“Lovely morning,” he said.
My father laughed. “If you take it so,” he said, “it ’s better. After all, what does the weather matter to an old sailorman like you?”
“Not a bit. I never let it make any difference to me. But the talk of these lads,” he said, waving a weatherbeaten hand, with its talon-fingers, at the two black men, “always makes me want to laugh. It sounds like monkey talk.”
“Don’t you understand it?”
He shook his head. “Not me. I never learned Portagee. I should die laughin’ if I tried. They had none in the navy in my day.”
My father was interested. “Have you been in the navy? I should have said merchant vessels, but I did n’t think of the navy.”
The old man nodded. “Oh, aye,” he said. “It was the navy until the war was over, and I was too old for that, and then the merchant service for a couple o’ years, and then whalin’. Whalin’ ’s easier. They don’t drive a vessel so. You were n’t goin’ on this ship?”
My father smiled, and laid his great arm across my shoulders.
“No, I ’m not going, but—”
“The boy?” the old man interrupted. “Is he so? Well, can I be sort of lookin’ after him? I ’d take him under my wing with pleasure, perhaps teach him a thing or two, and try to keep him out o’ trouble.”