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Dola welcomed Sheeta as the daughter she had longed for, the daughter for whom she had waited with atrophying hope. Years after years of sons and then–-Sheeta running down a gravel path, bullets humming like hornets all around her, braided pigtails flying.
But Dola need not have waited so long. There would have been other daughters, had she thought to look.
Sons came and went. Sons were easy to find, and easy to forget. So she told them, anyway, lying through her teeth as she blew smoke in their anxious, suddenly apologetic faces.
(She never forgot any of her sons.)
Dola and her man found sons in every port of call, every shipyard, every tavern, every black-market den where sawdust was poured over the blood and piss on the floor. These sons of theirs might have dark or sallow or freckled skin; thick accents; missing limbs; tattoos or scars or none at all, just narrow shoulders and glasses pushed up on their noses. When Dola was pleased with them, she would tell them how strong the family resemblance was.
What they had in common was a hunger for more than whatever ugly, shriveled share life had given them, and a certain lack of fastidiousness when it came to acquiring more.
They were not leaders, her sons. These were the hungry ones who were also hapless, aimless. They were perennial losers. It was not in them to challenge her authority. Instead they clung to her, and she steered them, and patched their broken parts as best she knew how. She provided them place and purpose and safety and their repayment was piracy in her name. They gave her both notoriety (which she craved) and the money and the swiftness and the covering fire that meant freedom (which she needed.)
They were friendly, by and large--Dola’s temper permitted no serious grumblers aboard her ship; there was room in the sky for only one mood and it was hers by right–-but they were not harmless men. She harbored fools, but no useless ones. They would (and did) kill in her name. Her approval was their moral compass, and it did not always point north.
(When she met the coal-miner boy, she doubted him. Oh, the yearning was in his eyes, all right. It was written on every last sketched and crafted and tamed winged thing in his little brick house. But he seemed too clean, too polite, too well-tended in his habits and manners to encompass the kind of desperation she understood. She looked at him and thought, that boy will shit his carefully mended britches the first time some sheriff points a pistol at him.
Dola had seen only desperation for so long that she had forgotten what determination looked like.)
But she had no daughters. Loudly she bemoaned their absence. Where were the hollow-hearted, steady-handed girls? Where were the girls who could smile through the blood running down from a broken nose, if their prize was at hand? Where were the girls who wanted nothing more than to go their own way, and devil take the hindmost?
Dola did not find them, but they were always there. They were not to be found in shipyards and black-market dens. They were in the taverns, but sometimes they served the whiskey instead of drinking it and complaining about their rotten luck. They were in debtor’s prisons with children even younger than themselves. They were in nice houses with painted shutters. They were everywhere that Dola never thought to look.
Dola had grown settled in her ways, a predator who thought she knew her hunting grounds too well. No one had challenged her in too long. It was luck that brought Sheeta across her path, and the coal-miner boy. She would not have found a daughter on her own, the way that she carried on.
There would always be pirate daughters, if one looked for them.