Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
I left Plymouth on a Tuesday. I know this only because the fish market was running, which it did on Tuesdays, and the smell followed me down to the harbor where I found a French merchant vessel taking on crew. The first mate looked me over the way men look at boys presenting themselves for work — measuring whether the ambition outweighed the size. I was small but I had learned to stand as though I was not.
He hired me as a footboy. I signed the ledger with the name my mother had given me and did not look back at the street behind me.
I want to say I felt free. The word is tempting. But the truth is I felt cold and slightly sick and uncertain in a way I had not allowed myself to feel since childhood. My mother’s hand straightening my collar was still fresh on my shoulders. I could feel the exact pressure of it. I thought about it more than I thought about where the ship was going.
The work was brutal in the simple uncomplicated way that physical labor is brutal. Scrubbing decks until my hands bled, hauling cargo in harbor after harbor, climbing rigging in weather that had no interest in whether I survived it. The other sailors had no idea what I was. Why would they. I worked as hard as they did and complained less and asked for nothing I wasn’t owed. In a ship’s crew that is sufficient. Men do not scrutinize what does not inconvenience them.
I learned the sea on that vessel. Not from instruction but from necessity, which is the only education that truly holds. I learned to read weather in the color of the horizon. I learned which knots held and which ones lied to you. I learned that the ocean has no opinion about human beings whatsoever, which I found more comforting than most people would.
I learned something else on that ship. Something I had suspected in Plymouth but could not confirm until I was surrounded by men constantly, living among them, sleeping in the same quarters, eating from the same pot.
Men are not what they pretend to be either.
The performance of manhood — the bluster, the posturing, the carefully maintained indifference to fear — was as constructed as anything my mother had coached into me. The difference was that their performance was invisible to them. They believed it absolutely. I watched it from the inside and understood it in a way no man ever could, because I had learned it deliberately rather than absorbing it unconsciously.
That knowledge was the most useful thing I ever possessed.
I went back to Plymouth once.
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