Pirate Talk or Mermalade (7 page)

Take care, your leg’s not—and the wallow of the boat—

Never mind the leg. I’ll get it, I’ll get it. It’s not so high that I can’t—with this poker—

Watch out! The deck there—the rope—

Once more—I’ll get it sure this time, I will—If I have to hear its gallows’ talk once more, I’ll—

You missed by a length.

I’ll throw this belaying pin at you too, I will, if you don’t stay quiet. I think I nicked the wing of it. A nick and a
jab, it was, and a good one with the poker. You don’t see the bird now, do you?

I don’t see the poker neither.

I would sleep but the pain—every wave jolts it—I can’t abide the pain in my leg. Or what it once was.

Calm yourself. You’re bleeding again.

That is not the death smoke that the priest makes, smoke traveling from the far yonder of the boat?

Not incense, no. But smoke it is. Where did you throw that damned hot poker?

Not far enough, not overboard. I can see the fire rising.

I love an island.

I love an island with a bit of wood on it.

Yes, we could use a bit of wood, deserted and empty as it is.

With my leg burnt to ash, I think of wood more than you, I ponder quite a bit over wood.

I would have paddled my own soul to heaven and back for you to get at the wood of our skiff but it drifted. I pressed hard at the oars but our boat stood still with you screaming Fire! of your leg.

I was afeared you had forgotten me.

It was enough to drag your sizzling leg ashore with that cutlass trying to drown us both. Who could see the bloody shore for the smoke of the boat burning and your leg? I couldn’t. I was glad for the island, happy for dawn at last.

It’s not just the dunes, the dunes suck down the prince of legs, it’s this stick I suffer forward on, this twisted length of rotten driftwood you think is so bloody perfect.

You wouldn’t want a leg of palm. The Queen’s ton it would be. Real wood will float in from the boat. Just wait.

I’ll crawl from one end of the island to the other, from leeward to windward, that’s my waiting. Cannibals wait, I can’t.

You are an idiot.

Tis true. Soon enough a lost shrike or a pigeon or that Hanged will come flying over the island and instead of eating the seed in its beak like a glutton after all its flying for days and days with nothing at all for food, it will drop its seed over a soft patch of sand where the seed will take root and sprout and then branch over our heads to make a place for the gluttonous bird to rest in after all his flying for days and days. Just for me a fine leg will be grown from the tree which we’ll then saw down in great haste, having waited as we must, fully for twenty years, but having eaten the bird some years back.

Sea almonds! Wherever I step.

I thought they were stones of a rough sort, hampering my way like every anthill and crack.

Your cutlass could break them open if I could but use its rubied hilt or its broadside.

It is all I have, in protection—and to practice my carving. We must get a gull to drop these almonds from high onto a rock.

You’ll be buttering gull on toast in heaven before it obliges us with that great trick. Your cutlass. Now.

I’ll run you through first.

You are such a pirate.

I am a legless man in distress. Stand back!

Try for a button on the first mate’s canvas or the lace and underthings of McDougall fast across my chest. Come on.

Bless my cutlass, you are such a sight swimming in all
those clothes. They are barely dry.

McDougall was really the one for fancy clothes, always pawing through the chests. I heard him say he was careful not to shoot through the actual hearts of the well-dressed gentlemen so as not to ruin the lace at the front.

At least it’s cloud season on this island, and cool for all this you are hauling on your body like it was all you had.

It is.

Hanged.

Mercy!

It liked the fire, it warmed itself by the flames.

Get thee away from me.

Egad.

That was fair close. I swear upon my gobspit that island birds eat more than others, they have that much more to drop.

Make yourself calm. The bird is gone.

I’ll play calm when there’s no more wave. What? The print of a hand?

A print of a hand.

A cannibal’s for sure.

Or a monkey’s. There’s the palms here for them.

The belt of the earth is higher than this, and monkeys winter in places warmer, or I would.

No footprints, just these marks of a body dragged behind. Another like you, legless.

We must find and succor him!

And share rations? The sea almond splits only in two. You were right, it must be a cannibal’s.

Hanged.

Oh, why couldn’t we be put ashore according to the rules, with a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and a pistol with one load? Why did we have to burn and sink? Why this bird—

When the rain comes, you’ll catch it in your mouth in the midst of your caviling. Me, I’ll find a cup in a shell.

To the cannibal then, we’ll toast him.

So—the hand was yours. Why, why, why do you follow us? We’re but lost lads ruined from greed with nowhere to go even if we change one island for another.

I chase you best through water.

Without your cane you will not gain on me here on land. Except that we are marooned. But for a drink of water, I could use the water.

Rest your wants. The parrot knows the way to fresh water—that’s why you should heed it.

My brother will kill the parrot first and drink its blood.

Tell him the cannibal sent it and if he lets it out of his sight, it will squawk to the cannibal of his fire.

He thinks the cannibals are roasting his leg. Every night he wakes screaming that the other leg’s gone and bades me to touch it. For him I concocted a salve from a plant as I cut from the shore. Except for the bird, he is better.

I’m sorry that the bird recites “Hanged” so willfully. He must have been cheap, that’s all I can say, with a teacher not so skilled as I. I would have taught him “Water.”

Oh, for a lime! Get us off this island now, we are bound to this sand and tree and its almonds. Oh, but for a few fish.

All I can do is follow and wait until you will follow
me. Our father despises you every day for not choosing the sea, for locking yourself to the land. Feel around your neck.

I have no gills if that’s your meaning.

The mixing of the races does not always come true. Pity. But the sex is always sure. You’re my sister.

Don’t touch me there.

After Peters caught me, I sang the wrong pirate off the gallows. When first a creature like me comes up out of the deep, all humans and time are alike. I knew you to be a pirate, just not where. After you slipped me your brother’s name signed by you, I knew you better. Except you were male. Show me your females.

I will not.

I will swim beneath the poop deck.

Not that! It is hard enough.

Together we will tell Father you have returned.

I know nothing about this father. Leave me be.

He is the father you seek. Didn’t your mother tell you?

My mother told me of many fathers, none wishing death upon me.

Although Father is not weighed down by gold and other appurtenances, just by the fishy depths, the pirates so often cannot keep their ships afloat even on sunny days and their treasure sinks to him of their own accord.

All of that treasure is his?

And yours, by way of family, with the squabbles that attend it.

I can’t breath underwater.

You haven’t tried. Gill/girl. It’s just a slip in the writing. Let me teach you exactly how they come together.

Oh, no—that’s a lesson I don’t want.

Two sister fish we are, and one knows the ways of the shore and can sing a sailor to the very brink, and one trails her hair the way they do, until it catches a sailor.

I have heard the singing when I press my ear to the hull. I have heard my own.

A pirate sees the hair in the tide before he swings, a true wild swag of it. He has to sing back quick or his nether part will grow longer and longer with him a’dangle on the rope. We are uncommonly clever about a man’s parts, as you will be too. You must come with me, for the love of our father who abandoned you because he could not stay.

The world is scarce of love, it washes few and drowns most of those.

You will not come?

There it is—the rain at last. I must race to the shells I have collected and nurse my brother.

You are bound to your brother as fast as husband to wife.

Don’t come upon him or he will think he is raving for sure and I will have to attend his supporations all over again. And don’t leave any more of your prints. He will become a cannibal himself if he is reminded.

You send me away after all my trouble? Why can’t you see that you know your rightful place all along, and long now to swim there?

I am no girl, nor fish. I am not your sister, nor your father’s child. I am a pirate on a pirate’s island, with no past at all, and surely no future. Do not slander what little I have left. Begone from me. Leave my sight!

In the beginning, everyone lived beside water.

I like that. Beside and not in it.

Everyone lived beside water that was sweet and you could drink all of it. You didn’t wait for a storm, you didn’t wait for a bird to show it to you.

Water, I want water.

You should not have scared the bird.

Let it fan me with its water-love, let it fly to me with a key to water around its green neck. I didn’t mean to throw so many rocks.

Sit down, sit down. The dew can be sucked from the leaves on the morrow. Let us try again for a water story: Tataunga, the great chief—

—whose teeth crushed shells, who cannot see his business his belly is hitched out so far, who keeps pirates behind staves to dance on his fire.

The savage king Tataunga gives a great feast in praise of water, with grog and beers and soups—

Not soup. Never soup again. Too much rope in the soup.

Tataunga possessed two beautiful daughters, begot by a woman flung off a maharajah’s vessel.

Named Ma.

They are all named Ma who have you as a son.

One of the daughters escaped the evil Tataunga and the other stayed below and kept her fins. The son who is not so beautiful is from another father.

So many fathers. What of the fish woman?

She’s a whale. Small, but not perch or something with silver in its skin.

Whale, fish—they are all mostly water.

O, hateful water, oh beautiful water.

This beautiful fish with watery fins and skin the color of ruby beaches at sunset the boy befriends, speaking to her just long enough to get her true secret.

Many palms sway behind Tataunga as he dances—what secret would that be? The secret of life? I know that secret, it’s the thing that Tataunga does at night to his last and final daughter.

No, not at all. The fish gives him the secret of death instead, that’s it, the fish tells him how death fights us.

We are all dying. Great gasping breaths, the hawking, then the phlegm. How can we listen?

Don’t lean on me so—the daughter possesses an eye that sees beyond all others and she uses it. Though Tataunga sends her to every part of the sea, to every shore that the seas wash up to find her sister and her secret, he dies before he hears it.

I have the eye. See—a whale’s eye.

Give it here. That eye is mine.

I was given it, I didn’t take it from you and I need it
now, to fight off Tataunga with mine eye.

It stinks. You don’t want it.

I’ve had it too long to stink, unless it be the stink of my skin against all these washed-up clothes.

Keep the eye then, you cur. Tataunga brings his hooks and axes. I see him bury himself inside the whale’s chest.

I’ll bury myself.

You’ll get sand down your gullet, you’ll choke on it.

You are without respect! Tataunga comes to cut out your tongue.

Put down that cutlass. It’s my cutlass.

The palms wave as if to attack, we must fight Tataunga.

All right, we’ll fight the palms so they don’t cut out your tongue. As long as you don’t harm the stick I walk on. Tataunga!

Tataunga! Not so close. I think you are too close.

The battle ends with Tataunga drinking a cup of grog with us—

—and weeping over his lost daughter.

What about the daughter?

His tears fall upon the lost daughter and they turn into treasure, pieces o’ eight in bags of silk.

Finally, treasure. Which Tataunga doesn’t need or want so we hasten to take it.

But you are Tataunga.

I thought you were the daughter.

The fish?

I am not the fish either. I am not even the whale. The secret! The secret! I’ll cut it out of them.

Let me seize that sword of yours. You’ll do yourself harm.

My eye! You have cut mine eye! You have poked out my eye!

Don’t—scream—so.

My eye, my eye!

It’s just the one, you can do all your looking with the other.

Get away. Get away. My eye!

Hold it with your thumb to stop it bleeding.

Monster!

We’ll get you a patch, a lovely patch out of hide, or a black swatch. It’s not like losing another leg.

What am I to do? I’m blind.

You are the one-legged brother who creeps, and now you will have to creep alongside me.