Fortuna and the Scapegrace Read online

  The homunculus was occupied with explaining something or other to the new crewmembers, and I took that opportunity to duck and slink away.

  The parson stood holding a halyard for balance in the rain. He appeared to be in deep contemplation of some tiny icon he held in his palm, most likely ruminating over some weighty issue of the soul, or possibly muttering a prayer for the Rose-loving fool so recently sucked down to Davy Jones. I was loath to disturb him, but felt I had no choice.

  I cleared my throat. “And God said, Let there be light…”

  The scarecrow twisted my way.

  I held up my palms. “And there was light.”

  His expression was one of puzzlement.

  I stepped forward. “And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

  His confusion continued as he studied my approaching person. He tucked his icon into his pocket.

  “They are the ongoing lines,” I explained, “in the passage you read from the Bible.”

  “Oh.”

  “I found your choice of verse most appropriate and inspirational, considering the circumstances and setting. The lines spoke to me and lent a sunny illumination to an otherwise dreary day in my spirits.”

  “Well, I am pleased to hear you say that.” He smiled modestly. “I wondered if anyone was listening.”

  “Always listening and watching,” I said, “seldom understanding. That is mankind’s plight in a peapod, do you not agree?”

  “Maybe so.”

  I considered him for a moment, endeavoring to cursorily gauge his character.

  “Of course,” I ventured, “it might be that we have, in our state of sinfulness, simply lost our ability to know Divinity’s language.” I stepped closer. “Maybe it is coming to us all the time, guiding us in ways we are too blind to see, or too deaf to hear.”

  (I was taking a chance, thinking that a man who chooses to enter the preacherly arts might find himself preoccupied with this particular subject. By the way his eyes sparkled to life, I saw that my guess was a good one.)

  “Our job as followers,” I continued, “is to be open to that holy language – to its subtle messages of signs and sounds and ironical symbols – and your difficult job as God’s collaborator is to shine a light on its secret meaning.” I nodded consolingly. “No small task for you.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “One I fear I’m not suited for.”

  “I am sure that was a common enough feeling for the Lord’s shepherds from Moses to Solomon, and even for the Savior himself, on his more tiresome days.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “You are doing fine,” I assured him. “Just fine.”

  We then stood regarding one another. We were both well soused by the rain, our clothes soaked through. His hair was smattered to his head. It was uncanny, but I felt somehow that I knew him from somewhere. Had our paths intersected before? His searching gaze gave me to think that he was entertaining a similar notion. I was about to pursue this line of thought with him when I heard someone yell my way.

  “Hey, you! Get your puckered ass back over here!”

  Of course, it was the runt purser suggesting rather figuratively that I rejoin him and my fellow neophytes.

  I signaled to him that I was coming. Then I turned back to the pastor. “Well, duty calls. But I look forward to continuing our conversation at earliest convenience.”

  He nodded and held out his hand. “I’m Adamiah,” he said. “Adamiah Linklater.”

  I grasped his thin damp hand and shook it.

  “Call me Hoper,” I winced. “Hoper Newfangle.”

  AND SO, THERE I found myself – one day an ill-starred flounderling with little promise of rescue, the next a gainfully employed deckhand on Cloud, the sleekest ship ever to sail the seven seas.

  I suppose I could have justifiably let myself get piss-drunk mad at the soothsayer’s treachery. That was surely the overriding sentiment of the simpletons with whom I had been drafted. They all swore vivid, cannibalistic oaths of revenge on the various agents who had so slyly hoodwinked them into service.

  “I’ll lop off her teats and boil ‘em in beer!” exclaimed a Smith.

  “I’ll stuff her slot with onions,” rejoined a Jones, “and toast her up with salt and pepper!”

  Hmm! Their graphic imaginings, joined, as they were, with their rancorous appetites, were, to my mind, getting the better of them.

  I personally tried to see the matter in a different light. Sure, I might have preferred to awaken in the ivory lady’s bed, strung out on carnal satisfaction, and with a blissful matrimonialism looming in my near future, but not vouchsafed that elusive dream, I was trying to see my new position as Captain Nilsson had portrayed it – a golden opportunity granted me by the Fates. Putting a sunshiny face on the day seemed more pragmatically sound than making oneself sick with a festering ire. Perhaps, I reasoned, there was a grander and more beneficial plan moving into place – some plot thought up by a supreme intelligence that would ultimately lead me to love and to treasures beyond my paltry imagination. A hoper could only hope. Besides, I decided, travel can be so broadening. A bit of salt-sea air might do me good.

  Nevertheless, all the optimism in the world could not obscure certain of the more troublesome elements of my situation. Foremost on this list of qualms were my fellow conscripts. One assumed they were each the result of some soured maternal bond. For surely men did not come naturally into this life with such an overriding odium and meanness. Unable to immediately fulfill a vengeance on their alleged betrayers, they were the sort who would exact a proxy payback on anyone available – kittens, nuns, or, as it might prove, former poets.

  We were each given a new set of sailor clothes – itchy blue linen trousers and a cotton blouse with a tricot jacket. We were instructed to change in the open air of the top deck, and the intervening spectacle of our transformation caused the nearby sailors to hoot derisively at our collective nudity. It was most humiliating, but it did feel good to slide into clean clothes. We were then told to toss our old flea-ridden garb over the side of the ship. My shirt and trousers tumbled and flapped into the waves like wing-shot pelicans. I watched them disappear in the ship’s roiling wake, and I could not help but sense an emblematic significance in the molting of my old plumage as I moved into my new station in life.

  A seaman named Bosco guided us to the crew’s quarters in the forecastle. He was black as coal, tall as a mainmast, and sported a string of white shark’s teeth around his brawny neck. He stooped beneath the low ceiling.

  “Choosey up a swing,” he said, and pointed with his thumb to a webbery of hammocks slung between some posts. “Those there are for the shanghaied.”

  It was obvious that we shanghaied did not rate as highly as the regular crew, as their boarding arrangements seemed rather spacious and luxurious by comparison. The hammocks we were given, in contrast, were strung up in the room’s cramped and poorly lit reaches, stacked so close together it seemed that a fellow slumbering above would most certainly sag into the personal proximity of the fellow below. Each hammock held a rolled blanket and I moved to one of the upper berths, spreading its blanket as if to mark it as my own.

  But alas, no sooner had I staked my claim then I felt a primal paw grasp my shoulder, wheeling me about. “Oh!”

  It was the scar-faced Smith. He leaned into my face, expelling the breath of a man who had recently eaten a dog shit pâté. This foul breath substituted itself for words, making his meaning clear enough. But to ensure I understood his intention, he then snarled and grabbed up my blanket, tossing it onto the hammock below.

  I smiled. “Well, of course,” I said. “You are surely correct. Forgive my presumptiliousness. Upon closer inspection I can see that, yes, this mooring here is more rightly fitted to your girthy frame than my own. My apologies, friend. May you enjoy many a restful nocturne held therein.”

  I did not wait for Mister Smith’s reply, sensing that it might involve pain,
and so I bent, quickly straightened my blanket in the lower hammock, and then moved near to Bosco, trusting he might provide me some protection.

  After that we were led to the ship’s galley for victuals. Hoo boy! I had lost count of the days since I had last eaten, and my gutworks fairly flopped for joy at the mere aroma of hot food – rutabaga soup with a sizeable chunk of sourdough bread! I found a corner away from my comrades and thoroughly indulged myself, sopping up every last drop with my bread, and then licking my bowl for any lingering residue with all the shameless manners of a pig. A gastronomic contentment subsequently inundated my being, and a rooty burp passed pleasurably over my happy smacking lips.

  But there would be no after meal respite.

  “New birds,” called Bosco. “Uppy now to the top deck.”

  Our tour of Cloud continued.

  THE DECKS GLISTENED WITH the unrelenting rain. The skies, if somber before, appeared even more so now. The clouds pressed down like the lid of a pot.

  “This way,” called Bosco. “Over here we go.”

  We all shambled along after our master like hesitant schoolboys.

  Bosco summoned a throng of the regular crew, and then they set about giving us a demonstration in ropework. After they loosened one of the lines and let it slip back through the pulleys, a sail over our heads went luff.

  “Watchy now how she’s stretched.”

  The sailors stepped forward, each taking hold of a section of the hemp line twisting through the tackle fastened to the gunwale.

  “A ready!” ordered the lead man.

  “A ready!” answered his mates.

  “And a heave!”

  “Ho!”

  The men hove on the halyard, drawing it back through the pulleys.

  “A heave!”

  “Ho!”

  “A heave!”

  “Ho!”

  They rocked in unison, putting their weight into it, as if doing a sort of dipping jig, stretching the line tighter with each rhythmic gather and tug.

  “A heave!”

  “Ho!”

  The sail soon billowed again, and then while the others braced against the line, the end man looped a fancy knot around a cleat. The seadogs stepped away from the straining halyard. One man skillfully wound the extra line into a coil on the deck. And that was that. Job done.

  It had been such an impressive performance that I nearly broke into applause.

  “Now for ye new birds,” said Bosco. “Steppy up.”

  We new birds halfheartedly waddled forward in the rain.

  A sailor unraveled the knot from the cleat and the wet line buzzed back through its pulleys, causing the coil to unspool, and the sail above to slacken once again.

  “Take it up,” ordered Bosco.

  We picked up the tail end of the coil with all the enthusiasm of schoolgirls picking up a dead snake.

  “Tight holds,” warned the lead man, “or it’ll scorch your hands.”

  We heeded the man’s warning and more firmly secured our grip on the length of soggy hemp. A Jones positioned himself between me and the tackle. The others lined up behind us.

  “Now!” hollered Bosco.

  “A ready!” barked the cantor. “And a heave!”

  We green recruits gave a spiritless effort, timid and out of tempo each one with the others.

  “A heave!”

  We halfheartedly pulled again.

  Bosco yelled, “Call out!”

  “A heave!”

  We pulled a bit harder, a bit more in unison. “Ho,” we muttered shyly.

  “Loudy up!”

  “A heave!”

  “Ho.”

  The line began to resist as the sail caught the wind. Somehow, this small progress emboldened us, and our cadence call grew more forceful.

  “A heave!”

  “Ho!”

  We started in with the dipping motion as we had seen it performed by the regular crew, pulling harder as the rope put forth an increasing fight against our efforts. The line grew evermore taut between us and the straining tackle.

  “A heave!”

  “Ho!”

  I could not say if my cohorts were feeling the same way as I, but as we labored at our common chore, I began to sense a transformation in myself that was oddly pleasing – I was becoming a sailor! Right then and there! I was suddenly part of a collective effort. A brotherhood. I had a sense of being integral to a goal in ways I had never experienced before. Perhaps, I pithily pondered, this is what is meant by being a member of society, a piece of the main, a person important to the forward progression of mankind. For, surely, the endeavor of moving a ship across the ocean could be seen microcosmically as humanity working together to forward the cause of society as a whole. And now I was important to it. Not just some feckless outsider looking on at others, not just some miscarried poet to whom no one pays any mind, but a vital cog in the works. Goodness! I belonged. The thought put an irrepressible grin on my face. I began to enjoy myself – the purposeful strain of my muscles, the musical, grunting chorus of Ho! It all seemed like a Homeric epic come to life – the actualization of a heroic concept – a metrical concretion of noble ideals borne on the winds of universal…

  And that is when I lost purchase of the rain-slicked boards beneath my feet.

  Between an A heave and a Ho.

  My soles slipped, and I pitched headlong into the Jones at the front of the line – blonk! – causing him, in turn, to tumble forward.

  Our sudden disruption of the momentum of the team, synchronized as it was with a fortuitously ill-timed pitching of the ship, resulted in the men behind us being yanked forward by the abrupt resistance of the halyard they gripped.

  “Oomph!” they expelled as one. “Ungh!”

  We all toppled, slamming into the tackle and then sprawling onto the deck in a heap of manly wreckage.

  For the briefest moment, everything settled.

  We sorted our bearings.

  And then someone began yowling like a fornicating tomcat.

  “Arwooooo!” he wailed. “Mrowwww!”

  I was fairly disoriented, on my knees with my rump in the air, my cheek planted firmly against the deck with the weight of my fellows pressing down on me from above. Everyone began cursing and squirming. As I waited for them to disentangle themselves, an object came into focus before my face. At first I took it to be a crab. It lay on its back, its legs wiggling spasmodically. How peculiar! But then I saw it more clearly and found that what I had at first taken for legs were, in fact, fingers.

  Four fingers, to be exact, and a thumb.

  It was a hand – palm up – singular and disengaged from what one typically comes to expect as normal residency for a hand.

  Lying in a pool of bloody rainwater.

  Deckhand, I thought, etymologically.

  “Arwoooooo!” called someone. “Oh gawd! Oh gawd!”

  The men all scrambled to their feet, and then everyone – new birds and veteran seamen alike – formed a half circle around the severed hand and its distraught owner. This Mister Jones knelt in the rain, clutching his newly truncated arm, and whimpering.

  Blood squirted enthusiastically from his stump.

  Thinking quickly, Bosco knelt by the man and cinched a cord around his lower arm. This stopped the flow of blood at once. Bosco then hefted the luckless fellow to his feet. The man wobbled, his face the color of wood ash, exhibiting a generally stunned deportment.

  “Takey him down to sickbay.”

  Two of the regular seamen led the whimpering chap away.

  Bosco peered up at the sail flapping in the wind over our heads. “You needs to be careful,” he said matter-of-factly, “you don’t catchy up in the winch.”

  Then he bent and grabbed the hand by its middle finger, holding it up like a deformed starfish.

  We all shrank back, automatically rubbing our palms together in private appreciation for the continuing continuity of our own digits and limbs.

  Bosco nodded thou
ghtfully, licking the raindrops from his lips, as if considering how the hand could best be cooked.

  Then he stepped to the gunwale and tossed it into the big stew pot of the sea.

  NOW IT IS A sorry trait of humanity that when something goes awry in the system, everyone involved is eager to find a culprit on whom to pass the blame. Politicians know this all too well. As did both Socrates and Christ. But in my former incarnation as a lowly and unsung poet, I found this to be of little daily concern. For it seems no one believes a humble sonneteer holds power enough to make a difference – positive or negative – of any measurable culpability. And yet now, within my first minutes of life as a sailor, I discovered that being part of a team, although initially quite invigorating, could just as soon turn into a worrisome liability.

  No sooner had that lifeless hand slapped the waves then all the remaining Joneses and Smiths turned my way with narrowed eyes.

  Bosco had stepped away to speak with the regular crew, leaving me and my peers without supervision. Oh bother! It was my long-gone school days all over again.

  “Heh-heh,” I said, when it became apparent that I was being singled out as Cloud’s current scapegoat. “Well now, let that be a lesson to us all – appendages and straining tackle – never the twain should meet. A valuable awareness for us to have gained so early in our apprenticeship.” I frowned woefully. “All the same, it is a pity about Mister Jones’s hand.” I shook my head at the grisly space of deck between us. “No more pat-a-cake for him.”

  Scar-faced Smith stepped my way, completely indifferent to the blood puddle in which he now stood. My back was pressed to the rail. Outside of diving into the Pacific, I saw no escape.

  The man-beast leered at me with, to my opinion, an out-of-proportional hostility. Whatever had I done to him?

  “You knocked him down,” he grunted. “You made us all fall down.”

  This, although arguable, seemed unfair. The decks were exceedingly slick that day, and the ship had pitched in untimely fashion. Demon Chance was plainly as much at fault as myself.

  “Well,” I sighed. “I am sorry if I in any way contributed to Mister Jones’s mishap, but we are all of us new to this trade, each just learning the ropes, so to speak, and so surely my slipup could just as easily have happened to you.”