhythm had frozen, too. When I was above and one or another of the sailors would take a rest from his work and pick up a flute or squeezebox, I clung to the notes of music as if they nestled in my innermost workings. One evening as an old squeezebox lent “If I Wast a Blackbird” the most elegant melancholia, I found privateers weeping in their cups. I gave myself to learning the tunes though some of the men spoke with the direst accents or mispronounced things entirely. I learned the words, too. Ma would have disapproved.
“A coarse and lusty wench a-riding barebacked on a mare,”
went one song, and another began with a chant of
“Damn your eyes, Bos’n Bandy. Damn your eyes.”
I had no idea what the song was about, but the tune was merry and anyone aboard deck might step out a few paces of a jig when they played it.

When I was made to clean, I was often cursed at in language of an art that would have made even my pa faint. I grew used to their words and soon realized there was less threat behind them than there was a natural tendency to venomous hissing, rather like a basketful of snakes afloat on the sea, so to even the reckoning, I began to pilfer. First a bit of thread or a button, sometimes a nail or a bit of rope, once, a hat. I tossed the things overboard soon as I got a chance, placing them on the gunwale and bumping them off with my elbow. It was rare I heard the splash, but I felt satisfied that their things were lost forever. One time I tossed over a belaying pin left loose in its notch. A sailor was cuffed and sent hunting the thing, and I smiled heartily at seeing his blackened eye.

Just when it seemed that the sea was to be my life, that nothing changed nor would it ever change, that dirty men and piteous women were to be my life’s companions and cold starvation my lot, the ship changed course and heeled the sails leeward. We began to move with the sun and toward its setting. I watched men furling sails and fitting out the canoe with its small sail and oars and three lanterns. When the sun went down, four men climbed into the boat and began to row for shore. The night closed around them just as I climbed down the ladder. I felt the ship moving in the night, yet, rather than the usual rhythm of calls and chatter above, we sailed in ghostly quiet. Before morning broke the ship had calmed in a way that I knew we had moored in a bay. Nary a lantern gleamed above. No moon cast a shadow, nor did stars prick the heavens. Save for the glow of sea foam, it was black as pitch when they led us to the ladders.

Against the coldest wind I had ever known, the English lined the women up and made us climb down the rigging again. This time they ferried us ten or so at a time, still under guard, to an empty beach of dull buff and stone. As I awaited my turn, I looked hastily for August. I spotted him below in the boat holding an oar, once I had both feet over the side and was about to take a step downward. “Brother!” I called out.

“Get on wi’ ye,” one of the sailors barked at me. I was afraid he would give me a shove over the side, so I scrambled down the ropes.

“Ho!” August called, and helped me settle my feet into the boat. He reached up for Patience and settled us in. I took a seat beside him. He took up his oar as the other men did, and one called out the strokes.

I asked him, “You will come with us, will you not?”

“Quiet. I am a sailor now, Resolute.”

“But August, we’ll be alone. You cannot stay. Oh, tell me you shall not stay with—these”—I looked about to see if anyone paid me heed—“men!”

“I must. I signed papers. I will only go around, though, Ressie, and then I will come for you. I promise.” An unsteady glow filled the sky, as if the sun hid behind a blanket of dense clouds.

At long last I asked, “How far around? How long will it take?”

“I do not know. But I will come for you. I will.”

When we made the land, they put us off into what I found was a circle of Englishmen holding captives at sword’s point. The sailors with all haste started to make for the canoe again. I held August’s sleeve and looked into his eyes, trying to see what he might feel for us, his sisters, cast ashore on some strange land. There was something there, I vow, though what it was I could not say. Not a tear marked his countenance. Perhaps he had learned to cry on the inside as I had. Or perhaps he was keeping a stern face for those who might watch him. He whispered to me, “I will make my fortune and I will come for you both.”

I called out, “I will watch for you, August. Do not forget us, your sisters. Do not forget we are deserted here.” There was no time to hear his answer if he gave one, for he had turned his face to the sea.

On the beach we waited and shivered, sitting upon the sand. Cora and I sat on either side of Patience, who said nothing, staring at her feet. I felt an urge to lean to one side or the other, to make up for the swaying of the land. I knew the ground was not moving, yet my constant rolling with the ship had become such a habit that it continued here. I felt ill, so much did the ground seem to swell and sway.

Cora asked, “Feels like you still on the boat, don’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. Though in truth it was worse, for the ship would come to rights, but this ground moved with some scheme other than an ocean, some devilment of my mind, so that I could not guard against it. I lay upon the sand and stared at the sky, all gray and heavy with clouds. Only then did the earth seem to lie still beneath me. “August is gone, Patey. Gone with the rovers.”

“I know,” she said.

What a land this was. What a sea. Cold. Bleak. Black. Not a hint of a shimmering blue-green coral reef. Not a leaf hung on any tree. Dead trees stood like gray skeletons forked against a drab sky. I needed no further proof that we were indeed nearing the top edge of the world than the closeness of the sky, for the gray clouds caught and snagged on the tops of the trees. How much farther the edge was, God knew, but I feared we should find it and plummet into the abyss. I whispered to myself, to the sky, repeated it louder, “I hate my brother August. I shall always, always hate him.” As I said it, I squinted at the clouds, willing them in my imagination to part, for the sun to appear, for the sand to warm, and the voice of Ma to call me home for dinner. I would eat all my vegetables, this time. I said, “He will come back for us.”

Patey turned to me and let out a deep breath. “Yes. Keep watching for him. Watch for him always.”

CHAPTER 5

November 20, 1729

The men bade us stand. I watched money change hands, new voices and faces amongst the men who scrutinized us as if we were wild boars that might charge their drawn cutlasses at any moment. And then the walking began. Uncle Rafe came along at the rear of the line as we walked. He was the only one from the trip here that came; all the other pirates went somewhere else, back to the sea, I suspect. May they all drown. God send them the plague. The pox. A fire. A Gypsy ship loaded with Saracens, rats and plague, and blasting kegs and fire.

We walked any number of hours I could not fathom. I had no shoes. My feet ached but yet grew numb; I could not feel the ground I walked upon, yet every pebble made me wince. I began to imagine the drumming of each footfall as a pace in a dance. A chant came from some lost memory, and I began to sing something old that Ma sang when she walked upon the hills, mumming it with my lips.

Everyone stumbled. I began to believe Patience’s hand holding mine was the only feeling I had in the world. After a while we could go no other way but single file and so I had to let go of her hand. I got a stitching in my side and it spread to both sides. If I could have found time alone I would have eaten the rest of my pocket.

I stared at the ground in front of each step, wishing that Patience’s feet would stay long enough to warm it before I stepped there. I tried to step into her footprints, but of course, that was imaginary, for there was no print on the frozen ground. Her feet were as frozen as mine. I had never known such agony. The numbness and burning and bitter shivering never stopped.

With every step I thought of new ways to hate Rafe MacAlister, whose fault it was we were here. “Patience?” I whispered.

“Yes?”

“Do you think Uncle Rafe was a pirate always? Did he join them as August did?”

“I do not know. Be shushed, Ressie.”

“He was fighting the other pirates. I saw him do it. Right alongside Pa.”

“Nary the first man with duplicity of heart.”

I made her explain that as I stumbled onward another length of time, holding to my sides against the shooting pain that threatened to bend me. “I wish someone would steal us back and take us home again.”

“It will not happen.”

“August said we have to start over. I just want to go home, that’s what I want. Some bloody French pirates could kill Rafe MacAlister and take us on a big man-o’-war or a ship of the line, as they called that one they burned down with the rats and the plague, remember? And then they would take us back to Jamaica. And then we would find Ma and take up sewing. I figure since those Saracens fed us almost not at all, and the English fed us quite a bit better, well, the French do like their victuals, Ma always said, and they would have more food and sail around the other way and take us home if we asked them to and explained how we were stolen. Mostly should someone kill Rafe MacAlister, that’s the good start of it. French voyagers, I think—”

A hand jerked me from the line. “Who’s going to kill Rafe MacAlister for you, brat? I’m going to tie you to that tree there and leave you for the crows.” I looked up into Uncle Rafe’s grizzled face, aware that although I began with a whisper my voice had taken strength from my words and I had been talking loudly enough to echo in the woods around us. He held my arm with a grip that felt like he would crush my bones. He pulled a dagger and held it against my lips, sliding it up and down so that I felt a stinging, as he said, “It would be worth the ten pounds I’ll get for you, to me, to cut your throat and watch you strangle on your own blood, you little cur. Maybe I will just cut your tongue out. How would you like that? Maybe I’ll cut out your briny tongue and give you a taste of what’s been keeping your sister company. Eh?”

My mind raced. My stomach gnawed and growled as he shook me. Had Patience been given extra food? The look in his eyes told me something more, as if I were to know something unknowable. Remembering Patey’s bruised and bloody face, I shrank from him and he let go my arm. Soon as we began to move again, I sang Ma’s old charm against evil to the rhythm of my steps, my voice meant for Patey’s ears.
“Gum-boo cru-ah-he na clock. Gum-boo du-he-he na’n gaul, gum-boo loo-ah-he na lock.”

Patience turned and stared at me, not watching where she walked, and my heart was moved, for she smiled! She turned and took up my song, the first part which I had forgotten, and whispered the song under her voice to the rhythm of our feet.
“Ulk-ah he-en mo-lock; gun gaven-galar gluk-glock.”

I answered back with my part and she sang again,
“Go-intay, go-intay, sailtay, sailtay, see-ock, see-ock, oo-ayr!”
I thought of Rafe MacAlister, and chanted the ancient words under my breath until I laughed aloud. My laughter was not mirth but clinging faith in the words I said, a curse against all who might do us harm. I wished I had thought of the songs while still in the capture of the Saracens. Perhaps they would never have got us as far as the English sailors and Rafe, and we would be home already.

The path widened into a narrow road. Waist-high brambles lined both sides. If a cart had come along we would have had to stand in deep brush to let it pass. They stopped us by a well to rest. The well was below a small rock circle, under a roof so low that anyone taller than me would have to stoop to reach the cracked and useless bucket that had been left by it. We fixed our quilted petticoats as capes. “That is warmer,” I said. I thought Patey looked so haggard, so drawn, that I feared for her life.

“Why do you look at me so?” she asked.

“Something is so lost in your eyes. Your face is so terrible you make me afraid.”

“’Tis merely that you have not seen me in the light of day in so long.”

“We shall go home soon. Mayhap that old charm will work.”

“’Tis old foolishment. Ma was naught but a gentlewoman and she would never cast a spell or a charm. ’Twas a song she knew from her granny.” Patience brushed her hands along her arms under the petticoat-cape. “I doubt we shall ever see Jamaica again. I doubt I will live to see Christ’s Mass Day.”

I pressed her arms with my hands then, the same way she was doing, to give more comfort to her. “I am more afraid now than ever I was before. We must go home again. If the charm helps, it is good to remember it.”

Cora fiddled through the other women toward us. She said to me, “Little Miss Resolute, what is that shining on your sister’s back?”

I saw the shine just as she said it, too, and clasped my hands across my mouth. “Patience, turn quickly.” The cloth had worn through and showed a glint of metal with the too obvious shape of a coin printed into the linen. Our treasures!

Patience rolled it in her hand. “I shall turn it inside outside,” she said, and worked the cape over her head again.

Cora squinted and asked, “What’s you got sewn into that, Missy?”

Patience shrugged and said, “It is nary a thing,” but I heard how Cora’s voice had changed. Now on land, she had said “missy” the old slave way instead of Patey’s name.