Pirate Freedom (17 page)

Azuka and his wife fixed a swell dinner for us. There was chicken pie with a yam crust, which I had never had before, fried bananas that made me think of the monastery, homemade bread with butter and three kinds of cheese, and a lot of other stuff. When we had eaten we went back to town and bought a new jolly boat and as much tar and oakum as we needed. The quartermaster wanted me to buy more, so we would have some on the ship, but I said no. The Spanish captain's money was about gone, and by then I had the feeling I was going to need what was left on Saturday.

When we got back to the
Magdelena
, I had to tell Novia all about Azuka. You bet I did! I explained over and over that she had belonged to Lesage, nobody else could so much as touch her, and I had not wanted to anyway. Novia tagged me a couple times before I got her knife away from her. After that I showed her I could break her arms easy if I wanted to. Then I kissed her, and once we got the bleeding stopped we went on from there, trying a few new positions. I have never thought she really wanted to hurt me. I would have been cut a lot worse if she had. It was just her way of showing me that she was dead serious when she said she loved me. In a way, she was right. I never had exactly believed her. Not all of it. I mean, who would love a guy like me? But after that I did.

WITH THE NEW
tar and the new oakum, I had been hoping the ship would be ready by Saturday. When I remembered that we were going to have to put the guns back, I knew it would not. It would have been nice to figure out some way to postpone the auction. I worked on it, but none of my ideas seemed like good ones, even to me.

All our men had muskets already, and we had a pretty fair number of Spanish cutlasses, too. When we went back to town Saturday morning, I wore the Spanish captain's sword, a long one with a fancy silver hilt, and his boots. With two pairs of stockings on and some thick wool we had cut out in
the shape of a footprint, they were a pretty good fit. (After that I wore the sword and the boots just about any time I needed to impress people.)

"Crisóforo, darling, look at these."

It was a fancy case we had taken off the ship with the other stuff from the cabin. Inside it was a pair of little brass pistols, right hand and left hand. There were powder flasks, bullets, and so on in the case, too. I had found them myself when we first took the ship, but I had not paid much attention to them. I had a good pair of iron pistols, big long-barreled pistols that would really get somebody's attention.

"May I have them, Crisóforo? I need them much more than do you."

I said sure, and taught her how to load them. After that, I took her away from the beach half a mile or so, and let her shoot each of them a couple times. That may have been the first time they were ever fired—they looked that new. I checked the flints, and they were in real good shape.

Those pistols had belt hooks, so when we went back to town for the auction, she had them hooked in her belt. I had my pistols, too, but mine were in canvas slings I hung off my shoulders. Every man in the longboat's crew had his musket and a cutlass. I had left the crew with the boat the first time, and I had made sure they would stay there. This time it was the other way. I left the quartermaster to watch the boat, and led the rest to the square. We tramped through that little town like an army, and you could hear the shutters closing and locking as we went by. The auction had not begun when we got there, which gave me plenty of time to get my men into position and make sure they understood their orders.

This was not Port Royal by a long shot. There were only five slaves— three men, another woman, and Azuka. I went up to the auctioneer and told him to take Azuka first. He did, and announced a minimum bid of one guinea.

I yelled "A guinea!" and drew my pistols.

In the silence that came after that, I could hear the musket hammers going from half cock to full cock. There was no other bidder.

I was supposed to pay Vanderhorst then and get a signed paper saying I was Azuka's new owner. I admitted that I did not have a guinea and gave him a gold Spanish doubloon instead. He did not like that, but I pointed out that I had been a good customer already and promised to trade more with him the next time we got to Fat Virgin.

He still would not do it, so I said, "Sign it. Sign it now. That will save a lot
of bloodshed." It was in French and he did not understand it, but Azuka interpreted for us like she had before and pulled her finger across her neck. When she did that, he signed.

I borrowed his pen and wrote across the bottom of the paper that as Azuka's new owner I freed her. I wrote that in French, signed it, and read it to her.

"I am free?"

I said, "You sure are," and handed her the paper.

"But where will I go, Captain? What will I do?"

"You're a free woman," I told her. "You can do whatever you want to, and go wherever you want to."

"Then I go with you," she said, and took my arm.

I yelled, "Estrellita, don't!," because she was pulling one of the little brass pistols off her belt. I do not believe just yelling would have stopped her, but I caught hold of her pistol and that did.

"What are you going to do now?" she yelled. "Flog me?"

I kissed her instead, and took my time about it.

Pretty soon after that all of us walked back to the longboat. I got everybody together and explained that Azuka had been in the crew of a ship I had before, and was one of our crew now. Anything she did willingly with any of them was between him and her, and I made sure everyone understood that. Then I explained that if anybody forced her, the rest of us were going to be very, very unhappy about it.

"We're all one family," I said, "the Brothers of the Coast."

That got nods and yells.

"We're brothers, and I'm the capo, the head of our family. Part of my job is seeing to it that my brothers treat each other the way brothers ought to, that nobody gets cheated and nobody gets picked on. I'm going to do that, and it would be good for everybody to remember it. It doesn't just protect Azuka here, it protects every person on board our ship."

Nobody wanted to argue, but Griz wanted to know what she was going to do.

"She'll be working with Estrellita," I told him, "and that means the two of them will do whatever I tell them to—fight, cook, make sail, nurse the wounded. Whatever I say."

Simoneau said women could not fight, and both those little brass pistols were pointed at him a lot faster than one had been pointed at me.

I yelled, "Hold it! We can't start fighting among ourselves like this. We're toast as soon as it starts. You know how I fought Yancy. If you two want to fight like that, we'll find you a little island—there's a hundred of them around here."

When I said that, Simoneau muttered something about not fighting a woman and turned away, and the whole thing blew over.

The funny thing was that the two women got to be friends, but they were always jealous of each other. Men can do the same thing, I know. Sure, they like each other, but there is a certain rivalry. I think Azuka may have made it with some of the guys in the crew, and I know with Jarden, who was pretty good-looking. I also know Novia did not, that I was the only one she ever slept with.

Or anyway, that is what I think.

SUNDAY AFTERNOONS ARE
always slow at the Youth Center, probably because kids who have not touched their homework all weekend are trying to catch up. That was yesterday, and Fr. Phil offered to Phil in for me. (His joke.) That gave me a chance to poke around the library for a few hours. Writing about Novia and Azuka the way I did on Saturday got me to wondering about women pirates, sailors, and so forth. I thought maybe we were the only ones who ever did that, and I wanted to see.

It turns out there were quite a few. Mary Read and Anne Bonney are the famous ones, but there were others. Her captain called Mary Anne Arnold the best sailor on his ship. Grace O'Malley and a mysterious Chinese lady known as Mrs. Cheng were pirate captains, both of them. Some pirate crews had a special rule—NO GIRLS—just like a bunch of little boys playing in a tree house. When I read about it I wanted to say, "Oh, grow up!"

Well, I had two of them, just like Calico Jack Rackam. Back then I
thought I knew how Novia had come on board, but I was as curious as anybody would be about Azuka. When I asked whether Lesage had sold her, she said he had and cried. I let a few days pass and tried to find out what happened again, and she cried just like before. So you can say, if you want to, that I never did find out.

In another way, I did. I wanted to know whether Lesage had sold her because he got tired of her or because he had to have the money. But it had to be both. A man who loved a woman would never sell her, no matter how badly he needed the money. And a man who owned a woman and was tired of her would always find out he needed the money sooner or later. Mostly it would be sooner.

Since I have been ordained, I have spent quite a bit of time counseling people. I would say offhand that it has been about forty percent men and boys, sixty percent women and girls. Even if that is not quite right, there have been plenty of both. A man cannot sell his wife, and a wife cannot sell her husband. But I have talked to a good many husbands and wives who would if they could, and cheap. Teenage girls would buy certain boys, too, if they could. And the teenage boys would let them, pretty often for a paper clip and a stick of gum. They do not say that, but when I have talked with them once or twice I know.

The pirate books I found in the library are not as bad as I had expected. They do not tell you what it was really like, but they cannot be blamed for that, since the people who wrote them did not know. I know what it was like for me, and that is why I am writing this. (You have to know to understand why I murdered Michet.)

Things I have seen on TV have not been nearly as good. One thing I have noticed particularly is that the pirate ships look like big navy ships and fight the same way. I never saw a pirate ship as big as a Spanish galleon, and we never opened fire on a Spanish ship unless we had to. Once the cannons open up, ships get trashed in a hurry, and a lot of people get killed. We never wanted the ship we were taking to get smashed up. We wanted to sail it someplace and sell it. Getting our own smashed up would have been ten times worse, especially when it was the
Magdelena
, which was poison fast once her bottom was clean, and just the right size.

We did not want people killed either—not us and not them. There was always a chance that a Spanish ship would have people we could use on it, a carpenter, a surgeon, or whatever. If they had hidden their money, they could be scared into telling us where, but only if they were still alive.

You take the
Rosa
, which was the first ship we took. She mounted ten little guns, about four-pounders. We were flying the Spanish flag, and I hailed her in Spanish. When we got close, we ran out our guns and ran up the black flag. I told her to surrender, or we would blow her out of the water.

Which is what we would have done as soon as her gunports opened.

She surrendered, and we grappled her and boarded. I had more than fifty men, and every man had a musket and a cutlass. That was the minimum. Most of them carried the big butcher knives they had used on Hispaniola, too, and some had pistols. I had two pistols, my dagger, and the long Spanish sword. But all that was just for show—I knew I would not have to use them. They had twenty-one counting the captain. What chance would they have had if they had fought us?

I got them all together and told them the truth—we were buccaneers, and their king had treated us like dirt. We could not make an honest living anymore, so we were doing this. Since they had given up without a fight, I would let them take the boats. I would even let them take food and water, if they would tell me where the money was.

They said they did not have any, and there were too many to go in the boats.

I said, "In that case the boats will sink. I don't care because I won't be on them. The rest of you can lighten them by joining us, maybe. Anybody want to apply for a job?"

For a minute it looked like nobody did. Then somebody in back said, "Captain! Captain!"

I thought he was talking to me, but he meant the Spanish captain. He was a black man, average size, who looked like his life had been pretty rough lately. He said, "Me stay ship, Captain? One not in boat."