“God spare us from churchmen. When skewered, they make such a woeful noise.” This was Isaac the Blind, an old sailor.
“Ha-Shlossing-Shem spare m’ earwax the wheedling prayers and simpering pleas of clergy as their sickly bodies are pared from soul,” he went on. Isaac the Blind. Most of him was lost. And what remained was hardly seaworthy.
His single seeing eye was a broken and bloody egg. His one grizzled hand the offspring of a spider.
Tefillin slouched over his blind eye, the box like a patch. The stump of his left arm, too, was wrapped in tefillin, the leather phylactery strap holding a fragment of anchor to serve as his hand. He was whatever he had scrounged.
Like all of us.
Except for those whose lives seemed the scratchpad of fate.
Shlomo. His body was a book of scars. We’d seen him on the island of Jews where he had settled with those who’d sailed away from Spain. Together with Isaac and the others, he had then escaped that new Zion and become part of our crew.
The Isle of Jews had been no easy billet on a sleepy pinnace. When Rabbi Nalfimay died, another quickly stripped the old rebbe of his red fez and orange-gold robes and appointed himself rebbe of the island. Unlike Nalfimay, this Reb Salomo’s rule was grim and sadistic. When Shlomo questioned—when he asked for the passage in the law that explained a severity—Salomo had ordered Shlomo’s arms tied to a palm tree and the words of the Ten Commandments cut into his skin. The Hebrew had scarred, red pus-crusted serpents writhing across his body as if he been flogged with a whip whose grip, you could say, was nowhere yet whose lash was everywhere.
“Ach, it’s not so bad,” Shlomo laughed. “When I call my own name, I’m still the one who answers. I saw a Yid who’d been flayed alive by Salomo, and you’d hardly believe how much it altered him for the worse. Skin and bones he was. Skin there, bones over there.”
Our crew included an African—an Ethiope—whom we’d found floating in the sea, clinging to a barrel of olives. He was half pickled himself, his body like the wrinkled inside of a mouth.
We called him Ham, after Noah’s black son who came across his father ongeshnoshket, pants down, putz rampant. His father cursed him and his children. They were punished by the five-thousand-year enslavement of those races who were also beyond the pale.
We named him because he couldn’t speak. His tongue had been cut out. What we learned later, through a combination of shipboard sign language and writing, was that he had cut it from his own mouth so that he would not have to speak of what he had witnessed.
Though we came to know why Ham didn’t speak, we never knew what he wasn’t telling us.
Ach, but I remember Rabbi Daniel muttering that memory is useless if none of us remembers the same thing.
It was ten years since Moishe had left Martín Pinzón and his men at the village. For hours he’d run blind into the forest, then scrabbled up a tree into the dark canopy, panting, directionless, disoriented, and hungry. He had thrown his weapons and stripped most of his clothing as he sprinted in the heat. At nightfall he’d shloffed in the crook of a giant tree and I slept in the branches above him, listening always for danger.
Early morning and we found ourselves inside the boisterous mechanism of the forest. The flywheels of insects, the flap and flutter of birds. A hum, a purring, the footfalls of animals we didn’t know. Then bright feathers: I was surrounded by a crowd of parrots kibitzing in a language I did not understand.
Soon they scattered. This I understood: predators.
Several natives walking, chanting, armed with bows. Their leader, the young woman from the village, spotted us immediately. I pressed myself against the tree trunk, not keen to lose a divot of flesh or to have my guts festooned in fletching. Moishe uncurled himself and sat on the branch in plain view. Pale and mostly naked. He did not appear to be a great warrior or bold sailor gluttonous for conquest. Instead, Moishe: a pallid Yiddishe Mowgli lost in the Caribbean.
“Help,” he said and raised his hand.
And now, that same young woman, Yahíma, was part of our crew. Yahíma: our new Sarah. She, too, an orphan, her parents lost amidst the bohío blood.
So, nu, what about all those stories of New World Pocohonawitzes? Beautiful girls who go native in reverse. Sheyneh native maidelehs who put down their porcupine quills and tomahawks for doilies.