“You’re a hearty lad, I’s can tell,” the sailor said. “Spoke right up. Ye be welcome. Look to The Sea’s Pride early tomorrow and ye’ll sail with us.”
“You,” the sailor said to another. “D’ye have some teeth?” The boy grimaced, showing such teeth as he had. “My father went to sea, and this I aim also.”
“Family,” said the sailor with a grin wide as a plank. “We’re all barnacles stuck to the rump of family. Tomorrow. The Sea’s Pride.” He waved the boy away. “And you?” he pointed at Moishe. “Ye be a big lad.”
Moishe wasn’t a Jew.
Until he spoke.
“Vell,” he said. “A ponim yeh. It seems.”
As soon as he said it, Moishe realized how foreign his words sounded. Like having a mouthful of something you just realized was treyf, not kosher.
The big man paused.
Moishe was about to run.
“We never had a Chosen People on board. Ye do something nasty? Need to make a quick exodus from Egypt?”
“No … I …”
“You Jews are clever and I don’t knows I trust ye. But there be no baby’s blood on board and if you turns out not honest, we’ll beat you till ye bleed like the baby Jesus hisself.”
That night Moishe slept under a pile of sticks and broken bottles in the lee of a dung heap behind the tavern. At first light, he made his way to The Sea’s Pride to leave the solid earth behind.
Chapter Two
To be new to the sea is to have your kishkas become the waves themselves. For days it was white water inside of Moishe, and a team of pugilists bailed out his insides with their convulsions. He’d be a new man, keneynehoreh, for nu, what could be left of the old one after such puking?
The Sea’s Pride was sailing for Portugal, laden with cargo and a crew of the feckless, the brave, the poor, the drunk and the honourable both, as well as seasoned sailors preserved by salt, farmisht first-timers, and the master, purser, quartermaster, bo’sun, the captain and his parrot, an African Grey, he who has lived to tell the tale.
Moishe’s commission was to serve the master, the big macher sailor who had hired him. In his cabin, the master had created his own private Versailles. Instead of a crew’s shambles of piss buckets, hammocks and a salmagundi of sailors’ chazerai, he had stored an abundance of liquors, sweetmeats, sugar, spices, pickles and other things for his accommodation in the voyage. He had also shlepped a considerable quantity of fine lace and linen, baize and woollen cloth. Not for him the usual shmatte slops of the everyman mariner. And besides, these things could buy him passage on the fleshy sloops of night women or be traded without tax or duty for gold or drink in port.
The master was good to Moishe and taught him much, though his was a pedagogy based on exhaustion and the definite possibility of a mighty zets to the ear. In addition to his work below deck, on deck, and climbing the rigging, working on booms, gaffs and spars, Moishe was a manservant to the master, serving his every wind-changeable whim.
But he asked and, if his work was done, was allowed to gaze at the maps and charts. Even as they took him away, they recalled his home and his longing to leave. His quick mind pleased the master.
“Ye shall be a sea artist good and true, right ye will. Your paint shall be the shiny stars in the sky above and your canvas the waves of the salt sea.”
You think Moishe had any idea what such words meant? Gornisht! Nothing. Nada. Bupkes. Not that boychik. Until he met me, he didn’t know his shvants from a sloop, his dick from a deck.
Was I good at language? Let’s just say Polly’s been a nautical boy for most of his long life. Since I was press-ganged out of Africa covered in pinfeathers, I’ve been parrot to a whole shipload of shoulders—Arab, Portuguese, English, Spanish, German, Polish—but none like Moishe.
And I taught the young bubbeleh something other than the mother tongue mamaloshen.
Hogshead. Rumfustian. Hardtack. Turtles.
Baldric. Blunderbuss. Muskatoon.
Cutthroat. Tankard. Stinkpot.
How d’ye do?
In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.
Yes sir, very good, sir.
Captain. Ocean. Syphilis.
Pirate.
He was a good mimic, that sheygets, though no parrot.
“Farshteyst? Do you understand?” I’d say.
“I oondershtand,” he’d reply.
I took an immediate liking to him. His narrow shoulder, his earnest face, his kindness, his credulity.