Deadweather and Sunrise (3 page)

He did that a lot. But I didn’t hold it against him like I did Adonis, because unlike my brother, Dad didn’t seem to take much pleasure from whacking me—he just wanted to get the point across that there was work to do and I wasn’t doing it. And he never stopped working himself, except every once in a while just before sundown, when he’d sit for a few minutes alone on the back porch, staring at the threads of smoke curling up from the
volcano and looking sad. It was an aching, heartbroken kind of sad, and it made me feel awful, because I knew without asking he was thinking about our mother.

Most of the time, though, he didn’t look sad—just grim and determined as he went about his work. And when he’d catch me doing something I shouldn’t—like sitting and reading in the middle of the day, beside a pile of wood that needed carrying—his eyes would flash with anger, and then the cracking would come.

But this time, there was no flash of anger. He wasn’t even looking at me—or at anything, really. His eyes held a puzzled, faraway look, like he’d forgotten something and was trying to remember where he’d put it.

I’d already stuffed the book halfway inside the back of my pants and was hurriedly gathering the wood in my arms when he stopped a few feet away and fixed his eyes on me for the first time.

“’Ey—got paper in there?” he asked, nodding at the book.

Coming from Dad, it was an odd question. Other than the accounting ledgers he muttered over sometimes at the long table in the den, he didn’t have much use for paper, let alone books.

“What, in the book?”

“Yeh. Loose-like. Fer writin’ on.” He raised one of his big, rough hands and jiggled it awkwardly in the air with his fingers and thumb pinched together, like he was pretending to write something.

“Only just the book pages,” I said. “I could tear some out.”

He shook his head. “Percy’s got paper, yeh? Fer lessons and such?”

“He’s got parchment. It’s in the den.”

He started for the house, disappearing inside so fast that I’d
barely reached the porch with the wood when he popped back out again, a sheet of parchment in one hand and a charcoal pencil in the other. Without a word, he brushed past me and headed back up the mountain.

Back inside, Percy was emerging from the den, rubbing his sleep-swollen eyes. He glowered at me, like it was my fault Dad had interrupted his afternoon nap.

“What the blaze does your father want with a pencil?”

THE SUN HAD SET and we were all sitting at the dining table, eating Quint’s stew, when Dad finally came back. The pencil and parchment were gone, but the puzzled look was still there. He walked past us without a sound, went to the stove, and ladled out a bowl of stew. He ate a few spoonfuls of it, leaning against the counter and staring off into space as we all watched him curiously.

“Daddy?” Venus called to him in her whiniest voice, as she twirled a lock of her dark, stringy hair around her finger. “Are you thinking about the pony?”

A while back, I’d made the mistake of telling my sister that one of Percy’s novels (
The Crisps of Upper Mattox,
which was mostly lousy except for a couple of good fight scenes and a carriage race) had a girl in it who married a prince. Venus ran squealing for the book, and while she never actually read it herself, she somehow wheedled Quint into reading it out loud to her before bed. The only details that stuck with her were that the girl in question was rich and owned a pony. Venus decided the pony was key to the whole thing—if she could get her hands on one, she’d automatically be rich, and once she was rich, the whole prince-marrying business would take care of itself.

So for the past six months, she’d been asking Dad several times a day to buy her a pony. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t smack her one and put a stop to it.

“Egbert give ye trouble? Want me to set ’im straight?” Adonis held up a fist and cocked it in my direction. I shifted in my chair, ready to dodge the blow if necessary.

Dad ignored them both. He ate another spoonful of stew, then set the bowl down and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He scratched his chin a couple of times through his beard in a thoughtful sort of way, then announced, “Lay out yer finest. Headed to Sunrise at first light.”

I COULD BARELY SLEEP that night. Partly because I was so excited about the trip—visits to Sunrise Island were rare and wonderful, and we’d never gone there on a nonholiday before. And partly because the next day was my thirteenth birthday, and for the first time I could remember, I was going to spend a birthday doing something besides trudging up the far side of the volcano with my family to pay our respects at my mother’s grave.

But mostly I couldn’t sleep because Adonis kept busting into my room to hit me with a stick.

This wasn’t a coincidence—he was trying to make me so tired I’d oversleep, because he knew if I did, Dad would leave me behind. It had worked once before and almost worked two other times. Of course, to do it he had to stay up half the night himself, which left him so tired he was always groggy and surly the next day. You’d think that would spoil his own trip to Sunrise, but I guess for Adonis, it was worth it.

It almost worked this time, too. The moment I opened my
eyes, I could tell from the heat and the heaviness of the air that dawn had already broken. Panicking, I sprang out of bed and ran smack into the wall because I’d forgotten that I’d turned my bed sideways in the middle of the night to barricade the door.

Once I got my bearings, I managed to get the bed out of the way so I could open the door and let in enough light to see. Then I found my best, most itchy shirt and put it on as I ran for the kitchen.

No one was there except Quint. He was standing on top of the counter—Quint didn’t have legs, just a couple of stumps where his upper thighs should have been, so he spent most of his time standing on top of things—and prying the last of his breakfast biscuits out of an iron tray. I could tell the biscuit had set up pretty hard from the way the thick muscles on his arm had to flex to rip it loose.

“Best ye hurry,” he said, tossing me the biscuit. “Yer dad already went up to get his boots on.”

I knew if I wasn’t sitting in the carriage all ready to go the moment Dad came out of the house, he’d smack me one for slowing us down, so I busted out the front door at full speed, trying to work my jaws over the biscuit without cracking a tooth as I went.

The carriage was parked out front, its door wide open. Percy was standing just behind it, tying up the back of Venus’s dress for her, and Stumpy—the field pirate who drives for us, and who in spite of his name actually has more of his legs left than Quint—was already up on the front seat holding the reins.

I waved to Stumpy as I jumped onto the side runner and launched myself through the open door into the backseat.

Then Adonis punched me in the mouth, launching me right back out again.

Even before I landed on my back in the dirt, I was cursing myself for not having seen that coming. The biscuit rolled away, bouncing a couple times before coming to a stop near Percy’s foot.

As Adonis hawed like a donkey inside the carriage, Percy bent himself over with a grunt, somehow managing to reach past his belly and pick up my biscuit without falling over. He dusted off the dirt and crunched it down as Venus wrinkled her nose at me.

“Egbert! You filthed up your best shirt! Daddy’s going to smack you for that.”

I opened my mouth to answer and tasted blood. As my sister stepped over me into the carriage, I put my hand to my lip and found a pretty good cut. It was either from Adonis’s fist or a shard of biscuit. I wasn’t sure which.

“Bleed down the front, he’ll smack you twice.” Percy stood over me as he said this, and little wet gobs of my stolen breakfast sprayed from his lips onto my forehead. Then he turned, blotting out the sky over my head with his big wide butt until he squeezed himself through the carriage door and into the seat next to Venus.

I had just enough time to wipe the blood with my handkerchief, dust off as best I could, and take the seat next to Adonis before Dad showed up on the porch.

He was in his best coat—the blue velvet one with the tails—and the bulges on either hip meant he’d strapped on his pistol belt, too.

That was another sign, not like we needed any, that this was an unusual trip. When we went to Sunrise Island for holidays, he always wore the coat. When he had business to do, either there or down in Port Scratch, he wore the pistols. I’d never seen him wear both at once.

As I chewed this over—
why get all dressed up to shoot somebody?
—Percy pulled the door shut, and the carriage shuddered as Dad swung himself up onto the front seat. Then Stumpy must have reined the horses, because we lurched forward, pulling away from the only home I’d ever had.

If I’d known then how long it’d be until I saw it again, I might have turned for another look—at the two upstairs windows, peering out from under the eaves like the eyes of some fat, sleepy giant, and the big wraparound porch with the shark’s jaws mounted over the door. It’s funny, but I wound up missing those jaws over the days to come. They made me feel safe, I think. You just knew no one was going to come after you in a house with teeth like that. No one from the outside, anyway.

The road from the house took us through the lower orchard. The ugly fruit trees were fogged in pretty heavy, and as we bounced down the hill, a few pirates drifted out of the haze to watch us pass. In the misty half-light, they looked like silhouettes of ripped-up paper dolls—half a leg missing here, most of an arm there, a hunk of one skull gone.

The one missing a hunk of skull was Mung. Seeing me in the carriage window as we passed, he gave me a little wink, and I managed a kind of two-fingered wave back without the others noticing and giving me trouble. Mung had worked for Dad forever, couldn’t talk (probably because of his missing slice of brain), and was nicer to me than anybody. When I was little, we played catch. We’d toss an ugly fruit back and forth, pretending it was a ball, until one day Dad caught us doing it and smacked us both for wasting time. That pretty much turned us both off sports, but I still liked Mung a lot.

Percy, jolted into action by a nasty bump in the road, announced, “Time for lessons, children.”

Adonis rolled his eyes, and Venus pushed out her bottom lip in a pout. “But, Percy! We’re traveling.”

“Nonsense. Learning never stops, not for travel, not for nothing.”

He said it with a straight face, even though we all knew the “learning” was just for Dad’s benefit, in case he was listening from up in front.

“Now tell me: what makes fog?”

No one answered.

“No? Nobody? Very well. I’ll tell you.” Percy raised a stubby finger, then paused dramatically. He always did that when he answered his own questions. To anyone who didn’t know him, the pause made it seem like he was emphasizing how important the lesson was. But the truth was he needed the pause to give himself time to make up an answer.

“Volcanic activity. The same forces that make the volcano smoke… seep up from the ground in the night, and—”

“Why don’t it stink?” Sometimes, Percy’s facts were so outlandish they even made Adonis skeptical.

“What? The fog?”

“Yeh. Volcano smoke reeks. Like rotten eggs.”

“Why do you THINK it doesn’t stink?” Percy asked with a little snarl of disgust. Repeating questions like that was another way he bought himself extra time. “Because the ground… traps all the stink. Dig a hole sometime. Get down far enough, it’ll all come rushing out. Gag you fierce. Then you’ll see.”

BY THE TIME we rolled into Port Scratch an hour later, the morning sun had burned off the fog, it was oven-hot inside the carriage, and Percy had filled my brother and sister with dozens of new facts about science, history, and math, all of them spectacularly wrong. Not that they would bother to remember them anyway.

Port Scratch was slowly waking up as we made our way down the wide, filth-ridden main road, the carriage lurching from side to side as Stumpy snaked around the pirates who’d passed out in the street the night before. The clop of the horses’ hooves stirred a few of them, and they’d stagger to their feet, shake the rum from their heads, and double over again to vomit. There are a lot of things that Blisstown, the port city of Sunrise, has going for it over Port Scratch, but one of the first ones you notice is the lack of puke on the streets.

When we stopped at the dock, Dad made us stay in the carriage while he haggled for a boat to Sunrise. He always kept us in the carriage until the boat was hired, mostly because of Venus—there weren’t many females in Port Scratch, let alone fifteen-year-old ones who bathed, and even though my sister looked like a horse and had the personality of a lizard, I guess the pirates weren’t too choosy about who they carried off.

It took longer than usual. Ordinarily, Dad liked to head down a day early with Stumpy to settle on a boat, but this trip was so last-minute there hadn’t been time for that. So we baked inside the carriage for almost half an hour, until my good shirt was so sweat-soaked it no longer itched, while Dad rooted around on
the docks, interviewing half a dozen candidates and occasionally waving his pistols when things got hot.