Was this what happened?
Certainly, there was smoke and wailing. The world was tsedreyt confused, a fog that couldn’t find its own foundation. The driftnets of veins in our temples were pulsing and ready to burst with exhilaration, fear, righteousness, wonder.
Did Moishe loop a rope under a priest’s arms then hang him from a yardarm over a menorah?
Did he seize a priest and say, “Afraid to die?”
“I hope to receive my eternal reward,” the priest replied.
“In the meantime, thanks for everything,” Moishe said and lit the seven candles.
Did the priest dance and weep and scream until his soft trotters smelt like barbecue?
I remember the general sense and the certain rage of our victory and our ardour. The cauterizing fire.
Was the treasure equally divided among our crew?
Were the dead pushed through the scuppers to be sharkmeat?
Did Moishe stand above our hatch in a haze of Spanish boat smoke and proclaim to its imprisoned captain and his son a speech for which he had hoped to find occasion?
“A broch upon your pestilient kishkas for you are a sneaking hintl puppy, as are any who submit to be governed by the chazer rich who want only their own security, for the whelps have not the beytsim otherwise to defend what they get by such dreck-mouthed knavery. And,” he continued with an ostentatious wave of his hand, “a broch upon ye altogether. And damn them for a pack of crafty gazlonim thieves, and you, who serve them, for a pekel of hen-hearted shmegegges. They villify us, the mamzers do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor and weak under the cover of law, and we plunder the rich with no protection but our own chutzpah. You should rather join our minyan than sneak after the tucheses of villains for bread.”
We were then seaborne Robin Hoods, our Sherwood a forest of waves.
Was there then silence from the captain and his son? And did we wait hours to investigate whether it was sleep, death, exhaustion, hopelessness, or villainy that kept their bodies mute?
Chapter Five
Was I surprised my hopeful pink boychik Moishe had turned pirate?
Feh.
God Hisself would have turned pirate if, on bumping into the New World, He had seen that the othershtupping Spanish had discovered only a larger canvas on which to paint their murderous scenes. The same hateful fire burned inside their poxy hearts as fueled Inquisition flames. They had persecuted Jews. Now they persecuted Los Indios.
But God—being the kind of shmendrik who thinks both of everything and nothing—sailed Himself beyond the margin of the world’s flat map, past the interstellar Borscht Belt, and through the quintessence into His own forever new, forever ancient and unnavigable world. Sha. One day, the oldest alter kaker of them all, Captain Yahweh, ignoring the constellations of yellow stars, pointed his metaphysical bowsprit beyond time and the page and left this world, leaving us no choice but to mutiny.
Gey gezunt, Captain.
Good riddance, you old tummeler, you cosmic stand-up.
Take all of creation. Please.
Plato, that ancient rebbe, once said we’re each only half a person. And that, far back in some prehistoric Grecian dreamtime, each of us were whole, each of us pickled in an amazement of love, friendship and intimacy instead of having our kishkas roil with the burning loss of the other half of ourselves.
The New World? It was to be the Old World’s other half, the earth whole and healed again. Humans to fill the empty side of the Big Macher Adonai’s chest. Instead, a hollow in all of our chests, beside which the deserted island of our heart keeps beating, because it doesn’t know what else to do.
A pirate? With enough pieces of eight, you can rebuild the world. One kind of chest isn’t that different than another.
Late afternoon. Moishe wrapping Ham’s leg in a bandage fashioned from his own britches. Moishe the physician then applying medicaments to Samuel’s hand. Namely, rum.
“Where to?” Jacome asked. He was bo’sun of the ship.
Our ship. What had we Jews christened it? We had adopted a Talmudic approach and continuously debated an appropriate name. And nu, maybe like the unutterable name of the captain of captains, YHVH—Yahweh or Jehovah Himself, its real name is unpronounceable, hidden, unutterable.
The Gopherwood Shmeckel.
The Eleventh Plague.
The Meshugeneh Ship of Fools.
“Where to?” Jacome repeated.
In an adventure, the next place is always somewhere else but in order to set the sails, we would likely need to be more specific.