Terese Svoboda - Pirate Talk or Mermalade

I’ll close her eyes.

Don’t touch me.

That was surely the last breath.

Another.

I found a penny here, beneath the sheet.

You will need two.

Not if you never close your eyes, Ma.

I was in Hampshire — or Maudin’s. A man came up out of the sea. He had arms only, such arms.

What sailor was this one?

Manuel, a man from the seas of the south. He had a big mustache, and he wept that I should hold him.

A mustache like my brother’s?

She has no more to tell.

She is finished now.

She stirs.

He left, and I wept an ocean.

I’ll hold her up. Take a breath now. Did she ever tell us true?

She made the soup, she called us sons. You don’t waste breath on a deathbed.

But she only clouded the water.

Listen. That was surely the departed rattle, that last. You can’t wake the dead.

She’s green about the face—

Don’t go to sea, I tell you, don’t.

The sea? But — I will go, like brother.

We all go. What else?

Ma! Ma! Quiet yourself.

One of us is stolen, if not us both, and one of us—

The mustachioed man, the sea—

Ma!

She is surely done now. Open the window. Here is the mop. I’ll lay the coins.

It was just something she said. Look — I have her nose. She is my mother.

And I have the height of the beggar on Bond Street. Who is our father?

Are we even each other’s?

We were too young to know if that were true.

At least I will no longer find Ma hung on a rope everywhere.

Use the mop on your tears. What a woman you are.

It was her great wish, to be hung by her own hand. If she’d have just cut the mussels off the rope, she wouldn’t have suffered so. The terrible wounds at her neck. The coughing into it. She didn’t trust the baker. Those are badly crossed buns, she’d say to the baker and not put a penny his way.

Yes, yes. We’d better be doing the washing ourselves now, or the flies will take Ma to her rest.

Each fly with the face of Ma, each face the same and not ours.

We are men complete now, we need no mother. For a scene in whalebone: “The True Mother Greeting Her Lads.”

Surely the true father is dead. So many years have passed and not many live out their time.

There are tales about fathers who die and leave their estate to those who have been stolen away. It bides us well to consider this.

Not if he crawled out of the sea.

Or died of the snot, like Jimmy. Or built the gallows.

Or stole the bones of a whale with drink.

Or a dozen others.

A new woman we need more than a father. A woman to cook and carry the water.

Aye, water is the point of all this.

It’s too cold to even drag a nib over paper, let alone write my name.

You’ll be writing on a block of ice in midwinter to learn the signing, that’s what she said. And here we are.

Why must I sign a marriage contract? It’s just a delay, one of so many.

It can’t be so difficult if she can.

It’s easy for her. Her name is shorter by so many letters.

Until she gets ours. She says I remind her of her sister.

What — you?

Some way I make my laugh.

After I make my mark, you won’t need to laugh with her again. Oh, but what if someone sees how I sign and uses that for himself? I’ll make my money without all this writing, and as for marrying, she can sign for us both. Besides, I’m sure to topple the bottle just keeping the paper in order.

My sister Kate, she said, would advance the argument thus: If he can’t write his name, he can’t give it to you.

Peters is all the family she has. Oh, bother. So few of the seabirds yield the right nib for a seaman’s hand.

You should have swum when she asked.

Am I a donkey to be tested to see if it is worth the sale?

You don’t swim either, no one swims in the sea if they can help it. I wouldn’t swim even for the bone.

Or a wife?

I need to spread my name with offspring, not with a nib.

I don’t understand why she doesn’t put the test to someone else.

I am a man of high quality.

Just learn your name and write it or I will.

Threats, idle threats. I suppose the devil needs a signature too.

Put the curve there. I bought you a bit of tallow so you can see the paper after the sun sets.

The sea takes an X. You can join a crew with just a mark. Why couldn’t Peters have taken up with someone less taxing?

She’s slapping herself in the next room to keep the cold off, she’s tapping her cane.

Waiting’s a good lesson for someone whose relation could drink up a whole whale’s bone, as he may well have. Not to mention my own waiting, my soul dragged out and around for these many months, trying to find out what she wants.

It’s not Peters she wants. His signing is wrong.

You have spoken to her in confidence?

We were waiting for you to bring the paper.

Ach — I’ll teach the teacher — about waiting. We will wait in the cold, and not write.

I must’ve slept.

You snored to heaven.

What now? The ink has frozen in a puddle.

But you managed it — look.

I did that? I don’t remember — Is the fire out? Let me sleep just a little longer.

I’ll take it to her.

The tails be a little long.

The way my sister would make it, if she were one of us. Your finger is stained.

I dropped the ink.

It is your hand on this paper.

No, no. -Aye. I did it to reduce the steepness of my distress, having to listen to him all these months. Now the banns can be said and it can be over.

You are female. I see it now.

What? I am my mother’s son.

There is more mystery under the roofs of bakers than inside your smalls. Let us all meet at Eben’s Kettle.

Peters would hide the bone here, with the very weft of the sea underfoot, a smuggler’s hatch in the floorboard to load unseen from the water.

It’s not in these rooms, neither of them, that I can discover.

Are you wanting me for the bone or for myself?

For your cleverness, for then others will know your teaching as my own wife’s, for your shapely hands, for your gentle way with a needle—

At least you learned the courting well enough. Take the bone as my vengeance to Peters.

There’s bone sticking out above the tideline — where the snow starts.

We’ll return grateful, my dear. Then the banns.

That’s a strange bit of singing she’s making.

It’s the wind. The wind howls and chills her.

Do you believe she’s a’witching, brother?

She’s a woman, brother.

Aye, she’s that. And found combing her hair at the sea.

She combs her hair at all hours and places. I’m taking her to the parson to be married — not like Ma and her doings — and then I’ll build a house away from the sea, with the door facing the land.

She won’t like that.

It’ll be a relief to her. Is that Peters? Go to the turn in the road to see.

I’ll pile the bone into the sack.

She’s gone.

You were sent to check the road — she’s gone?

I looked behind the door and around and under it all and into the hatch hole. There’s her cane.

She didn’t pass by here, I didn’t take my eye off the road.