“No, tell about the earthquake,” Carrot said. “But here, come get in bed with us. Tell about the man who was buried alive and then washed out to sea.”
So I climbed in between them, as they insisted, pulling my quilt on top of the three of us, and I whispered to them about Lewis Galdy, who was first swallowed up by a massive chasm when the Great Earthquake erupted, and afterwards, in a subsequent shock, was spat out of the ground and cast into the sea, whence he escaped by swimming to a boat.
“Could you do that?” Carrot asked. “Or would you be too afraid?”
I imagined the earth closing around me, imagined the panic.
“You would be afraid, wouldn’t you?” he challenged.
“I would be,” Touch said.
“I don’t know how to swim,” I said.
“I don’t either,” Touch said.
“We’ll have to learn,” Carrot said.
We all went to sleep that night imagining ourselves sitting down to dinner and hearing the terrible noise when the ground opened with choking fumes of sulfur, everyone thinking hell was coming forth on earth as the streets washed into the harbor and the sea rose in mighty waves, tearing ships from their anchorages and sweeping them inland over the sunken ruins of the town.
After that, we three always slept together, with me in the middle. It was cozy, and we found it easy to imagine ourselves bunked together in a pirate ship, sailing in the West Indies. Some nights I told stories about Captain Morgan, who quit being a buccaneer when he was made lieutenant governor of Jamaica; and Blackbeard and Calico Jack; and the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were not executed with the rest of their gang because they were both with child at the time.
And sometimes Touch would make up stories of his own for us. As quiet and gentle as he was, he had a powerfully inventive imagination. The sea was full of not only pirates in his tales, but sea serpents and mermaids as well, and more than one sailor lost his heart to those golden-haired sirens, or his life to a beast that rose unexpectedly from the depths of the Caribbean. I marveled at the way he could make my mind see just what his mind saw. He was four months younger than I, yet he seemed to have absorbed so much more of the world’s magic. I wanted to see things the way he did—to have his imagination and his kindness—and at the same time I wanted to be like Carrot, too, who was so sure of himself, who never doubted that life would always treat him well.
In those first days, around Mr. Lincoln’s map-covered table, I discovered the world. He was consumed by maps—in fact, among ourselves we sometimes called him “Maps,” because he had so many and seemed to love them above all else. Meticulous, colorful, hand-drawn maps, printed maps, entire books of maps—the whole world laid out like an architect’s drawing, as if one could indeed know all the workings of the universe if one could only devour enough maps. Soon enough I came to notice drawings on those maps: a sea serpent peeking over the waves, a compass decorating a corner, even a schooner in full sail.
Carrot nodded toward the schooner. “Touch drew those,” he said.
I glanced at Mr. Lincoln for confirmation, and he smiled and nodded. “Our friend here has a rare talent,” he said.
I noticed then that Touch’s eyes were downcast, but he was grinning.
“You could be a mapmaker!” I said enthusiastically.
“He could, if he wanted,” Carrot said.
“Indeed,” Mr. Lincoln said. But Touch did not acknowledge their words, nor did he look up at us, and the smile had disappeared from his face. It would be months before I understood why their encouragement pained him so.
Though he never beat us, Mr. Lincoln could be a most difficult man, and he brooked no foolishness. I quickly learned, as the others already had, to see beneath the surface of his questions, understanding that the correct answer was never enough; it was always more important to know why it was correct. He believed in saturating us with learning, so that from the moment we came downstairs for breakfast until the light had faded and we trooped up to bed, we were nearly always studying something, talking about something, learning something.
His teaching was all about war: the wars against Napoléon when I arrived, but later, Julius Caesar’s campaigns and other wars that suited his purposes from time to time. What boy does not imagine himself a hero? Five and a half days a week, Monday morning to Saturday noon, we leaned over the maps, aligning our tokens in battle order—red for the British troops and blue for the French, and green and brown and black and purple for the other nations—and we fought those battles. Or we calculated the time it would take a thousand troops to pass a specific point, or the trajectory of a cannonball or the operation of a trebuchet, the weight of a barrel of salt pork or a barrel of rum, and the mechanics of lifting such heavy weights aboard a ship.
For the Napoleonic Wars we spoke French—or the rest did, as I struggled to follow along. Unswayed by my ignorance of the language, Mr. Lincoln spoke to me in French anyway, asking questions I did not understand and waiting impatiently for answers I could not give, until the others finally supplied the answers for me. The fact that I had no French seemed to matter to no one but me; they gave me no quarter, and thus I learned it to keep myself in the game. Though, in fact, it was no game; every discussion was deadly serious.