Final Paper - Mercy’s Pirates

Dull thuds of booted footfalls alternated with hollow clicks of a wooden peg as a large, bearded man paced the deck in front of his ragged crew. The hot sun beat down on sweaty brows and tricornered felt. The peg-legged man, a pirate captain ironically known as Captain Mercy, squinted up into the sun to see the Jolly Roger luffing high above, its fiendish sneer mimicking his scarred face. Mercy’s pride, his 41-gun schooner the Lady Knife, was riding the swell a league east of Barbados. Many called this passage the blood sea, due to the sanguine hue it retained after the sounds of cannon fire were carried away on the evening’s breeze. Situated directly on the trade wind corridor, many a fat merchantman would here be forced to run the gambit between pirates, privateers, and treacherous waters.

Mercy knew his crew was restless. None had been ashore to carouse with women or brawl in the bars for almost two months, and there had been no plunder for the last three weeks. The men were hungry for blood and loot, and Mercy could smell that some were beginning to develop an appetite for mutiny too. The water barrels were running low, but, for the captain, returning to port without a prize was as good as signing his own death warrant. Mercy paused a moment and thought. He heard pieces of a muttered conversation; the tone did not sound happy. The muttering had an airy, rasping quality to it, issuing as it did from the gaps in mouths missing teeth. Apparently these bastard ingrates had forgotten their personal chests of little pieces of gold and finery that they had plundered as part of Mercy’s crew; they had forgotten how good it was to be one of Mercy’s Pirates. He would make them remember, he had before. All he needed was just a little luck.

Mercy thought back to his earlier life, remembering the luck that had gotten him to where he was. What was life but luck? At the age of fifteen, he had stabbed and killed one of his mother’s lovers and run away from his mother and younger brother, a stowaway outbound from Portsmouth on the good ship HMS Justice. The whole voyage he remained undiscovered with his only friend, his knife, the instrument of his first kill. It began to speak to him as the days wore into weeks, and the weeks wore on into months. The knife told him how strong and righteous he was, and how he deserved so much from life.

He sat staring at its cool, silver-black blade for hours; he remembered asking it question after question. He asked it, often to obsession, why his mother’s lovers had given him all the bruises and black eyes. It seemed like every day he had done something so wrong that he was brutally or whipped as beaten as punishment. It was the only constant thing in his young life. He asked the knife why he had always been forced to sit, hungrily, as he watched the father figures in his life eat the last of the food in the house and drink themselves to a slovenly, snoring sleep, or else go chase after his screaming, pleading mother. The knife had reassured him in the softest tones that all would be well. All he had to do was take what was rightfully his.

Mercy reached his arm around behind him and unconsciously felt the scars that crisscrossed his back like red snakes of pure hatred. It seemed to him that these scars, more wounds inflicted by his mother’s boyfriends, were the product of pure sadism. Some thought Mercy was a sadist as well; the sailors he routinely robbed, tortured, and killed for profit certainly must. But, to Mercy, the scars he bore on his back were an ever present reminder that cruelty, for cruelty’s sake alone, was the meaning of true evil. He was merely taking what was his, as the knife had told him to do, and was comfortable in the knowledge that his way of making a living was no more brutal or exploitative than many legitimate businessmen’s. Indeed, a pirate’s work was far more humane that that of, for example, that of a textile mill owner. Mercy’s prey at least had a chance to flee or, if cornered, fight. The strong would survive. The poor men and women whose lives were ground away in the mills, however, had no such hope of a fighting chance.

Mercy recalled the end of his time as a stowaway and the start of his new life. After the Justice made landfall and Mercy escaped from the confines of its hold, he found himself in a marketplace, assailed by strange sights and sounds. His clearest recollection from his first arrival in the Caribbean was the corpse of a man, all the evidence of a rough life and rougher death redolent on his body, lying neglected on the sandy beach. He smiled as he remembered how he checked the corpse’s pockets for money. Finding none, he had noticed how unusually thick the soles of the dead man’s boots were and pried them apart. There he found a considerable trove of gold pieces; there was enough to keep him fed for a year, at least.

Mercy was not a God-fearing man, and so he assumed that God must fear him because of his miraculous and never-ending font of good fortune. When he was eighteen, he inherited a brace of ornate silver-embossed pistols from a man he killed. Many years, and many dead men, later he found himself in command of his very own vessel, which he had named for his protector, his knife. He didn’t care how many died. Mercy was going to get what he wanted, and the way to do that was to be the most black-hearted pirate ever to prowl the seas.

Mercy’s life had been hard ever since he had been left on his own when he was fifteen. His luck always saw him through in the end, but there were times when he didn’t know if he was going to make it. He started pacing the deck again. Click, thump, click, thump. Mercy tried never to rub his peg leg against the wooden deck of his ship. Whenever he did, it caused the most horrible nails on a chalk board sensation to run up the stump of his leg, through his spine, and into his brain, giving him an instant and horrible headache. Often, during the heat of battle, he would accidentally scrape his peg on the deck and, on account of his headache, become a hundred times more vicious. Even Captain Mercy was afraid of Captain Mercy with a headache.

Once, many years previously, Captain Mercy and his crew had been in a fierce battle with an English frigate. Her Majesty’s ship-of-the-line had almost overwhelmed the Lady Knife; indeed, the pirate crew was heavily outgunned. Mercy was standing on the main deck, bellowing orders and running around the ship on two sturdy legs. “This isn’t the first and won’t be the last frigate we sink. God damnit, lads, put your backs into it!” Just then the English crew had loaded chain shot. The withering volley cost many of Mercy’s crew their lives; it only cost him a leg.

Eventually, after the battle was won and the English sailors were visiting Davy Jones, Mercy had the rest of his leg amputated. Only his own knife was good enough to touch his flesh, she would be gentle with him. As the ship’s surgeon, formerly a barber and petty thief, began to use the knife to saw through flesh, through muscle, through tendon, and through bone, Mercy’s eyes watered and his face transformed into a likeness of the Devil himself. His mouth foamed around the piece of spar that had been placed between his teeth to prevent him from biting his own tongue off. After a while, Mercy began to relish in the pain. He let it wash over him and forge him into a new man. The Mercy that emerged from the crucible hobbled and clicked, but the new Mercy has never since engaged an English ship-of-the-line. The new Mercy was smarter and even more focused. He was going to make up for his leg being taken from him by taking more from others. It was only fair.

He would never let on to anyone for fear of his crew thinking he’d gone soft, but the sheer brutality and inhumanity of chain shot disgusted Mercy. It reminded him too much of the whip his mother’s boyfriends had given him the horrible welts with. Chain shot hurt much worse physically but, emotionally, there was no comparison: the whip was a thousand times worse. For Mercy, both the chain shot and the lashings he had suffered crossed the line from necessary to sadistic. Mercy still remembered the worst pain he had ever felt in his youth. It had not been a physical pain. The cries and pleas his little brother let out when the sadistic bastards beat him had been worse than any physical wound Captain Mercy had ever received. His little brother’s pain cut right to his soul like the sharpest of all daggers. It flayed him within an inch of his life and left him defenseless. One night, he could bear those tortured cries no longer, and so he had stabbed the man beating his brother. That was the real reason for his first murder, though he’d told many a pirate over a mug of grog that his first was solely for the love of killing. Mercy still remembered it clearly. The blood running down the blade of the knife and slowly dripping onto his hand branded him with the red mark of a murderer. It was the most drastically life-changing event Mercy had ever known. That was the night when he had run away into the comforting black of a midnight Portsmouth and set out on his path to piracy.

The watchman’s voice sounded from the crow’s nest, breaking his reverie. A merchantman was in sight. Flying English colors, she was low in the water. Mercy sprang into action; this was it, lads, the long-awaited booty. He shouted orders to his crew, and with the promise of plunder, they all set about in a rhythmic motion, looking more like a well-oiled machine than a crew of drunk, toothless, illiterate brutes. Soon the excitement of the chase took over and, unintentionally scraping his peg leg on the deck, Captain Mercy became more of a raging beast than a man. The ship on the horizon became the Golden Fleece, and Captain Mercy commanded his Argonauts to prime the cannons, load powder charges, break out the swords and muskets, adjust the sails for maximum speed, and prepare to engage if the merchant crew attempted to put up a fight. As the two ships drew nearer over the span of agonizingly long minutes and it became clear that the Lady Knife would soon overtake the merchantman, a wave of despair overtook the latter crew; they were unarmed.

After the other ship’s cargo was plundered, Mercy’s crew took her captain aboard the Lady Knife and put him into a kneeling position at their captain’s feet like some kind of trophy. The man kept his eyes lowered to the deck in shame, anger, and rage. Mercy had witnessed this scene before him a hundred times, and, in his moment of absolute triumph, Mercy felt like God himself, wrathful and omnipotent. Moments like these were what he had been working toward his whole life. He was respected, feared, and in command. He put his knife to the other captain’s chin and raised his head with the blade. Mercy had his speech ready to go; he had rehearsed it in his head a thousand times. He was looking forward to humiliating this man and then feeding him to the sharks that always lingered about the Lady Knife. Mercy had never considered himself a cultured man, but this elaborate, primal, ritual of displaying absolute dominance over another man was a form of theater in which he indulged. It was also one he felt was particularly valuable for his crew to witness.

As he raised the man’s eyes to meet his own, however, he felt a shock like a dagger of ice penetrating his heart. It was the same dagger that had cut him all those years ago, when he had been listening to the sadistic men beating his poor, defenseless, little brother. The eyes he was staring into were his own. They were his eyes—his brother’s eyes. The cold hand of panic grabbed hold of his stomach and he staggered backwards a few steps. Then he remembered his audience. Mercy turned and glanced at his crew. Many countenances were stupefied, some looked suspicious; all expected Mercy to be his usual merciless self. Mercy fished for words. His speech, full of vitriol and invective, was entirely forgotten. Throughout countless years of bloodshed, the life of the man kneeling before him was one that his knife told him he could not take.

But no! Such hesitation would be the end of him, as his crew would take him as weak and immediately become mutinous. The pirates now seemed to Mercy like the sharks that dogged the Lady Knife, and their captain’s paralysis was a spreading red stain of blood in the water. Though Mercy knew this, he was overcome by the moment, unable to act. His arm, a lead weight, steadfastly refused to draw a weapon and his remaining good leg refused to kick the man contemptuously to the deck. The man’s eyes staring back at him silently pleaded for mercy, just as they had done with the sadistic torturers from his childhood. Reflected in those eyes, Mercy saw not himself, but rather a red-skinned devil of pure malice. The men from his childhood had appeared to him in the same manner; he saw them not as men at all, but rather incarnations of anathema. And now he was one of them. As Mercy gazed at the horrible devil reflected in the man’s eyes, he knew that he could not, no matter how hard he tried, bring himself to do harm to his brother.

Suddenly, Mercy felt something grip his shoulder. He spun around, but there was nobody there. It happened again, and Mercy spun again and drew his pistol. Yet, again, there was nobody in front of him. A look of horror spread across his face just like a pool of blood spreads beneath the victim of a stabbing. He kept turning one way and the other, trying to confront the specter of Davy Jones that was so instantly taunting him.

Rage bubbled up inside of him. He was Captain Mercy, the greatest pirate captain of all time. He refused to believe that he was a sadistic torturer; Davy Jones wasn’t tapping him on the shoulder. He planned on living forever. There had to be a way out of this situation. If fate were going to be so cruel, he would fight fate. If God were going to give him a choice between his life and his brother’s, he would fight God. All he needed was just a little bit of luck—

And then there was agonizing blackness for Mercy, as the new captain of the Lady Knife smashed open his skull with a large wooden plank and watched Mercy’s broken form crumple to the ground. Mercy would have done the same thing, were he in the other pirate’s position. After all, he was just doing what he needed to in order to make sure he was going to get his in life. Any pirate would kill for a captaincy. Mercy’s dying thoughts were of his brother; there were no regrets, except for the fact that he hadn’t been able to think of a way out fast enough.