Centuries of June by Keith Donohue Page B

told her the words were of the Sea Venture ’s arrival upon this shore a year ago, and how this fair cross was praise for their great deliverance. Despite the pleadings from the Rolfes, from Mr. Strachey, and Somers himself, she would not join the sojourners but hid herself with the other three upon a promontory to watch the ships set sail and diminish to mere toys before falling off the edge of the world.
    A kind of desolation fell upon us all in the bathroom, as we witnessed the ships sail away across the sink, and from person to person passed a profound loneliness of spirit as if we, like those left behind in Bermuda, were the only four people in the wild world. Dolly fidgeted next to the old man and sighed in a drawn-out manner, and he had a faraway look,contemplating a horizon visible only to the inner eye, gathering in the monotonous waves on the vast and endless ocean. In her gaze, Jane, too, seemed to be recalling a distant time and the prospect of those stranded mariners, not knowing what fate awaited but certain that they were now most desperately alone. As for myself, I was astounded by the girl’s feckless bravado.
    “Were you unconcerned,” the old man asked, “to be stranded with those three salt-crusted knaves?”
    She rolled her eyes and parked a curl behind her left ear.
    T ho by all appearance and demeanor she was one of them, a boy among men, Long John fared no better than a woman. Not only did she must keep her sex hidden at all times, but she must play the lad. The three sailors—Christopher Carter, Robert Waters, and Edward Chard—became three masters, and where in the past she had been attendant upon Ravens, she now found herself looking after three, cooking all the meals, fetching clean potable water, tending to their meager garden, mending holey breeches, and every sundry office required by her youth and station. While she oft resented her duties, they were light, and often whole days would pass with nothing to be done but to languor upon some shaded spot for hours, the men reluctant to move or bother themselves to act at all. Crab, who was Mr. Carter’s pet, could be her boon companion when the sailors were indisposed. One month gave way to the next, and when no ship appeared to rescue them before summer’s end, they contented themselves to remain on Smith’s Island of the archipelago, fishing the rich waters or killing a hog or brace of cahows for their supper, and poking through the woods or along the shores for distraction or adventure. Small treasures could be found—a trunk drifted in from the Sea Venture ’s skeleton, an oyster once with a pearl inside, and all manner of shells shed from the creatures of the sea.
    Of the three men, Mr. Carter kept most to himself and paid scant attention to the boy. He occupied his time with the few books left behind, seizing upon and rereading the Geneva Bible that once belonged to Mr. Bucke, complete with strange numbers at the verses and notes printed in the margins to explain the more uncertain tales. Or else he scribbled in a journal fashioned from a ship’s log commandeered from the effects of Master Ravens. On those few occasions when alone in the boy’s company, Carter sought to instruct him in how to distinguish the letters among the alphabet and in six months’ time had conveyed an elementary understanding of the art of reading. Robert Waters, who had late killed a man, she avoided as best she could, but he was forever near Mr. Carter or Mr. Chard, anxious in his solitude, as if plagued by the memory of his foul deed and discharge of his temper. Whenever alone with Long John, Waters bore a smile upon his face, made all the meaner for the disappearance of both teeth that some call the eyeteeth and others the dogteeth, for they are pointed and sharp in some mouths. How he became untoothed Waters never said, and he also walked with a bandy-legged strut, and she guessed that upon the sea so long he had suffered the sailors’ disease on a