“I was last down, of course, and as I was coming — there were men on deck — I saw why my sail had come loose. A worn mast-ring had broken and caused a main rope to fly and my canvas to come tumbling. But the ring also had held the nearly split aft mast together, and in the wind, a crack twice the length of my arm pulled open and snapped to, again and again, like a child’s noise clapper. There was a rope — a near, inch-thick line — coiled on a spike. Holding myself to a ratline mostly by my toes, I secured it and bound the base of the broken pole. Each time it snapped to, I looped it once around and pulled the wet line tight. They call this whipping a mast, and I whipped it till the collar of rope was three feet long to the top of the cleft and she couldn’t snap anymore. Then I hung the broken ring on a peg nearby so I could point it out to the ship’s smith and get him to replace the rope with metal bands.
“That evening at mess, with the day’s incidents out of my mind and hot soup in my mouth, I was laughing over some sailor’s tale about another sailor and another sailor’s woman when the Mate strode into the hall. ‘Hey, you sea scoundrels,’ he bellowed. There was silence. ‘Which of you bound up that broken mast aft?’
“I was about to call out, ‘Aye, it was me,’ when another man beat me by bawling, ‘It was the Big Sailor, sir!’ That was a name both Cat and me were often hailed by.
“ ‘Well,’ snarled the Mate, ‘the Captain says that such good thinking in times hard as these should be rewarded.’ He took a gold coin from his pocket and tossed it on the table in front of Cat. ‘There you go, Big fellow. But I think it’s as much as any man should do.’ Then he clomped from the mess hall. A cheer went up for Cat as he pocketed the coin; I couldn’t see his face.
“The anger in me started now, but without direction. Should it go to the sailor who’d called out the name of the hero? Naw, for he had been down on deck, and through rain and darkness he probably could not have told me from my rival, anyway, at that distance. At Cat? But he was already getting up to leave the table. At the First Mate, the same First Mate of this ship, friend, that we’re on now? But Jordde was out stomping somewhere on deck.
“Perhaps it was this that caused my anger to break out the next morning when we were in calmer weather. A careless salt jarred me in a passageway, and suddenly I was all fists and fire. We scuffled, pounded each other; we cursed, we rolled: we rolled right under the feet of the Mate, who was coming down the steps at the time. He sent a boot into us and a lot of curses, and when he recognized me, he sneered, ‘Oh, the clumsy one.’
“Now, I’d had a fiery record before. Fights on ship are a breach few captains will allow. This was my third, and one too many. And Jordde, prompted by his own opinion of me, got the Captain to order me flogged.
“So, like meat to be sliced and bid on, I was led out before the assembled sailors at the next sunrise and bound to the mast. I thought my wrath went all toward the First Mate now. But black turned white in my head, hard as something to bite into, when he flung the whip to Cat and cried, ‘Here, Cat, you’ve done your ship one good turn. Now rub sleep off your face and do it another. I want ten stripes on this one’s back deep enough to count easily with a finger dipped in salt.’
“They fell, and I didn’t breathe the whole time. Ten lashes is a whipping a man can recover from in a week. Most go down to their knees with the first one, if the rope is slack enough. I didn’t fall until they finally cut the ropes from my wrists. Nor was it till I heard a second gold coin rattle down on the deck from the First Mate’s hand and the words to the crew, ‘See how a good sailor gets rich,’ that I made a sound. And it was lost in the cheer that sprang from the other men.
“Cat and one other lugged me to the brig. As I fell forward, hands scudding into straw, I heard Cat’s voice: ‘Well, brother, that’s the way luck goes.’
“Then the pain made me faint.
“A day later, when I could pull myself up to the window bars and look out on the back deck, we caught the worst storm I’d ever seen. The slices in my back made it no easier. Pegs threatened to pull from their holes, boards to part themselves; one wave washed four men overboard, and while others ran to save them, another came and swept off six more. The storm had come so suddenly not a sail had been rolled, and now the remaining men were swarming the ratlines.
“From my place at the brig’s window I saw the mast start to go and I howled like an animal, tried to pull the bars away. But legs passed my window running, and none stopped. I screamed at them, and I screamed again. The ship’s smith had not yet gotten to fix my makeshift repair on the aft mast with metal. Nor had I yet even pointed it out to him as I had intended. It didn’t hold ten minutes. When it gave, its breakage was like thunder. Under the tug of half-furled sails, ropes popped like thread. Men were whipped off like drops of water shaken from a wet hand. The mast raked across the sky like a claw then fell against the high mizzen, snapping more ropes and scraping men from their perches as you’d scrape ants from a twig. The crew’s number was halved, and when somehow we crawled from under the frayed fabric, one mast fallen and one more ruined, the broken bodies with still some life numbered eleven. A ship’s infirmary holds ten, and the overflow goes to the brig. The choice of who became my mate was between the man most likely to live — he might take the harder situation more easily than the others — and the man most likely to die — it would probably make no difference to someone that far gone. The choice was made for the sicker one, and the next morning they carried Cat in and laid him beside me on the straw while I slept. His spine had been crushed at the pelvis and a spar had pierced his side with a hole big enough to put your hand into.
“When he came to, all he did was cry — not with the agonized howls I had given the day before when I watched the mast topple, but with a little sound that escaped from clenched teeth, like a child who doesn’t want to show the pain. It didn’t stop. For hours. And such a soft sound, it burned into me deeper than any animal’s wail.
“The next dawn stretched copper foil across the window, and red light fell on the straw and the filthy blanket they had laid him in. The crying had been replaced now by gasps, sharp every few seconds, irregular, and…so loud. I thought he must be unconscious, but when I kneeled to look, his eyes were opened and he stared into my face. ‘You…’ he rasped at me. ‘It hurts….You…’
“ ‘Be still,’ I said. ‘Here, be still!’
“The next word I thought I heard was ‘water,’ but there wasn’t any in the cell. I should have realized that the ship’s supplies had probably gone for the most part overboard. But by now, hungry and thirsty myself, I could see it as nothing less than a stupendous joke when one slice of bread and a tin cup of water were finally brought and with embarrassed silence handed in to us that morning at sunrise.
“Nevertheless, I opened his mouth and tried to pour some of it down his throat. They say a man’s lips and tongue turn black from fever and thirst after a while. It’s not true. The color is the deep purple of rotten meat. And every taste bud was tipped with that white stuff that gets in your mouth when your bowels stick for a couple of days. He couldn’t swallow the water. It just dribbled over the side of his mouth that was scabby with crust.
“He blinked and once more got out, ‘You…you please…’ Then he began to cry again.
“ ‘What is it?’ I asked.
“Suddenly he began to struggle and got his hand into the breast of his torn shirt and pulled out a fist. He held it out toward me and said, ‘Please…please…’
“The fingers opened and I saw three gold coins, two of whose histories suddenly returned to my mind like the stories of living men.