The Convicts Page 9

  He'd turned to David and Goliath. The giant was twice the height of the horses and their riders. His boots alone were taller than David. But the boy stood before him, swinging his slingshot, as though he had no fear.

  “That's me,” said Midge. “Me all the time. I'm always fighting giants.”

  He looked around before he whispered. “Weedle, he's the worst of them. He's the head of the nobs.”

  At the far side of the ship, Weedle was sprawled below another window. He took up three times the space of anyone else, and again made me think of a king. His courtiers were sickly and wan, but they hovered around as he lay like a Roman in his squalid splendor.

  “Why is he here?” I asked.

  “ ‘Cause he's a convict, Tom.”

  “But what did he do?”

  Midgely moved closer. “No one knows but me,” he said. “I was in court when the judge sent him here. I heard what he did.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You have to promise not to tell. Promise, Tom. He'll kill me if he knows I did him out”

  I thought it must have been something dreadful, something beyond my imagining. I gave my promise, and Midgely whispered in my ear. “He's a snow dropper, Tom.”

  “What's that?” I asked.

  “Why, he was smugging snow, of course. From off the hedges, Tom.”

  “But what's snow?”

  “Shhh!” There were boys on each side of us, boys all around. They coughed with fever and moaned with dismay, and not one cared enough to listen to us. “Washing, Tom,” said Midge. “The white things put up to dry. You know, Tom.” His voice became even softer. “Ladies’ things.”

  “Petticoats?” I said. Midgely nodded quickly, with a smile on his face, and I laughed out loud. “That's why he's here? For stealing petticoats?”

  “Shhh!” said Midgely sharply. “He'll kill me, Tom. He really will.”

  But Weedle was laughing with Carrots, the long scar splitting his face so that his jaw seemed ehormous. I could easily picture him prowling through the tiny gardens in the slums, plucking petticoats from hedges, and my fear of him dwindled somewhat. He was only a bully after all, full of nothing but bluster, as my father had said, the fancier of women's clothes.

  “I shouldn't have told you,” said Midgely. “I should have minded my tongue.” He closed his Bible book. His hands worried the edges of it. “You won't say nothing, will you?”

  “No,” I said.

  He looked worried, though. He opened the book again, then quickly closed it. “In that picture, Tom, that battle? Does the giant kill the boy?”

  “No,” I said. “David slayed Goliath.”

  “Oh, he must have been brave,” said Midge. “He must have been like Acres there.” Only his eyes moved toward the farm boy. “David would have said the same as him. ‘Get shtuffed,’ he would have told that giant.”

  Midge moved right beside me, his shoulder on my arm. “Don't you wish you was like that? Brave as him? If you ain't brave, you're done for here.”

  His words stung like slaps. I didn't think of myself as a coward, but Midgely clearly did.

  “We're just bum-suckers,” he said. “Me and you.”

  I felt myself blush. “It's not that, Midge.” I told him what the Bible said, that the meek will inherit the earth. But he only frowned again and asked, “What's the meek, Tom?”

  “The mild. The gentle people.”

  “You mean the ones what don't fight back?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. I didn't really know. “The Bible says not to fight your enemy. It says to turn away if he hits you, and not to cry out if he hurts you. Never hit back. Never cry out.”

  Midgely nodded. “That's me, all right. That's you too, ain't it, Tom?” He looked up at me, and a smile lifted his lips for a moment. “We'll inherit the earth,” he whispered. “Think of that, Tom “

  He put down his Bible book and took up the other. “Now read me some of this one, Tom,” he said.

  It was the story of a missionary who had been to the South Sea islands. The pages had been turned so often that they were torn and grubby, smeared with dirt. Midgely knew exactly where to turn to find the picture that he wanted.

  “Look,” he said, showing me an etching of an island. “Look at the trees. There's birds in the trees.”

  I couldn't see them until he pointed right at them. Tiny and blotted, they looked at first like mistakes, as though the printer's ink had dropped on the etching. But I saw the shapes repeating, the trees just full of birds.

  “There'sh bonesh and thingsh.” He was slurring Bis words in excitement. “There'sh sheashellsh on the shand,” he said.

  He showed me a path leading up from the beach, the corner of a house that was otherwise hidden in the forest. He showed me a fish in the water, and the fin of a shark going by. “What does it say?” he asked.

  I read to him what was written underneath. “The home of the chief was a thatched hut all but invisible from the sea.”

  “All but invisible,” whispered Midgely.

  There were a lot of pictures, and he knew them all in the same detail. In each he pointed out a thing so small that I just couldn't see it, no matter how I squinted or turned the book in my hands. I never saw the spear propped against a tree, nor the face of a savage in the bushes, nor the lizard sunning on a rock. Perhaps they weren't even there. In his mind, I thought, Midgely wandered through those pictures. In the evenings, and the nights, he lived on those faraway islands.

  A boy beside us leaned across to see the book. Midge shoved him away; he knocked him aside with a sharp blow that came in perfect time with the ring of the ship's bell. Decks above us, that thing started tolling. The last time it had rung three times, but now it kept going—eight strokes in all. “Someone's forgotten the count,” I said.

  Midgely frowned, then laughed. “We're in the dog watches,” he said. “Don't you know that, Tom? You, what can read and all?”

  Pleased to know more than I, he launched into a dizzying talk on watches and bells and dogs, and I still didn't understand. “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I grew up in the dockyards, didn't I?” he said, getting to his feet. “All I ever knew was ships and sailors.”

  Once more we went on deck, but only for a moment. In a long line, we threaded up the hatch and straight to the tumbling shacks at the front. The boys ahead fetched the bundles that I'd watched them bring out in the morning, going at the same plodding pace that took them anywhere and everywhere. I saw Oten Acres shuffle through the door and stop there, bewildered. A guard gave him a clout and a push; “Take your hammock,” he shouted. Poor Oten doubled over. “No one never gave me one!” he cried.

  Fearing the same thing for myself, I waddled through the door with my hands held out, calling, “Please, sir, I haven't a hammock!” I avoided the beating Oten had got, and thought myself lucky for that.

  We tramped down to that dark lowest deck, where boys were already hanging their hammocks from the great timbers on the ceiling. “I want to be by the window,” I told Midgely.

  “Ain't a win-dow,” he said scornfully. “And it ain't really a scuttle, so don't call it that.” As if I ever would have. “It's a grating, Tom. All them holes, they're just carved out. ‘Cept for the ones on the gundeck, where die cannons was. And anyway,” he said, “there ain't a chance that you'll be sleeping there.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “ ‘Cause you ain't a nob,”

  I ended up somewhere in the middle, between the noseys and the nobs, in such a crowd of hammocks that they nearly made a solid floor of canvas above the wooden one. We all stood there, our heads above the brown mass, like moles peering from the earth. A guard said, “Up!” and in a great rattle we climbed aboard the things. With twenty-four pounds of iron on my ankles, I didn't think I could do it. But I watched Midgely, then did as he did, swinging up and into a contraption that closed around me like a pod round a pea. I swayed from side to side, bumping first against M
idge, then against the boy on my other side. He swore and pushed me away, so that I swayed all the harder, and hit him again.

  My sickness returned, suddenly and wholly, as I gripped the sides of the hammock. At last it stopped moving, and I lay there, packed among the other boys as tightlylis bats in a cave.

  The lamps went out. I heard the guards tramping up the ladders, then the rattle of chains and locks.

  “What's going on?” I whispered.

  “They're locking us down,” said Midge. “The guards never stay down here at night.”

  I raised my head and stared across a sea of hammocks. A murmur of voices spread through the deck. Boys coughed and muttered; some began to snore. But others cried in muffled sobs, in whimpers and sniffs. They tossed and turned in a clangor of metal.

  I heard a soft thud nearby, another farther off. Metal scraped on wood as someone crawled below the hammocks. The sea of canvas, now disturbed, moved in ripples here and there.

  “Don't look,” whispered Midgely. “It's the nobs, Tom. At night they own the ship.”

  From the darkness of the ship came a sudden cry of pain. High and shrill, it jolted through me, setting my nerves tingling, my heart racing.

  “Lie still, Tom,” whispered Midgely. His fingers were hooked on the edge of his hammock, but all the rest of him was hidden inside it. “Don't even move,” he said.

  The cry came again, then a thump and a scuttling sound. My mind turned the noises into visions: a boy curled on the floor with his hands on his face; feet kicking; fists pummeling.

  “Ain't nothing you can do,” said Midge in his whisper. “It ain't you they're after, Tom. Lie still and wait.”

  Wait for what? I wondered. No, it wasn't me they were after. Not that night, at least, or not that hour. But my turn would come; I knew it. “Midge,” I said. I reached across and shook his hammock. “Show me where the hull is rotten.”

  “Now?” he said.

  I didn't wait another moment. I slid from my hammock and crouched on the floor. The faintest of light came in through the grates, making gray of the black space between the floor and the bulging hammocks. With a soft tinkle of his irons, Midgely came down beside me. We crawled below the sleeping boys, along the deck to a distant grating. The light of the stars shining up from the water glowed dimly on Midge's face. He touched the wood at the base of the wall, then rapped with his fist. He did the same at the next grating, and the one after, before he looked at me and said, “Here. Look at the spirketing, Tom.”

  “The what?”

  He took my hand and put it on a thick plank just above the deck. Even in this faint light I could see a patch of wood darker than the rest. “Tap it,” Midgely said. The patch was soft and spongy.

  “That's rot,” he said. “There ain't enough of it here, but that's what it's like. Smell it, Tom.”

  I put my nose close to the wood. The smell was rich and earthy, like mushrooms in a cellar. It tickled my nostrils.

  “That's what you want,” said Midge.

  We went right thrQugh the ship, up and down the ladders. Once we heard the boyish voices of the nobs, and once the march of heavy footsteps. As they came toward us, Midgely pressed me into the shadows behind a ladder. On the deck above, a guard went by in a circle of light from the lantern he carried. It made huge sweeping shadows of his legs.

  “You said they didn't come down at night,” I whispered when the guard had wandered by.

  “I said they don't stay” said Midge. “They come on their rounds sometimes.”

  We held our irons tightly so they wouldn't rasp against the wood, and went up and down, back and forth, until I was hopelessly lost. Then somehow, in the darkness, we parted. I suddenly found myself alone, with no idea where I was. “Midge!” I called, as loudly as I dared. “Midgely!” But there was no answer.

  I crept through the ship. Every post and pillar, every window looked the same. I thought I was going in circles, until I found a doorway that took me to a new and different room. Benches stood in perfect rows, in a place that towered twice or thrice the height of any other deck. In a hatch far above me, the stars of the Pleiades shone in their square.

  It was such a quiet and peaceful place that I could hear the river rippling against the planks. Then timbers creaked, and the ship turned a bit in the current. The moon—a curved sliver—seemed to balance on the edge of the hatch. It sent a beam of light down through the darkness, through swirls of dust, onto the face of a bearded man.

  He stood in the shadows below the ceiling, many feet above the floor. Utterly still, and utterly silent, he seemed to be staring right at me.

  I eased myself toward the wall, into the corner by the last of the benches. Hidden there, I waited, willing him to go. I heard the bell very far in the distance, and waited till it rang again. But the man never moved.

  From somewhere in the ship came another sudden cry, and the sounds of a struggle. There was such misery in the voice that I clamped my hands to my ears. It was Midgely, I thought. The nobs had caught Midge because I had dragged him from his hammock. They'd caught Midge, and next they'd catch me.

  The hull creaked and shifted, and the moon seemed to turn in the hatch. Its light, for a moment, shone more fully on the man's face, and I saw there a look of worry, of care, perhaps. Then the moonlight shifted away from him, across the room, and directly onto me. Too late, I dropped behind the bench. But I heard no shout, no movement. The man must have seen me, yet he stood still and quiet. I wondered if he was hiding too, tucked as he was into the top of this high, empty space. I whispered into the moonlight, “Who are you?”

  His silence was unnerving. To think I shared this secret place with such a mysterious person put prickles in my skin. Yet I felt only comfort to have him there; I knew that he meant no harm to me. I could have stayed quite happily all through the night, free from worries of Weedle and the nobs. That was the sense he gave me.

  But I was worried for Midgely. It annoyed me that I was, for I had never fretted about the welfare of others. What Mr. Goodfellow had told me once was true: I was selfish, and I knew it. I owed nothing to Midgely, so why did I want to find him?

  I took off my shirt, thinking I could wrap it around my chains and muffle their sounds. I leaned against the wall, drew up my legs to grasp the irons—and there I stopped. The smell of rot was all around me, strong as smelling salts.

  Everywhere on the ship, the wall was made of planks. But here it was paneled in sheets of oak that might have belonged in a rich man's home. Each square was set in its own frame, and each seemed solid when I tapped it with my knuckles. I pried at the framing here and there. It was nailed in place, strong and tight wherever I looked, until I came to the lowest corner. The wood there was blackened and eaten away, the last inch of framework missing altogether. Another piece came loose at a tug, as though nothing gripped the nails. The mushroom smell wafted over me with such a richness that I guessed the rot went on and on behind the panel, maybe folly through the hull.

  I didn't wait to prod any farther. The bearded man was hidden now, but I didn't fear him. I wrapped my shirt around the chains and crawled between the benches and out through the door, into a deeper darkness. I kept moving, calling in a whisper for Midgely.

  Scuffling sounds made me pause, until I realized that I was hearing rats on the deck below. I started forward again, then wondered what had put the rats on the move.

  “Midgely?” I whispered.

  There was a different sound then, a small scrape and a clink of metal. And the boy who answered wasn't Midgely.

  “Nosey,” he said, very softly. “Nosey, where are you?”

  I went forward more quickly. When I came to a ladder, I was no longer sure if I wanted to go down or up. But it seemed easier to go down, and I let the chains dangle from my feet. They settled on each rung in turn, easing their weight for a moment, then falling away with a jerk on my ankles.

  I was nearly at the bottom when a voice said, “Don't move.”

  And
a hand reached out and grabbed my ankle.

  The fright that I got nearly brought a scream from my lips. My hands flew from the’-ladder, andTbarelycaught it again as I went toppling backwards I clutched the rung with all my strength, but it seemed my heart had plummeted to die floor,

  When I lifted my foot, someone pulled it down.

  “Tom! It's me. It's Midgely,” He held my chains so they could make no sound, and he told me, “Stay still!”

  Hie ntsbs were above us. I heard them scuttling across the deekwilh thaljingk of icons and the soft padding of bare feet. I heard their whispers and pressed myself against the ladder. The nobs came closer, nearly right to the hatch. Weedle called out, soft and clear,“Nosey. No-o-sey!”

  They stopped right above me. The darkness was so complete that I couldn't see Midge, and I supposed they couldn't see me. But I felt the ladder tremble, as though someone was starting down. Then I heard the nobs moving, and I waited a long while before dropping down to Midgely's side.

  I expected to find him lying battered and bleeding, but he was fine. He was even a little annoyed. “I've been waiting forever,” he said. “Where did you go?”

  “I'm not sure,” I told him.

  We huddled where we were, and even slept for a while on the hard deck below the ladder. Midgely, knowing the patterns of the ship, got us safely in our hammocks before the guards came below to start our day. We were marched to the deck and down again, and I thought that breakfast would follow. But we went in a different direction, toward the front of the ship, straight to the home of my bearded man.

  It was the chapel. There sat my benches in their perfect rows. There, high above me, stood the silent figure. His feet crossed, his arms spread, he was carved out of wood—a crucified Jesus. As I looked at his downturned face, a small flame kindled in my heart. I felt that he would protect me, that I would escape from the hulk. Even that I had to.

  I maneuvered to the proper bench, Midgely at my side. As we sat, the chaplain entered through a narrow door beside the altar. In a white surplice he climbed to his pulpit, opened a black Bible, and read the psalm that began “The Lord is my shepherd.” The hundreds of boys sat in silence, none of them listening, all looking up at the sunlight that glistened in the barred hatch where I'd seen the sickle moon. I leaned against the wall, exploring with my foot the bit of framing near the floor. I could see the heads of the nails I'd loosened.