Kingston by Starlight Read online

  “So his majesty in England has issued a proclamation for the suppression of freebooters and scourges of the sea,” Calico had said, his voice dripping scorn, speaking to everyone and no one. “That every man of the trade, if he should declare himself and renounce his profession, should receive pardon.”

  “’Tis an offer worthy to be entertained,” said Mackinnon, a tavern regular with a Scottish brogue, eyes as thin as coin slits, and two jagged black eyebrows that struck down at his nose bridge like lightning bolts. “The halcyon days of De Graff are finished. How well I remember his fair hair and blues eyes! But De Graff is much retired, or is entombed with his fortune. Governor Rogers has been hard on the brethren of the coast since he was installed in office. There have been two score hangings in the last fortnight. And Governor Lawes in Jamaica has mounted a similar campaign. This proclamation of pardon—’tis an offer worthy to be entertained.”

  “Enough!” Calico had cried, slamming down his mug at the bar. “You fear a man who should fear us! More directly, I have come to say this: my sloop sits in the harbor awaiting. In the afternoon of tomorrow, I am of the intention to sail out of New Providence, and we go under a black flag.”

  Silence greeted those last words and all laughter died.

  “Who among you will join my crew?” Calico’s voice rang out. “We give all hands a fair shake, no matter who your mother was, no matter if you arrived in the Americas in glory or in bondage.”

  There was much grumbling and talk among the patrons at the bar, but no answers in the affirmative.

  “Come, come! This town has a reputation for breeding sea-dogs! Can a few hangings quell both bite and bark? Know you not what his majesty’s Royal Navy provides its seamen in return for their labors? Let me offer you an education: an admiral on a ship of the line is entitled to half of all prizes taken under his command. A ship’s captain, one quarter, and so on and so forth, until all the officers, from fore to aft, larboard and starboard, from lieutenant to midshipman, have dipped their beaks in the wealth that you ordinary seamen have purchased with your own sweat— forsooth, your own blood. Serve you the Governor? Serve you his majesty? Well, I’ve metal monarchs on my mind. And you all know that the loot we win as brethren of the confederacy of the coast is divided up in a more equitable manner. No prey, no pay. Two shares for the captain and high officers, a share for all else. Let his majesty keep his Royal Navy! I’d rather serve monarchs I can spend!”

  Still, silence.

  Calico coughed a bit, and his hack was thick and hoarse, as if his throat had been layer’d with phlegm as the result of the course of some long infirmity or flux. Then the wily privateer laughed, clear and strong, and he bent over, hands on his knees, with his laughter. The men in the bar, cautiously at first, joined in. Soon the whole tavern was rocking with mirth. Then Calico, pulling something from his boot, stood straight up and slammed it on the bar with a loud thud. It was a leather bag, out of which tumbled a goodly number of large doubloons. Each coin glitter’d gold.

  “This is but a taste,” said Calico. “A squeeze from a rag dipped in a barrel of wine. Indeed, the men that sail with me shall slake their thirst on treasure and grow drunk with wealth. De Graff never set his blue eyes on such treasure! For on my sloop we have obtained the secret routes of Spanish galleons returning from Cartagena and Portobello, laden with the riches of those gilded ports. This information was precious and much blood was spilt in its taking. But I swear to you, those who sail with me shall end their lives rich men— or else, at the least of it, you’ll have coin enough to pay grim-faced Charon for your ferry ride ’cross the Styx!”

  There was silence again, but it was a different kind of quietude than the first. The second was akin to the kind of uncomfortable, unbearable pause that comes at the end of conversation when two people have naught left to say to one another and yet still must spend time together. Or rather, it was akin to this: when a joke is told, if the teller but slightly trips upon his tongue in relating it, all humor is drained, and it will earn naught but polite smiles, but certainly no guffaws. After Rackam had completed his speechifying, there was a painful sense that something had been tripped up.

  “Do I waste my words on an audience of drunken tinkers?” Calico roared. “Are you not men? Are you not men?”

  At that, there was a kind of growling among the patrons in the bar, like when some low beast is disturbed in its sleep. After some debate, a wager was struck: several of the scoundrels at the bar agreed to go with Calico, if he would but put his manhood to the test. He was known as a man willing to take gambles, so this group challenged him to a single coin flip— if the shilling’s toss showed the king’s head, they would go with him, and gladly, but if it lay with the king’s crest facing up, they would split Rackam’s bag of doubloons among them, and send him on his way.

  “Done,” said Calico.

  With that, he flipped a shilling into the air. All eyes watched its fall.

  It landed crest side up.

  The group of men who participated in the wager, with much laughter, converged on the bar to split their winnings. Mackinnon was among the group, and he turned, with a broad grin, to mock Calico.

  “Your wild wagers will be the death of you, Calico,” said Mackinnon.

  The patrons of the bar turned away from the scene and the buzz in the room returned and grew back to its usual almost insufferable din. Calico’s recruiting drive, at least at this venue, was a failure. Calico, his face betraying no emotion over his loss, paid for his drink— his bill was two shillings— but he dropped a third shilling on the floor. Falling to all fours, Calico searched for the lost coin, first near the counter, then beneath nearby tables, asking patrons to move their legs as he continued his inquest. At last he found the shilling had rolled into a puddle of Kalik that had spilled on the floor. Calico picked up the coin, wiped it off, and pocketed it.

  * * *

  Calico exited the bar and I followed hard after him. There is a sort of state of mind that the Greeks call akrasia, which is being of a disposition to know the right action and yet take the opposing course instead. Following Calico was, no doubt, a prime example of akrasia, and an error in judgment, but I was primarily ruled by the fact that I was running short of coin and was in desperate need of employment.

  All through the night, and with only a little less cacophony in the daylight hours, I could hear the cries of whores in the streets of New Providence. It was the fate of all women in that town, unless they were well married, and sometimes even then, to end up in the streets, renting the space between their legs, and as of late a great fear had grown in me that I, too, could be sucked down into that hell. When I passed strumpets in the streets, their rouged cheeks rough as plowed fields, their dresses rent with holes as if by sharks, brown clay pipes tilted insolently out of their stained mouths, they seem’d to call to me, wordlessly, to join their numbers and despair. I imagined my body circumscribed by their crude, cruel eyes, and sharp fingers tearing at my clothes until I was revealed naked in the street, to be measured and bartered like a barrel of indigo. The sea’s siren song seem’d less ruinous. So I followed Calico with little concern for peril.

  He slipped into the shadows of an alley, and, fuddled a bit by the darkness of the night, I lost sight of him. Feeling my way against a stone wall, I came to the end of the alley, which led to another passageway, which came at last to a gutter. There, sitting in a rivulet of filth, was one of the figures I so feared: a draggletail, clad in a worn purple petticoat and a tattered gray mop cap pulled close over her face. She sucked on a long-stemmed clay pipe and, after each drag, she coughed a little, in a voice that was low and full and rather like a man’s.

  “Ho there, harlot,” I said. “Have any passersby lately come through?”

  The woman looked up.

  “Calico?”

  Quicker than the flick of a cat’s tongue, he was on his feet and his dirk was at my throat.

  “Do you have any money?”

 
“What?”

  “If you have money for harlots, you have money for me.”

  “Why were you dressed . . . ?”

  “When times are hard I work this ruse and it pays handsomely. Come now, give me your purse, so some profit may come of this night.”

  Calico had thrown off the petticoat and the mop cap and now stood before me in manly form, as he had at the bar.

  “I have no money.”

  He pressed his blade closer to my throat.

  “I saw you at the Roach and Salamander,” he said. “Why were you following me?”

  “I have only a question,” I said.

  “Speak it then!”

  “I seek employment on your ship. Do you need a hand?”

  Calico smiled and the fires from the torches burning along the street paths were caught in his eyes.

  chapter 9.

  On the west beach of Nassau Harbor there was strange commerce afoot. I had risen from my hammock in the morn with the resolution that on that very afternoon, I would go out to sea. The thought filled me with an exultation the like of which I had not previously known or experienced. My limbs and my spirit were light and free, I felt as if my tie to the earth had been loosed, that I was not merely taking to a ship, but I myself was an unanchored sloop, the wind filling my white sails. Of course I had traveled upon both the Atlantic and the Caribbean and other bodies of water as a passenger, but, with Calico’s crew, for the first time I would be a woman of the waves— or, more properly, a man of the sea, given my continuing ruse.

  My flat on Culmer Street was a small one, its major features being a pinewood chest, an iron trivet, and muslin netting hung over the hammock to ward off the unwanted annoyances of

  no-see-um’s. Having no other occupation over the last few months other than pilfering through the pockets of drunks, I had fallen behind on my rent, modest as it was, so I thought it best to pack light so as to not arouse any suspicion of my leave-taking with the landlord of my abode. A trick of the shadow-life, my love, and advice to all tenants present and future: the last week’s rent is always free, and never leave a forwarding address. So, living out that maxim, I gathered together, in a tidy brown leather sack, a small portion of my few belongings: a pewter washing basin, a pewter drinking cup, a toothbrush with tooth powder, a pair of red woolen socks, two pairs of brown canvas trousers, and a loose-fitting white shirt. I had long since torn my women’s clothes into strips; now I used the remnants to bind my breasts tight to my body. Having not reached full womanhood in that area, there was not much to bind.

  I strolled onto Bay Street to take in the sites and sounds and smells of quayside for one last time. It was a fair day in late August and because the sun was newly arisen, the full heat of the day had not yet arrived. There were no clouds and the sky was very blue. The turf was kissed here and there with shrubs of yellow buttercups, the proud stalks of red heart flowers, the mauve petals of potato bushes. Sweet melodies of doctorbirds hummed from blossom to blossom. The air was still except for a high breeze that shook the emerald crowns of the tall palm trees that grew next to the strip of sandy beach that ran alongside the wharf. Seamen were just awakening on their ships and the clustered masts of their vessels, denuded of their sails, made the harbor look like it was fringed by a forest of stripped pines. I paused for a moment to imagine the men slipping out of their sleeping places, stretching their sun-color’d bodies in the softness of the morning illumination. The thought of the private waking rituals of men, of warm lather, leather strops, and straight razors, left me breathless, and my tongue water’d as if in anticipation of sucking on a stalk of sugarcane. I longed to both touch their bodies and inhabit them.

  The marketplace beside the harbor was already bustling with activity, with gray wooden booths set up to sell various goods, most stolen, many available at a substantial discount if one was a canny enough haggler. There were trays of iron cutlery, tables spread with cheap glass jewelry in hues of crimson and heliotrope and aquamarine, stands piled high with various native fruits including spiky-crown’d pineapples, smooth-complexion’d papayas, green scaly sweetsops, tanned toelike tamarind pods, and brown coconuts cover’d lightly with coarse hair like the heads of grandfathers. Having no coins of any sort in my pockets, I did as the less fortunate of the island often do, and picked my breakfast from the green clusters of sea-grapes that grow in the bushes near the beach. The sea-grapes were green and crisp and large as eyeballs and more sour than sweet. But the juice within them was cool and tasty and so I plucked a half dozen and continued my stroll down to the beach, my snack in hand.

  * * *

  The gallows was an unexpected sight. It was located between two booths in the market, both selling overripe guineps, and commerce continued all ’round the ghastly monument, the buyers and the sellers, one and all, apparently impervious to the specter of death. The gallows, like the booths, was made of gray wood, with a large gray platform and a large gray wooden arm reaching overhead from which, suspended by a thick braided rope, dangled the corpse of a young privateer. He was dressed in brown canvas trousers and was naked from the waist up. His hair was blond and his eyes had rolled partially up in his head, greatly exposing the whites. His cheeks and chin and forehead were puffy and red, the rope ’round his neck having caused the congestion of blood in his face. I had expected the final look of a dead man to be a peaceful one, as cares are released and the soul passes, with pacific resignation, to that other place. However, the privateer’s expression was the opposite: love and hate and fear and all else seemed drained out his visage, leaving only an awful void, an abeyance of humanity.

  There was a sign posted near the gallows, a piece of splintery worm-infested wood with red letters crudely slathered on it: EXPULSIS PIRATIS, RESTITUTA COMMERCIA. The words were in Latin, and I knew well what they meant from my study of Ovid. This was not a poet’s phrase, but a politician’s, and a hard one at that.

  “It was a prize of a hanging, it was,” said a voice.

  A boy, no older than ten, had taken a place next to me. He had full cheeks and bright eyes, this boy, and his brown hair was as tangled as a bird’s nest. He conversed with me in an easy manner, as if we were of long acquaintance, and, as he talked, he sipped from time to time on a gourd of Flip, which is a mix of beer and spirit, sweetened with sugar and heated.

  “It appears to me that the good citizens of New Providence have, after this man’s death, made a prize of his shoes,” I said.

  “No— they hung him barefoot,” said the boy.

  “Barefoot? Why?”

  “He made a speech, he did. Addressed the crowd like a pastor delivering a sermon to a Sunday congregation.”

  “They took his shoes because of a speech?”

  “That’s not the whole of it. His name, as he gave it, was Dennis McKarthy. He said that friends told him that he would die in action, that he would die in his shoes. So before they hanged him, he kicks off his shoes and he tells all those assembled: ‘Some friends of mine have often said I should die in my shoes, but I would rather make them liars.’ ”

  “And what became of the shoes?”

  The boy shuffled his feet. He was wearing shoes big enough for a man twice his age.

  “It was a prize of a hanging, it was,” said the boy.

  I turned away from the boy and walked quickly toward the meeting place.

  * * *

  A small band of recruits had gathered on the open space of the parade in the cooling shadow of Fort Nassau. Calico’s powers of persuasion had indeed made an impact: I recognized a few of the throng from the Roach and Salamander. The largest number were unknown to me and appeared to be around my age at the time, which is to say old enough to consider one’s self an adult but too young to realize one is far from a state of full maturity. A dangerous and ridiculous age. All things seem possible, all directions appear open, and life seems as endless as the open sea. Then wisdom arrives, the hair grays, the muscles ache, the waist thickens, and, perhaps blessedly, th
e memories of a healthier, more youthful time fade away. But I still remember my age of action. It is a time more precious than any other because only after it has passed do we realize its value. And it cannot be lived again except in imperfect recollection and in our hopes for our children. No, by my faith, not even then. We stumble through our youth like fools in blinding sunlight, and, when twilight comes, we remember the day and exult that we got even one thing right in our vast and bless’d and inexcusable ignorance.