Read Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley Online

Authors: Kenneth Roberts,Jack Bales,Richard Warner

Tags: #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc., #Nottingham (Galley) - Fiction, #Transportation, #Historical, #Boon Island (Me.) - Fiction, #Boon Island, #18th Century, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc - Fiction, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc, #Shipwrecks, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sea Stories, #Historical Fiction, #Shipwrecks - Maine - Boon Island - History - 18th Century - Fiction, #test, #Boon Island (Me.), #General, #Maine, #History

Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (45 page)

BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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Page 310
White and Mellen cursed each other.
The thought came to me that their dispositions had changed, and their voices, too. Their voices were breathless, squealing, like pigs struggling at a trough. I wondered whether the meat had done it, or the salty ice we chewed to quench our thirst, or the unending cold, or our inner fears of the eternity that had drawn so close.
I pulled at Neal's sleeve, and we went out on the rock. We looked all along the coast for smoke. Like the captain, we saw nothing.
"Neal," I said, "it might help these men if you recited parts of plays to them."
Neal shook his head.
"Why not?" I said. "It might keep them quiet."
"No, it wouldn't," Neal said. "Nothing would keep them quiet. They'd laugh at any part of any play, because plays aren't worth believing. Nothing's true except this." He swept his arm from the tent toward the ocean and the mainland.
There wasn't much I could say.
"Anyway," Neal said, "I've forgotten everything. I don't want to remember, and I never will. I'll only remember that my father hated the stage and wanted to keep me from it. I want to forget my name, even. I want it to be what it should beMoses. That's what my father and my mother named me.
"If I'd never gone near the theatreif I hadn't done what my father didn't want me to dothe
Nottingham
wouldn't have sailed when she did. She wouldn't have gone to Killybegs to take on butter and cheese. She'd never have struck this island. It's all my fault."
"Look, Neal," I said, "If you want to start thinking that
 
Page 311
way, you can trace every bad thing in the world back to some little incident that nobody was to blame for. Instead of blaming yourself, blame the circumstances that brought that nasty little fop to Greenwich. Blame the thing that made him a fop in the first place."
Neal's eyes had a hunted look. I think if there'd been a hole on that barren rock into which he could have crawled, he'd have crept there to get away from me, from Captain Dean, from his memories, from the eternal thundering of the breakers all around us.
"I know how you feel," I said, "and I'm glad you do. My father was right, too, and I wish I could tell him so. I can hear him now'pint-sized clowns in tatters and tarnished gold lace, making faces and laughing like hyenas at their damned dull witlessness.' "
Singularly, I thought of Sir Isaac Newton and his discovery of the reflecting telescope: of Langman, who said there could be no such thingwho laughed at the truth. And ironically it came to me that there would be people like Langman who would say that there was no truth to this island or to the tribulations we'd endured upon it: that our labors were nonsense. It came to me suddenly that when I left this island, if I ever did leave it, I wanted nothing to do with the Langmans of this worldnothing to do with those who derided the truth, and defiled it.
We went back to the tent. The captain, carving pieces of fat from Chips Bullock's kidneys, looked up at us sharply. "Any smoke?"
When we shook our heads, he sliced off a piece of the fat, laid it on a board and pounded it with the handle of his knife, spreading it into a thin sheet.
 
Page 312
"There," he said. "That's pretty near the same as the mutton tallow my grandmother used to make. Each one of you can have an equal amount. You'll have to make it go as far as possible.
"We'll flatten it out, flatten it out, and when it's as thin as we can make it, we'll take off these oakum bindings and wash our feet and legs again, same as we did before. The fat ought to be good for deep sores. It's bound to help those who've lost toes."
 
Page 313
December 31st, Sunday
If a man, on the last day of any year, chooses honestly to consider his shortcomings, he must always be depressed; and if any people anywhere ever had occasion to be downcast on the last day of that year, it was we on Boon Island.
The sight of our legs and feet on the day before, when we applied the poultices of kidney fat to them, had frightened us. They were worsemuch worsethan they had been in the dim and dreadful past, when we cut off our boots and first swathed ourselves in oakum. The sores were deeper: the toes broke off more easily, though without pain.
Then Henry Dean screamed that horrible epileptic's scream of his in the deep dark, and flung himself around the tent as though he had eight legs and eight arms, all made of steel. When we finally pinned him down, he twisted and turned in our hands with almost unbelievable violence, and on top of that he groaned horribly, and there's something catchingsomething poisonousabout groans.
The whole night was a bad one and after Henry Dean
 
Page 314
had stopped thrashing and writhing, and had fallen into an epileptic's heavy sleep, I lay staring upward, afraid of the dark, afraid of what must happen to my feet and legs if this cold continuedif we went on and on, being drenched daily by the salty spit from the breakersif I lost the use of my hands and could no longer occupy myself in the brain-deadening task of picking oakum.
In my thinking I groaned, realized too late what I was doing, tried to turn it into a cough, and produced a sort of squawk, like a crow with a beakful of food.
I felt a hand fumbling at my shoulder and heard Neal say, "Are you all right, Miles?"
"Of course," I said. "Of course I'm all right. Are you all right?"
"We're
all
all right," Captain Dean said. "Even my brother's all rightor will be when he wakes. All of you felt how much strength he has. Just remember you're all as strong as Henry if only you make up your minds to be."
He hesitated: then added, "I've been thinking. I don't believe we've been praying right. We've been praying as if we didn't know God at allas if he was some sort of distant image, away up above the stars somewherean image with whiskers, like ours.
"Well, he isn't an image. He's real. And since we expect him to answer our prayers, he can't be far away. We believe he'll help us if we deserve to be helped, but we don't ask him for that help in the same way we'd ask our own fathers for help."
He hesitated again. "Would anyone like to speak to God? If you can't find the words, I'll speak for you, but I think you might feel better if you did your own speaking."
 
Page 315
"I'd like to speak to God," Neal said. "I'd like to speak about my father. God, I'd like to have my father told that I know what he did for us. You must know what he did, God, and I hope you won't let it be wasted."
"What do you mean by that, Neal?" the captain asked.
"God knows," Neal said.
After a time the captain spoke again, conversationally, as if God were in the tent with us. "God," he said, "you've been kind to us, though some might think you haven't been. By giving us ice to eat, you've saved us from the most horrible of all deaths: you've given us work to do, so that we've preserved our sanity: you saved us from disaster when you overturned the boat: you let the sea wash up the cordage from which we made clothing and shelter: you gave us seaweed to eat: you gave us Swede Butler to strengthen our courage ..."
Langman spoke up. "Don't forget the seagull."
"Yes, God; the seagull," Captain Dean said. "The seagull helped us. All things considered, God, we've done as well with these blessings as any equal number of men could be expected to do, and all we ask, God, is that you don't withdraw your favor from us."
"Aren't you going to ask for a ship to take us off?" Langman demanded. "Why don't you ask him to send the seagulls back? There hasn't been one sighted since I killed mine!"
"Ask for fire!" White demanded.
The captain shook his head. "Ask for them yourselves if you think it'll do any good," he said. "If God feels we should be helped, I think he ought to be allowed to work it out in his own way. I don't feel qualified to tell God what to do or how to do it. I wouldn't feel justified in
 
Page 316
asking him for more seagulls. He probably had a good reason for sending 'em away from the island.''
I couldn't improve on what the captain had said, and the others were silent as well; but I think we all felt better because of Neal's and the captain's talks with God.
For the first time I felt about God as I'd so often felt about my father: felt that he'd do anything reasonable I asked him to do, and that if he should refuse, he'd only do so for my own good.
There were lines of light showing around the edges of the tent-flap, so I went out with the captain to help him with the meat.
Neal followed me. He didn't even look toward Cape Neddick or York.
"Neal," the captain said, "I want you to find another hole in the rock where we can store part of this meat. I want you to attend to moving half of it, and I don't want to know where you put it. I don't want anyone to know: not even Miles."
Neal nodded and moved away.
Captain Dean watched him go, then turned to me. "Was it three days ago, Miles," he asked, "or four days ago that Swede and Hallion put off? I forget. Every day seems a year long."
"It was Wednesday," I said.
"Miles," he said slowly, "I think Neal knows his father's gone."
"I know he does," I said. "I know it, too, and so do you."
"Yes," Captain Dean said, "but he knows more than we do."
 
Page 317
"Yes," I said, "I know that he thinks he knows, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's right. I hope he isn't."
When the captain didn't answer, I asked him what he meant by asking Neal to find another hole in the rock.
"I don't quite know," the captain said. "I think this meat has made some of the men a little crazy. Have you noticed Saver's and Graystock's eyes when I pass around the meat?"
I said I hadn't.
"Well," Captain Dean said, "I had a ferret when I was a boy. I'd turn him loose in the stables, and he'd kill rats. When he jumped on a rat, his eyes looked red. I don't think they
were
red, but that's how they looked. That's how Saver's and Graystock's eyes look when they get their meat. If that's how they feel about it, they might crawl out of the tent any night. Being the sort of people they are, they wouldn't hesitate to steal what rightly belongs to all the rest of us, and they haven't enough brains between them to exercise restraint or common sense in their eating. They'd eat until they dropped dead."
He watched Neal coming slowly back to us, picking his way over the icy ledges.
The captain drew four large bundles of meat from beneath the seaweed and piled them in Neal's arms. "Be sure they're covered with three feet of seaweed," he told Neal.
When Neal was out of hearing, the captain asked, with seeming carelessness, "What is it Neal thinks happened to his father?"
"Well," I said, "you know how I feel about Neal. From the moment I saw him, I've thought of him as a brothera younger brother. I wouldn't want you to think that
 
Page 318
there's anything odd about himthat he has hallucinations, or anything of that sort."
The captain sniffed. "I know hallucinations when I see 'em, Miles. The night the
Nottingham
was wrecked, I was sure none of us would last until morning. Then when morning came, I had a feeling. Not an hallucination. I don't know how you get feelings, or where they come from; but I had the feeling we were going to come safely out of this. I still have it, and I still think I'm right. That's no hallucination. Now what is it that Neal feels about his father?"
"Well," I said, "he thinks he saw his father in a dream, or something like that. His father told him the raft hadn't a chance of getting to shore with two men on it. He told Neal that since he was a good swimmer, he was going to get into the water and swim and push. He thought that if he did that, the raft might get to shore, so he was going to try it."
The captain nodded. "I see."
"Well, that's what Neal thinks, Captain. He thinks his father swam as long as he could, and then just slipped off."
"I can think of worse ways to go," the captain said.
BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
7.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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