Sam had never had such a headache in his life, had never been so tired, heartbroken, or so sad. As well, he had never felt such relief. The terrible day of death had begun with the passing of little Beth Evenstar, The Captain’s dear daughter. The day had ended with the slaughter of The Captain and near their entire crew, along with every red man that had swooped down upon them, except for this shark-ate-leg, nearly dead fellow that Clay was tending to by searing his knee stump like a chicken thigh. Even the insane Englishman with the curious spiral case that had brought this fate down upon them like a choking wave was now dead, lying at the feet of Mickey Durst, their wild Irish rigging monkey that no one but Clay—who liked every soul on earth it seemed—had much cared for.
Here I lay, Lord, among the dead and dying, at the feet of the day’s final killer. Is it You who drags us out to sea, Your will that we all go down to the deep for these terrible things we have done?
I truly am sorry for striking the head in of that fellow with the oar. I was protecting my own. Please have mercy on my soul, Lord.
Mickey was picking up the spiral case and looking to the gunwale, obviously intent on pitching the object of all of this carnage into the deepening sea, for they were clearly being carried out into the depths under the blinking stars. He felt for certain that this was their funeral cart in the form of a ship.
Miraculously the red man, who must have lost half his blood, and was none too young by the looks of him as he lay there naked on the deck with a cross burned black into his sunken chest, let out a groan. Mickey turned to look with his crazed blue eyes that blazed icy under his dirty blonde hair.
Clay was holding the leg stump high and pressing against it, still talking about burning it with the stove iron, but had not yet gotten the necessary help. The little red man, miraculously still alive though obviously not for long, croaked a word they could understand, “No.”
The man looked up to Mickey with pleading eyes, and without the energy to ask again. Clay then spoke up with his grave old man voice, which always shocked when one was looking at the scrawny boy speak.
“Mickey, it is a holy thing, I think. Why else would men this age chase a crazed white man all across the land? I’m no doctor and am about to have a hard enough time. Please let him hold it while we tend to him. It might give him strength or may ease his passing.”
Mickey’s prematurely hard face softened by a line or two as he turned full around and stepped over Sam to kneel before Clay and the maimed red man. He then placed the case—a leather snap sheath encasing a hard thing of spiral nature—upon the man’s belly, and then placed the man’s calloused hands on the case.
“There you go, Old Penny. It is not ours. If you pass we’ll bury it with you. None ‘ill take it from your 'and.”
The man’s eyes brightened, and he tried to speak, but was unable and passed into a fever state, still clutching the case.
Clay looked to Mickey as he pressed on the raised stump to keep the blood from squirting out. “We need the iron from the coal bank below the stove.”
Mickey bounded off down the stairs to the galley and was up within a minute, the glowing iron in his hand. Sam had helped with cows before and knew his part, laying his bulk over the man to keep him still for the searing.
Clay spoke, “When I remove my hand, Mickey.”
Sam averted his eyes, looking at the face of the red man who was so painfully brought back to consciousness. The smell made him never want to eat meat again. Within seconds it was over and he was scrambling for poor old Jonah’s rum cache. That hard old man had been so hated and misunderstood by the crew. Sam had come to know his soft side, and had seen him sitting up nursing his rum every night, unable to sleep for something that haunted him.
Clay drenched the leg stump with the rum and covered it with drenched cloth, propping it up on Mickey’s sea chest, which the rigging monkey dragged over for that purpose unasked. The Captain would have been proud of their unspoken cooperation.
“And there he lay, peaceful as can be, with a bitten off leg,” Sam spoke without thinking, which seemed so natural now that all of the leading men were gone.
“We are like a candle adrift on the sea—no anchor. What do we do?”
Clay answered, “We need to have a captain, someone to answer to other captains so we are not taken for pirates. I say Mickey should be our Captain.”
Sam looked at them both, knowing that kind, bookish Clay did not have the stuff of a leader, and that he himself had no inclination to stand out above his mates let alone answer on their behalf to some masterful white man.
“I see no other choice. Mickey is the best sailor, best fighter, and is quick to act. It…”
Keep that to yourself. No sense in pointing out the truth in this mess.
Mickey looked at Sam with suspicion. “Why don’ you think I a captain make?”
“Oh Lord, Clay, could you tell him?”
Clay raised up and touched Mickey on his arm, like a woman would who was trying to calm a man out of his anger; like Mistress Evenstar had when The Captain had taken to his black moods. “Mickey, if I can be ship's doctor you sure are fit for captain. Sam is just concerned about you being respected by the other captains, for your young age and for being Irish.”
Mickey, with the look of a person who knew well the station he had inherited from his race, nodded his head gently in agreement. “We’ll avoid ships. We’re misfits on the sea. My worry is not bein’ lettered—Sam either. Clay, we need you to dig in ta The Captain’s charts an’ books and make sense o’ this. The three o’ us can make ‘er move, but I ‘aven’t a clue a factorin’ where.”
The Obvious then hit Sam like a cartload of freight.
“Do we know where we are, where we are floating to?”
Clay and Mickey both looked down to where he yet lay in his own blood and the blood of others, with blank un-answering looks.
“Oh Lord, we are being pushed out to sea by an undersea river in the dark! Do we have any way to stop? What are we to do with the dead? If we bury people in the dark will we bring down a curse?”
His head pounded in the yellow glow of the stern lamp, the rolling ocean indistinguishable in the gloom from the strange rolling hills where they had buried Beth. Come light he supposed they would bury the rest beneath the rolling sea. Above them blinked the stars, where all their eyes seemed to be drawn as one.
“Lord, we’re small men, en we sure have us some big problems.”
Clay kept looking above. Mickey turned and reached down a hand to help Sam to his feet. “Take a swing in your hammock, Sam. Me an’ Blackie Boy ‘ill watch the night.”
Oh Lord, please let me wake to a bright day on a fair sea.
As if in solemn answer, the beautiful night-shrouded ship, named for a beautiful earth-shrouded girl, moaned in the watery night, with all the stars in the sky as her pallbearers.
Sam felt none-too-contented with the answer to his prayer as he came sorrowfully to his feet on the bloody deck that slid away into eternity beneath them, with them clinging to it like sins to a curse.
