1
Maureen never will believe that all of this happened because of her.
But let me start from the beginning. My name is Joe Sharp, Able-Bodied Seaman from Boston. Many seafaring men remain single: some because the girls don’t want to be sailors’ wives, forever watching the sea from their widows’ walks; and some because they have already picked up souvenirs in ports of the kind they want to lose, but never can; and some because they prefer the company of the men on a ship. But I was married once, and then, when fate cut me loose, I put my head back into the noose again. There’s no hope for me, says Zeb, looking at my hair and then looking at young Tammy, and I say nothing at all.
I made a verse for one of the songs we sing, while hauling on ropes, explaining my situation. When I was a little boy, my father always told me that if I did not kiss the girls my lips would grow all moldy. So first I loved a Yankee girl, and she was fat and lazy…
(That was Lou Belle in New Amsterdam. She was only fat in a pleasing way when I married her. She grew fatter, later. She said it was because eating took her mind off watching the sea and fretting about me. However she must not have fretted very much, for when the old Bonnybridge was reported lost, and most of us were then rescued and brought home more directly than expected, Lou Belle had already married Timmy Pratt, and good luck to him, said I. Only I never go ashore in New Amsterdam, lest the news that I still live be thrust between them. I thought my escape from that union a stroke of luck, I did.)
And then I loved an Irish girl who almost drove me crazy. That was Maureen, back in Boston. She had a prettier face and a better temper than might be expected, in spite of the bright red hair she kept tucked up under a hat with a dark blue veil behind. The house could not be better run. Like the virtuous wife in the Book of Proverbs she arose early in the morning, and stretched her hand to her needle, and sent the hired girl out to deliver fine garments to the merchant. But straightaway I noticed that her hearing was bad. Then I noticed that she was subject to fits of dizziness, mostly in the morning. Then the doctor said that the deafness, for such it was bound to become, and the dizziness are a family curse, and the dizziness will only stop when the deafness is complete.
The only thing to be done about it, he said, was to learn some sort of code we might use to communicate to each other as Maureen grew deaf-er. So that was what I did. I favored the good old Morse code as being simple and sensible. The doctor said it would take too long to use Morse code for all the talk that needs to be done around the house. The thing to learn was some sort of code that other deaf people use, where one motion of a hand means a whole word. The doctor just happened to have an aunt’s stepsister’s niece who was deaf, and earned her living teaching other deaf people this code. She happened to be in need of a situation. So nothing would do for Maureen but we had to engage Miss Rowntree to come in and twiddle her hands at us twice a week; and we must practice our twiddling in the evening, too.
Things a wife would think shame to say to her husband, with her tongue, she can say while twiddling her hands. Pleasant things to see, they are, though they’d not sound proper to hear.
So I learned that hand language right quick. I was resolved not to go to sea again, for fear of spoiling a good thing. Maureen’s cousin Davy McNabb had a roof-shingling business. I went in with him. Took me six weeks to earn with him as much as I earned in my first year at sea, and I had thought myself well paid then. But not three years passed before young Davy met me on the way to work, and says he, “Joe, I’m mixed in with some boys from Ireland, and there’ll be trouble if I stay here; I’m off to California. You’d best be off, too, but don’t you go to California. Your best chance is to keep far from me as you can.”
And me so innocent, I still don’t know what it might be that I might have done, or for whom.
I asked him, I did. Says he, “Well, of course I’d not say a word”; and away he went.
I went to Nelly’s Bar to see if Nelly Nelson knew of a situation. There sat Captain Bill Pritchert. “Looking for you,” says he. “I was told this was where you were likely to come, in a few hours.” So I told him my situation, and says he, “We’ll sail in three days, be out for two years, and your pay’ll be a hundred dollars at the end of it.” Which is not bad in the merchant marine. They reckon a fellow earns more than that in two years, but the captain must deduct for his food and other expenses. Some first-time members of the crew are lucky to get twenty-five dollars for a two-year voyage.
2
So we were not far from land when Captain takes his bearings, and bids us steer straight toward a big rock, where he said sat the fairest mermaid you eer saw.
“And what if there be little rocks around the big mama rock?” says young Tammy.
“Then we smash on’em,” says Zeb. “Try not to ask foolish questions.”
“We smash,” muttered O’Leary. “Mermaids is the devil in disguise, is all.”
However we struck a clear passage toward the rock, and as we drew near, instead of bidding us draw nearer, that mermaid dived into the water and swam up nearer us. Captain bid Terry lower a boat with a washtub in, and, if you’ll believe me, the creature seized the washtub, dipped it into the water, and shoved it back up for Terry to set in the boat. Then over the side she hove herself and pointed to a barrel of provisions that was kept fastened in it, for Terry to draw up to the barrel. Which he did. Then she sat on the barrel and dipped her tail in the washtub.
From that close, I learned, you can plainly see a mermaid’s no woman. Not much like one either. That long yellow business that drapes down over their shoulders? It’s not hair; it’s gills. They have little paws, with thumbs, on their long fore-fins, but they don’t have fingers. The upper body, which is shaped sort of like a woman, but not exactly like, is rosy pink, but it’s covered in scales.
They don’t speak, either. They sing, like whales, to tell each other where they are.
3
This mermaid looked at us, with her brassy fishy eyes on either side of her scaly face, and raised her fore-fins, and began twiddling just like Maureen would have done. In deaf people’s code she was saying, “Who are you and where are you from?”
I spelled my name for her in the code.
“You can speak!” says she, with her fins twiddling away just exactly like Maureen’s hands and arms. “Who taught you to speak?”
I explained to her about Maureen and her Miss Rowntree, and how I wished I was at home twiddling in front of the fire with them, but I had needed a job suddenly and Captain had taken me on.
“Can he speak?” says she, looking at him on one side, fish-like.
“Why, of course he can speak,” says I, so as he could hear me.
The mermaid twiddled at him, but of course the Captain didn’t know what she was doing. He said, “Captain
Alexander Pritchert, ma’am, at your service.”
“What are you doing?” twiddled the mermaid. “Are you having trouble breathing, or are you sick, or are you making signals to each other with your mouths?”
“We are talking,” says I, “like men,” says I, “saying words with our mouths.”
“You mean you can hear each other making sounds?” says she. She could no more hear us speak than we might hear whatever a fly might be saying, when it buzzes. “Can none of the others speak?”
I said to my shipmates, “She can use the deaf people’s code that my wife uses; she can’t hear us talking.”
“Then you are the one I want,” she twiddled to me. “Jump into the boat with me. I have some human things I’ve been waiting to give to some humans, if I had a way to communicate and bring them close enough.”
“She wants me…” I said.
“You’re welcome to her!” says Zeb.
“Been good to know you,” says O’Leary.
“Go with her,” said Captain. “Any final message for your wife?”
I felt disgusted with the whole crew of them. “Tell her I love her,” says I, and slipped down into the boat. I picked up an oar.
“I’ll lead you,” twiddled the mermaid. She flipped herself out of the washtub and over the side, grabbed a line, and began towing the boat behind her. She must have been half again as long as a human is tall. She swam like a dolphin, big and fast and powerful. She stayed between the boat and the rock, too, which gave me a feeling that I might yet get back home.
Then she snubbed that line around the rock, and raised herself up, twiddling for me to use the oar to keep the boat off the rock. Then she dived deep.
And then, back she came, hauling an old waterlogged wooden chest.
“Stay here,” she twiddled. “There’s more.”
There were two metal lockers, and another chest, and some things tied up in a piece of a sail.
“There’s more,” she twiddled, “but that’s all the boat will hold.”
She towed me back to the ship.
4
The smallest chest was full of parchment papers, soaked and ruined. Some ink still stuck to the mass of them but it didn’t stick close enough for any pictures or words to show. One of the lockers was full of liquor in old wooden kegs, and wouldn’t you know the salt water had got in and ruined that, too. The other locker had old clothes in it. Nobody could have got much wear out of those, either.
But the big chest was full of old coins, gold and silver; and the sail was full of jewels, pearls, ivory, coral, and bones. We thought they must be human bones but they had come from at least three different skeletons, not from one complete one.
“Almost three hundred years ago,” she twiddled, “when I was just a little girl, my mother was sitting on the rock singing to a friend when a ship came near. I wanted to have a look at the ship. Mother said she’d beckon them closer if I promised not to try to touch. The men were afraid; they were all running about, throwing these things to us. None of them held on to an oar. The ship smashed up against the rock. It drifted In three little circles before it went down. Some of the men even fought and pushed each other overboard before the ship sank.”
I translated that for the others.
“Does her mother look like her?” asked Captain.
The mermaid said she did.
“Men say that mermaids are like beautiful women who want men to give them babies,” he said. “Seeing what you really look like…”
“Some of us have tried that,” said the mermaid. “It’s no use. Humans seem to reproduce in a completely different way. Men don’t recognize our eggs on the ground, much less react to them in a useful way. Everyone knows that by now. But I’d heard that it was only an old myth that humans could ever be taught to speak, or understand language, and look at you! Maybe it’s good for you not to know how to speak; otherwise some of us would want to keep you as pets. It’s so funny to watch your stiff little fins make words. In another hundred years or so, when I’m old enough to have children, you must come back and talk to us again. I promise not to try to keep you with us.”
“In another hundred years or so I’ll be dead,” I explained.
“Really?” she twiddled. “How do you know? Are you ill?”
I explained about the days of a man being threescore and ten.
Says she, “How funny that your lives are so short when you look so much like little people. Almost all merfolk live a thousand years. I have a great-aunt who’s over fifteen hundred and still active and healthy.”
Her fishy face didn’t show any expression that a human could recognize, but she said she was pleased, having been able to return all those human trinkets to some humans.
“If you come back,” she said, “I’ll bring up some more. There was more, on the ship.”
5
But of course none of us ever went back to sea, except Zeb and Tammy. They said the way they felt about each other was bound to show, and get them into trouble, on land but nobody thought anything of it at sea.
But Captain, and O’Leary, and the rest of us, took our hares of the treasure to retire on. O’Leary didn’t hang onto his money for long, somehow—pessimists like him, you always wonder whether bad luck makes them or they make it—but the rest of us work just exactly as much as we want to work.
That's a great fantasy story. Enjoyed it! :)
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