“I’d build a hospital, a hospice for memory. I’d line its shores with gold and ale and zaftikeh half-dressed nafkehs. We’d call pirates from the seven and imaginary seas. To smash open and plunder our words and memories. Take these things, you buccaneers, spread this farkakteh hoard thin across the shoulders of the world like a pox so we can breathe again.
“And then we could forget.”
I jumped from Moishe’s shoulder and onto his hand. I bent my head low. Surely it would comfort him to rub the feathers of my neck, and give me pleasure.
“Perhaps the future will rewrite our stories,” Moishe said, “if only the Fountain will wash out our skulls and drown our remembering.”
“We have rum that does that,” I said. “And coca leaves.”
“Ach. Each day we scour and soak both inside and out with them. And with blood and gold. But each day we wake again. Each day, its own sorrows.”
“Each day ends,” I said. “Eventually. Perhaps a month later.” I hopped onto the gunwale. We watched as Yahíma rowed into obscurity.
Past and future. We birds remember everything. And nothing. The only words we have are those we haven’t forgotten.
We have a different forward and backward. A different up and down.
And so, too, did Yahíma. Pocahontavitz she would not be. She was free to paddle without thinking of us. To find a place where the most dramatic event was the harvesting of tubers. Or the birth of her child.
Soon it was day. We could no longer see the island or its fires. Instead we watched for the shapes of the map to emerge from the blue cerulean of the sea.
We wended in and out of nights and days. Eventually we came to a region skerried with rocks and an assortment of islands. The map was a star chart and we watched for its constellations.
“Oy. Avast.” Samuel said, pointing at an island off the starboard bow. “It does look a tuches—as if some sea-ogre were sticking his hairy nates up at heaven.”
Thumbing his nether-nose at God and His insistence on mortality.
Moishe gave the order to sail close-hauled, working us to windward. Halyards were heaved. Sheets rose. Booms swung across the deck, and sails snapped. Our quick ship rippled and shuddered in the thrill of the wind as we approached the island from the south and were soon sailing upon the cyan-blue skirts of its white sand shores.
Some thirty fathoms away, we dropped anchor on the lee side of a small islet that—as mapped—concealed a broad and congenial lagoon. Our landing party would row in skiffs between the islet and a black cragged spit and into this lagoon. From there, we’d bushwhack to the valley, scouting for the tall marker tree, looking for the earth-bound yud under which our treasure lay.
We mustered on the deck, aft of the fo’c’sle and divided into those to come ashore and those to stay.
None stayed.
Nu, when there’s treasure, go with the shmendrick who has the spade.
“So,” said Moishe, climbing halfway up the fo’c’sle companionway. “I’ve a word to say. This land upon which our feet soon shall fall is where we find freedom from time’s cat-o’-nines, where we find our treasure, those books which will lead us to that fabled freshet of life everlasting. And now, a brocheh, a little kiddush grog. Each one on board has done his duty, alow and aloft, and so let us drink our health and luck. And Baruch atah, a gantseh sea-cheer for we kings of the ocean.”
Each man downed a mugful of schnapps.
The black redaction of booze: some nights disappear into mugfuls of drink and shikkereh song.
We woke, blinking in the Klieg-light of noon, the clapper of day pealing on our uninsulated skulls. Muskrats had revelled in our mouths and left their fuzzy and acrid dreck on our tongues.
“To the island,” Moishe hissed, careful not to let his voice drive a spike into his own earholes.
Though far from jolly, we boarded the jolly boats, pointed the bows northeast and began pulling the oars—and the island—toward us. Then the wind blew from starboard and huffed us beyond the veil of the islet and further out to sea.
The crew’s faces were furled with determination and the hammer-ache of the morning-after-the-night-before as they madly stroked the oars. I chanced to look larboard and saw the dark cloud of a Spanish ship anchored on the islet’s other side. We two boats: two ships that had not passed in the night, but had slept on either side of land like a travelling swain and his farmer’s daughter bedmate, separated by bundling board.
“Moishe,” I said. “Look.”
The Spanish had undoubtedly seen us. Perhaps they had already landed, for we had slept late. There might be a greeting party, ready to skewer us with hospitality and swords.
“Ferkakte,” Jacome scowled, “as the chicken’s pink nuts in the fox’s gob.”
We could row only where the wind might take us.
There was movement on the deck of the Spanish ship, then a skull-staving boom and a cannonball plunged into the water a single fathom from our bow.
“I’ll not wait to be knacker-sausaged,” Jacome said, dove into the water, and swam toward shore.
Another blast and a cannonball divoted the water close enough to Jacome to pull him under. A moment later and he emerged spluttering. Samuel reached out an oar but Jacome turned, disgusted, and resumed his churning.