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Flint’s grandfather told him a story once. Told him many, actually, when he was only James, and Flint only a shadowy figure in Grandfather’s stories. It was a routine, after the use of his hands had passed over to arthritis, and he’d retired from the sea only to watch his son pass and have to find his way back into the world of work so he could make a living for little old James.
They both went to work. James with his hands shaking through the mending and James with his short stature in greater men’s homes.
And after work, Grandfather taught him how to cook.
And after dinner, in a cold and silent house, James made the fire and James piled the blankets onto the chair and James gave him lessons and James told him stories.
This one went a little something like this, as far as Flint could recall, staring through the fog of dust dancing in his singular beam of sunlight, snuck through the cracks of the Eurydice’s hold. In chains and under the watch of Israel Hands. Occasionally visited by Long John Silver, who spoke fast and without conviction. Who then left with a heavy sigh of someone who’s dropped his burden off at the top of a hill, only for it to roll right on down.
He thought he remembered it perfectly.
Simple and practical and like this:
James McGraw was crewed to a merchant ship once. Many times, actually. Back when anyone who was anyone to him called him James and never McGraw. When he was strong and slight and his fingers slipped knots into ropes as though they were born to it. Back when he thought that ease and dexterity would last forever.
On merchant ships, he said, things were simple. You worked and you worked and you worked, and the ship went and went and went, through an endless abyss of water that looked all about the same to you. The only variation was the weather, who changed herself only for the express purpose of betraying you. At the end of it, if there was goodluck, good wind, and a good captain, maybe you got paid enough for good bread, good wind, and a good bed to tide you over ‘till the next ship.
And if you weren’t lucky, well, then, maybe you didn’t get paid nothing at all.
On this merchant ship of this story, there wasn’t no good captain. The crew saw little by way of good wind. And James was about shit out of luck.
So well, that seemed just about the way things were bound to go.
Made for a miserable, discontented batch of sailors, I’ll tell you, Grandfather had chuckled, ruffling his hair. And none was more discontented than Smitts.
But then, that wasn’t true.
Smitts was just the loudest, lacking the caution and subtlety of a belching factory chimney pipe.
So when the air turned colder, and they found themselves huddled as close together as they could get without being a commentable amount of close, around that splinter-ridden, sawdust sopped table, James found himself across from Smitts. Who was talking too godamn loud.
And that, James thought, in anticipation of the story’s end before it came, and the leaving of his humble beam of sunlight through a slat in the ship’s hold with it, was the lesson.
Smitts was sitting next to MacGuthers that day, he’d recount, and he was siddled all the way up to him because Smitts was stupid enough to do all his loving and all his hating out in the open. He was on his way to getting caught for it, too.
And that was the lesson.
Because Smitt’s hand was a pinkies’ width away from MacGuther’s, which was just about where the trouble started.
“You know,” Smitts started to say that day, a story on its way to slipping from his tongue. “I’ve heard there are ships out there where the captain and his men eat all together.” Theirs was in his cabin. “And they eat the same food, that they’ve pooled their —and theirs the key word—ships’ fund all together for, and that the ship’s cook makes all the same.
“And on these ships, too, the captain only makes a share or two above the cook. And share’s the key word. And the cook makes just the same as everybody else.”
Here MacGuther snorted, pulled his hand back from where he’d allowed Smitts to come so close, and took a swig of his drink. Left his hand around the mug.
The only part James had to play here was watch, not a comment slipping free from the silent thoughts in which they belonged.
That was MacGuther’s role here, after all. He rolled his eyes, turning to look him full in the eyes, his own as skeptical and frowning as his friends were wistful. “Oh,” he said, “and where’d you hear all that from, since those ships sure as hell ain’t sailing into our ports?”
“Just something going around.”
“Well, then, whose flag they flying, so I can get myself going around there, too. I don’t mind getting lost in some Spanish port, never to be seen again, if I must.”
Smitts grinned, shaking his head. “They fly their own flag.”
Here MacGuther’s worked his cheek half concave into his mouth, but said not a word until Smitts had nudged him into other jokes and other fairytalke, faraway things.
Grandfather shook his head, though, taking a sip from his hot soup cup, watery and weak as it was. He told him, oh well, James, name of my name and blood of my blood, wasn’t long before Smitt started up that old song all over again.
Just as it wasn’t long ‘till the rain fell about them like sheets, and they were huddled together less for their own sake and more against their own will.
See, they’d all been called on deck, where the cold and damp struck them like stones, with orders from the Captain to tidy up their sails, patch up the holes and whatnot. And yes, right now, he answered with a sneer, all what need could he have of sailors who didn’t feel like working. They felt like that, he’d drop them off without pay or food just as soon as he could.
If they couldn’t have some better work ethic taught to them, instead, he added.
So they’d climbed up the rigging, careful not to slip, and had to gather the canvas in the flapping wind without it flying off. And by the time that was done they were soaked through, folding the sheets up between them as they climbed down.
And shivering, they’d brought it down into the barracks with them, sitting around the sheet and about the hammocks cross-legged on the floor. Cut up bits of fabric between them. Needles held in their teeth with thread spilled between their fingers.
By the time the fuzzy, wet moon had broken through its clouds and poked its way down the hatch to them, rain just on its way to lightening up, Smitts had worked himself into quite the seething mad frenzy, wringing out his hair into a puddle right onto the floor behind him.
MacGuthers, teeth chattering as much as any of them, had offered him a sigh and a pat on the shoulder. Was more than any of the rest of them felt up to managing, right then. He’d only grunted and nodded through Smitts ranting, personally.
MacGuther’s “oh, calm down. Ain’t nothing to do about it now, but work, and maybe there’ll be time for a good long sleep afterwards.”
But Smitts’d only shaken him off. “No,” he said, huffing. “Fuck him.” And then he’d broken off, muttering, “I know a place where Sailors don’t brook that kind of thing and don’t got to, either. Complete, silly nonsense as it is. No tyrants on those ships, who don’t end up replaced or right on cut up to little bits over it.”
James couldn’t help himself here, he said, waving his needle about. “Now, I know you know better than to talk like that.”
But MacGuthers had other concerns and it’d only encouraged him to roll on. “Point to it on a map,” he laughed the deep, booming laugh that was exactly the warm, comforting stuff any man with a heart couldn’t help but seek out, better a prospect than warm food and soft bed both. “And, I’ll tell you what, I’ll be right over. Lickety split, too.”
“Can’t,” said Smitts, poking angry holes in his canvas, even as he darted a glance over, full of warm things he didn’t feel quite like spelling out for such a young, impressionable lad as his grandson. “Ships don’t stay in one place, y’know.” He fished his bit of thread through.
“Yeah, well, then what do they do, after they’ve kicked off the last captain, or whatever grisly thing you like alluding to.”
“Simple,” he’d shrugged. “They vote themselves in a new one.”
“What are they, parliament men?” MacGuthers guffawed. “Well, now I really don’t know why you bother with these stories. Only fancy hall I’ll ever make my way inside of is a courtroom, and with my luck, it probably won’t be for a visit.”
“Other people vote.”
“Sure, rich men do, with their lands and their hefty taxes paid with good cheer. But I don’t got none of that, and I know you don’t either.”
“We wouldn’t need any of that, if only one of them would come by and scoop us up. That’d save us the trouble of taking matters into our own hands and of stitching up our own flags, too.”
And well, how Smitts didn’t realize how his mate kept pushing him to speak outright, plain and punishable before witnesses, I don’t know. I could tell you he was a poor trusting fool of a man, I suppose. I could tell you he was far too brash.
But MacGuthers kept pushing, anyhow, and Smitts was sure to keep talking. He grunted, lifting up his own portion of canvas to haul a new section into his lap. “So now it’s a fantasy nation, and we get to make up names and flags like little boys playing pretend in some whimsical field.”
“Nah, ain’t no nations for us, if you and I were under a black flag.”
Abruptly, MacGuthers started poking and prodding. Personally, James put his head down here, not looking at no one, but keeping his eyes carefully on his own sewing. So he wasn’t sure what feelings came upon Guthers then, if he was seized by regret or unease or satisfaction or what.
All he knew was that for once he didn’t say nothing.
But, then, of course, he must’ve.
Rather obvious what it was, too, seeing as MacGuther left that ship with his pockets weighted down, though not by much more than he was promised in wages, not nearly enough to make up what he’d done to Smits, either. Especially seeing as, after Smitts got flogged within an inch of his life, infection and fever took him, and he didn’t get to keep that inch, either.
Grandfather left with his wages, after all.
But of more import, he left with a lesson to impart on his dear James.
One he’d repeated more than once by now. To his father, surely, and his mother, even, though she’d passed even earlier than the middling James.
Don’t share your heart with nobody, son, is what he’d said, getting in right and real close, not unless you know theirs, too. And know you know it, on top of that. And if you know you know all that, well, then, you probably don’t know nearly enough. Chances are you’ll be wrong.
To be trite about it, even, loose lips sink ships and all that.
Here Grandfather, reached the end of his telling, would give a mirthless, shifty little chuckle, and pat him on the head. He’d say it was time at least one of them was off to bed. Old men needed their shuteye.
And that was the end of it.
Flint finished his telling in this sorry ship’s hold, tilting this way and that as it did.
And, eventually, John Silver stopped scrambling to explain himself. Stopped coming to see him altogether, even to stand there and stare at him, without bothering to see him. Without a willingness to meet his eyes, as if all his will and surety had gone out of him the moment he’d put the pistol down. The moment, even, he’d set the birds wheeling and screeching through the air, away from them both.
Eventually, the ship came to a halt, only the stern tilting his meagre cell up.
When the opportunity came, when guards who weren’t named Hands wandered off from their post, not half as quick or as quiet as the mouse he’s sure they thought they were, whether it was to take a piss of have a bite or fumble through a fuck, he shuffled over, ignoring the clanking of his chains against themselves.
He peered out of that damned slat, which allowed in his thankful beam of light, whether moon or that daylight that had severed that tie he’d prized so highly and found himself done in by. Sure enough, there was the long white beach of the Maroon camp, dotted by trees and brought to an abrupt halt on all sides by rockier shores and green grass and white foaming water.
In the hours they spent encamped there, Flint missed his chance to watch Silver embark for shore. But it wasn’t as though he had to work too hard to imagine the scene.
His head held high. His crutch swinging out in small semi-circular arcs, making an authoritative clapping noise against the gangway and carving shapes into the sand. His sword thumping against his hip.
He wouldn’t look back. Of course not. Not Long John Silver, who spun tales and couldn’t stand the thought of having all but the carefulest, characterless crafted about himself.
So he’d meet Madi, who’d be waiting for him, of course, who might even ask where he was. And pulling her close, into whatever kind of embrace it was the two of them could stand to be spectacle, he’d whisper falsehood into her ear.
Maybe she’d even believe him, a friend of his or no.
It was a short visit, nevertheless, though he didn’t think Silver’d readmitted himself, before the ship pulled off again. Pulling back into the ocean, then, Flint had all the time to wonder if he’d remembered the lesson correctly at all, or if it was only something that he’d thought to recall too late.
~
Thomas is right where Silver said he’d be.
And all he has to bear to keep him is the dividing rows of crops, the self-satisfied ponderings from a man in all white, the puff of white smoke floating up from his long white pipe, the constant surveillance, and the effort it takes to push their cots together in a crowded barrack.
He won’t lie there is a certain bearability to it, with Thomas’ hand tucked into his, their heads facing each other across the pillows, returned to him at long last.
Even the questions aren’t as hard as he thought they might be. Spoken in a whisper between where their pillows end and drop off into separate mattresses, which then end and drop off into wooden legs, which then end and drop off into idle air holding the two of them together.
Even his long, tedious story to tell is met with more sympathy and less horror than he’d expected. His story, shorter and yet more tedious, is not so easy to hear, and makes it harder to bear, but still, he thinks, he might just be able to bear it, or would’ve, if there weren’t so many years standing between them and he hadn’t become such a starkly different person.
If Thomas hadn’t, too.
“James, do you—” he’d ask. And he is James again. Only James, in fact. That’s all they can bear to admit, there, unwilling to brook the question of whether or not he is Flint or McGraw. Now. Still. However, the question must be formulated to either.
The overseers don’t call him anything at all. They tell him to do things and that is the end of it. Neither do his fellow prisoners, who say little at all, silenced by their shame, unwilling to break the stifling, cushioning veil of blind, empty acceptance.
Or maybe they all smell the same stench on him, the thrashing, stormy rage, equal and opposite thoughts harbored by those in Nassau.
Still, him and Thomas reach the end of their stories between fields of wheat and the protective blanket of the dark.
From there, the questions evolve.
The unspoken ones shaped now along the lines of ‘so close’ and ‘nothing to show for it’ on one axis and John Silver’s name on the other.
The spoken ones devolve quickly into ponderings of action.
These Flint answers with a story.
Another of grandfather’s lesson.
He told it like this: “When my grandfather was a boy, before he was yet old enough to be a cabin boy, as he used to tell me, sitting on his doorstep, eyes alternating between the horizon line and his crooked line of stitches, worked by shaking, imprecise hand. Not that a gaping hole or god could keep me from socks my grandfather had made just for me. Back then, when he still had fresh, gangly legs, many years yet to turn their back on him, he would race from the very house I grew up in down to the docks. And there he would stop at the fishermen’s houses, which sat together in a huddle and hug right off the coast.
“Mostly to chat with the old folks and to wrestle with their boys, but sometimes, when there was no work on the horizon and no food on his or his mother’s shelf, he’d push out with them.
“One night after doing so, an old man, who I think he’d named Godwin, invited him onto his porch for a cup of hot and bracing ale. Staring out into nothing, he told my grandfather a story, which he then told me, and which I’m telling you now.
“’When I was but a young man,’ he said, ‘not much older than you, we had a hard season. Exceedingly hard, even, the hardest I can still recall. For days on end, we’d put our meagre boats out. Me and all my brothers and my father and our uncles and our cousins and all our neighbors, and we’d be lucky if our nets pulled in anything at all. It was a miracle if we caught ten.
“’And so, with the cold wind buffeting our brows and naught but misery sitting in our stomachs, we caught sight of the daintiest ship, designed perfectly to set our bellies rumbling with wild, circling thoughts.
“’That between our fleet of fisher boys, there was no way they had numbers to match. That this close to shore, they couldn’t have pushed out long ago. And, therefore, they must be flush with stores. The softness of bread. The warm curl of drink. The sweet saltiness of meat.
“’That they didn’t spy room for a single canon. While they had their spears and their meat cleavers and their gutting knives, all sitting on their seating slats or strapped to their person.
“’So, well, we looked at one another. We pulled in our nets.
“’Not one fish.
“’ We picked up our spears.
“’Ended up being right, too. Not much to go on up against but a flintlock or two plus the cooks’ matching butcher knife. And who’d of expected it from a contingent of fishermen, either.
“’They surrendered quick, and we lost little. Certainly not any of mine.
“’Then we took their bread. We took their drink, their fruit, and their meat. We took the sheets off their bed and the coats off their backs, for us to sell and to wear and to repurpose. We took their dinghies, either as new fishing vessels or to break apart for lumber.
“’Then we made our big mistake, which was to send them on their way.
“’Wasn’t a monster or hard-hearted villain among us, after all. Weren’t real robbers. Just desperate fisherman, and we couldn’t think of doing much else. We left them without a scratch or word of breathed threat.”
“’That was our big mistake, son,’ the old man said. And grandfather repeated it, frowning down at me from his chair, clouds hung over his face, much the same as I imagine hung over the old man. ‘Godwin said here that they should have killed them all then or gone home with nothing and starved. Have it over the way god wanted it done when he took all our fish away.
“’You let a whole group of them make it home like that, knowing exactly where you must’ve come from, with all their wits about them, with every sailor having someone they needed answering to, and they’ll tell their own stories.
“’And they won’t care that you’re starving, won’t even stop to think about it, really. Now they’re the victims of good for nothing pirates. Ain’t nothing complicated about it to them. And there ain’t, really, son. There stops being any of that the moment you make it into someone else’s story.
“’Turns out you’re either something or you’re not, and all it takes is one action to cement that. Then all the sudden you are something and there’s not more choosing not.
“’Wasn’t long until there was someone at our door asking questions. Eventually, someone had to answer them, too.
“’Else it’d be on all our heads.
“’And someone did,’ and the old man turned away. And grandfather’s eyes were on the horizon line. ‘They must’ve been careful not to implicate sons or brothers. Because who wouldn’t be. Must’ve steered to the path of least relation. They must’ve offered names, pointed out a dinghy or a familiar stitch on some man’s coat.
“’Whatever and whoever was said, they were carted off. Maybe there was a trial. I don’t know. Only know that they never did come back.
“’Couln’t tell you whose fault it was.’
“’But that’s not the point,” Flint said, pulling him in closer, hidden by the waving arms of cotton stalks. Into the vortex of all his convictions. Learned at his knee as easily as at grandfather’s.
“The point is you either are something or your aren’t. You either do something or you don’t. No half measures. All your eggs in one basket.”
That’s the war Flint had waged. That was the chance he’d sought so desperately with Silver and Madi. That was what had got him here.
And that was what was going to get them out.
Thomas had nodded, his lips pursed.
It’d be on him to break the silence with the others, he figured. Thomas had been here longer. It would be on Flint to organize the rest. To break whatever bits of metal and meat and physical things stood between them and their freedom.