Free Centuries of June by Keith Donohue Page A

hogs, abandoned no doubt by earlier visitors to these isles, the Spanish or Portuguese or Irishmen perhaps, were rounded up in a most ingenious way. Mr. Chard had discovered a herd of swine rooting through the forest and that night, he lay down with them, next to the boar, and when the hog began to snuggle close, he grabbed its leg, held fast, and tied him with a rope, leading sire and sows and piglets back to our encampment as if Chard were the king of all hogs. Crab, the dog, kept his watch over the pen we built, and the hogs were bred and slaughtered in turn when the survivors tired of lobster or fish. Admiral Somers ordered a garden to be tilled with English seed, and within ten days, the first sproutlings shewed their green necks, tho the muskmelon and peas and onions never bore fruit, for theplants themselves were eaten by the multitudes of birds and creeping insects. But berries flourished on low bushes, and the fruit of the palm, when boiled, reminded many of English cabbage. Mr. Chard discovered that the palm leaves, when crushed and fermented, made a drink not unlike port wine.
    “Have a taste, boy,” he said one evening near the end of their first marooned month. Seated on the corpse of a felled cedar, they were enjoying a moment’s peace at the end of ten hours’ labor. Just at the waterline, they watched the rising of the moon, the appearance of the constellations one by one. Chard, like so many of the men, had failed to don his blouse, and his suntanned chest, brown as a beetle, glistened in the failing light. His whiskers and beard had grown so that when he spoke, he looked like a bear or some other fabulous beast. She took the cup from him and drank deep till the liquor spread across her belly and crept into her limbs.
    “That’s the stuff, lad, that will rid all cares and make you forget all about old England. Precious stone set in a silver sea , my arse.”
    The palm wine roared to her head.
    “I, for one, am glad we are here,” Chard said. “Glad of the storm. Glad to be off that ill-met ship. I don’t care if we ever leave here. I am sore sick of the sea, cooped like a rat belowdecks, never your own master but bound to serve men of no sense, men who sail into the cheeks of the wind at full sail. Half-wits and knaves who like to drown you in their vainglory. There’s them who pull the yoke.” He poured another cup of wine for John. “Fish aplenty, the sun on your back, no crowds jostling and bustling. If only I was my own master, then I would show them as fools they be. For want of coins in England, but here, lad, here there is no king, and all can be had by a man’s own labor. Here a Chard can be a lord, and a lord no better than a Chard. Here now, drink up, John, and be glad you are a free man. This mash will put a beard on you yet.”
    John nodded at the good sense of the argument, tho the wine toyedwith her mind until all reason, indeed all feeling, escaped. The stars lost their places in the night sky and the white sheets atop each wave rolled in and then pulled away so fiercely that she feared the blankets would reach and drag her into the sea.
    Like a great bellows, Chard yawned and drew a deep breath. “No more talk of kings and knaves tonight, for such fancies sit heavily upon the soul, and hope is more tiresome than a day’s labor. I take my leave with my bottle and bid you good night till the morrow.”
    A crab emerged from a hole in the sand and began to fan the air with its great claw, its eyes twisting on their stalks, first one and then the other, and fascinated by its display, John laid her head upon the sand to watch more clearly. The little crab was the color of the sand itself and difficult to see in the moonlight, but she strained to catch every motion, and in so doing, fell asleep, rocked in wine-soaked slumber by the sound of the endless sea. How long she slept, she could not say, and when she woke ’twas as from a dream, or more than a dream, for the first thing she