The Boatmaker (17 page)

The boatmaker has no idea why the priest has come at this moment—but he knows it is the right moment. When he sees the two men of God, the desire to be part of something larger than himself surges up in him like the sea surging and foaming around Small Island. Life has exhausted him. He cannot survive any longer living for himself alone. He has come to a place of terrible dryness. If he does not find his way out of it, he will die.

Father Robert, who has brought many to the light, knows more than to give a long sermon at this moment. All he says is: “Are you ready to join us, brother?”

The boatmaker looks up and sees a softness in the rounded face, a brotherly welcome in the blue eyes.

“There may be a special role for you there,” says the priest. “An important calling. I can see it in you. Isn't that right, Brother George?”

The neckless man steps out from behind the priest. “Yes, Father. Very special. I see that too.”

“Now, brother, will you join us?”

The boatmaker, feeling his tears beginning to flow at last, can only nod.

CHAPTER 13

After Father Robert and Neck leave, the boatmaker lifts himself up, sits on the edge of the hospital bed and cries silently. He has not cried since his brother drowned off Small Island. After that, he felt he had to care for his mother, even though she seemed more angry than sad and pushed him away when he came near. To protect her he stopped crying, has not cried since. Until now, when he feels a hot gratitude to Father Robert and Neck for finding him in his darkness.

The men from the New Land are to return the next day. That evening the boatmaker eats again and smiles at the nurse. After dinner he goes back to his work on the miniature house. He works through the night, feeling the pleasure of working in wood return, renewed. When the weak winter sun appears, the house is finished, the walls up, roof on and door hung amid a pile of
wood scraps. He has left the front of the house open so the nurse can reach in and arrange the furniture he has carved for her: beds, chairs and tables.

The house is the one where he stayed with the woman of Small Island when he was ill. There are private jokes carved in the gift. A wheelbarrow sits by the side of the house. Three salmon hang from the knob on the front door by a thread through their gills. The nurse will not get these jokes, but she will feel his gratitude in the thing he has made.

The priest and Neck come for him and bring him out into the country in a farm wagon on roads covered with snow. The community is set by itself, surrounded by fields and close to a stream. The cold is harsh; the animals are already in the barns for the winter. The boatmaker is given a bed in a room with many other men and a robe like Neck's.

He has been looking forward to being among brothers working together. But he has come to the New Land at the time of year when life slows and much energy goes to staying warm. The men take their meals in silence in the refectory at heavy wooden tables while one of the brothers who can read sits on a stool at the front and reads from the Gospels. The boatmaker is surprised to find that Neck is a frequent reader; he had assumed
Neck was unlettered. The neckless man reads in a warm, clear voice from the witness of Matthew. Neck asks the boatmaker whether he would like to read. He declines.

The snow deepens. Time begins to stand still. The boatmaker finds quiet corners and reads the Gospels, swept up in their repetition, their strangeness, the unknowability of Jesus, the acts of magic that seemed designed to impress His audiences but in which the carpenter of Nazareth appears to have little interest. He goes for long walks through the snow with Neck, both bundled against the cold, the boatmaker wearing his tall woodcutter boots, Neck in his sandals.

Neck shows him the fields where the cattle will be pastured in the spring, the pens for goats and pigs. In the warm weather, the ducks will wander freely but will usually stay close to the pond that is now under two feet of snow and visible only in ghostly white outline. He shows the boatmaker where the bees, now inside, will be kept.

Their long walks often end in the square that lies in the center of the New Land. On one side is a small church made of boards painted white, on the other a handsome two-story building of local stone housing the office and living quarters of Father Robert and the few administrators who keep the community's books and manage its common funds. None of the brothers owns
anything: A brother will give his robe and sandals freely to anyone in need of them.

On a cold winter day Neck and the boatmaker stop into the church. Inside it is empty and cold. There are no images, none of the stained glass that provides the beautiful colored illumination in most churches, the warmth and fire. Yet when Father Robert preaches, as he does every Sunday and sometimes during the week, the room blazes with light and color.

The pews are divided in thirds by two rows of thin white columns that support the roof. Neck and the boatmaker go to the front and sit in the first pew. Facing them is a simple lectern, behind that a large round window of clear glass. Strips of lead radiate from the window's center, crossed by other strips in widening circles around the central point. The window looks like a map of the world seen from the pole.

The two men sit in silence. Neck's eyes are closed. His lips move slightly. The boatmaker wishes he knew how to pray. He assumes he will learn in his new home. Outside, snow falls heavily, as it has for many days. The outside world is as white as the walls of the church, covered in quiet. The boatmaker closes his eyes and recites to himself the words of one of the prayers he is learning. It does not feel satisfying. He waits until Neck is finished, and
the two of them go back out into the snow that is already covering the prints they made when they entered.

The snow accumulates in drifts as tall as the sheds. The animals go into the fields less and less, until they never leave the barns at all. The air in the barns is thick with animal breath, animal smells. The animals are never eaten on the New Land, but they are occasionally sold in a nearby town for cash. With the proceeds, Father Robert directs Neck to purchase salt, tea, nails and other essentials. Aside from these few purchases, the New Land survives on what it makes or grows.

As winter deepens, the meals in the refectory dwindle. Fresh fruits and vegetables are long gone. Then fruits and vegetables preserved from the golden summer begin to disappear. The stored grain goes slowly, but one day there is no more bread. Toward the end, only turnips, potatoes and carrots from the root cellars are left, along with dried lentils. The brothers eat stew made from these root vegetables day after day, a little less in their bowls each week.

The boatmaker is amazed at how little grumbling there is despite the lean rations. There is some. The brothers are human, after all. It is cold and their diet puts them not too far from starvation. But as he looks across the dark tables while Neck reads from the Gospel of Matthew, he sees that these unshaven men in their stained
robes, many unable to read the words they are hearing over their vegetable stew, believe honestly and deeply in the New Land and Father Robert. And if following him means eating gruel made from potatoes and lentils for weeks in the deepest winter, that is what they will do. It is unlike any other group of men the boatmaker has ever seen or heard about.

As the brothers' meals shrink to nothing, the snow subsides. The days begin to be more than a brief interlude between acts of darkness. Tentatively at first, the animals leave the barns. The earth unfreezes. Snow comes again, but not as heavily, and it melts quickly. The brothers walk the fields, seeing where fences need repairing. They plan the first plantings and prepare to move the bees back out under the trees.

One evening, as they prepare for the evening meal, Father Robert joins them. The priest has not joined the brothers for a meal in weeks and has done so only occasionally over the winter. The boatmaker is far from the inner circle of the New Land, but even he has heard the murmured gossip from Neck and one or two others. Some say the priest has been fasting much of the winter—not every day, but many days in a row. Others say he is not fasting at all, that he is gone for long periods to the capital, where he meets in secret with supporters of
the New Land: wealthy and powerful benefactors who believe in the priest and his mission of purging, renewal and purification.

When the priest enters the hall, he does look thinner to the boatmaker's eyes. He was never fat, but his face, which had been rounded, is more sharply defined, his eyes a heightened blue like the sky of a perfect summer day. He is pale, but it is a paleness underlain by fire.

“Brothers,” he says, towering over them where they sit at their benches, “kneel and pray with me.”

There is a shuffling of sandals and benches as thirty or more monks stand and then kneel as a herd.

“Father, hear our prayer from this New Land dedicated to You. The season for planting draws close. We ask You to make us ready, not only to sow but also to receive seed. We would be fertile in Your name, Father—this land and these men. Bless the beasts of the field whom You have entrusted into our care. Bless us, who have placed ourselves in Yours. Give us Your Grace so that this harvest is fruitful. Bring us a yield beyond what earthly hands can make, what earthly eyes can see. Grant our request that this season be the beginning of a special planting, cultivation and harvest. In Your name, amen.”

“Amen” rumbles from the throats of the kneeling monks in an unmusical chorus. The boatmaker, who bows
his head only sometimes during prayers, and rarely keeps his eyes closed, has the feeling Neck is watching him.

Not long after Father Robert's prayer, the rituals of plowing and sowing begin. The brothers work long hours, collapsing exhausted at night with little conversation, sometimes dispensing even with prayers and reading from the Gospels. When the planting is done, there is a lull, and the brothers sleep deeply in the fresh spring nights. The days lengthen and warm; female animals are heavily pregnant.

As the first shoots come out of the earth, the boatmaker finds in himself a love for what is growing from the earth that he has never known before. In particular, the lettuces draw him. There are six or seven varieties, from small mottled dark-green leaves that will form a head no bigger than a man's fist all the way to big pale floppy heads that will be capable of filling a child's arms when they are ripe. Each variety forms in its own way and at its own pace. The way each one knows exactly what it is fascinates the boatmaker.

He spends hours making sure that each plant has a good mound of dirt around it, that each pyramid is moistened at the right time, that caterpillars and slugs are picked off young plants, chopped to pieces and returned to the earth. He fights an ongoing war with insects and
with hares. Some nights he sits under a big oak near the lettuce field, dozing, shotgun across his knees, waiting for the hares. But they rarely appear when he is there.

During the day, Neck comes to him carrying a heavy old wooden bucket with a ladle in it. The water is drawn from a small springhouse enclosing a spring that bubbles up at all seasons within a low circle of stone. Neck stops to offer the boatmaker cool, clear water and chat before moving on to his next task.

Though the misshapen man is not the brightest or shrewdest brother on the New Land, he seems to have more of the confidence of the young priest than anyone else. At Father Robert's order he goes all over the community, even into the capital. And everywhere he goes, Neck carries his belief in Father Robert. His faith in the priest and his cause is a light that connects all the brothers. To the eye, Neck seems like a creature from underground: neckless, snuffling and blind. Yet he is capable of bringing light up into the day where other men, less broken, dwell.

Aside from Neck, offering cool springwater from his bucket, the boatmaker talks to few of the brothers. Yet he is never alone. Around him the others are tending vegetables, orchards, goats, the chickens in their runs, the bees in their hives under a grove not far from where he
walks slowly up and down the rows of lettuces with his hoe and watering can.

At their meals, which are growing steadily richer with the fruits of the season, the brothers listen to the Gospels. On Sundays they gather in the white church to hear Father Robert preach in front of the big round window with its polar map. The priest returns again and again to the virtues of silence and obedience, which go together like root and leaf. But as he listens, the boatmaker does not feel obedient. He knows he may never be, no matter how hard he tries. Silence, however, is in his nature. It is one of the reasons being at the New Land makes him feel he has come home.

As the year turns forward and the lettuces bloom, Father Robert shows special interest in the New Land's newest brother. From time to time he invites the boatmaker up to his office overlooking the central square. His office is on the second floor of the administration building, the only stone building on the grounds, quite old, made of the same dark brown stone used to build the Mint and many of the other royal buildings in the capital. When Neck calls him, the boatmaker tilts his hoe into his wheelbarrow, brushes his hands on his robe and walks slowly through fields now green and lush, past the springhouse, past the chapel, into the square.

He climbs stone stairs to the second floor and enters the office. The priest is sitting behind a heavy desk of dark mahogany. He looks up as the boatmaker comes in, puts some papers in a folder, closes it and gestures the boatmaker to sit. A carafe and tumblers stand on a side table of the same dark wood.