The Convicts (9 page)

“It was you what gave me this.” The boy touched his scar, and it twitched into a terrible grin. “Well, things is different here, ain't they? Who's got his mates around him now?”

I felt utterly nriserable, woozy and hot. But even through my daze I was afraid of the boy with the scar. The others had been withered by the hulk, but he had been hardened, like a bit of steel in a fiery forge. If he thought I was someone else, how could I prove that I wasn't?

“Lads,” he said. The eating stopped. Faces looked up. “This here's the Smasher, he calls himself He'll think he's a nob, but he ain't. He's worse He's a nosey, you hear.”

I didn't know what he was talking about.

“Pay up, nosey.” He tapped his spoon on the rim of his bowl ,lfeutoo, bumpkin boy. You both owe me a share.”

I would have given mine gladly if I could. But it seemed too huge an effort to lift my bowl. I groaned to myself.

“He's got the fever,” said a redheaded boy.

“Ain't the fever, Carrots,” cried another. “He's seasick!”

It was true. I, the son of a captain, the descendant of fishermen, was seasick in an anchored ship in a river.

“He is! He's seasick.” A laugh spread up the table and across to the next. On the whole dark deck the boys leaned left and right and stared toward me, those skeletal boys with skulls for faces. They might not have smiled in months, but now they sat in their brown clothes, in their irons, and shook with mirth. “Seasick! Seasick!” they cried. Even the guards laughed, and I doubted if that horrible ship had ever heard the laughs of boys and guards together. But it didn't last long. The guards recovered first, then beat the laughter from the boys. Heads went down again, spoons to bowls again, and the ship seemed to shrink into misery and darkness.

The scarred boy tapped his bowl again. “Pay up. Give us a share.”

Oten Acres stared back with a wondering look. “Why? It's the little fellows here who need it. Like him.” He pointed at the boy beside me, so small that his feet didn't touch the floor. “It's you should share with him. Big lump like you.”

That little boy gasped. He wasn't more than ten years old; he couldn't have been even that. His face was still like a baby's, his hands just tiny things. “Do what he says,” he whispered. “That's Walter Weedle. He's a nob.”

Weedle's little rat's eyes fixed on Oten Acres. “It's share and share alike here, ain't it, lads?” he said. “You share and I like you. Don't, and you get a bruising.”

“I don't want no trouble,” said the farm boy. “But you've got a lot, and I've got very little.”

“You've got little
sense”
said Weedle. “Now pay up, noseys.”

“Please give it to him,” whispered the boy beside me. “You give him yours, I'll give you some of mine.”

“I don't want
any
of it,” I said. “He can have the whole lot.” I nudged the bowl away. It was picked up and passed from hand to hand, then came back the same way, lightened by a quarter. The little boy set it down in front of me.

“There's the lad,” said Weedle. “Now you, bumpkin.”

Oten Acres surprised me. After all his tears and pleading on the deck, I thought he would buckle under. But he sat up straight and glared at his bowl. “Take mine, too,” he said. “Pigs is all it's good for anyway.”

“Pigs?” The boy's scar turned pure white. “We'll see who's pigs around here.” It was Oten who had stood up to him, but it was me who Weedle fixed with his rat's eyes. “Just you waif,” he said.

The ship moved; my stomach boiled. I was half sick with dread, and the sight and smell of my food made it worse. I swept the bowl away. “Take it,” I told the little boy beside me.

“Do youtoean it?” He gazed up, then wriggled with happiness. His hand, below the table, gave me a small touch of thanks, and I saw that I had gained a friend, as well as an enemy.

I heard the ship's bell ring, and the boy who had brought my breakfast in a bucket now came and fetched the bowls. The tenches cleared as a frenzy of work began. Boys tipped up the benches, tipped up the tables, and stowed them along the wall. A brush was put into my hand, a bucket of water sluiced across the floor.

The little fellow who had eaten my breakfast appeared now at my side. “Tom!” he said. “Ta, very much,” He worked Mis brash back and forth. “I'm Midgely,” he said. “It's Williani Midgely, but they never say William.” He looked around very quickly. “Mostly I'm Midge.”

The water from my sponge streamed across the wood. In my muddled mind it seemed to run uphill.

“Is it true?” His voice was a whisper. His eyes always moved, watching every corner. “Did you really do that to Weedle?” He drew the scar with his finger, across his face. “Did you, Tom?”

“No,” I said.

“If he thinks you did, he'll kill you. He will.” Midgely nodded. “Sure as spit, he will.”

“But—”

“Shhh!” Midgley turned himself about and went scrubbing toward the wall.

For hours, it seemed, I was left by myself to wash the same bit of wood over and over. When the bell tolled eight strokes in quick pairs, it brought an end to our chores. We put away our sponges and our mops, rags and brooms and buckets. Our bowls were brought back, now cleaned and damp, and Midgely appeared at my side. He showed me how to wrap the bowl in my handkerchief and where to stow it along the wall, then made sure I was with him as we marched to the deck above, to a vast workroom full of tables.

We sat together at one, with Weedle and Carrots and Oten. The table was heaped with cloth, the same brown canvas that made our uniforms. A guard brought reels of thread, and for each of us a long needle as thick as a little spike.

“Look, Tom,” said Midgely, touching my wrist. “Look here, I'll show you how it's done.”

The cloth was in two shapes—the sleeves and the backs of shirts—and it was our task to stitch them together. Midgely stretched his arms apart to measure his thread. He broke it with his teeth and, squinting, poked it through the needle's eye. “Never tie a knot,” he said. “It only slows you down.” He talked as though his mouth were full of water, slurring all his sounds. “Only shlows you down,” he said. “Now look.” He took a sleeve from one pile and a back from another, and matched the edges. “Like this,” he said. “You see? Match ‘em right, and all'sh Bob, Tom. Now look” He sewed them together. That was all there was to it, but Midgely showed me every step and every stitch. “It's easy when you get the hang of it,” he said, “Now try it, Tom.”

I threaded my needle and sewed my cloth together. Midgely smiled up at me with his baby cheeks. “That'sh good,” he said, in his watery voice. “Oh, that'sh grand, Tom.”

There were small, square windows along the wall that let in shafts of light and cold breaths of air. But still the lamps were burning, and my sickness only grew worse. It came in bursts, with each shift of the light, or every time a reel of thread suddenly rolled itself along the table. I tried to put my mind on the work, but it was the most mindless business anyone could have dreamed of, and I soon saw that it would never end. When we got near the end of the piles, more cloth appeared.

The bell tolled once.

I recited Virgil to myself in Latin, and Pliny in Greek. I made myself dizzy with Euclidean elements, and I kept listening for the ring of the bell. When my pile of doubled pieces grew, Walter Weedle reached out and took a few to add to his own, so that it seemed he did twice the work of me. The guard, each ti&ie he passed, saw my little pile and bashed me on the shoulders. “Work harder;” he said. “Work faster”

We were supposed to do it without talking, but a murmur of whispers hummed in the room, and bubbles of silence followed the guards. I was reminded of frogs in a pond. But Midgely knew when to whisper and when to be silent. He asked where I was bom, and why Iwas on the hulks. “Can you read?” he whispered. “Can you do numbers?” But I Mrefy answered, too ill to care. Hundreds and hundreds of times I pushed the needle through the cloth and pulled it out the other side. Soon my fihgertips were punctured, and drips of blood marked every second stitch.

A boy fell asleep and was bashed awake. Two others were taken from their places and marched from the room.

“They're going to punishment,” whispered Midgely. “Every morning there's punishment.”

“Worse than
thisT
I asked, and he laughed.

“You'll see.”

They came back hunched and hobbling, their faces drawn. It seemed they had aged into old men with trembling hands.

The bell took forever to count up to eight. But finally it did, and we put aside our cloth and thread. We trooped downstairs for our dinner—a bowl of the same gray gruel, and a little chunk of waxy cheese. We held it up and chanted a blessing, and Weedle demanded his share. But Oten Acres wouldn't give up a morsel. “Get stuffed,” he said, staring glumly at his food.

I remembered my father telling me once about bullies. “They're only seventh-raters, dressed up like ships of the line,” he'd said when I'd come home in tears one day. “Run out your guns, Tom, and they'll strike their colors.”

The only color Weedle struck was a deep and furious red. He muttered the most bloodcurdling oaths, then demanded a double share from me. I gave it up without a care, and passed the rest to Midgely. “Don't think I'm done with
you,”
said Weedle.

Already I hated the bell. It rang once to start our meal, twice to end it, and we formed our lines and climbed through the ship. I followed a rut that irons had grooved in the planks, up past the workrooms and out to the open air.

I thought then that I would see the sun going down, that my first day was over. But it was only noon, not evening, and I realized that the bells counted
half hours.
With seven years ahead of me, the difference was nothing. A blink, an instant, was all it was. But the disappointment was nearly enough to break me. I lowered my head and trudged in the line, round and round the deck. My heart felt as heavy as my irons.

Seven years,
I thought. I couldn't last that long. Why, I couldn't last the six
months
the Overseer had hinted at. If Weedle didn't kill me, I would die from sickness, or wither away from the sheer misery of the place. I dragged my feet until Midgely bumped up on my heels. I whispered back at him. “Do people escape? Has anyone
ever
got off?”

His child's fist pushed me forward. “Don't talk to me, Tom.”

“Tell me,” I said. “Yes or no.”

A guard came running. He bashed me with his cane, then bashed Midgely, too. I cowered from him, ducking my head, and in the angle below his raised arm I saw the Overseer watching. I took a blow on my elbow, another on my wrist, but poor Midgely caught it worse. The cane whistled up and down, and a pathetic squeal came from Midgely's lips. But he didn't move to protect himself. He only winced and shook with each blow.

We circled the deck once more, then filed through the hatches and down to the workroom. I took my place and started sewing again. Across fixe table sat Oten, weeping silently. I could see the tears coming from his eyes, his tongue licking them away as they trickled down. Beside me, Midgely sewed his bits of cloth and watched the guards go back and forth.

Suddenly he leaned toward me. “People have done it,” he whispered.

I didn't know what he was saying at first.

“They Ve escaped,” he said.

I thought Midgely was clear off his nut. I couldn't believe I'd heard him properly.

“It's true,” he said. “That's how they escape.”

“They
tunnelT
I asked.

“Yes, Tom. Through the planks. Through the hull.”

Midgely bent quickly to his work as a guard came by. He waited, then whispered again. “The ship's half rotten. The wood's like mud in places, Tom. Look where there'sh water.”

It was some sly sort of clue, I thought. Where
wasn ‘t
there water, round a ship in a river? But a guard chose that moment to settle by our table, with his buttocks bulged against it, and we talked no more until the day was done.

The guards took our needles and thread. We went down to a dinner of boiled ox cheeks, a most disgusting sight. I watched the strands of cheese-colored fat curl over themselves like wriggling worms, and pushed my bowl away. Weedle took his share, and more, and Midgely got the rest. Across the table, Oten Acres neither shared nor ate, but only sat staring glumly at his bowl.

After dinner we trudged again around the deck, in the same weary silence. The air did me good, and I lifted my head to study the shore, thinking how I might get away. There were fishing boats in the river, and a fleet of scows and barges. In the navy yard to the south, a forest of masts grew from the wharfs and warehouses. The castle was in shadows, with the sun setting now behind it, but the marshes shone like a field of gold. There were acres and acres of grass, without a single building in sight. That was the way I would go; into the marshes and over the fields.

I went back into the ship feeling not quite so hopeless. Even my sickness was easing, and I was rather proud to think that I was finding my sea legs. We settled for the night on the lowest deck, crowded like cattle in a pen. Oten Acres lay huddled by a tiny window, staring out at the river. I was sitting with Midgely when a line of boys went marching past.

“Where are they going?” I asked.

“To chapel,” said he.

“Shouldn't we go with them?” I asked.

He sneered. “Only noseys go to chapel, Tom.”

We leaned against the planks, free now to talk as we wanted. In the middle of the floor, a group of boys played pitch-button with knots of thread and cloth. “Knuckle down fair!” cried one, as he might have at any playground.

“Tom?” said Midge. He touched my arm and surprised me with his question. “Do you think heaven's a hulk. Do you?”

“A hulk?” I said.

He nodded. “God's got ‘em, you know. I seen ‘em, Tom.”

I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. So up he got and went off to the side of the ship, and came back with a book—with two—held in his arms, at his chest. He put them down, then spread one open on the floor. “I nicked these from the chaplain,” he said, turning backward through the pages, past pictures of Elijah's flaming chariot, Daniel in the lions’ den, Joseph and his coat of colors. He stopped at Noah's ark and said, “There! See?”

The ark was tossed by a tempest. Round and dark, with a shack on its deck and a stump for its mast, it did look like a hulk. Faces of animals stared from round windows. The sons of Noah huddled by the cabin, fearful of the storm. But Noah himself stood up in the wind and the lightning with his long beard and white hair as wild as the spray on the water.

“See?” Midgely pressed his finger on the page. “That's God there, ain't it, Tom?”

I shook my head. “It's Noah.”

“No a what?” he asked.

I thought he was joking, but he wasn't He had never heard of Noah, or the flood that had drowned a wicked earth. He thought that the man in the picture had to be God just because he was so wild and so frightening. “There's other puzzles here,” he said. He showed me Moses in the rushes, Bartimeus being cured of his blindness. I had to explain them all, astonished that he'd never learned the Bible. Then he showed me one more picture. He said, “Look, Tom. It'sh me.”

He'd turned to David and Goliath. The giant was twice the height of the horses and their riders. His boots alone were taller than David. But the boy stood before him, swinging his slingshot, as though he had no fear.

“That's me,” said Midge. “Me all the time. I'm always fighting giants.”

He looked around before he whispered. “Weedle, he's the worst of them. He's the head of the nobs.”

At the far side of the ship, Weedle was sprawled below another window. He took up three times the space of anyone else, and again made me think of a king. His courtiers were sickly and wan, but they hovered around as he lay like a Roman in his squalid splendor.

“Why is he here?” I asked.

“ ‘Cause he's a convict, Tom.”

“But what did he do?”

Midgely moved closer. “No one knows but me,” he said. “I was in court when the judge sent him here. I heard what he did.”

“What?” I asked.

“You have to promise not to tell. Promise, Tom. He'll kill me if he knows I did him out”

I thought it must have been something dreadful, something beyond my imagining. I gave my promise, and Midgely whispered in my ear. “He's a snow dropper, Tom.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“Why, he was smugging snow, of course. From off the hedges, Tom.”

“But what's snow?”

“Shhh!” There were boys on each side of us, boys all around. They coughed with fever and moaned with dismay, and not one cared enough to listen to us. “Washing, Tom,” said Midge. “The white things put up to dry. You know, Tom.” His voice became even softer.
“Ladies’
things.”

“Petticoats?” I said. Midgely nodded quickly, with a smile on his face, and I laughed out loud. “That's why he's here? For stealing
petticoats?”

“Shhh!” said Midgely sharply. “He'll kill me, Tom. He really will.”

But Weedle was laughing with Carrots, the long scar splitting his face so that his jaw seemed ehormous. I could easily picture him prowling through the tiny gardens in the slums, plucking petticoats from hedges, and my fear of him dwindled somewhat. He was only a bully after all, full of nothing but bluster, as my father had said, the fancier of women's clothes.

“I shouldn't have told you,” said Midgely. “I should have minded my tongue.” He closed his Bible book. His hands worried the edges of it. “You won't say nothing, will you?”

“No,” I said.

He looked worried, though. He opened the book again, then quickly closed it. “In that picture, Tom, that battle? Does the giant kill the boy?”

“No,” I said. “David slayed Goliath.”

“Oh, he must have been brave,” said Midge. “He must have been like Acres there.” Only his eyes moved toward the farm boy. “David would have said the same as him. ‘Get shtuffed,’ he would have told that giant.”

Midge moved right beside me, his shoulder on my arm. “Don't you wish you was like that? Brave as him? If you ain't brave, you're done for here.”

His words stung like slaps. I didn't think of myself as a coward, but Midgely clearly did.

“We're just bum-suckers,” he said. “Me and you.”

I felt myself blush. “It's not that, Midge.” I told him what the Bible said, that the meek will inherit the earth. But he only frowned again and asked, “What's the meek, Tom?”

“The mild. The gentle people.”

“You mean the ones what don't fight back?”

“I suppose so,” I said. I didn't really know. “The Bible says not to fight your enemy. It says to turn away if he hits you, and not to cry out if he hurts you. Never hit back. Never cry out.”

Midgely nodded. “That's me, all right. That's you too, ain't it, Tom?” He looked up at me, and a smile lifted his lips for a moment. “We'll inherit the earth,” he whispered. “Think of that, Tom “

He put down his Bible book and took up the other. “Now read me some of this one, Tom,” he said.

It was the story of a missionary who had been to the South Sea islands. The pages had been turned so often that they were torn and grubby, smeared with dirt. Midgely knew exactly where to turn to find the picture that he wanted.

“Look,” he said, showing me an etching of an island. “Look at the trees. There's birds in the trees.”

I couldn't see them until he pointed right at them. Tiny and blotted, they looked at first like mistakes, as though the printer's ink had dropped on the etching. But I saw the shapes repeating, the trees just full of birds.

“There'sh bonesh and thingsh.” He was slurring Bis words in excitement. “There'sh sheashellsh on the shand,” he said.

He showed me a path leading up from the beach, the corner of a house that was otherwise hidden in the forest. He showed me a fish in the water, and the fin of a shark going by. “What does it say?” he asked.

I read to him what was written underneath. “The home of the chief was a thatched hut all but invisible from the sea.”

“All but invisible,” whispered Midgely.

There were a lot of pictures, and he knew them all in the same detail. In each he pointed out a thing so small that I just couldn't see it, no matter how I squinted or turned the book in my hands. I never saw the spear propped against a tree, nor the face of a savage in the bushes, nor the lizard sunning on a rock. Perhaps they weren't even there. In his mind, I thought, Midgely wandered through those pictures. In the evenings, and the nights, he lived on those faraway islands.

A boy beside us leaned across to see the book. Midge shoved him away; he knocked him aside with a sharp blow that came in perfect time with the ring of the ship's bell. Decks above us, that thing started tolling. The last time it had rung three times, but now it kept going—eight strokes in all. “Someone's forgotten the count,” I said.

Midgely frowned, then laughed. “We're in the dog watches,” he said. “Don't you know that, Tom? You, what can read and all?”

Pleased to know more than I, he launched into a dizzying talk on watches and bells and dogs, and I
still
didn't understand. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“I grew up in the dockyards, didn't I?” he said, getting to his feet. “All I ever knew was ships and sailors.”

Once more we went on deck, but only for a moment. In a long line, we threaded up the hatch and straight to the tumbling shacks at the front. The boys ahead fetched the bundles that I'd watched them bring out in the morning, going at the same plodding pace that took them anywhere and everywhere. I saw Oten Acres shuffle through the door and stop there, bewildered. A guard gave him a clout and a push; “Take your hammock,” he shouted. Poor Oten doubled over. “No one never gave me one!” he cried.

Fearing the same thing for myself, I waddled through the door with my hands held out, calling, “Please, sir, I haven't a hammock!” I avoided the beating Oten had got, and thought myself lucky for that.

We tramped down to that dark lowest deck, where boys were already hanging their hammocks from the great timbers on the ceiling. “I want to be by the window,” I told Midgely.

“Ain't a
win-dow,”
he said scornfully. “And it ain't really a scuttle, so don't call it that.” As if I ever would have. “It's a grating, Tom. All them holes, they're just carved out. ‘Cept for the ones on the gundeck, where die cannons was. And anyway,” he said, “there ain't a chance that you'll be sleeping there.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“ ‘Cause you ain't a nob,”

I ended up somewhere in the middle, between the noseys and the nobs, in such a crowd of hammocks that they nearly made a solid floor of canvas above the wooden one. We all stood there, our heads above the brown mass, like moles peering from the earth. A guard said, “Up!” and in a great rattle we climbed aboard the things. With twenty-four pounds of iron on my ankles, I didn't think I could do it. But I watched Midgely, then did as he did, swinging up and into a contraption that closed around me like a pod round a pea. I swayed from side to side, bumping first against Midge, then against the boy on my other side. He swore and pushed me away, so that I swayed all the harder, and hit him again.

My sickness returned, suddenly and wholly, as I gripped the sides of the hammock. At last it stopped moving, and I lay there, packed among the other boys as tightlylis bats in a cave.

The lamps went out. I heard the guards tramping up the ladders, then the rattle of chains and locks.

“What's going on?” I whispered.

“They're locking us down,” said Midge. “The guards never stay down here at night.”

I raised my head and stared across a sea of hammocks. A murmur of voices spread through the deck. Boys coughed and muttered; some began to snore. But others cried in muffled sobs, in whimpers and sniffs. They tossed and turned in a clangor of metal.

I heard a soft thud nearby, another farther off. Metal scraped on wood as someone crawled below the hammocks. The sea of canvas, now disturbed, moved in ripples here and there.

“Don't look,” whispered Midgely. “It's the nobs, Tom. At night they own the ship.”