Yiddish for Pirates(66)

All the men, armed.

Pinzón wanted to replay Columbus’s landing, with himself in the role of Columbus. But this time we would not trade small talk and worthless chazerei. We were not pedlars and tinkers, but Odyssean conquerors.

The ship’s master unfurled the flag of the Spanish kingdoms and planted it in the sand. For we shall have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth and have a fancy brocaded flag to prove it.

The natives fell to their knees and then, their arms stretched before them, touched their foreheads to the ground.

“They think we’re gods,” Moishe exclaimed.

“Maybe you,” I said. “Me, they think of as a bird.”

The islanders rose up and surrounded us. Some held out their gourd bowls of gifts. Our men made ready to receive them. Pinzón looked warily at them, and seeing no gold and not wanting a repeat of Columbus’s giltless meetings with the natives, gave the order for the men to take up their arms and make ready to fire.

What did war look like to the natives of this island—if they had war? In a war, a duel, or a chess game both sides need to know they are playing. Otherwise it’s hunting. Skeet shooting. Murder.

To Pinzón, the islanders, though statuesque as rippling stallions or shapely as does, were little more than animals inside: Less-than-Calibans. Un-Christianizables. Primitive though noble Golems without souls. And like Golems or magpies, they knew how to find shiny and precious things.

The men loaded their arquebuses with powder and gunshot while the natives looked on in fascination. Pinzón’s orders echoed in the stillness. “We don’t need a translator to explain this,” he said.

Then, “Fire.”

The sound was like a rank of cannons. The vessel of the world shattered to hellflame and thunder.

Islanders dropped to the sand, ragged hibiscus-flower wounds on their bare chests and contorted heads. Some ran into the forest. Some began to run and then collapsed. Surely not so many could have been hit. A kick and a brief inspection revealed that some had fainted in terror, while others had been slain by fear alone.

Pinzón ordered several men captured and chained to the flagpole. Some women he had bound and carried back to the ship. A man adorned in a feather headdress and long cape, likely the cacique, lay on his back in the sand, bleeding from his mouth. Pinzón stood over him, sword pressed against his heaving throat.

“Gold,” Pinzón said.

The man looked up at Pinzón, not understanding.

“Gold,” Pinzón repeated.

A gloaming light in the man’s eyes. Then darkness.

“Pah,” Pinzón spat, then drove the sword into the dead cacique’s neck.

All about us, twisted bodies amongst fallen gourds, the beach strewn with feathers, coloured stone, the bodies of women and men.

Moishe had an arquebus in his hands. When Pinzón had given orders, he, too, had fired.

“Sh’ma Yisroel,” he had muttered. He had prayed. He had expected to die. “A bayzeh shu.”

This was evil.

He felt that surely God would wake and come down to the island for this.

And Moishe expected that He would strike him dead.

After fireworks: smoke and ash. A bitter scent. Pinzón ordered his men over the killing field to pursue the natives who had fled. The bo’sun hoisted Moishe to standing, hauling his arm toward him like a halyard.

“Come. We hunt. And you, our surgeon: there may be a gash or two which needs your tending, a man rent asunder who’ll want his two halves knitted back together.”

And so we joined the slavering pack as they left their guns and strode into the foliage.

The silent woods. Even the songbirds held their breaths. All that was not rooted had fled or disappeared into stillness.

When soldiers march, all destinations hide.

Several natives were compelled to be guides and by the evening, they had led Pinzón’s men into a village. The buildings were quiet, but none more quiet than the Indios, haunched in a scrubby square, staring at us toytshreken terrified. At one end of the square was a large bohío, a sizeable structure of tree trunks and thatch. Inside, hundreds of villagers, close-packed and fearful. They did not dare exchange shelter for unprotecting sky.

The Spanish mariners, only lately pirates and conquerors of land, stood before the village considering the art of plunder.

But few spoils are as enticing as a good nosh when a warrior’s kishkas snake with hunger and so, when a steady-faced young woman rose and gathered a basket of roasted chickens—aleychem ha’shalom, peace be upon them—and walked up to the strangely bearded strangers, they accepted them as tributes.

Each fressed upon this Jeanne d’Arc meat, gnawing on the juicy poulkes with grave enthusiasm.

Alvaro Sanchez, a cousin to Pinzón, was first among the crew to finish. His thick cheeks glistened with grease, chicken pieces like burrs in his greasy beard.

He was an ox-large bruiser with a groys belly, fat as a booty sack.

A body into which the devil entered, for now, his dinner over, a fire enflamed his gaseous soul. He dropped his oily clutch of chicken bones and unsheathed his sword. This was not a spontaneous impulse toward cutlery and the graces of the table, for he howled, a monstrous beast.

As one, the twenty others seized their blades and they began to hack bellies and slice throats like crazed shochets dispatching sheep—men, women, children, and the old alteh Indios, all of whom were seated, unarmed, and caught off guard.