The women had given Moishe a firestick, a stone, and some dry grass for kindling. Moishe pressed the end of the stick into the stone with his palms and rubbed back and forth. We should only hope for a happy and propitious ending, nu? Some minutes passed. Then a splash over the rim of the barrel and the grasses were soaked. Moishe—always expecting fate to be a mamzer—removed some still dry grass from a small sack that he had kept in safety in his shirt, and began again.
Eventually, a weak smoke, and then the red spurt of fire. Quickly, Moishe dropped the burning grasses in the bottle and pushed its narrow neck into the wounded hull. The green world of the bottle teemed with smoke. Viperous tendrils would soon be fuming below-deck.
“Let’s hope—keneynehoreh—we haven’t lit the orlop and its store of gunpowder,” Moishe said. “But we will soon know.”
The ship came alive. The meshugeneh mariners aboard the Gopherwood Shmeckel scuttled fore and aft as a bees’ nest disturbed.
We heard them buzzing, running to safety up on deck, some into the rigging.
Moishe tipped the bottle and emptied the burning wad into the ship. He manoeuvred the barrel around toward the bow and held fast to some backstay deadeyes.
Soon, as expected:
“Gevalt!” the crew shouted.
“Fire!”
“Gotenyu, get the piss buckets.”
“Lower the hogshead o’er the larboard gunwale.”
“Fire!”
“Flames behind the salt pork store.”
“Shh! Zog’s nisht oys—don’t say it!”
And indeed the lovely boucan barbecue fumes of burning meat billowed invitingly from the ship along with an admixture of tar and mouldy lumber—the combined tang, an alter kaker’s shvitz, his shoes, and a variety of ailing muskrat. In the fire-fighting fury and smoke-filled hoo-hah, Moishe clambered up the hull, clasping chains, deadeyes, and shrouds, then scaled the mainmast. He was a grievous and avenging angel in a fog of rum and pork-fire and from high up the cross-tree, he proclaimed:
“Nu. Look up, for I am the voice of this cloud of sulphurous and tormenting flame. I who have turned this ship into a burning bush around which you now scurry farmisht. But don’t thank me. I have returned from the dead. That’s thanks enough. I whose putz is a great mast which requires no stays. Whose hair is an untamed and piratical porcupinity. Whose grepsn are the fortz of one who has dined on naught but forty years of rats. Whose eyes burn like twin stars and light up treasure maps with their reading. I who is not so easy to get rid of. But who were you expecting? Yoshkeh? The Messiah? A klog, but it is a farkakteh and scurvy world, but which other world would have us? I have returned as your captain and together we shall not perish but shall seek eternal youth and life whether in sea or fire, in earth or air or from the quintessence itself. Or in the sheyneh zaftikeh arms of another and their sweet knish. Remember the days that have been, the seasons we have lived, where we might sing, swear, drink, drab, and kill in vengeance as freely as cake-makers do flies, as parrots speak, or as the waves climb and fall as they seek the distant shores of the world. The white smoke—with your consent and articles—elects me again captain … if we are able to put the fire out.”
The farklemtifying cogworks of the crew required no additional input to become yet more farklemt. Because of the obfuscating fumes of panic and smoke, they did not recognize Moishe but took his voice to be that of a dybbuk or demon of the sea. A Yiddish zombie spirit. When one is truly frightened, all fiends speak your language. In addition to their mortal fear of becoming ship-bound barbecue or drowned pickles in brine, they now felt metaphysical dread. Who was this fallen angel who had climbed the main tree? Moishe had chewed up the sails and—vo den?—overacted. He had expected his supernatural alef beytsim routine to win the hustings with eerie machismo. His crew would recognize and be swayed by yet another inventive scheme of chutzpah and seyhcl by their once-and-fugitive captain, line up obediently, and await further instruction.
Plan B.
“Samuel,” he called. “It’s Moishe. Vi geyts dir—how’s it going? You thought I was dead but I’m back.”
“Abi gezunt,” Samuel replied. “But what does it matter who you are. We have a fire to kill.”
How do you know if you’re a captain?
Moishe clutched hold of a sheet and soared down to the poop and into the midst of the tumult. He began directing the directionless.
“Shlomo, raise the hogshead. Yankel, dunk and fill the bucket then pass it to Samuel. Samuel, pass it to Yahíma. Down the hatch, Yahíma, pass it through to Ham …”
The ocean was thus carried below-deck, hand to hand, bucket by bucket, and so quelled the fire.
“Jacome and Trachim, take the charred barrels above-deck, break out the pork, and pitch the smouldering staves overboard.”
Clothed in billows, Moishe stood amidship and became captain once again. A captain: the grammarian of ships.
His orders brought order and dinner to the deck. The fire extinguished, the crew gathered for a seder of braised pork, no longer slaves of danger and flame. Moishe, eschewing the treyf, opted for lentils on a trencher of cornbread matzoh.