Glasses clinked against wood as patrons of the Crow’s Coin Tavern finished out their working days with liquid relaxation. Most were seated pair by pair at the bar stools or in larger groups leaning in towards the center of circular tables, where piles of ever-growing loot from the current round of cards enticed each to ante up. All those from the docks, whether working men or those from the sea, migrated here with their boatmates before heading back to their bunks, or, if they were the lucky sort, to their house and waiting families.
The old man sat away from the rest, down at the end of the bar, his long white hair disheveled enough to almost mask its thinning nature. A bottle of something dark sat on the bar in front of him, a glass half-filled with the same drink of choice in his hand. He stared into it as though the liquid’s surface was a magic mirror showing secrets of the deep.
I strode over and sat at the stool next to him, removing my cap and placing it on the bar. He’d been alone long enough his whole body startled at my presence before he made the conscious choice to look my way with red, watery eyes resting in sunken-in sockets.
“Difficult thing, drinking alone in a town like Port Royal,” I said by way of greeting.
He nodded his head so slowly the movement barely registered in my brain, before he leaned forward and held up two fingers, which the barkeep responded to with a nod. Soon there after I had a glass, and the old man poured two fingers from his bottle and reset it onto the counter.
He took a swig, and I mirrored him; this echoing, an introduction. Then he started to speak in alcohol-induced cursive. My brain caught up to his meaning several seconds after he finished, having to do an audible puzzle to make sense of the sounds.
“You’re not from here,” I assessed.
“Is anybody?” he asked. He threw a hand out, swept it up so close I dodged to miss it. He shook his head. “No, no – I hail from the kingdom – ole’ Albion.”
I noted the sneer and the way the last word dripped from his mouth like poison. “I am – grew up not but a few villages over.”
He sniffed, as though his nose was testing out the validity of my statement. “You might be, but you’re still not from here.”
I shrugged. “Maybe somewhere down the line, I suppose, in the second or third generation of greats, my ancestors touched Spanish soil.”
He snorted out the air and took another drink before reaching into his inner coat pocket and pulling a bundle of parchment out of it. He slapped the lot of it onto the table “Well, then, I guess nowadays you have as much of a right to this as anyone in this place.”
I shuffled through the papers, worn enough that the sketches and written word were indecipherable in parts. But I could make out the British royal seal, a map of sorts – or perhaps blueprints to some sort of encampment or structure. A letter that, if I squinted, I could make out over fifty-percent of the slant cursive penmanship, even if the ink hadn’t been aged by what seemed like decades. A small leather-bound book. And a patch, one that had been ripped off the first mate of a British royal ship’s uniform, with the threads still hanging loosely from it.
The old man pointed shakily to the patch. “In a past life, that was mine.”
“Do you say now?” I murmured, rubbing a thumb over it, and back across. I had the urge to crush it in my palm – there was a possibility of it crumbling to dust with any amount of pressure – but instead I tossed it back onto the table and half-covered it with the letter. “What is this, then? Atonement?”
“Redemption?” the old man said. He shrugged. “Vengeance? Justice, perhaps. Call it what you will. I was crawling on ships since I was a babe, and the ocean ran through my veins. I joined what I could and hopped a ship from the great island as soon as it was allowed. I was hungry. For something unnamable, I was starved. And I did things, in that starvation, like a man desperate for food and water. He’d die without food and water, you understand? In that desperation, values have a particular way of getting skewed into nonsensical things. But I was just so hungry – I didn’t care what I did, nor who I did it to.”
“Hm,” I sounded. I gestured to the other things scattered on the bar. “And what do you expect me to do with these?”
“In my second year as first mate, we found a place – a Spanish mission – you’ll see it on the map there. Just a small outfit. A modest church, a few sleeping quarters—”
“You pillaged them?” I asked in disgust. “A church?”
The old man shrugged, then drew a pointer finger to the drawing of the blueprint, pressing and running the point of it down a particular structure slowly. “We tried. They had fled – the priests, those who had resided there – before we’d arrived. Even the animals, gone. But we tried. We searched every crevice, every outhouse, everything. All we could find was stale grain. We burned the place, what could be burnt at least, in anger. All that effort, for stale grain.”
“I hardly feel sorry for you,” I said.
“Nor I now, and I am not looking for sympathy.” The old man pushed the pile of things over to my hand engulfing my half-empty glass. “This is what I have from that time. My journal, the drawings – even the letter describing what should have been there. And should still be.”
I drummed my fingers along the bar’s wood, looking between the old man and his pile of worn papers, considering words and how much weight they should be carrying.
“Listen – I sold my soul to the devil long ago, and he comes to me now. I can feel him creeping along the back of my neck.” The old man stretched his neck up and around in a circle, only to drop it into a bow of defeat. “No amount of treasure can sate him.”
“But an act of redemption might?” I asked bitterly.
The old man shrugged, “What else do I have left?”
I picked up the items he had slid over to me and pocketed them. Just because I didn’t think death-door acts would bring anything other than a longer sentence didn’t mean I wasn’t going to reap the rewards of his guilty conscience.
📸 Photo by kaori kubota on Unsplash
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