Quintspinner (12 page)

“They’re still talking ‘bout the last one,” Smith nodded in agreement before commenting under his breath. “An’ none too kindly, if ya’ take my meanin’.” He grabbed William by the shoulder and tugged him out of earshot. “An’ speakin’ of butchery,” he smiled, “we’re off to see the Surgeon’s workin’ quarters.”

Sick bay was an area that contained four hammocks and two low wide tables. Only one hammock was occupied. William supposed that its occupant was the unfortunate pressing victim, as the man’s skull and forehead were obscured in a thick blood-matted turban.

The fellow is still alive anyway.
He watched as the injured man moaned and thrashed his arms about, the movements threatening to tip the poor fellow completely out of the narrow hammock. The patient appeared to be unattended at the moment, as the Surgeon was nowhere in sight.

“Who looks after the ones in sick bay?” William inquired, his nose wrinkling with the onslaught of the repelling mixed odor of human waste, urine, sweat, and blood.

“You’ll be the one, I ‘spect. Seein’ as how the last lander helpin’ out here had a short sail with us,” Smith explained. “He was the poor sod what took sick himself. The one with the pox.”

Just then the man in the hammock flailed his arms in a wildly contorted circle, and the meager sling swung sharply back and forth, rocking high to one side, spilling the man’s torso towards the floor. William lunged forward and grabbed for him, cushioning the fellow’s bloodied head. The two of them landed with a hard crash, tangled together on the floor. William found himself cradling the man’s skull and then realized that the foul crusted bandage had come off in his hands. Dropping it in disgust, he gaped at the disclosed wound. A skull depression high over the left ear was still fresh with splinters of bone protruding from a thick bed of clotted blood. William felt the man’s gaze on him and he sucked a sharp intake of breath as his own eyes shifted down from the wound and locked in shock onto the familiar deep blue eyes staring back at him.

“Naaaagh–,” the man pleaded, his tongue rattling in the back of his throat.

William’s own throat had spasmed so tightly he thought he would choke. He managed to squeeze out only a ragged whisper.

“
Da’….
”

“Nice catch, fer a lander,” Smith said, and extended a hand towards William. “C’mon. Back on yer feet.”

William looked up at Smith, then back down at his father’s face. “Help me get him up.”

“Just leave him where he lies,” Smith countered. “If’n he can’t get up on his own, he’s of no use to this crew an’ they’ll send him on.”

“Send him–” William looked up in alarm. “They’re not going to toss him overboard! I’ll fight to my last breath before I let that happen!”

“Easy now!” Smith warned, “It’s not me what decides an’ makes the rules in this hell hole! Just like the one with the pox, it’d be a favor. A quick death is the best a man can hope fer, instead of lingerin’ on, trapped inside a body what’s ill or not listenin’ to his own commandin’ any more. I don’ believe anyone would choose that over the other. Now c’mon, I tell ya’, leave that useless–”

“I’m not leaving him!” William took a deep steadying breath before softly continuing. He stared up at Smith. “This is John Robert Taylor. My father.”

It was Smith’s turn to gape in astonishment. “Eh? What’s that? What didcha’ just say?”

“My Da’. I thought he’d been killed! By the pressors!” William rushed on with the details. “I found his cap and they killed my brother, John–”

“Naaagh–,” his father uttered a high pitched moan. William suddenly realized with some relief that his father understood what was being said, even if he couldn’t form words himself. He also felt suddenly sick to realize that his father had not known until this moment that Johnny was dead.

“Hush, Da’!” William scolded, and then turned to face Smith, fearful that his father’s incapacitation would bring on the wrath of the crew. “Here! Help me get him up!”

Smith shook his head in exasperation, still surprised by William’s introduction of the wounded man, then sighed in resignation. Grasping William’s outstretched hand, he pulled him to his feet. The two of them hoisted the elder Taylor up by the shoulders and propped him between them, staggering under his weight as he struggled to stay upright.

“Take a step or two now,” William encouraged his father. His father only slumped more heavily on the support of the two of them.

“I’m tellin’ ya’,” Smith repeated, “They’re gonna’ dump him. Sure as hell they will. If he can’t walk, he’ll have to go. An’ fer God’s sakes, don’t be tellin’ anyone he’s yer father, or they’ll find some excuse to make both yer lives short but miserable.”

“John Robert!” William pleaded, his voice cracking with desperation, “Do you hear what he says? I thought I’d lost you already! You’re all I have left! Now walk, damn you!
Walk!
You got to
try
!”

And with that, John Robert stepped down hard, locking one knee back, and with enormous effort, he lifted his other leg forward in a first wobbly step.

The next few weeks were a blur for William. Fear of the unknown was soon replaced by the dull comfort of routine. Each shift began with tending of the goats, whose milk sweetened the officers’ breakfast porridge. Egg gathering from the crated hens followed.

Not so different from life back on land, in that respect,
William reminisced as he cleared the planking of the animals’ dung, scooping it into the shitpot and lugging the foul bucket up onto the main deck to empty it over the side of the ship.

He kept a small tin cup buried under the straw bedding in the goats’ pen, and at each milking, secretly filled it with fresh milk for his father. When there appeared to be enough eggs at any one gathering so that one would not be missed, he would break one open and add it into the cup for extra nourishment, delivering this contraband to his father in sick bay. Once there, he carted the man’s shitpot up to the main deck to empty, before returning to the galley to help Cook prepare each day’s tedious meals for the nearly seventy crew and officers aboard the
HMS Argus.

A thin porridge was standard fare for breakfast, along with a serving of either salted beef or pork and a thick slab of cheese. Noon and evening meals included boiled potatoes and turnips, and always, hard tack biscuits. William found the biscuits dry, tasteless, and loaded with weevils, which the experienced sailors just knocked out by tapping the biscuits on the tables. Some of the more squeamish preferred to eat biscuits only at the evening meal when the light was so poor that the insects were not readily noticed. Once or twice a week, if the seas had been calm enough for the crew to have been lucky with their fishing lines and nets, there would be fried fish or the occasional turtle served up as well.

“Flounder’s too skinny fer the eatin’ plates,” Cook had declared, sorting through the various fish on his table. “But they’ve a better use in the barrels.

“Split the flounders open like this,” he demonstrated, “and place the raw fish along the bottoms of the biscuit barrels. Leave them overnight, and then take them out.” The weevils much preferred the juiciness of the soft fish flesh to that of the hard tack, and once they had had time enough to infest the fish strips, it fell to William to remove the bug infested fish slices, placing the hard tack back into fresh barrels.

The fish pieces in the barrels are disgusting.
He could hardly bring himself to pick them up. They were practically moving on their own. The chickens, however, had no such compunctions about having weevils served to them and they fell to greedily pecking upon the loaded fish strips with a fierce, hungry intensity. Nothing ever went to waste aboard a ship.

Besides the food, monotonous but plentiful as it was, each crew member received his daily portion of grog–eight pints–and a large serving of straight rum at the end of his shift. Fresh water stored in barrels on board quickly went stale, and if consumed in any large amounts often made a sailor’s guts cramp and bowels run. It was no wonder then, that men of the ships viewed water with a great deal of suspicion.

Grog, on the other hand was doled out quite freely. As Cook’s helper, it fell into William’s line of duty to mix up a steady supply of the stuff. Each man’s mealtime portion consisted of a large ladle of the liquid which had been prepared by mixing together one measure of rum, three measures of hot water, lime juice while the supplies lasted, and enough sugar to make it palatable. William was amazed at the sailors’ tolerance for the fiery liquids, as the taste was, at times, far less than pleasant.

Officers, on the other hand, were supplied with French brandy and a variety of wines with which to wash their mealtime fare down. William was expected to serve each shift of messmates at the narrow tables, as well as deliver food to the patient in sick bay. He felt himself fortunate to be in such a position as to easily slip a better cut of meat or an additional serving into the sick bay bowl.

One morning William was astonished to see his father sitting at the low table in sick bay. John Robert slowly rose to his feet and lurched over to William. Even the rocking of the boat, which was by now much more intense than on any of the previous mornings, did not seem to hinder his father’s steps much. William grinned. He would have hugged his father out of sheer relief had a sharp voice not caught him off guard.

“You there, Shit Boy!” The pendulous stomach preceded the rest of him by a split second as the surgeon suddenly advanced towards them into the lantern light; he seemed to have come out of nowhere. “Take the Gimp here and be on your way!”

“The Gimp–?” William’s inquiry was cut off.

“We know not his name. He has suffered a head wound of such kind that he has lost the capacity for speech and is slow of movement as well, except for the fits which now overtake him. But he’ll unfortunately live, so perhaps he can be trained to do something useful to earn his existence on board. If you were to be relieved of the shitpots, your own two hands might be put to better use, seeing as how we did set sail desperately undermanned for such a voyage. I shall present such suggestion of duty allotment to Captain Crowell myself.”

Dismissing them with a flutter of his fat hand, he turned and continued to muse out loud to himself. “What should happen if calamity of any kind were to befall us or the
Mary Jane
that sails alongside us, I can only imagine. Even the bravest among this crew are presently ill at ease, but the Captain appears not to notice. I myself feel compelled daily to squash such worries with a tot of the officers’ good brandy, but this crew, bless them, have only their miserable grog with which to fortify their courage.” And doing an about-face, he tottered back in the direction from which he had appeared.