The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [88]
I finally pulled the shovel head from the ground, and stopped to marvel at how well it’d kept. Then I put it to the side, unfolded my father’s army shovel, and started digging as fast as I could.
After a few minutes, the dog seemed to understand what I was doing. He centered himself along the opposite edge of the hole and started digging, too, tossing pawfuls of beach through his legs into a pile behind him. We maintained a rhythm—his paws, my shovel, and our piles growing behind us. For each of his eight beats I made one, and we continued on for a span of time until I felt I needed to rest, by which time we had already cleared two feet of sand and dirt.
I stopped and leaned against a tree, inspecting our progress. The dog’s side of the hole was like a ramp. My side was more like a cliff.
By the time the hole was deep enough for me to stand in, time had passed in bucket loads. I had two blisters and a sore wrist, and the light flickering from Fred Livingstone’s house was gone. The sky brightened to a predawn azure and I panicked. I had never thought about running out of time. Now I would have to fill in the hole and start all over again.
I was muttering jumbled disappointments, just about to give up, when I heard Mairead’s voice in my ear. Keep digging, Saffron. Dig!
And then my shovel hit something hard.
And wooden.
Something hard and wooden. Like a crate.
“Holy shit.”
Emer spent her last day aboard the Vera Cruz packing. There were only a few things she wanted to keep from her evil life on the high seas. She pulled her neatly folded stack of embroidered capes from the shelf, rolled them tightly, and placed them into a satchel. She retrieved her small sewing box and her ivory and silver thimble, a spare pair of flare-legged trousers, her two pistols and a snuffbox she’d retrieved from a sailor killed on the Emerald and tried to get them all into the satchel, too, but it was too small. So she turned to her crates of swag and removed all the bland black packing fabric, replacing it with her capes.
Emer stopped and admired her best cape before wrapping it round the oversized emerald and then placing it in the box. It was over now. The running, the killing, over. When she was finished, Seanie nailed the lids on tightly and they stacked up their luggage next to the door.
They all decided that once they got to Port Royal, they would cash the treasure and split it. David insisted on some time alone in the sparkling cargo hold first, to pick a few rare things for himself before they sold it.
“For my future wife, aye. She won’t know what to do with a ring the size I give her!” he explained. He looked toward Emer, but she didn’t seem a bit bothered.
She handed him the key. “Take what you like.”
The next morning, when they docked in Port Royal, Emer turned to David before he went ashore. “We’ll buy a new frigate for the trip to Europe. You’re welcome to anything we leave behind. The Vera Cruz, the whole fleet if you want it, the maps we got from that Dutch frigate last year, the rest of what’s in my cabin. If I were you, I’d start with those maps! You never know what’s buried at the red X. And you should get far away from here for a while. Safest, aye.”
“So this is goodbye?” David’s mind wandered back to the first day he’d met her, on Foley’s sugar run.
“Can you blame me?” she asked.
“I reckon I can’t,” David answered, looking at Seanie on the dock standing next to the two crates and the satchel.
Emer hugged him and whispered a million thank yous into his ear. It was like saying goodbye to a brother. And in thinking that, she was reminded of Padraig and fought back tears.
Eight hours later, she and Seanie boarded their new ship. Seanie went to work choosing a few lads to sail it toward Ireland, and Emer retired to their cabin to rest her foot. She fixed a warm salt bath and soaked it for a half hour, the way the doctor had prescribed.
As they sailed from the Port Royal docks into the sunset, Emer went above deck to wave goodbye to her last Caribbean port—her last stinking