My Father, The Pirate
I have been looking for my father since I was little. My mother had never told me much about him but I knew he must be a sea man. A local merchant. But then the question that always came into my head was, 'if he was a local merchant, then how come I have never met him?'.
When my mother died, I went out looking for him. When our ship was blown up and I was rescued by the navy, I put my father out of my head for a year or so. But he was always there, in the back of my head, plaguing my thoughts. He was my ghost.
When I met Jack and sprung him from jail I knew he had known my father. For a long time I thought he had killed him. My father was no pirate and no one was going to convince me of that. It took all of my self-control not to fight Jack then and there or to trick into telling me the berth of the Black Pearl and then leaving him there to die.
Then he told me how he knew him… "Probably one of the few who knew him as William Turner." I remember thinking, William Turner? My mother didn't even call him that. It was just Bill. I remember struggling through Tortuga thinking about Jack had told me about my father. A pirate? That thought just circulated through my head over and over. I had grown up hating pirates and practiced in my shop to make sure that when I was finally met with one I could kill it, but this brought into my life a whole knew factor. What if Jack hadn't come into my shop and my father did instead? What if I didn't recognize him but killed him only on the fact that he was a pirate?
I sighed and look out of the bars that I am now surrounded by. Elizabeth is gone and so is Jack. The Pearls' crew is in the cell across from me and looking rather small considering they all can fit into a cell and an ugly, bald, old and a tall, thin, one-eyed pirates are mopping tar on the floor.
Cotton's parrot squawks and Gibbs translates. "Cotton says you missed a spot."
I smirk and Pintel, who is the ug-…bald one, hits the cell with his mop and grunts.
A question which has been in my head since I came aboard finally makes its way out, "You knew William Turner?"
"Ol' Bootstrap Bill? We knew him. Never sat well with Bootstrap what we did to Jack Sparrow…the mutiny and all. He said it wasn't right with the Code. That's why he sent off a piece of the treasure to you as it were. He said we deserved to be cursed…and remained cursed."
I rest my head against the bars and I can feel my spirits drop. This was the proof I needed. As if the piece of gold that Elizabeth had taken from me wasn't enough. But I had to be sure. I had to have multiple facts from different sources, to make my doubting heart finally believe that my father was a thing that I had hated my whole life.
"Stupid blighter." Said the guy with the wooden eye.
"Good man." Gibbs said, taking his chances. I shoot a look of appreciation to him. He said the same thing Jack did. That's somewhat reassuring.
"Well as you can imagine, that didn't sit too well with the Captain." Pintel said going on with his story.
"That didn't sit too well with the Captain at all. Tell him what Barbossa did."
"I'm tellin' the story!" Pintel yells at his friend. "So…what the Captain did, he strapped a cannon to Bootstraps' bootstraps."
"Bootstraps' bootstraps," whispers wooden eye.
"The last we saw of ol' Bill Turner, he was sinking to the crushin' black oblivion of Davy Jones' Locker." His mood suddenly changed as he said, " 'Course it was only after that we learned we needed his blood to lift the curse."
"That's what you call ironic."
They laugh as I swallow hard and think about my father's last sight. Seeing his crew drown him alive. Seeing his ship that he had spent most of his life on, leave him down there.
Okay Will, keep in your head that he STUCK UP for Jack. That he thought it was wrong…that he had morals. He was different. He was a good man. I sighed, I had put my father on a pedestal my whole life and then finding out that he was a pirate. That he broke the rules and killed and stole and hurt people. That he was part of all that crushed me. That he put his life on the line and that he rejected his family.
My thoughts were put on hold when Barbossa took me to the island. Things passed quickly for me then. Jack came back, I was free, Elizabeth showed up, then Barbossa was finally killed. I remember rowing Jack to the Dauntless. I remember the look on his face.
When home and pardoned by the Governor I finally had the time to really think about my father and everything he had become in his life. Can you or can't you… I sighed, Jack's words echoed in my head as I thought about him sitting in that jail cell. I looked at the clothes on my small bed. "Can I or can't I accept that my father was a pirate?" I sighed again and thought about everything Jack had taught me in the weeks that we had spent together. My father probably would've taught me the same kind of lessons. Jack wasn't exactly the best father figure and I didn't want him to be, but he was a good friend. "A good man." I said to myself. "As was my father," I said.
I had done it. I had worked this whole time to get used to the idea and now that I was faced with a problem that had to do with a good man, it broke the spell over me. I had accepted that my father was a pirate and my father. And that's what he would always be to me. My father.
"Now to save another good man, before it's too late."