Parrot and Olivier in America (26 page)

Very well, he could take us while the gentlemen had their lunch.

I had not known what war might mean until we got to Plymouth. Just past the Guild Hall in Wimple Street I heard the constant bugle calls and the tramp of soldiers, sailors shouting in the alleys of the Pool. Everybody looked as if they would kill everybody else. Poor tattered French prisoners of war shuffled beside our diligence, so close I could have stolen a hat if I had no heart. My giant companion boasted an idiot's smile which he used to persuade the driver to take us right into Sutton Pool where the great battleships pushed their noses into the crowded center of the town. The driver was then under the impression he had honored his contract, but no, he must up to that eminence they call the
Hoe
. This Hoe was green and hard and naked of all trees and faced the open ocean from which blew a cold hard salty wind.

Very well, but fair is fair. The driver had an important member of the corporation abandoned in the inn, but Monsieur withheld his coin. Leaving the coachman to sulk, he strode to and fro on those windblown gravel paths atop the Hoe, and I was held hard beside him.

"What's he up to?" shouted the driver of the diligence. "What's his game?"

Monsieur was surveying Plymouth, Devonport, Stonehouse, StokeTemples, and those magnificent floating castles which had so recently set his fellow countrymen afire. If he was not a spy, he looked like one. I watched him wipe his watery eyes as he slowly took in the churches, towers, steeples, colonnades, porticoes, terraces, gardens, groves, orchards, meadows, and the green fields cut by estuaries. He fitted his claw around my neck. He shifted his attention to the gibbets on the lower path below the Hoe, on one of which there hung a man or what had been a man. I thought I could smell the gibbet but it was more likely the foul air blowing from the Hulks. I did not know these ships were prisons yet, but would see them later--floating hellholes draped with bedding, clothes, weed and rotting rigging--but this was the odor of the king's prisons. God save him. I will not.

Below the Hoe, leading down toward the ocean, there were a number of gravel paths, all crossing each other, and fitted with many flights of steps and crescent-shaped benches. Along the lower path came a platoon of soldiers and at the very front of the platoon eight more redcoats each one carrying an empty yellow coffin, and between the coffins and the soldiers walked four men in chains, and it suddenly struck me as I watched this horrible sight that the man nearest to the sea and closest to the front was my own father, tall and gangling, dip-shouldered. I had not even the wit to raise my hand but as the party reached that point where they would forever disappear, he turned to look at me.

What the Frenchman understood I cannot say, but he scooped me up into the crook of his strong single arm and wedged my face into his hairy neck. He gave the driver his gold and grunted at him like an animal. Then he carried me, alone in my horror--more unbearable for being unclear--down a path until we were finally back among the armorers on the quay and thence to a second quay, where he lowered me to the flags and then onto a low wooden jetty, and there I found myself with a crowd of poor men and women all of whom were weeping pretty much as I was, and in their company I was persuaded into a longboat. I had no comfort from Monsieur's arm or the damp fustian of my fellow passengers, who smelled like unhappy chickens after rain.

I had never been on a boat before. I had been no closer to the sea than a beach or two where we had gone fossicking for useful storm wrack although we never found any more than a dented christening cup and oaken kindling sanded to velvet by the fury of the sea. We never bathed in the ocean, but rolled up our trousers and wondered at its treachery. One black afternoon at Falmouth, my da and I watched the lifeboat plow out into the storm and bring back the sodden wrung-out men who had once been sailors upon the
Dundee
.

We had seen sailors aplenty around the ports and had always been afraid of their air of hard hostility. They were missing eyes and fingers. They had killed other men, or so I thought. They were of the sea, and we were of the land, of hard tamped paths and the streams of Dartmoor with their
whisht
.

The ship's longboat pushed away from the jetty. Even now, my father was following his coffin or was dead from whatever vile thing they had done to him. The thought shackled my chest. Was he to be murdered for being an innocent accomplice to a forger? Was it even him? My young mind pushed against these gigantic thoughts as I left the land of England. There was no countenance divine. All the great ships in Plymouth Harbor were as tight together as creatures in a hive, all pulsing with the hum of war. We passed under the noses of the cannons, and the lapping sea was poison mercury beneath the gray sky, chicken guts and potato peels gathering around the towering hulls.

My sole protector was an enemy of England. He delivered me to the high black wall of the
Samarand
.

I wet myself halfway up the ladder. I was guided, piss-pant, limping, toward the fo'c'sle, past the cattle pens and boxes filled with chickens. Then the Frenchman gained access to the captain's cabin and was a mute no longer, speaking good French and bad English both. I was worried I would need to vomit and this was of more importance than Monsieur presenting the handsome captain with a palm full of Piggott's pound notes. Thus the currency trumped the navy who would have gladly had the Marquis de Tilbot, no matter what the complexion of his politics, hanging from a gibbet until his feet fell off his legs.

III

I WAS CONFINED to a cabin not much better than a crying room, its entire length consumed by a bed as narrow as a plank. Beside this bunk there was a very squeezy space to stand and dress, and beyond this a dresser too shallow to accept the Frenchman's boots which must hang from a hook on the ceiling above his feet. It was inside this unhappy box young Parrot Larrit set to sea, suspended in a soupy atmosphere of socks and bacon. When the weather was rough my protector's boots kicked me in the face.

I had no notion of what and who awaited me.

First there was Dr. Bingham, a frail and handsome fellow from Lincolnshire whose harelip was sometimes visible beneath his nest of pale mustache. By
sometimes
I mean the occasions he peered into my open mouth hunting for "foul tongue." The harelip is of no importance. I should not have even mentioned it.

Dr. Bingham could not know the grief that wrung my heart. I wished to die but he administered an
emetic
, and after I had thrown up my guts--which he had warranted I would--he gave me a bright orange
purgative
which I tried to spit away.

He was a good man I'm sure, but by the time he had finished I was a hopeless shitting little animal and the captain had received the Port Admiral's order to leave the mooring. Through a gray curtain of nausea and stomach cramp, I lay in my hammock and heard the handsome Yorkshireman shouting that there was no damned wind and he did not see why he should abandon the harbor in favor of seasickness for all. He apologized for saying damned (so I knew there was a woman with us). I felt the keel scrape its way across the bar and, at the same time, dragging noise
above
.

I filled the chamber pot. I slept and woke with the bells of every watch. The
Samarand
lolloped with its sails flapping like washing on the line. I vomited and shat and wept. I did not have
sea legs
but had to reach the heads to empty my chamber pot. I woke at dawn to find myself attended by a stranger. She was short and plump and pretty and I was too gutted to be embarrassed when she wiped my bottom.

Mrs. Bingham, the wife of Dr. Bingham, spoke with the same soft Lincolnshire voice as her husband. I lay in my hammock. She lay on the bunk and stroked the inside of my wrist until I thought I would go mad. A day passed, and then a night.

I was woken by a cry of
Beds on deck
and the most horrid rattling dragging noises above my head. A man's voice cried: "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea."

I slept. There was a mighty thwack of canvas and the whole ship groaned and screeched and then, at last, we were under way.

I curled up like a grub inside a leaf, not speaking, beset by waking dreams of my father and his yellow coffin.

A big bristly face inspected me: the Frenchman. His gray eyes reflected nothing but the little cabin and the bright speck of light which was the sea.

The winds soon grew fiercer and the seas larger, until the oily waves were like those I had once seen crashing in yellow foaming fury on the Devon coast. Except there was no coast, no
there
, no terminus, no restraint and the waters surged past us, over us, shaking not only our bones but the whole ship from stem to stern, sending great spurting plumes of spray across the decks, dropping a huge weight like earth above my coffined head. I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a
nothing
, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

I asked Monsieur, "Where are we going?"

I could get no comfort from him, no purchase, so I slipped off him as from the hard black body of a seal and he played the mute even with our door shut fast.

How I yearned for some softness, even from the doctor's wife, but when she begged me to join the mess table I dared not accept for fear of what lethal secrets I might betray. When I finally did sit down to breakfast it was only because the ship pitched and threw me to the table from the heads.

"John," cried Dr. Bingham. "Eat some porridge with us."

"John," said his little plump wife, and caught the Parrot by the hand and presented him to everybody excepting the first mate, who was otherwise engaged on deck, and Major Alexander, who had business with the prisoners. I did not know what prisoners. Below us, the seas surged across the pitching foredeck. Above, the sailors clung to the rigging like soft fruit in a storm.

Monsieur was eating an egg.

And there was the clergyman I had heard howling out the psalm. I had pictured a craggy gray-haired hermit, but he had pie-eater's jowls and the straight floppy dark hair of a boy. "Your father has been worried for you, John," said he.

My father?

The captain's flinty eyes were on us hard like a gamekeeper on a well-known pair of poachers.

Monsieur towered silently over everyone at table, a frowning bull.

"Good morning Da," I said. I kissed him and felt the quiver of his foreign skin. He grasped my arm and I knew, he never had a son to love in all his life. Who will care for me, I thought.

"This is a big adventure for a young lad," said the clergyman.

Would
he
look after me?

"Your mother must miss you, John," he asked.

"My mother is dead sir."

Monsieur's nose contracted.

"A new life," said the doctor's wife, and patted my hand. Would
she
look after me?

"An important job," she said.

"Miss?"

"To be your father's voice. How very fine that is, John. What a privilege it is for you."

I doubt Monsieur understood a word. He bestowed on all a ghastly smile.

The doctor flicked back his doggish hair as he examined me. I smiled in the hope that he would like me.

The captain wiped his well-shaped mouth with his napkin and leaned back in his chair "What will you be doing in Australia?" He slid the sugar bowl toward my porridge and it did not rest until brought up sharp against the table rim.

I thought,
He does not like me
.

"Dr. Bingham," he asked, not taking his eye off me for a second, "what do you reckon of his nibs' color?"

I turned to the doctor, whose harelip showed like a sea anemone in the morning light. I thought, Please do not send me to Australia.

"He is ill," said the doctor.

"Passez-moi le sucre,"
interrupted the clergyman.

"Le sucre,"
I cried. Please do not send me to Australia.
"Passez-moi le sucre."

The Frenchman squeezed my knee so hard it hurt, but he would not look at me, only at the clergyman, who did not have the sense to be afraid.

"Ah-ha!" Potter cried the clergyman. "You speak French."

"No, sir."

Reverend Potter licked his plump lips so they glistened. "I was admiring," he continued, "the way your father has his coat cut. I'm sure it is the latest thing." He cast sideways glances at the captain, blinking at me like some silly lady's dog.

"I'm just a parrot, sir," I cried, all cockney.

Potter bounced his bottom in his chair and the Marquis de Tilbot stretched his long single arm and laid it like a claw upon his shoulder.

"Et quel est le but de votre voyage?"
the clergyman insisted, but he had not reached
voyage
before he yelped, and then I understood Monsieur, who was smiling in the most amiable way imaginable, had his hand like a gill hook in the chaplain's flesh.

Said Dr. Bingham, "You need fresh air, John."

I escaped fresh air on that occasion, but the next morning I was escorted onto the poop deck by the doctor, where I once more heard the cry of
beds on deck
, and this time looked down to see the soldiers raise a great studded hatch on the deck, and from this maw was produced, from the belly of the ship, a poor race of trolls and troglodytes who brought with them the most awful fetid smell. I watched in disgust and fascination as these creatures bundled their bedding up into the netting, and the boys--you never saw such boys, their eyes black as crab eyes, shrunken like grapes unwanted by the world.

When they were all assembled, clanking in their chains, pressed tight onto the quarterdeck and surrounded by the soldiers with their guns and bayonets, the Reverend Potter performed the morning prayers, and this caused several of the men and women prisoners to kneel, thus making the most horrid sound of chains rubbing on each other and falling hard onto the deck.