It was nearly bedtime by the time I finished. Carrot was staring at me. Touch was drawing figures with his finger on the tabletop. Mr. Lincoln was beaming. “Very good,” he said, nodding. Then he leaned forward. “But there is more, you know.”
“I don’t understand, sir,” I said.
He leaned back and smiled. “But you will,” he said. “You will.” He gazed at each of the other boys in turn, before looking again at me. “You have made a start at least, and that is enough for one day.” He rose then and lifted a candlestick as signal that it was time to retire. He started away from the table but suddenly turned back to me. “Jamaica,” he said, “is a very interesting place. Very interesting. Jamaica. We shall be calling you that: Jamaica.”
“Very good, sir,” I said, not knowing at all whether it would be good or not.
Chapter 4
I could not get Jamaica out of my head. As I climbed into my cot—barely noticing that Athena had put a quilt on it—I was already recounting more than I had told at teatime, starting with Columbus’ huge black dog, larger than any such animal the natives had ever seen, frightening them so terribly that, after their first attempt, they rarely tried to attack again.
“That’s no surprise,” Carrot said. “He probably ate some of them.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “I’m sure. The book never said it, anyway.”
“I bet he did, though.” In the dark, I could tell he was grinning.
“Tell again about the buccaneers,” Touch said.
“No, tell about the earthquake,” Carrot said. “But here, come get in bed with us. Tell about the man who was buried alive and then washed out to sea.”
So I climbed in between them, as they insisted, pulling my quilt on top of the three of us, and I whispered to them about Lewis Galdy, who was first swallowed up by a massive chasm when the Great Earthquake erupted, and afterwards, in a subsequent shock, was spat out of the ground and cast into the sea, whence he escaped by swimming to a boat.
“Could you do that?” Carrot asked. “Or would you be too afraid?”
I imagined the earth closing around me, imagined the panic.
“You would be afraid, wouldn’t you?” he challenged.
“I would be,” Touch said.
“I don’t know how to swim,” I said.
“I don’t either,” Touch said.
“We’ll have to learn,” Carrot said.
We all went to sleep that night imagining ourselves sitting down to dinner and hearing the terrible noise when the ground opened with choking fumes of sulfur, everyone thinking hell was coming forth on earth as the streets washed into the harbor and the sea rose in mighty waves, tearing ships from their anchorages and sweeping them inland over the sunken ruins of the town.
After that, we three always slept together, with me in the middle. It was cozy, and we found it easy to imagine ourselves bunked together in a pirate ship, sailing in the West Indies. Some nights I told stories about Captain Morgan, who quit being a buccaneer when he was made lieutenant governor of Jamaica; and Blackbeard and Calico Jack; and the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were not executed with the rest of their gang because they were both with child at the time.
And sometimes Touch would make up stories of his own for us. As quiet and gentle as he was, he had a powerfully inventive imagination. The sea was full of not only pirates in his tales, but sea serpents and mermaids as well, and more than one sailor lost his heart to those golden-haired sirens, or his life to a beast that rose unexpectedly from the depths of the Caribbean. I marveled at the way he could make my mind see just what his mind saw. He was four months younger than I, yet he seemed to have absorbed so much more of the world’s magic. I wanted to see things the way he did—to have his imagination and his kindness—and at the same time I wanted to be like Carrot, too, who was so sure of himself, who never doubted that life would always treat him well.
In those first days, around Mr. Lincoln’s map-covered table, I discovered the world. He was consumed by maps—in fact, among ourselves we sometimes called him “Maps,” because he had so many and seemed to love them above all else. Meticulous, colorful, hand-drawn maps, printed maps, entire books of maps—the whole world laid out like an architect’s drawing, as if one could indeed know all the workings of the universe if one could only devour enough maps. Soon enough I came to notice drawings on those maps: a sea serpent peeking over the waves, a compass decorating a corner, even a schooner in full sail.
Carrot nodded toward the schooner. “Touch drew those,” he said.