MY FATHER SAYS HE’S SAVED MY LIFE nine times. Once at my birth, once when we fled master and overseer through rows of struggling tobacco beneath a sky choked with stars, and the other seven paid out over all our years before the masts of ten different ships.
The oldest two I must take at his word, as I have no memory of either. The first of the seven was the time Pop shut me below when I thought to skip up the rigging to the topmost yard of the Barbry Allen in a near gale off Barbados, the decks awash and the sea yawning up before us. Six years into life and already I was full of the piss and vinegar he taught me to walk with. The kind he said would serve me well no matter what the tide.
“Boys are all piss and vinegar,” he would say as he scraped his grimy razor over my scalp till I was bald as an egg. “It’s what keeps them alive, pet. On the sea or off.”
Mostly I think I’ve saved my own life. I knew enough to listen to Pop from the first moment we stepped on shipboard and learn the ropes from anyone with something to teach. When we came upon the Golden Vanity a few months ago, the bosun handed me the ledger without so much as a look toward Pop, and I signed the articles on my own for the first time.
I grinned at Pop hard enough to blind the sun. He smiled back, but when he thought I wasn’t looking he shook his head, slow and sad.
Pop still thinks we chose poorly, joining the Vanity’s crew. “It’s a brig, pet. Moves slow, like an ox in molasses. We’ll never catch anything faster than a merchantman. We’ll never be able to outrun anything faster either.”
I’ve given up trying to convince Pop that sloops and schooners might be quick but they can’t bring as many guns to bear. Besides, the Vanity’s old man has an eye for ships loaded down with plunder and swears the wind tells him things. And if you’re bold enough to ask what things, he’ll merely wink and say, “Things about things, lad.”
Which is no answer at all, but when you’re the captain and your name is Half-Hanged Henry, it’s an answer you can give a bold sailor who’s a little too curvy amidships to be an actual boy.
We’re flying a Union Jack we stole from our last prize and lying in wait for the next behind a barrier island off the coast of Carolina. I’ll be on watch in another turn of the glass, but for now I’m up on the mainmast yard, my bare legs swinging, the salt-wind curling through my jacket and over my windburned face.
A flurry of seabirds circle the topgallant yard, then dip and glide down to the waterline. But when they gather just above the spray, I flinch hard and grip the mast.
Mother Carey’s chickens.
They’re not proper chickens, not the kind you’d eat. They’re little seabirds, black at the wing with a white stripe across their tails. There are four, and they dance eerily over the surface of the water without ever landing.
I wonder if I knew them. They were once men, and I’ve seen my share of floating corpses since I was a cabin boy. These birds are the souls of drowned sailors who’ve escaped the wife of Davy Jones and returned to warn seamen of storms. Even crews like us who use captured flags to lure prizes close.
I shinny up the mainmast till I reach the topmost yard and can go no higher without becoming a bird myself. The sky is clear and gray. Not blue, but no angry clouds mount. The air doesn’t smell like a storm, and the wind promises naught but a good chase once the prey comes in sight.
“Ha! Almost got that one!”
Hanging over the rail near the bowsprit are Johnny and Black Tom. They signed the articles in Port Royal, no older than me and full of showy false swagger that lasted a single turn of the glass. Pop took pity on them and now they’re our messmates, two sons closer to the big family he always wanted.
Black Tom flings a stone and it misses one of Mother Carey’s chickens by a handswidth.
I’m down the mainmast in a trice and I haul those two coves collar and scruff away from the rail. They go stumbling and fall into fighting stance before seeing it’s me. Then they straighten and eye me warily.
“What gives, Joe?” Black Tom has squinty pig-eyes and a constant white-boy sunburn. Johnny’s the one who’s blacker than me and Pop put together, with ritual scars like Pop remembers on his granddad.
“Don’t you make Mother Carey angry, harming those birds.” I stab a finger at the feathery shadows tiptoeing across the water below. “Or else she’ll call up a storm so she can serve our drowned guts to Davy Jones for tea.”
“You really believe that old yarn?” Johnny asks. “Them’s just birds. Souls go to heaven or they go to hell.”
Eight bells rings, four sets of two peals, short and pert.
These lads must stop. Killing even one of the little harbingers could bring us all to a bad end, and Pop’s grown attached to both Johnny and Black Tom, orphans like him, like he’s terrified I’ll end up. I want to smile at them, to use honey instead of vinegar, but Pop says nothing makes me look less like a boy than when I smile.