Wilderness of Spring Part 50

"It could be."

"I want you should take that back. Ben a'n't for dying."

"He a'n't even full-growed.... Ah, Christ, count him in then, and what could he and the two of us do, three against French Jack, and Ball, and Marsh, and Shawn himself?--not to say nothing of poor Dummy, that don't know nothing except the devil is kind to him? I'm a stout man. Break me in half with one hand, Dummy could, grinning like a dog the while he done it."

"Ben is kind to him."

"Ah? You think----?"

"I--don't know. But hark 'ee to this, Matthew: could somebody steal the key to that leg-chain and turn the Old Man loose----"

"G.o.d Almighty, who'll bell the cat? Don't the key hang on a cord at the devil's neck, and is it ever off him?... What was it you seen in the cabin, Joey?"

"Ah.... Only him, the Old Man, that ha'n't touched a drop the whole year long, and that devil keeping it ever at his hand--only him, not paying me no heed at all, I could've been a breath of wind in the cabin--only him, Matthew, lowering himself to his heels, slow, and then grabbing the table and pus.h.i.+ng himself up, clean off the boards, chain and all, and down again, slow. Against the day, Matthew, against the day. Did _he_ ever go within four foot of the end of that chain? Could three men, four men, ever hold the Old Man, if somebody was to steal the key?"

"He'd be match for three or four, grant you that. When it was over, you he'd only see hanged with time to pray, but he'd snap my neck with his own hands. I fit out them irons myself, Joey. I wouldn't wonder but I'll wear the like in h.e.l.l, if there be justice. Forty years honest, that's me. Nay, Lord, ha'n't I been in irons myself, my life long, with this purple face? Forty years honest, and Chips for seventeen of 'em--nine and more on the old _Hera_, seven on the _Iris_, eight months on the _Artemis_. I'm not counting this last year, she's the _Diana_, he'll break her heart like mine. Forty years honest--oh, I was in anger already at the Old Man for slights and curses a good sailor would've ignored, so I listened to Tom Ball, Shawn's pet hog, and then to Shawn himself, his singing tongue--listened in my anger and said I'd do it, and I did it. You think G.o.d forgives such a thing? I killed Hanson, shot him dead, never harmed me. You G.o.d might forgive, not me. I wish I was dead."

"Nay, Matthew, you old sod----"

"I mean it. I don't see why G.o.d didn't strike me down a year ago. I a'n't sunk yet, but the tiller's gone. Wa'n't Shawn broke it, it was me.

I should've thought--why, should've hove to, but Christ, I let her broach, and the sea come over me, the tiller's gone, it's clean broke off. Anything in that bottle?... Sometimes it's on me to march into that cabin, say: 'Here, _sir_--that neck, you been wanting it.' He'd take it.

With him loose, we might win back the ketch, grant you that. Then you for Copp's Hill and my neck cracked a mite sooner. Don't forget it."

"All the same, Matthew, it won't be the Old Man that does for Shawn.

Nay, it won't be the Old Man."

_Chapter Two_

Driven by a southwest wind of the upper air that stirred as yet no breath here at the island, a cloud moved toward Polaris, and would conceal the star a while, and pa.s.s on. Ben heard no voice except of the sea, and that unconcerned with him, a hiss and groan of breakers on the beach, and somewhere, beyond the southern arm of the cove, a larger mourning as incoming waves lashed an outlying part of the island's body and fell away sighing.

The ketch now named _Diana_ had been careened for sc.r.a.ping, a labor completed yesterday, wearisome in the sun. Comfortable again in the deep water of the cove, she rode at anchor, waiting on sunrise that should summon a breeze, and rouse the man who ruled her (if he ever slept) and send her out wherever his desire commanded. The tide would be running fair an hour after dawn.

Her shadow begotten of the May moon stretched long across the still surface, in nearness sharply edged, then vague, then melting in the blackness of open water far out. The May moon, approaching the full, would be illuminating the letters on the starboard side. If Ben leaned over the rail he could glimpse the black sprawl of them: DIANA. But Ben Cory still thought of her as _Artemis_.

This was one private way to keep alive the integrity of a self. Another was to inquire: Where does the self end and the universe begin?...

Manuel was aloft. Manuel loved sleep, and could sleep anywhere, he shyly told Ben once--even at the masthead. But his fawn eyes would likely be open at present, searching the harmless night. If he drowsed up there, or if Captain Shawn or the second mate Marsh merely imagined he had, Manuel would be whipped, and then obliged to swab away any red drops that might have spattered on the sacred deck. A year ago Shawn had been quite kind to stupid Manuel. That ended after Cornelius Barentsz of the sloop _Schouven_ had been hanged, and Manuel had furtively tried to cut the body down from the yardarm.

However balmy the weather, however empty and flat the sea, a twenty-four-hour lookout must be kept on the _Diana_: Shawn's law. Even in harbor the men stood watch and watch, having learned not to grumble in the presence of Captain Shawn, who might seem not to hear the words at the time spoken, but would nurse them in his bosom a week or so, and bring them forth and quote them gravely while Ball or Marsh corrected them with a rope's end. The deck must s.h.i.+ne spotless as a d.u.c.h.ess's drawing room; the bra.s.s must be dazzling, the ropes coiled exactly so, and the powder dry.

Judah Marsh and the hunchback mute who possessed no name but Dummy were somewhere aft, idle as Ben. Marsh never invented work when nothing needed to be done. This was not from laziness, certainly not from any charity: human beings were simply not so important to Judah Marsh that he could derive much joy from dominating them. He executed Shawn's orders for punishment with satisfaction; the sight of Manuel bleeding deepened his fixed smile; but he seemed to find no pleasure in ordering big soft Manuel about and watching him fumble at meaningless tasks.

It was not in nature, Ben thought, that a creature could be devoid of all common impulses to mirth, compa.s.sion, generosity, recognizable l.u.s.t, interest in his fellow men, and still walk about on two legs; but there Marsh was, unquestionably spewed up by the human race. Some man must have begotten the thing, some woman borne it in pain and maybe loved it a while. Marsh would not even eat like a man, but like a peevish dog, gulping the tedious food and returning to his one-eyed vacancy. For Daniel Shawn Ben had been obliged to learn hatred, a waiting, despairing hatred that even now might hold some tormenting elements of love or at least of searching. Before the stalking dead man Marsh, Ben could only recoil, watchful, glad that, except for the necessary rule of the starboard watch, Marsh let him alone.

Ben expected nothing to be required of him till after sunrise when the tide turned. Then it would be up anchor and away, if Shawn's intention held. It often changed. Shawn was in no triumph these days, after a year of frustration and trivial actions with nothing gained.

The tide should turn at about seven bells. The mate's watch would tumble up early to lend a hand at breaking out the anchor and making sail--unavoidable since, after a year, the ketch was still woefully undermanned. As always at such times, the mate Tom Ball would remind the men that better times were coming with the next prize--more hands, better food, another vessel maybe, riches to burn, and best of all probably a bit of amus.e.m.e.nt at the expense of the Spaniards and their women, say at Campeachy or Merida. They paid scant attention to that noise now when it came from Mr. Ball, though the mere word "money" gave Ball's thick Devon voice a special fruitiness as if the taste of it comforted him all the way down to the gut. ("Money is the thing, Ben boy," he said once with damp and genuine friendliness, pawing amiably at Ben's s.h.i.+rt. "Got gold, you got everything, take an older man's word for it--good food, good smocks, safe old age. Gi' me the money, other cods can have the glory." Then finding Ben's stare to be an incomprehensible cold lance, he grunted with the pained astonishment of a man who wants to be liked, and spat overside, and pushed his hands against the sides of his paunch to settle it better on the burdened pelvis, and waddled away.) Manuel might giggle at Ball's belching oratory, but French Jack would only shrug without chattering, and Matthew Ledyard's purple-stained face would freeze into a peculiar quiet. When Captain Shawn said nearly the same thing (without the women and Spaniards), standing tall in his green breeches and green sash, in that favorite spot of his where his left hand could stroke the larboard falconet while his other rubbed the copper farthing, they still listened. Or they seemed to. While p.r.o.nouncing such words as "our company," "our enterprise," Shawn's splendid voice could briefly make it seem that the men gathered to hear him were indeed a company of some consequence, and not a tatterdemalion handful of sharkbait committed to the guidance of a lunatic dreamer.

Ben tried to lose himself in the tranquillity of black water out yonder, to make some temporary truce in the private struggle. A battle with arithmetic, in a way: how does one youth steal a vessel from seven grown men--not counting Manuel, who was rather less than a man?

Ledyard was a man; little Joey Mills had at least a memory of manhood.

One or even both might be allies, if there were any way to reach Ledyard. But all year long, Ledyard had seldom acknowledged Ben with more than a grunt, a stare and a turning of the back. He offered no other unkindness; he merely made it plain that Ben's existence distressed him somehow, while chattering Joey Mills tried to explain to Ben that Matthew was a grieving man who meant no harm by it. Ledyard, Ben knew, was deeply involved in Shawn's declaration of war against the world. Ledyard had shot the mate Hanson and one of the seamen in the taking of _Artemis_. Ben could imagine how Matthew Ledyard might still cling to the thought of the new lands in the western sea, and might forget (sometimes) that if ever he arrived there his own conscience would arrive there with him, to speak with him in the night and burn down on him in the noonday sun.

Ben had grown acquainted with a saving reasonableness in the very monotony of s.h.i.+pboard, in the endless daily things that must be done for the vessel's survival and one's own, without much thought, certainly without argument. Not too unlike the labors of a frontier farm--but the earth can be kind, with many shelters for one in extremity. In the open sea you've only to glance over the rail, and understand.

There is another sort of reasonableness in the status of a slave. Maybe, Ben thought, most men accept a little of that status because they must: but when you begin to accept it willingly, you begin to die.

("_Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years...._")

After eight bells, breakfast. Hardtack, and stew built on a wild slimy formula unknown to any mortal but French Jack, and a dark tragic fluid that Jack called _cafe arabique_. The stew originated in Bahaman goat and wild pig, shot by Ledyard and Ball not long ago but too long for comfort. Nothing remained of the good provisions taken in a midnight raid two months ago on a coastal settlement at Martinique. Shawn might try another such raid before long; if not, back to the salt cod.

Shawn had not even considered trying to dispose of that honest cargo of Mr. Kenny's at one of the Caribbean ports where he could have sneaked in to bargain with no questions asked. Tom Ball had urged him to do so, waving his stumpy arms, his voice climbing to a reckless howl of despair. Shawn merely grinned at his copper farthing, and let Tom sputter out like a fat candle, and then remarked that one day soon they might be most happy to own such a handy supply of dem'd wonderful fish.

Ben Cory had never regarded himself as a poet, but he thought sometimes that if he ever saw home again, there was one original composition that he could recite to Reuben in a decent glow of authors.h.i.+p. It went like this:

Old boiled cod.

O G.o.d!

As for the _cafe arabique_, Captain Shawn had been heard to say that he supposed Jack made it from a secret crock of hog manure hidden in the hold. Ben more charitably suspected an infusion from sc.r.a.ps of old leather salvaged maybe on the field of Blenheim.

Red-haired Jack claimed to have fought gloriously there under the banners of Marshal Tallard until the surrender, when a great light burst around him, and G.o.d told Jack that Louis the Fourteenth was no mortal king but an incarnation of the fiend Asmodeus who cut up little girls and ate them. Well--Jack could have been at Blenheim; far more likely he wasn't. Peter Jenks, captain in 1705 of the s.h.i.+p _Iris_, had happened on French Jack in Barbados, and being in sore need of a cook, had signed him on, with Jenks' usual ma.s.sive disregard of authorities and formalities--Jack doubtless had the status of a prisoner of war, but he was somehow at large on the island, he seemed to be declaring that he knew how to cook, and that was good enough for Jenks. ("I say to dat captain, I am so big man, so good man, me, I am _coq du village, coq de la paroisse_, me. He say strong, 'You coq?' I say coq, he not know nut'n, nor me not more. I fool, I crazy, me--he big fool, strong crazy, go to h.e.l.l.")

Somewhere, before then, Daniel Shawn might have known the man. At any rate French Jack, as well as Ball and the carpenter Ledyard, had been a part of Shawn's conspiracy. When Shawn took _Artemis_ by deceit in broad daylight, it was French Jack who loomed up behind Peter Jenks with a capstan bar and struck him down.

Ben could still see that--Jenks reeling, clutching at the mizzenmast, missing it and going down--as almost a year ago he had seen it in reality across a gap of s.h.i.+ning water, the sunlight of that May sparing Ben nothing of it as he writhed at the rope that held him and gnawed the gag in his mouth. Everything had been well planned that day, in the clear Atlantic, the island of Nantucket just over the rim of the world.

If Ben had been able to struggle free, a scream of warning would likely have done no good: Jenks was down. The strangely methodical skirmish came to an end with the prim grace of a minuet--but that was no dance, that s.h.i.+fting and interweaving of pigmy man-figures over there in the sunlight. That was plain murder, like the death of Dyckman.... Then Manuel lashed the tiller of the sloop and came to Ben, removing gag and rope, patting his hands, troubled in his soft way by Ben's unhidden loathing, but grinning with a dazzle of white teeth and explaining: "Iss good, got s.h.i.+p now. All be ver' rich, much gold, much women. You like women, boy, so pretty? You like gold?..."

Very shrewdly planned, even to the tarpaulin spread over Ben and covering him up to the eyes.

The sloop from Harkness' wharf had stolen a long time without lights through the depth of a May night until fog closed in around her. Then she crept on most gently, slowly, under mainsail and jib, head on to a leisured march of smooth rollers, her captain aware that _Artemis_ would be fogbound too. Ben had known nothing of that. Ben was asleep.

He woke late that morning, his head throbbing wildly, in the stench of a dark hole in a universe which was swaying impossibly back and forth, and from side to side too, with a grand inexorable calm. In this pocket of dimness he found he was alone with a human-like thing that could bob its misshapen head, and grin, but not speak. He dimly remembered this creature from some faraway evening: it was harmless. Steps led out of the cavity to a grayness of daylight. The cavity--oh, it was harmless too, it was the tiny cabin of a sloop, one that Mr. Shawn had been hired to sail to the Banks for somebody named Harkness, all fair enough. But why, Ben wanted to know, why was she at sea now, and why was his head one great blind snarl of pain? Toward the daylight he reeled, asking questions. Up in wet salt air, he learned that everything was gray--under him a gray sliver of deck, above him muttering and sobbing canvas gray with damp, before him a shaft of gray wood--that was a solid mast, harmless, and he grabbed it frantically to save himself as gravity dropped away from his feet, and he could see all around him one heaving gray of ocean to the end of the world. Behind him a cackling voice inquired: "Mr. Shawn, sir, Mr. Shawn--be that there thing a sailor?"

"Why, steady as she goes, Joey Mills! I shall make it one, Mother of G.o.d, and you kissing his boots one day."

Ben forced himself around. In the act he lost the mast somehow, the sloop gravely but mirthfully tossing his feet elsewhere. He fetched up against the larboard rail and grasped it with all his power, retching.

The cackler was another ma.s.s of gray, small, hunched at the tiller, an old man and shriveled, who observed Ben's situation with an uncommunicating, not unfriendly eye, and cackled again and spat astern.

Shawn--the same Shawn and somehow not the same--was coming forward, the green coat flapping about him as he swayed with perfect casual ease to the sloop's leaning and rise and fall. "Your head'll be paining you, Beneen, I know it and sorry I am for it, but without a bit of persuasion you'd never have consented to come with old Shawn at all, I could see that, the way I was forced to it entirely. O the poor landside dreams that do hold a man, the pull of a hearthstone and the clutch of women!

You're free, Beneen--old Shawn hath set you free. Never you mind all that now. Back below, man dear, and tell Dummy I said to give you a jolt of rum. You'll not be standing watch the day. Tomorrow you shall, beginning with the forenoon watch, that'll be eight o'clock of the morning the way you measured time in the old days, man dear, the old days you was a landsman, but now you go with Shawn, now you go with old Shawn that knows the brave heart of you, and that better than you'll be knowing it yourself, now that's no lie."

The Irishman was virtually singing. It penetrated the whirling agony of Ben's head--a little. He mumbled uncomprehendingly, not understanding with his brain, but understanding the event in his marrow maybe as clearly as he had ever done in the year since then. Shawn watched him, smiling, firm on the crazy deck like a weighted doll: let the world swing upside down, that'll stay upright, no fear. "It was the drinks.

You drugged me," said Ben, not believing it, praying for denial.

"Ben, go below!" Shawn said that firmly but softly, not unkindly, and moved away forward in rolling ease, the green back vanis.h.i.+ng beyond the mainsail, the dark riddle of him immediately replaced by the black riddle of someone else. This also Ben would not believe, this gaunt thing striding aft, its black eye-patch and its frozen smile. With no effort, the one-eyed man of the Lion Tavern detached Ben's hands from the rail. "Captain said go below," said Judah Marsh, and struck him in the face.