The Meq (7 page)

Finally, he said, “I am captain of a fine and fast clipper ship, the
Clover.
Twelve years I have been her skipper now. A smuggler I am and proud of it, but that day we were taking on a legal load; cane sugar, it was. Next to us in the harbor was a ragged old ship I had never seen nor heard of before called the
Pisces.
I was busy with the load-in and not paying much attention, but on board the
Pisces
there was a mean and sinful thing taking place: a flogging. If you have ever seen one, you will never want to see one again. The unfortunate man receiving the lash was stripped to the waist and bound to the rigging, hands tied above his head, legs spread apart, and ankles secured. The boatswain’s mate wielded the cat-o’-nine-tails. I could hear the dull whacks followed by the poor fellow’s low moans.

“I should have done something, maybe called out the captain or stopped it myself, but I did nothing. Flogging has been outlawed since the sixties and I knew it, but still, in my business, you often lend a mute conscience as well as a deaf ear and a blind eye.

“But to the point. That Spider Boy, who I soon found out was a girl by the sound of her voice, had somehow sneaked up my own mizzenmast and was dangling there in the rigging, looking down on the
Pisces
and the flogging. No one saw her but me and I don’t think anyone else heard her issue instructions to the boatswain to put down that cat-o’-nine-tails and walk away, even though he was a good sixty feet away and had no way of hearing her. She said it nice and steady, just like you, and in a low voice that was more a chant than anything else. But put it down he did, and walk away he did also, knowing, I suppose, that his own captain would probably have him flogged for doing it. After that, the Spider Boy—what did you say her name was?”

“I didn’t say, but her name is Geaxi,” I said.

“Yes, well,” he went on, “she looked down at me and, I swear by Neptune, she knew I had been listening and watching, but we never spoke of it and I delivered her safely to Bogy in Biloxi.”

He looked down at his pipe, saw that it had burned out, and tapped it again on the table. Whether it was the circumstances or he could just handle his liquor, I didn’t know, but he now seemed completely sober. He was a patient man, I could tell, and he was going to wait until doomsday for a response.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

He looked me squarely in the face and leaned forward.

“Can I speak openly in front of her?” he said, nodding toward Carolina.

“Yes.”

“I want to hire you, boy. I want you to come and work for me. I will take you on as an apprentice, so you don’t have to bunk with the crew and you can do what you do, however you do it, when I need it. I need your power, or whatever it is, to protect me. There are a great many scoundrels in my profession, let me tell you. I will show you the high seas and a fine life of adventure. You will not regret it.”

I looked at Carolina. A million things were going through my mind. Was this it? Was this my chance to do what Mama said and find Sailor? Carolina was tight-lipped, but she was nodding, as if to say, “Yes, yes, do it. This is your chance.”

I looked back at this odd man in his tam-o’-shanter, holding his long-stemmed pipe. He wasn’t going to say another word or persuade me in any way and, in that respect, reminded me of Solomon. I liked him for that.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll go with you and I’ll do what you said when it’s needed, but I’ve got to tell you now, I’m going for another reason.”

“And what would that be?” he asked.

“There’s someone I’ve got to find; another one like me named Sailor.”

“Aye, that would be the one you asked about. Well, not to discourage you, boy, but almost every man at sea has, at one time or another, been called Sailor.”

“I know,” I said, “I’ve thought about that.”

“Well, never mind, we will find what we can find, that I promise you. I expect to leave for the Gulf bright and early in the morning. Can you be ready?”

“Yes,” I said.

He got up to leave and stopped at the door.

“By the way, what is your name, lad?”

“Zianno,” I said. “Call me Z.”

He tipped his cap to Carolina and said, “In the morning then, Z.” And he left, leaving Carolina and me sitting by the light of a single candle, staring at each other.

We sat like that until dawn, talking and trying to imagine what my life was going to be like. Carolina saw it as the adventure of a lifetime and I did too, but I couldn’t escape another feeling; I felt guilty about leaving and not “watching over Mrs. Bennings” as Solomon had asked; and I felt guilty about leaving the girls alone after Geaxi’s warning. Carolina said Mrs. Bennings would be fine, she’d see to it and she would always be there for Georgia. I said, “Yes, but who’s there for you?”

She said not to worry, everything would be fine, and we both acted as if I’d be back in a few weeks. It was a lie. We both knew that too.

I stopped by Mrs. Bennings’s room before I left. Natalie and Georgia were asleep in chairs, but Georgia had pulled hers next to the bed. Mrs. Bennings was curled up on her side in the center of her bed with the sheets tucked all around her. Her right hand was at an odd angle beside her cheek. She was snoring. She had something clutched in her hand and I bent over to see what it was. I recognized it immediately, but I hadn’t seen it in a long time; I thought I’d lost it. It was Solomon’s cap, the one he’d tossed to me when he left.

I walked out of the boardinghouse into a pale gold dawn light. It was the winter of 1883. It was cold. Carolina and I stood shivering in it.

“You know that when I come back it will be completely different between us, don’t you?” I said.

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Because you’ll be older . . . different . . . a woman . . .”

She just laughed and turned to run back inside. She got to the door and as she went in, leaned her head back out.

“Well?” I said.

She laughed again. “What difference does that make?” she asked, and closed the door.

Two weeks later I was at sea, after traveling with Captain Woodget, as he now liked to be called, down the Mississippi by steamer to New Orleans and then to Biloxi by train. We slipped out in the dark of night by longboat and met the
Clover,
anchored in the Gulf about a mile out. We set sail for points south by southeast, headed for Key West, Nassau, and ports unknown.

The
Clover
was one of the last of its kind, nearly ninety yards long with miles of rigging and a well-drilled crew. Steamships were beginning to vie for trade with the clippers and the days of the great merchant sailing ships were numbered. Captain Woodget didn’t agree with this fact and never backed down from a challenge to race with one of the “tin crates,” as he called them.

He made sure that everyone on board understood I was his apprentice and not a cabin boy. No one ever doubted him and I was given free rein on the ship. He was a good captain, hard but fair, and he was an expert in sail-making, rigging, and navigation. He had the respect of every seaman on board and each one knew that things would be done one way—Captain Woodget’s—no matter how trivial it might seem.

I got my sea legs early and never got seasick, even crossing the Gulf Stream, which was rough. I made friends with many of the crew and most called me Z, but I also got a nickname from our Portuguese cook, who called me “Pequeño Basque,” or “Little Basque.”

Captain Woodget became a friend and helped me search for Sailor in every port, as long as I remembered my primary task, “watching his back.”

I loved the life at sea; the wind and the smell of the constant spray and the stars at night, ten million more than I’d seen when I woke up to the Milky Way in Colorado. I was kept busy most of the time, but I also had endless hours to think about Mama and Papa, Solomon, Ray, Georgia, and Carolina; people I had loved and somehow lost, much too quickly.

Time has a different pace at sea. Days turn into weeks and weeks into months so easily. It rolls under you and you sail through it as you would the sea itself. It is vast and broken only by the light, the weather, the next harbor, a memory of lost things. Sailor, if he existed, must have felt this way a thousand times, I thought.

I hadn’t found a trace of him. After Captain Woodget had taught me how and where to look, I talked to seamen of all colors and nations. I stopped and hounded dockworkers, barmaids, whores, kitchen cooks, anyone and everyone. Months went by, then a year, then two. My Meq blood and sensibilities concerning Time didn’t seem to notice; only my obsession with finding Sailor mattered. We took on cargoes of tea, wool, coal, jute, redwood, brown sugar, dyes; hundreds of different goods from hundreds of different ports. We anchored off West Africa, Brazil, Madagascar, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, the whole rim of the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Most of our cargoes were legal, but the
Clover
always had one hold, or at least part of one, filled with contraband, and a cabin was always available to the occasional revolutionary or murderer at a price. Holidays and birthdays were never celebrated; smuggling is mainly business and the demands on the men who do it are relentless and never romantic. Two years became four and four became eight. I saw Captain Woodget and most of his crew through two separate cholera outbreaks, where dozens died. I learned to speak bits of French, Spanish, and Portuguese, enough to ask, “Do you know a boy named Sailor?” But no one did. Twelve years passed and I was as lost as I’d been when I first went to sea; twelve years of searching I felt were wasted. I still wore the Stones, though I hadn’t had to use them, not once. Captain Woodget and the crew never mentioned how I looked the same. I was just “Little Basque,” another unexplained mystery of the sea.

Then we anchored in a cove on the coast of Bermuda, not in the main harbor, but near it. It was New Year’s Day 1896, and twelve years were about to feel like twelve seconds.

Captain Woodget and I came ashore after dark with his first and second mates. “This is a human cargo,” he said, “a job beneath me, but still worth the money.”

As we made our way up a rocky path, he told me we were transporting the mistress of Antoine Boutrain, a well-known captain of the French shipping firm Bourdes, to New Orleans.

“Seems the good captain has a beautiful and loving wife at home,” he said, “but he likes to have this one meet him in different ports around the world. She cannot sail with him, so this time she sails with us. He is a warped man, I tell you, probably from trading that damned Chilean nitrate, but he pays well and guess what more is in it, Z?”

“I think I know,” I said.

Captain Woodget stopped on the path and turned to look at me. It was dark all around us, but I could feel his eyes bearing down.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I mean, I’m not sure, but then again, I am.”

“Damnit, Z, say what you mean!” he fumed.

“This woman,” I said, “this mistress you’re picking up, she has an entourage; two of them, two Basque like me, right?”

“Holy Trident and dammit to hell! How did you know that? Only Captain Boutrain told me and I told no one.”

I looked in Captain Woodget’s face. He knew me as well as anyone by now.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We left the rocky way and started on a path of sand between the seagrass and weeds. The ground leveled out. We could see the house ahead of us, alone and lit by candles, white against the black sky.

I heard the song first. The lonely notes. The ancient melody and words woven into the night. Two voices exchanging lines, sad lines in a forgotten language; singing, swelling, falling. I knew that language. It was Papa dying, singing Mama’s song.

Captain Woodget asked if I was all right. I nodded and we walked toward the house.

The captain introduced himself and his first and second mates to the mistress, whose name was Isabelle, and was ushered in. I hung back in the shadows. The singing had stopped, if it had even begun. I turned and made my way in the dark around the house to the rear, which sloped down through the marsh and rocks toward the Atlantic, a thousand yards away. I stood in the silence.

Then I felt them. I couldn’t hear them, but I felt them. I felt them closing in, coming nearer. I knew they would and they knew I would feel them. It was what we knew. It was knowledge I had never been taught, but now could never forget.

“I am Unai,” he said.

I turned to my left.

“I am Usoa,” she said.

I turned to my right.

I looked back and forth between them, our eyes exchanging greeting and welcome. They had come to within ten feet of me and never made a sound. They were both dressed in loose black trousers tucked into leather boots laced to the knees. They wore broad-collared cotton shirts and no jewelry, except that he had a necklace around his neck and she a priceless blue diamond in her pierced right ear. They looked like twins, and if they were twins, I could have been their triplet.

“I am Zianno,” I said.

“We know,” they said in unison.

“I heard you singing, I think. What is it?”

“It is an old Meq song,” Unai said, walking over to Usoa and taking her hand in his.

“It is about Home,” Usoa said, “and return, the longing for return.”

“It was beautiful, but I don’t know the language.”

“You will,” Unai said.

“It will come to you,” Usoa said.

“But how?”

“Be patient,” Unai said, “you have come a long way, Zianno. You are learning, believe me, but I should introduce myself formally. I am Unai Txori, Egizahar Meq, through the tribe of Caristies, protectors of the Stone of Silence.”

He lifted Usoa’s hand. “And I am Usoa Ijitu, Egizahar Meq, through the tribe of Autrigons,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. It had been over twelve years since I’d seen one of my own kind and the last time had been almost too short to remember. But there was a presence, a kinship . . . something.

“You’re wearing the Stones around your neck, aren’t you?” I asked Unai.

“
Très bien,
Zianno. You are learning recognition. Later, you will learn more than any of us—more than your father.”