Pirate Talk or Mermalade (3 page)
Read Pirate Talk or Mermalade Online
Authors: Terese Svoboda
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Mermaids, #pirates, #Sea Stories, #Arctic regions, #Brothers
I would not guess it.
Man cannot fly but he can swim.
Some, I have heard. I can’t. Water has always crept up and filled my shoes with trouble or taken our roof. Only when it buoys a boat do I want to venture upon it. My Ma screams in fear of it.
Your Ma has been taken too much by it.
Some sailors have had her, even from the far seas, and roughly too. I think it is why she loves the rope so, she dreams of belaying herself to land at last.
If I did not have these curls to keep, I would show you how gently the waves lift and hold your arms.
You will always have curls to mind.
I will.
Dust to dust, as the church says, not water to water.
Water to water.
I get seasick just hearing you say that. The way you sing it.
Water is ever more prevalent than earth. How many days can you journey by sea? How many by land?
I do not journey these days. I am a poor boy who studies but what you tell him.
Let me say then I think it is time for you to immerse yourself. Listen to my song. Come, come—
But your curls—
Over here. Through the rocks. The song.
There are currents. There are terrible fish. The waves—
Take my blasted cane! Waves to hold you, waves to—ah, Winthrop.
Snake! Snake!
Unbanded. I believe it is harmless, but you can’t be certain about one so orange along the tail. Hold it tight about the head, or it will bite you. Count the colors as it dies.
It’s dead, Winthrop. You’re going to die.
Don’t put fear into him. He might tell his father and his father will have you jailed for stealing his lessons.
The boy is slow, and will be slower.
Leave the snake in the thicket and go along. That’s a fine boy.
A boy with a fine purse.
The water—
I want no more to do with water, I want a berth on shore, with the whale’s bones and a woman who can carve its bone where I instruct. It is your own Cap’n Peters whom I fear has drunk the bone down.
Your Ma is ill over Cap’n Peters.
Cap’n Peters is ill over you. I will give you my name, make you a fortunate wife with an honest hearth.
The time is near when a woman will not need to set her hand in contract. Why not give her merely a set of numbers as can be found in any book to suffice for a term of possession, and not the name of a man? There are surely enough numbers, and more.
You are certainly a clever teacher and will make a clever wife.
Cease tempest-crying over that snake bite, boy, and press the burdock against it. Keep your hand over the wound where it swells too, that’s right.
You know so much about these things?
You must address me with belief in your voice.
Belief is a learned thing, like writing.
You do not learn your way to me.
Ways open daily like routes between blocks of ice athwart the bow that the brave sailor faces so often before his triumphant return.
Remove your hands from me. I will have the boy’s father lash your back to ribbons, with Cap’n Peters providing the whip.
Are these Dead Man’s Fingers?
Brother! I told you to stay away and ask questions later.
Point them toward the sky. Pray, point them up to where the blue clouds await their carpenter.
She is full of cant. You talk to her. I’ll see you later at Ma’s.
What do you two whisper of?
Of how prettily you speak of carpenters and clouds.
Thank you. Your brother is less sure of his words.
He is unused to women, having been at sea. That makes him a bad judge of their wiles. I know women from my Ma.
What about us is wily? I am as open as a hand. As for you, it’s not the Dead Man’s Fingers you want, it’s the full hand of a life you can spend. Here, open your own.
What ho! It’s as hard as marble, with the blue of a wave inside.
The whale’s eye. It should be dry and gone by now, eaten by cats. I found it in amongst the sycamore leaves, left from when that poor whale was taken asunder. Have it and study it. I like the way you laugh.
My brother is not watching? He will see nothing?
Nothing, I swear it. He cuts his thumb sawing on a stick as if it were bone, and sucks the wound.
5
Another Six Months
As tractable as a dog, she was.
A hound, I think. A harrier.
Likening me to dogs! When I think of all the trouble you’ve been.
Ma, don’t talk. You’re making bubbles of the blood.
I tried to return you after the theft but the family was gone, in grief I suppose. I was in Hampshire or Maudin’s, a’laundressing, or making the swords’ scabbards, or looking to the curling goods. I remember the sea and the stink of civet cat. It was after I fell in—and out—with the maharajah.
The leech that was left for her—find it. I think it’s crawled beneath the chest.
The man kept civet cats, fifteen of them. For the perfume. Baltrick was the name.
Not Kinnell?
Kinnell once gave me a trinket beaten out of gold. He’s the one who urged your return. At Godspeed, he shouted, over your infant cries. It could’ve been Reverend Baltrick. Or the maharajah.
No water—let her speak. Her lips still move.
The stealing wasn’t hard. A loaf under the blanket in
place of you.
place of you.
Which of us is stolen, Ma?
They wouldn’t pay my price to fetch you back. Or they didn’t receive my sign. They went sailing after the maharajah.
Peters’ route? The high one?
Don’t ask her more, she can’t speak.
She speaks.
A cow bellows better with a beet stuck in its throat, she struggles so.
What, Ma?
I wanted lads to fetch and cover me on the occasions when I had drunk overmuch, and to carry water that I should not have to do it myself with all my fine husbands.
I’ll close her eyes.
Don’t touch me.
That was surely the last breath.
Another.
I found a penny here, beneath the sheet.
You will need two.
Not if you never close your eyes, Ma.
I was in Hampshire—or Maudin’s. A man came up out of the sea. He had arms only, such arms.
What sailor was this one?
Manuel, a man from the seas of the south. He had a big mustache, and he wept that I should hold him.
A mustache like my brother’s?
She has no more to tell.
She is finished now.
She stirs.
He left, and I wept an ocean.
I’ll hold her up. Take a breath now. Did she ever tell us true?
She made the soup, she called us sons. You don’t waste breath on a deathbed.
But she only clouded the water.
Listen. That was surely the departed rattle, that last. You can’t wake the dead.
She’s green about the face—
Don’t go to sea, I tell you, don’t.
The sea? But—I will go, like brother.
We all go. What else?
Ma! Ma! Quiet yourself.
One of us is stolen, if not us both, and one of us—
The mustachioed man, the sea—
Ma!
She is surely done now. Open the window. Here is the mop. I’ll lay the coins.
It was just something she said. Look—I have her nose. She is my mother.
And I have the height of the beggar on Bond Street. Who is our father?
Are we even each other’s?
We were too young to know if that were true.
At least I will no longer find Ma hung on a rope everywhere.
Use the mop on your tears. What a woman you are.
It was her great wish, to be hung by her own hand. If she’d have just cut the mussels off the rope, she wouldn’t have suffered so. The terrible wounds at her neck. The coughing into it. She didn’t trust the baker. Those are badly crossed buns, she’d say to the baker and not put a penny his way.
Yes, yes. We’d better be doing the washing ourselves now, or the flies will take Ma to her rest.
Each fly with the face of Ma, each face the same and not ours.
We are men complete now, we need no mother. For a scene in whalebone: “The True Mother Greeting Her Lads.”
Surely the true father is dead. So many years have passed and not many live out their time.
There are tales about fathers who die and leave their estate to those who have been stolen away. It bides us well to consider this.
Not if he crawled out of the sea.
Or died of the snot, like Jimmy. Or built the gallows.
Or stole the bones of a whale with drink.
Or a dozen others.
A new woman we need more than a father. A woman to cook and carry the water.
Aye, water is the point of all this.
6
Dead of Winter
It’s too cold to even drag a nib over paper, let alone write my name.
You’ll be writing on a block of ice in midwinter to learn the signing, that’s what she said. And here we are.
Why must I sign a marriage contract? It’s just a delay, one of so many.
It can’t be so difficult if she can.
It’s easy for her. Her name is shorter by so many letters.
Until she gets ours. She says I remind her of her sister.
What—you?
Some way I make my laugh.
After I make my mark, you won’t need to laugh with her again. Oh, but what if someone sees how I sign and uses that for himself? I’ll make my money without all this writing, and as for marrying, she can sign for us both. Besides, I’m sure to topple the bottle just keeping the paper in order.
My sister Kate, she said, would advance the argument thus: If he can’t write his name, he can’t give it to you.
Peters is all the family she has. Oh, bother. So few of the seabirds yield the right nib for a seaman’s hand.
You should have swum when she asked.
Am I a donkey to be tested to see if it is worth the sale?
You don’t swim either, no one swims in the sea if they can help it. I wouldn’t swim even for the bone.
Or a wife?
I need to spread my name with offspring, not with a nib.
I don’t understand why she doesn’t put the test to someone else.
I am a man of high quality.
Just learn your name and write it or I will.
Threats, idle threats. I suppose the devil needs a signature too.
Put the curve there. I bought you a bit of tallow so you can see the paper after the sun sets.
The sea takes an X. You can join a crew with just a mark. Why couldn’t Peters have taken up with someone less taxing?
She’s slapping herself in the next room to keep the cold off, she’s tapping her cane.
Waiting’s a good lesson for someone whose relation could drink up a whole whale’s bone, as he may well have. Not to mention my own waiting, my soul dragged out and around for these many months, trying to find out what she wants.
It’s not Peters she wants. His signing is wrong.
You have spoken to her in confidence?
We were waiting for you to bring the paper.
Ach—I’ll teach the teacher—about waiting. We will wait in the cold, and not write.
I must’ve slept.
You snored to heaven.
What now? The ink has frozen in a puddle.
But you managed it—look.
I did that? I don’t remember—Is the fire out? Let me sleep just a little longer.
I’ll take it to her.
The tails be a little long.
The way my sister would make it, if she were one of us. Your finger is stained.
I dropped the ink.
It is your hand on this paper.
No, no. -Aye. I did it to reduce the steepness of my distress, having to listen to him all these months. Now the banns can be said and it can be over.
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