When I finished my soup, I followed the row of women back to our jail. This vessel, the others said, had been built to carry cows and sheep. If the builder had spread the bars one inch wider in any place, I could have slipped between them and made my escape. But to where? Swim to Jamaica? I would swim, I vowed, as no one had swum before. Only when I sat on a knee formed by one of the ship’s ribs, leaning my head against the side, did I notice that Patience was not to be found. It never occurred to me where she might be, and I felt I had but to wait for her. After all, she was not a good swimmer.
I picked at a piece of tar squeezed from between the planks near my head and rolled it between my fingers as I thought about home. From a tiny opening where tarred rope connected parts I could not name, I could get one eye to the outside and see that it was still daylight. The Saracens’ hideous ship, now run by English pirates, was going to our home, albeit the ship itself was full of holes and might sink on the way. This one, no matter that it was cleaner and there was food and air, was not going home at all! We were already at Hispaniola and this accursed boat was going north.
I whispered against the hull, “I will always live in Jamaica. No one can take me far enough that I shall not find a way to return.” I used the piece of tar to scratch a line against the wall. I drew Patey, August, and myself, with sad faces and chains around our feet. I wrote, “Jamaica, Two Crowns, we are prisoners here.” I drew Pa, lying down with a cross upon his chest.
As I drew, I thought of Ma, pining away there, with no way with which to write us, her children, and now with Pa buried in the ocean—oh, Saint Christopher, do not let him wash up on shore where she finds him—she’ll be widowed and no doubt unable to manage the plantation, then put out. She’ll need us. And now, August a turncoat and a vagabond privateer! Ma’s heart will break upon hearing that news. When I drew Ma, I drew tears falling from her eyes. I vowed then that when I found opportunity to write her, I would not write of his wretched apprenticeship. Patience and I would write of our captivity and deprivations. We would somehow make our way home and together we and Ma would survive, perhaps on Ma’s sewing. “Oh, la,” I said aloud, for want of any real words to tell the depths of my aching emptiness. The thought that I had begged to go aboard this ship plagued me above all else. If I had stayed where I was, I would have been put off in Jamaica!
“Let us have a seat, there, girl,” a woman said to me. She pointed to a small mat. “You can have my bed there, if you wish. My back pains me so.”
At that moment the iron door creaked open and I said, “Here, madam, you may have it,” as I saw Patience slip through the opening, clutching a parcel, her head bowed. She flinched when the door closed with a loud clang. I thought she had carried her pocket and I called, “Patey!” At once I felt a thrill that she had procured our passage home, and the same moment a terror that her rings had been traded for naught.
Patience came toward me, eyes on the floor, and reached my side just as men above slid the hatch cover closed and the twilight of this deck enveloped us.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Above,” she whispered.
“That lady said I could use this mat. Would you sit with me?”
Patience lay upon the mat but turned her body away from me and curled her knees up. Her shoulders shook as she cried.
“Patey?” I whispered. “What is that you’re carrying? Well, no matter. Please take heart. We shall find a way to get home.” Even as I spoke, I doubted we could. I thought of what August had said about escape. I thought of Ma, looking out to sea from the widow’s walk, day after day, waiting for us. I put my arm around Patey’s waist to comfort her.
She flung my arm from her as if it had been a snake, hurting my shoulder. “Keep still!”
I pulled back a little. “Where did you go? Why did they not bring you with the rest of us? Tell me what happened. Why are you carrying that?”
“Leave me alone, Resolute. Leave me.”
I was not sure if she had not finished her words or if she meant more than a wish for me to keep shushed and meant me to leave away from her side. I said, “You did not have to hurt my arm. I merely reached to pat your side.”
“Simply do not touch me.”
“Fine, then.”
She lay a-weeping then, moaning sometimes, and as it was dark and I was fed, I slept to the sound of her sobbing, an old familiar tune. When the woman asked for her pallet again, Patience sat next to me on the wale. She reached under her skirt and loosened a tie, then pulled off the petticoat Ma had made for her. She raised it over our heads and made for us a little tent. She held my hands, and when I started to make a sound, shook them. She opened the parcel she had brought. Into my hands she placed a boiled turtle egg and half an orange. The need for food was ever awake in me and I crammed the egg into my mouth, whole. The fruit had dried, but once I bit through the hard part, the juice was sweet and tart on my tongue.
“Do not smack,” she whispered. “I have one for each of us.”
“Oh, this is excellent. How did you get these?”