His Humour of going a pyrating proceeded from a Disorder in his Mind, . . . occasioned by some Discomforts he found in a married State.
–Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (1724)
News travels its own paths. The king, let’s say, signs an edict, ring-laden fingers drawing quill across parchment, it’s bound for a ship to the colonies, it crosses an ocean, but before the king’s messenger so much as sets his silver-buckled foot on the pier, word has already reached tavern and fisherman’s hut, custom house and bawdyhouse. The news has slapped ashore along with seaweed and flotsam, the salt breeze carries it along cobbled streets and muddy alleys, it clings to the cracked and battered shoes of sailors and before anyone’s seen a broadsheet or heard a town crier, every seafaring man knows it, has always known it: the governor’s going to offer an amnesty.
A half-mile’s walk from the governor’s mansion takes us to a sunless alley near the wharves, wooden buildings whose bowed and sagging walls are suffused with saltwater rot. Between the fishmongers’ stalls and the brothel stands a tavern favored by those who’ll benefit most from his excellency’s largesse, in fact they’re shouting the good news back and forth across the room.
It’s only for a week, one insists, but others shout him down, no, two weeks, no, a month. After that they’ll hunt us like rabbits. King’s got new fast ships, if they catch you they’ll string you up, no questions asked.
Some argue for taking the pardon. If they come forward now they won’t have to make amends, they can retire on the spoils, live in peace. Retire on what? another says, all I’ve got in the world’s a debt for two drams of rum. He casts a sullen glance at the stout, red-faced woman who runs the tavern.
Still others want to seize a whole island somewhere, set up their own government. A commonwealth, they call it.
“Rogues’ republic, more like.”
“Now then, Sarah, you’ll be lonely if we take off for the Indies.”
All the changes she’s seen in her life, it wouldn’t surprise her to find her establishment empty one night, not a single paying customer, and that is the end of that. Transformation–the one constant of the universe. Herodotus, Lao Tzu, and now Sarah the tavernkeeper.
“Good riddance,” she says, but no one pays any mind. The debate tapers off and they go back to drinking beer, throwing dice. Lately they’ve been fancying themselves great readers since one of their company pinched a volume of history from the bookdealer on Front Street. A history of the pirates, their own story on fancy paper between hard covers instead of the lurid pamphlets that show up after every notorious trial. Each evening the designated reader labors through a few more pages, sounding out the words while the others nod encouragement.
While they’re reasonably sober Sarah approaches them with the usual question. She picks out any face that seems new–or maybe it’s just different today, leaner, or gray from malaria, swollen from toothache.
The regulars never let on that she’s asked them before. They steer her in the direction of fresh customers: over there, an older fellow just up from Port Royal.
“Hezekiah, did you say?” He searches his memory while the others listen, curious. Maybe she’ll finally get an answer. “Ship’s chandler on Captain Worley’s sloop, isn’t it, or no, a bo’s’n on the Winchelsea? Tall fellow, right?”
“Not very.”
“Wait, does he have a club foot? No? Must be someone else.” Though he relishes the chance to peruse his mental catalog of shipmates over the decades, from the look on her face it gets through even to him that the question is not posed out of idle curiosity. This Hezekiah isn’t just someone who ran out on his bar tab. “How long–” he starts to say before the others cut him off.
It’s a warm night, but Sarah lights a fire in the fireplace. She hopes it will dry out the damp ocean air that seeps in no matter that the door’s always closed and the shutters drawn. She can’t get away, it seems, from heat and humidity. In her long years as a domestic servant the task she dreaded most was the laundering. She boiled water in great fire-blackened kettles, the steamy smells of lye and bleach billowing about her while she wrung out table linens and bedclothes and the only thing she could even imagine hoping for in this life was to draw a breath of cool air. Here in the tavern the woodsmoke competes with the smell of the whale oil in the hanging lamps, which has gone rancid and is blackening the ceiling beams. But the sea smell is stronger than both. It’s in the sweat of the sailors, it clings to their shirts and trousers, they breathe out sodden clouds of it. Sarah taps a new barrel of ale and out comes, what else, the clammy salt smell of the ocean.
The men listen to the story of yet another nefarious pirate who ended his days on the gallows, and let that be a lesson to respectable folk, for the lesson’s lost on the sea rovers. It seems this particular man, poor fellow, turned to piracy to escape a nagging wife. The listeners laugh and sympathize. Most of them know to do it quietly, but some of the newcomers are more boisterous. “He’s got that bit right,” one of them shouts. “And the governor understands, he knows it’s not our fault we went to the bad.” He gets a discreet slap on the head from an oldtimer, but another pipes up, “When we turn ourselves in, do you think he’ll give us new wives?” “Hush, y’ idiot.” The regulars look warily at Sarah as she slams down more tankards on the table and turns away, grumbling.
Suddenly the men scrape back their benches and jump to their feet while their comrade reads the list of pirates executed in the trial of Major Stede Bonnet. An honor roll. They stand at attention as well as scurvy drunks can. John Brierly. Rowland Sharp. William Eddy.
The history book, left on the table, opens and stirs as if a wind rustled its leaves, and assorted captains and crew blow right off the pages and skitter about on the floor. They stand up on shaky, transparent legs but they get more solid by the minute and soon they take their place amid drinkers and dice throwers, who grudgingly make room. Among them is the book’s author, a learned gentleman with a silk and linen waistcoat and fine ruffled sleeves.
Sarah is not impressed. Not only the captains but every least deckhand in this fellow’s book is robust and charming, more vivid than any sailor she’s ever seen. The historian leans his elbow on the bar. “Now then,” he says, “what drove your husband to go a-pirating?” He pities her, thinks her dull-eyed, dull-brained, hardly expects to hear an answer.
“Clearly, sir,” she says, “our husbands didn’t want to be pirates. Poor lambs, it was our nagging put cutlass and pistol in their hands, our scolding voices made them hoist the Jolly Roger and plunder every ship they could get hold of.” While the gentleman gapes she waves a reddened, callused hand toward the ever more inebriated sailors as they pound on their tables for more beer, quarrel and embrace and shake their fists at each other. “Now they’ve found someone to hear their tales of woe and put it in a book. Lucky for them.”
No historian would have been interested in her husband’s life on land. Starved-looking he was when she first knew him, with the hangdog expression of a man who knows he’s been beaten by life. In the lull between planting season and threshing he worked for the master’s gamekeeper, tended to the traps and the hunting, skinned animals, tanned the deerskin and cowhide, smell of death all round. One day he paused by the servant girl doing the laundering, her hands and sweaty face permanently flushed, lungs seared from breathing in steam. How lucky it would be, he thought, to be so clean. “Which of us is more miserable, then?” she’d said, and he managed a smile that looked to her like a death’s head grin. Later they used to talk about buying a farm when their contracts were up. Hezekiah had it well planned. They would keep a cow for milk and chickens for eggs and he would never cut off the hide or feathers or scales of a dead creature again.
Standing next to the learned gentleman now is a minister of God, formed of bindery dust and crumbled, flaked-off paper. Sarah tries to think why he would be in a book on pirates, then remembers the hanging scenes, always a clergyman somewhere in there urging repentance.
“It’s an evil business, this,” he tells Sarah. “Every coin a poor wretch hands you, there’s blood on it, and what you give him in return speeds him along the path to damnation.”
“Nicely put, Reverend,” the scholar says.
Sarah starts to reply but is drowned out by a fresh wave of laughter and applause. The history book hasn’t been completely emptied of its characters; in fact the sailors have just read about some pirate captain unrepentant on the gallows: “Others have done worse than me,” the captain says before he swings from the rope and meets his God.
The prostitutes come in as they always do, later in the evening when the men are softened by drink and the lights have burned lower. They get the sailors to order food for them, bacon and salt pork. Sarah knows about their cravings. She buys barrels of salted herring from the fishwife, and cucumbers in brine, things the sailors don’t want to touch.
The preacher scowls. “Yet another reason you’ll never be respectable.”
But Sarah knows that each of the ladies was not always what she is now. She herself hasn’t always been a tavernkeeper, a woman of means who pays taxes to the town council and drives hard bargains with brewer, butcher, and dry-goods peddler. Inside her still is the teenager who arrived in the colonies seasick and half-starved, indentured to a tobacco planter in the piedmont.
What if we’d never come here, she would say to Hezekiah sometimes. But the future was what he wanted to think about, not their lives before, not what it was like to be so hungry you’d sign a contract for anything and next you know you’re on a stinking, leaking ship bound for the colonies. What if we’d stayed, Sarah used to say. There were so many of us, they’d been shipping us poor folk off for a hundred years and still there were more of us. Hezekiah pictured mass starvation, heaps of dead bodies in the streets. Sarah pictured a ragged army, outnumbering the sabers and guns of the king’s men. They would march to the palace and knock on the door and say politely, We would like some bread and honey. It was a reasonable request. The king would understand.
“You should find an honorable way to make a living,” the preacher says.
“A fine idea.” What a luxury it would have been to choose their living in spite of no schooling, no inheritance. No money to buy land, a shop, or rent a building or a horse and wagon. She wonders how many of the men here now would be farmers, tailors, saddlers, tinsmiths, wheelwrights. Not sailors, working for paltry wages and moldy hardtack and the danger of washing overboard in a storm any moment. Hezekiah had told her about it after his first stint on the ships, when he came back more gaunt and hollow-eyed than ever. But his second voyage left him strangely elated. He had a plan, he said. They would buy a tavern that an old man was willing to sell for a good price, much cheaper than what a farm would cost. Sarah’s contract was almost over, they would run the tavern together, never again take orders from a master. He took Sarah’s hand and dipped it into a leather pouch heavy with bright coins. Pieces of eight, he said. And a smaller pouch full of tiny white globes that seemed to shine with their own light. Pearls.
“We men share everything equal,” he said proudly. “The money, the valuables. When there’s rum and fine food it doesn’t just go to our captain, we all get some.”
“What have you done?” she said. “Who have you killed?”
“It was never like that.”
One day out of nowhere, pirates swarming all over the ship waving pistols and swords, officers put ashore and the ordinary sailors given the choice, join us or leave with your captain. And then it’s away after new prizes, the work’s easy for the first time, you point a weapon and they hand over their cargo, no one hurt. Ships there for the taking, loaded with precious things sent from one side of the ocean to the other, the king waiting for them on the far shore.
No one hurt. Sarah soon learned different, the customers at the tavern they bought were seafaring men, they swapped tales all the time, they read the pamphlets written up when famous pirates are caught and put on trial, and then she heard the details, one pirate turning against another, passengers tortured and thrown overboard.
“A few bad ones,” Hezekiah said. “We didn’t do those things.”
They quarreled the day he left for the third voyage, maybe his last, for all she knows now. There was no need, Sarah had said, they had the tavern, he didn’t have to go out to sea at all, let alone join up with the pirates again. It was one of the few times she saw him angry. “You don’t understand how the world works,” he said. “It’s not just the pirates, it’s the painted ladies who come in to the tavern every night, it’s you yourself who sells drink to men in exchange for what little money they have, God knows they have better things to do with it. Everyone’s after the same thing in this life, how to get the gold from the other fellow’s pocket into his own.”
Sarah has had time to think about that, time to argue with Hezekiah in her head. If all she wants is the other fellow’s gold, she isn’t getting very far, and neither is anyone else around her. Most of the people she’s ever met or seen or heard of are servants or former servants, slaves, soldiers, sailors, desperate Indians. Somehow from this land of poor people ships are filled up with gold and silver and jewels, hides and fur, timber, tobacco and it goes into his majesty’s treasury and the people are left here, tilling, mining, fetch-and-carrying, patting their pockets for a spare coin and even when they find one it’s never made of gold.
Hezekiah was a gentle soul, he didn’t want to leave on a sour note. “Try to understand, Sarah. On the ship I feel–” He lacked the words to explain. His life was divided into three parts: the time in England that he hardly remembered, the years in servitude, and then the sea. It wasn’t just that there was no hierarchy on the pirate ship, that he wasn’t a downtrodden servant. It was the ocean, the sky, big things that should have made him feel small but instead he felt–big wasn’t the word. Expanded. Dissolved. “Free.”
The men in the tavern have heard any number of answers to the mystery of Hezekiah’s fate. He’s dead. He’s on this ship or that ship. He’s alive and well and living with another wife who never questions where the gold comes from. They’ve been looking so long that he has become for them a figure of myth. They can picture him clearly in their imagination; often they convince themselves that they have indeed caught a glimpse of him at a distance. But if there’s an actual sighting what will they do? Make their way back here or send word, If you’re heading for the Carolinas there’s a certain tavern . . . And then what to tell Hezekiah? Go home? Don’t go home?
There is a knocking on the tavern door, a loud, echoing pounding noise that seems more like the door itself shaking violently than the sound made by a fist. “Walk in,” someone calls out in a falsetto voice. Sarah steels herself for an argument as she heads to the door, probably someone too drunk to stand, looking for trouble. She steps outside and sees nothing. The alley is dark and silent. A waning moon sailing in and out of fast-running clouds gives her enough light to see something leaning against the threshold. A sack. She touches it and can tell it’s heavy. She’s tempted to leave it out there but she figures it belongs to one of the more addle-brained of her customers and he’ll miss it if he loses it. She picks it up, has to use both hands and brace herself against the doorway. She’s hugging it against her body as she maneuvers back inside. Something rolls out the top and hits the wooden floor with a soft thud that no one should have been able to hear. The men all look up, magnetized before they even know what they’re seeing. They turn away from rum, dice, quarrels, flirtations.
A lemon has fallen out of the sack.
The sack is full of lemons.
“Sarah,” one manages to say (the rest can scarcely breathe), “how much are you charging for those?”
Sarah, in the silence, knows that this is not the time to figure profit and loss. If they had any presence of mind right now they would be on their knees. She can feel their cells crying out to her. “Free,” she says, and then she’s mobbed and the lemons start flying around the room. Knives come out, no matter the rust on them, or dirt, or dried blood. The fruits are cut in half and the sailors are devouring them like drowning men sucking air. Blistered, rope-scarred hands that had trembled around tankards and dice now hold the yellow half-globes delicately, she sees fingernails, knuckles where before had been claws. The men are transported, they seem to be praying. To call it an orgy would not do it justice.
Sarah, the prostitutes, and the characters from the pirate book all gather at the bar and watch. It is the most bizarre thing they have ever seen.
She picks up a stray lemon that has rolled against the wall, cuts it into thin slices and passes them round.
“Quite sour,” says one of the prostitutes.
“But it smells good,” Sarah says wistfully.
They shrug.
Slowly the men sink down to their seats, groaning, satiated. Sarah watches them. Her shoulders have started to ache and her knees feel stiff. The soreness has been getting worse in recent years and she does her best to ignore it, but it makes her more irritable.
“Why a pardon?” she asks the scholar and the minister. “What will they do with themselves? Must be a war’s going to start, and the king needs hands for his navy.”
The preacher looks at her sternly and says, “Our sovereign is a godly man.”
“Now Sarah, admit,” a sailor says, awestruck, “you have someone coming a courting you.”
He must love her, they think. To bring her lemons.
The prostitutes drift off, arm in arm with the customers they’ve managed to entice. The book characters are fading, crawling back into paper and printer’s ink and history. Sailors are slumped against each other, or face down on the table, still mumbling. Sarah pours herself a small glass of hard cider and sits by the fireplace.
This time of night, a few hours before dawn, her mood of uncertainty dissipates and she decides for sure that Hezekiah is not dead. She ceases her mental arguments with a ghostly Hezekiah and instead begins to brood on a live Hezekiah. He’s decided not to come back. Easy enough to do, sign on with a ship bound for far away, live with his brother pirates and no wife, stars for a roof so nothing pins him down, nothing makes him feel not free.
There are things she would ask him now, after these years among seafaring men. Whether he’ll take the governor’s pardon. Whether he came upon slaving ships and set the wretched captives free, or sold them like so many pouches of gold nuggets or piles of hides. What to do with blood money, because after all, who do you give it back to?
And how does it smell, she wonders. Back before he started, he must have thought the sea would smell so clean, sunshine and salt breeze, not like the stench of dead animals and rawhide. She’s not set foot on a ship since her arrival in the colony, but she knows the common sailor sleeps in deep holds that never get a whisper of clean air, she knows how clothing rots if it doesn’t get a chance to dry, same with wounded flesh. She knows the smell of foul-breathed unwashed sailors crowded into a tavern.
The stench, masked briefly by the fragrance of the lemon orgy, has returned. Enough to make her nostalgic for her laundering work. She would herd the men into the courtyard, pluck the rags off their backs because shreds and tatters won’t stand up to washing, just toss those in the fire. Put the men into the great kettles and push them about with the long-handled paddle, skim off the gray dirt floating to the surface. They’ll climb out and wait to be flung over the clothesline, bodies fresh and glowing.
The last semi-conscious customers are babbling quietly to each other about the governor’s amnesty. They think about establishing their commonwealth, they’re even getting tearful, as if they’re leaving tomorrow. “We’ll send you lemons, Sarah,” the last of them says as he drifts into sleep. “Crates of ‘em.” They dream of their Rogues’ Republic, where only the despised have the right to vote, where a man’s body won’t smell no matter how dilapidated his clothing or how many teeth are missing, or limbs. Where barrels wash up on shore, pry this one open, porcelain and linen, and that one, wine from France and tea from India. Gifts from His Majesty, they’ll exclaim every time, because the surprise will always be fresh.
Sarah gathers up tankards and lemon rinds, snuffs the wick in one of the lamps. No one left to talk to tonight. The customers are sleeping. Her imaginary discussions with Hezekiah have run out of steam. The minister and the scholar have crept back into their book, so there’ll be no more sparring with them.
God Himself is who she would like to have a talk with, but she knows He won’t show Himself in this squalid place. She has to go up to Him, step up onto a knife-scarred table, float up to the ceiling where the timbers are so rotted they let her through easily, watch the sewage-clogged alley disappear beneath her as she sails higher than the winds and the clouds, to where God sits on His throne. God considers bellowing at her like He did to Job (after all, who can compete with God in cadence, alliteration, and the dactylic meter?), but He knows she won’t be intimidated, and besides, she’s not paying attention to Him. She’s dazzled by the sunlight, the blue of the heavens, everything swept clean by cool breezes. She points down and all she can think to say is, “The king is in the counting-house, counting out his money.” They look down, she and God. Far below is the earth, the land and the great oceans, and tiny treasure ships like corks bobbing along in the water, and she can’t think why He should care.