Free Cast Off by Eve Yohalem Page A

shuffle-shuffle-shuffle.
    â€œAnd then, of course, there are the soldiers, right up there, just a few feet from my head. So it’s not as if I’m alone. Not really.”
    She said all this cheerly enough, but she said it too fast and too bright.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I asked, pointing at a pile of rags on her perfectly neat bed.
    â€œThis?” she said, holding up the pile. “It’s nothing. Just a doll I made for company. Twelve is too old for dolls, but I just thought . . . under the circumstances . . .”
    The thing was made of linen scraps with charcoal eyes and oakum hair. ’Twas the saddest, ugliest doll I’d ever seen.
    Rats, dolls, and soldiers. I’d brought Petra down here. Now I had to get her out.

15
    One month underwater. One month in the dark. One month in the bilge.
    But also one month with no new bruises, no swellings, no loose teeth.
    In those long hours I’d learned many things. I’d learned that ships leak, no matter how much oakum plugged their cracks. I’d learned that splinters from rope were impossible to pluck out, no matter how fine the needle. I knew what time the bells signified and the difference between the first dog watch and the last dog watch. From Bram’s sketches I knew all the ship’s parts and some of the men. I knew how to tie a becket hitch and how to flemish a line, and I could mend a torn sail well enough to earn Bram the nickname “sew sew boy.”
    I’d grown used to the hard, salty food. I’d even grown used to the rats; they were much smaller than Father, after all.
    But I missed air.
    By day I worked at whatever task Bram brought down for me, and by night I crawled up through the surgeon’s quarters to the galley to steal food. Portholes were kept closed while the ship was under way, even in calm weather. When there was no one sleeping in the sick bay I stuck my face up to a grate and breathed.
    Which was why, when Bram came in the middle watch and offered to take me outside, tears sprang to my eyes, and my hands shook so I could hardly straighten my shirt laces.
    Bram had lookout duty. With little wind and no need to change course, only the officer on watch would be awake on deck navigating the ship with the helmsman out of view in the steering house. Bram assured me that so late at night, the rest of the crew on duty—some sixty-five men—would be asleep at their posts. When he climbed the mast to his post in the crow’s nest, I’d go with him.
    â€œThere’s a new moon and no stars tonight. No one’ll notice you in the dark. Or if they do, they’ll think you’re Louis. We should be safe enough so long as we’re quiet,” Bram said.
    â€œI won’t make a sound,” I swore.
    â€œIt’s just like climbing a tree,” he said. “And when you get to the top, there’s nothing but sky and air for miles.”
    Sky and air for miles!
    We passed through the orlop deck, which was directly above the hold. Except for my visits to the barber-surgeon’s office and the cook’s galley, I hadn’t been on the orlop since the night I met Bram. We made our way through the long crew cabin, threading among sailors in hammocks strung with hardly an inch between them. Even on a night like tonight, with all the grates open, the air was sour soup. I could only imagine what it was like for the soldiers, trapped half a deck lower with no grates at all.
    From the orlop, we climbed through a hatch to the waist, the middle portion of the upper deck that was open to the sky. The sleeping crew on watch there were wedged between cannons called big guns. No one stirred as we snaked among them, little more than shadows, to the forecastle deck, at the front, or “bow,” of the ship. The fo’c’sle was where the crew worked and took leisure. From Bram’s drawings I knew that its mirror at the back, or “stern,” was the quarterdeck, a