Centuries of June (11 page)

On Michaelmas, being a day to celebrate the harvest and eat the fatted goose, they proposed to Chard an excursion to Smith Island, so it was named, to find fit repast for their evening supper, a turkle perhaps, or a few cahows. The isle was also the spot whereon Mr. Carter had once found an old Spanish gold coin, and Chard accepted at once on the chance that more might be buried there. Off they set in the little fishing boat, Chard and Waters at the oars, Jane turned in the bow to face them, her collar loosed, the day fine and the sea calm. Their excursion reminded her of happier times when the three had been genuine friends. Beneath the bright sun, Waters broached the subject that was torturing them all. “Do you ever think, Mr. Chard, had I not happed upon the
ambergris that our present enmity may have been avoided? For it seems the promise of riches, sir, hath caused a great change unto you.”

At once Chard drew in his oar and stopped rowing, obliging Waters to do the same lest they commence traveling in circles. The little boat bobbed on the swell as Chard fixed his glare upon him. “You? You happed upon the whale? ’Twas I what saw it first.”

“Come now, Edward, let us be friends,” Waters implored. “We have good news to share this morn—”

“You cannot say so. I found the amber grease, and by rights, I own the whale’s share of the whale.”

“Jane and I, we have decided, we shall be wed—”

“Mine!” he shouted. “And what’s this, wed? You cannot have her, Robert, nor the money either. I found her out first, just as I discovered the treasure.”

“Mr. Chard, please,” Jane said. “We are in love.”

“Love, is it? Love? You are mine, too, Jane Long, and I’m ne’er done with you. How dare you lay claim to what is mine, girl or amber grease.” With the butt end of the oar, he poked Waters in the ribs.

“Leave off,” Waters shouted. He fingered the knife belted at his hip. “Once more, and I’ll cut your t’roat.”

Leaning forward in the boat, Jane set it rocking upon the waves. “Good sirs, I entreat you.”

“Entreat me not, thou jot. You are no better than a thief and a whore, you scarescrow.” He spat in the ocean. “He may have you, all I care, but that fortune is rightly mine, as I saw it first, damn you.”

She reached to lay a hand upon his knee and calm him, but then drew back. “A quarter is yours, Mr. Chard. And half belongs to us.”

The oar struck her so quickly and surely that Jane had no moment to raise a hand in defense. The blade of the wood hit the bone of her brow and split the skin like an overripe melon, a string of blood
dribbling from the wound, and the blow knocked her upright where she sat. ’Tis said that in the moment of death, all of life passes through one’s final thoughts, and she did think in that split second of her mother with the youngest brat at the breast, thought of how she grabbed the wheel and saved the
Sea Venture
from drowning in the houricane, thought of Ravens smiling o’er her like a father, the men and women waving good-bye from the decks of the
Patience
and
Deliverance
, thought of Chard’s first kiss and the dream of life with Waters, all these contained in one moment, itself cleaved in two and both halves split further still, for what measure of time cannot be thus divided? There was no pain but the shock of the clock suddenly stopped as Long Jane Long slipped from the rowboat and into the Atlantic, and the world turned upside down, the sky now below her head, the waves above her feet. When she opened her mouth to cry out to the men in the boat that now looked as if it were beneath her sinking body, “Come save me,” she drew in the whole sea to her lungs, felt herself swole and pressed for air, as if both men and Carter, too, and the whole Virginia Company were upon her chest, and hoped some great fish would swim by and swallow her, the Lord save her, in the hour of her death, as she quit this world by one man’s fit of anger and by his most grievous envy.

B
y the end of her story, she had trapped us in the pathos of our own imaginations. The curtains framing the narrow window stirred a breeze redolent with salt-heavy sea, smelling of fish fries and steamed spiced crabs and oyster shells baking in the heat, though the sunrise, judging by the bruised color of the sky, was an hour or two away. Water gurgling in the sink broke the peace, and I peered into the bowl to find a little rowboat circling in a whirlpool that soon sucked down all: boat, water, a small island complete with miniature palm trees and what appeared to be a barking dog the size of a flea. Craning my neck and placing my head in the bowl, ear turned toward the drain, I thought I heard the distant refrains of some sea shanty, the voices thinning into a dreadful emptiness. The disappearance of Crab, in particular, filled me with a profound sorrow of the vicissitudes of fate that spare nothing, the innocent and the guilty swept away in one tide. This seems deeply unfair to me, an accident of design. The others huddled together on the porcelain edge of the bathtub, Dolly and the old man on either side of Long Jane, their arms draped over her wide
shoulders, offering comfort as she quietly sobbed, her chin resting on her chest.

“But it was an accident,” I said. “Probably.”

They lifted their heads. Three sets of eyes stared accusingly awaiting explanation.

“That is, he—Chard—was probably aiming for Mr. Waters and hit her instead. Clearly, Waters made him lose his temper. He didn’t mean to …”

Jane glared as if I had just fractured her skull with an oar. A thin red scar appeared on her forehead, pulsing like an artery, and then abruptly disappeared. She bent her head and thick coils of slubbed hair hung like ropes toward the floor. I silently withdrew the manslaughter defense and offered no new theories, and we again retreated into the dark thoughts of our own minds. After a while, the old man asked, “Out of curiosity, what ever became of the fine young man who beat the girl to death?”

“Two years they waited for rescue, and only through the intercession of Mr. Carter did they not murder each other over the ambergris. He hid the gun the admiral had left behind and hid their knives and made them swear oaths after the ‘accident’ and gave them promise of salvation. If not in this world, then the next. All hope had been but abandoned when they espied the redcross sail of an English ship on a fine day in July of 1612. ’Twas the
Plough
, with sixty on board under the hand of Governor Moore, sent by the Virginia Company to make a settlement in the Bermudas from those survivors of the Somers expedition who had made it safely to Jamestown. To those on board, the three men were a strange sight. Nearly naked, brown as Indians, bedraggled, and hairy as apes, the mariners were a kind of legend, living proof of the grace of God.”

“Chard and Waters kept secret their hidden treasure and hatched a plot with Captain Robert Davies of the
Plough
to smuggle the ambergris
on board and then so on to England, and it was Davies who recruited Edwin Kendall, a man privy to Governor Moore’s council, to join the conspiracy. As all such plots, it was spoiled by their greed and fear, and they were turned in by Kendall and made to give over their treasure to the Virginia Company.”

“While Davies was forgiven upon his promise to sin no more, Chard was sentenced to the gallows. A scaffold was erected, but it was a ruse by the governor to ensure that order be kept. Chard was let off without severe punishment, and the ambergris was sent back to England upon the
Plough
, though truth be told, Mr. Davies and Mr. Kendall managed to steal some little chunks and sell them for 600 sovereigns, and though a warrant was writ for their arrest, Davies escaped to Ireland and Kendall to Scotland and then to Nova Scotia with settlers of 1622.”

Shaking her head, Dolly exclaimed, “Men.” And then she spat on the floor. “Whatever happened to the real rogues?”

“Carter and Waters were named to the council of Governor Moore, and after Moore departed for England three years later, Mr. Carter was one of the leaders of the colony. Mr. Waters left for Virginia and built a farm, only to perish on Good Friday of 1622 at the hands of the Powhatan.”

The old man asked, “What became of Mr. Chard?”

“Moore kept him in hard labor till 1615, and then he went off to the West Indies on a pirate ship, plundering in the Caribbean and as far east as Tunis. A mate of his, a Frenchman named du Chene, killed him one drunken night for coveting a girl he had taken from west Africa.”

I offered a bromide at the conclusion of her tale. “A kind of poetic justice, don’t you think?”

In two strides, Jane reached the corner by the toilet and grasped the pole of the harpoon, brandishing the broken end like a battering ram. “Justice?” She reared back as if to poke the ragged splinters through
my chest. “What justice can you possibly see in the life of a young girl cut short by the greed and envy of one man?”

Had not my protector stepped between the two of us, she would have impaled me on the stick, but the old man stopped her with a gesture and soothed her with a word. Her purple face paled to pink as the blood rushed out of her head, and dizzy, she again handed over the harpoon and collapsed to sit on the toilet.

“My friend.” The old man took me aside. “Perhaps your temporary absence would diffuse this tempest. What say you, ladies, that we retire for the time being?”

Dolly and Jane sidled up to him, hooked an arm in the separate crooks of his two elbows. They took turns whispering some startling words into each ear.

“Do you have a place where we might enjoy a private interlude?”

My first thought was of my bedroom, but then I remembered the various women still slumbering, presumably, on the bed. I suggested my office two doors down, but he seemed wary of leaving the ladies behind, and instead, sequestered them in the bathtub behind the shower curtain. He spoke once more to me in a low, suggestive tone. “They are going to teach me … certain things.”

“Certain things?”

“You know.… Certain things of a delicate nature. Certain things suggested by her story. Discreet matters.”

“I see. Certain things.”

“Not all of us are men of the world, like you.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I come from a very respectable family. I’ve often speculated, however, as to other certain things.”

Completely baffled by his reasoning, I could only nod.

“Be a good lad,” he said, “and fix us something to eat while we are indisposed. We are bound to be famished.”

“Do you have anything particular in mind?”

He stroked his chin as if contemplating a small Vandyke beard. “I am not picky, though if you had some turtle soup.”

“I think not.”

“Any slumgullion will do. A little
dejeuner
to take the edge off, eh?” And with that, he pushed me from the room.

O
ld Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
. The line from the nursery rhyme attended my way past the closed doors on the upper floor, and down the darkened stairway, but when I reached the bottom landing, the rest of the ditty had escaped my mind, and furthermore, I had forgotten the reason for my journey. Perhaps it was the bump to my coconut, or perhaps the visits from these strange people with their twisted histories had jarred my short-term memory, or perhaps events from long ago now jostled with contemporary thought, but the purpose of my presence in that spot at that hour had vanished. As often when searching for a missing item—my wallet or watch or keys—I tried to reason my way out of confusion by going back in time.

Our memories are best recalled by the houses of our lives. My parents’ home, where my brother and I were raised, holds within its walls the memories of childhood, and any attempt at reconstructing my younger self also requires rebuilding that home in my mind. As a boy, I used to sit for hours at my father’s desk in his study and draw. My mother would leave these huge sheets of brown paper, the kind you get at the post office for wrapping parcels, maybe four feet long. So that the edges wouldn’t curl, I’d stack building blocks to hold down each end. Every day after school, I filled every inch of that space. One time I drew a whole city block. Every window and door, all the bricks perfect and in place. Or I would make a map of invisible countries, mystery cities. Lay out where the park would be, the baseball stadium, all
the roads and bridges. Later, as a college student and then as an intern and junior associate, I lived in a series of apartments, boxlike studios or once a charming pied-à-terre, but those cells were not conducive to anything but a few hours’ sleep. When my brother and I bought this house to share, I had at last some dreamscape. Attached to this house are the reveries of a woman. Even now I can picture her here, moving like a phantom through the labyrinth of rooms, gracing the space with her laughter. At rest on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, her feet beneath the curled and napping cat. Drying her hair in the kitchen after being caught in the rain. Surrounded by constellations of fireflies on a warm night in June. I have everything of her but a name. Where is she now, and what has become of her? Who is she? For that matter, who are these strangers in this space? The possibility that the man who met me in the bathroom is the ghost of my father seems less and less likely, and if not, then who is he and what does he want?