Dagger Key and Other Stories

“In the end,” Klose continues, “Calico Jack and Anne were sentenced to hang in Jamaica, along with another female pirate, Mary Reade. She had joined Jack’s crew as well, recruited from a ship that they captured. Anne seduced her, thinking she was man, and the two of them had an affair. Quite a passionate one, it’s said. Eventually Jack was hanged and Mary was reported to have died of a fever in prison. But Anne did not hang. She disappeared. Now it is generally thought that her father, who was a wealthy lawyer, bought her freedom and conveyed her to a plantation that he owned in South Carolina, where she lived out her days under a false name. But this I do not believe. I believe she came to Cay Cuchillo.”

Fredo affects nonchalance; he scratches his neck. “Nobody around here named Bonny.”

Wilton re-enters, makes a show of shaking off rain. “Occurs to me you folks might want a ride back to the Cove. It’s coming down fierce.”

“That would be wonderful!” Selkie hops off her stool.

“She married,” Klose says. “She changed her surname to that of her husband.”

“Alvin!”

Klose casts her a bitter look, but begins to pack up his possessions. “The fact is,” he says to Fredo, “I believe she married an ancestor of yours.”

“You got your facts wrong there,” Fredo says, moving off to help another customer. “Ain’t no Yankees in this mon’s family.”

In the hillside shanty up from the bar, Fredo and Emily lie facing one another in a nylon hammock. Because wind is driving rain through the windows, they have put up the shutters and the air is close; the room is illuminated by the low yellow flame of a kerosene lamp that hangs on one of the posts to which the hammock is secured. Jenry and Palace are asleep in the next room. On a pallet to the side of the hammock, Leona makes a gurgling noise. The shanty shudders with a gust. Rain slashes against the boards.

“This weather harsh,” Emily says.

“It likely clear by morning.” Fredo presses against her and she laughs softly, pleased to feel his arousal.

“You want something? You got to work for it, then, ’cause I weary.”

“I weary, too. All except this one part.”

“That’s the part usually gets it way, don’t it?”

They kiss, his hand goes to her breast, and she makes a musical noise in the back of her throat. Her lined face looks older than her thirty-two years, yet despite three children, her body is still youthful, her breasts firm, and she likes having them fondled.

“Maybe you won’t have to work so hard after all.” She rests her knee on his hip and fits herself to him. “Mmmm,” she says as he pushes inside. “Ohh…that’s nice.”

They set the hammock to swaying, but their lovemaking grows less insistent and soon they are content with merely being joined, sustaining their arousal by means of slight shifts in position.

“I had a visit from Annie today,” he says.

“What she want?”

He tells her and she asks what he plans to do.

“I don’t know,” he says.

They move lazily together, hammock strings squeaking, and Emily says, “Think Annie warning us against the German?”

“The mon seem like a decent sort. It could be anybody.”

After a brief let-up, the rain pounds harder, the shutters rattle and, taking his cue from the storm, Fredo thrusts heavily into Emily, but she clamps both her hands to his buttocks, holding him still.

“Show him the pictures,” she says.

“The German fella?”

“You got to ’least show him. Find out how much money he willing to part with. And you know they got plenty. You see that stone his wife wearing?”

“We be taking a risk.”

Emily pushes him away, breaking their union. “Every time Annie come visit, there risk and there opportunity. We taking a risk not to show him. I worried about the boys.”

“The boys solid,” he says. “They be fine.”

“They not solid, they just young. But Jenry, he old enough he starting to understand that he don’t have no future better than what he sees in front of him. He come home the other day acting all crazy and smelling of gas. You know what that mean. He sniffing red gas with that bunch hangs around the wharf.”

“I speak to him.”

“Speaking to him won’t do no good. We got to give our children reason to hope.”

She rolls up to her knees, a practiced maneuver that allows for the unsteadiness of the hammock, and comes astride him.

“You want Jenry to wind up like them wharf boys? Begging for pennies and falling out back of Tully’s place?” She hisses in frustration. “That not my ambition. We got to do what we can for the children, no matter the risk.”

Fredo tries to pull her hips down, seeking to enter her again, but she restrains him.

“You don’t show him the pictures,” she says, “I will.”

Her ferocity seems to heat the room further and, confronted by such passion, weakened by desire, Fredo says, “All right. I’ll take care of it.”

“Tomorrow?”

“If you can manage the cafe…Yeah, I do it in the morning.”