Captain Adam (40 page)

He regarded the belt buckle. "You'd cut your wrists inside two days, we left you a knife," they had told him. But they hadn't noticed this buckle. The brass tongue, plunged into the neck at the proper place, could no doubt bring about a quick and comparatively painless death, albeit a messy one. But Adam did not consider that, either. He could see no profit in quitting before your time was up. And though he knew what some men said, Adam himself had always esteemed suicide a sin. God gave you your life and only God should take it away.

It was no use trying to sleep. He'd scratch. He'd twist.

If there's dew at sunup, he thought, d'ye suppose I could go around and lick it from the stones? D'ye suppose I could get some moisture that way?

"I doubt it," he answered himself aloud. "I'm not likely to be still alive bv that time anyway."

His hunger, too, was a terrible thing. Once again he sloshed through the shallows, turning over stones, sticking his fingers everywhere, in search of any sort of edible matter, but found nothing. On dragging feet he returned to the middle of the island, and there he tried to eat some of the seaweed, first dry, then moistened a bit. He couldn't do it, couldn't even swallow the stuff, which caught angrily in his throat, while his mouth and nose were crammed with the sour smell of it, which clogged these like a noxious gas. He must have all but stifled himself to death, suffocated himself, in his efforts to swallow that seaweed; and at last he fell to hands and knees, shaking his head, retching—retching—while his body was racked with sobs.

"A fine way to go and meet your Creator," he told himself after a

while, and he forced himself to get up and make one more trip around the island.

He was glad when the sun went down. He reckoned that this would be the last time he'd watch that happen, but he was glad all the same, for the sun had been merciless.

He went back to the center of the island, to that pathetic little well that contained the threads from his shirt, the least-soft stones, the belt buckle. He lay down.

It must be that he slept, after all; for when he was stung in the palm of an outflung hand he sat up suddenly, blinlcing, bewildered. It burned. But what could sting him here? What animals, what insects could there be?

He must seek them out. There might be a smitch of wetness in each. He must somehow catch them.

Then he was stung again in the same hand, and immediately afterward on his forehead, and on his chin. The truth came: It was rainins)-

mHe sprang to his feet, flinging off his clothes. All around him beautiful luscious large wet drops of water were biffing the sand and rubble—and were instantly lost. He spread his clothes out so that no part of one article would overlap the other, and then threw himself on the ground, where he lay now on his back, now on his belly, but always, in moving, rolling to a fresh spot, so that he could squeeze the under side of his body as close as possible to whatever moisture the earth might have soaked up, while the upper side was being doused from above. He laughed and wept at the same time.

It was no more than a shower but it was a heavy one. Twice Adam wrung his clothes out above his gaping mouth; yet when the rain ceased they were blessedly soaked once more.

He rose. He felt wonderful, and was even singing.

He had been a fool for fussing with the possibilities of fire while ignoring the chance of rain. What he should have done was collect every shell and even every flat stone with any sort of concave surface, and have these ready, tilted toward Heaven, waiting. He would do this now. There still was precious water in his clothes, water that should be stored away before the sun rose.

The shower had scrubbed the sky but there was no moon, only star-

shine. Nevertheless Adam Long searched every square inch of that island, moving on hands and knees. He gathered more than thirty shells, a few of them little bigger than thimbles. He placed them in a series of circles around his "fireplace" in the middle of the island, where the boldest encroaching wave couldn't reach them.

By this time the sun was up, and he knew that his treasure would not keep unless it was somehow shaded. He squeezed the clothes out for the third time, catching the water, treating each pear-shaped prize with a solicitude virtually sacerdotal.

Afterward he put the damp clothes on, except his undershirt, and they felt good against his no-longer-itchy skin: they even stirred him to shiver a bit, at first.

He fetched a great deal of seaweed, which he laid out to dry. He uprooted more grass. Weaving now one of these materials and now the other, and sometimes the two together, he experimented with thatch. His undershirt was spread over the thickest of the muddle of shells-with-water, but it was by no means large enough, and anyway he sought a substitute, an alternate, for he told himself that no good mariner would set forth without at least one spare suit of sails.

His fingers soon were slippery with sweat, his back ached, and he was dizzy, swaying where he sat, sometimes missing a stroke entirely: he seemed to have lost all sense of distance. His stomach hurt, too, though surely there was nothing left in it either to bring up or to pass off.

After a while his hands began to shake, and he couldn't even see what he was working on. He put the flimsy thing down, and opened and shut his hands very hard several times. It did no good. Mumbling like a pig, sometimes sobbing a mite, he covered the filled shells. He remembered doing that. Afterward he must have collapsed: he must have toppled over like a drunkard, to lie still.

When he woke it was dark, and he was in the same place, probably in the same position, excruciatingly stiff, and even more hungry and thirsty than before.

He saw at once that his thatch mat had been blown away, exposing the shells, some of which had been tipped, while into others sand had drifted, sopping up the water. However, at least a dozen remained, and he drank the contents of two of these very slowly, carefully.

He rose, and began to go around the island again, seeking more grass and more seaweed.

". . . the night cometh, when no man can work more." What was that: John? Luke? It was one of the Gospels anyway. With Adam Long it was the other way 'round: when the day came, when the sun rose again, ferocious and triumphant, Adam, stunned by its heat, moved sluggishly when he moved at all. Only in the night could he work. Even

then he doddered, unsure of himself, barely crawling from place to place, so that he must have looked like an old, old man, if there had been anybody to see him.

This was the time of dreams, whether day or night. There were hours on end when he was not sure whether he slept or was awake, indeed when he wasn't even sure he was not dead—and didn't care. Never morbid, yet sometimes he had thought about death, as every man should. He had pondered chiefly the physical aspects of it, wondering what the sensation would be. When you died would you instantly have a different feeling, no limbs, no skin, but be a soaring soul that could not collide wdth anything, couldn't bump? Would you shoot upward, making for Heaven with a speed that would have killed a living person? As you neared the Judgment Seat—horizontally? rising?—would there be a great roaring in your ears and would your face be flayed by a terrible light? Maybe it wouldn't be anything like that at all? Maybe you'd simply, quietly, without any movement, realize that you were there? Adam did not know. All he knew was that if death was anything like what he was now, it was a most uncomfortable state to be in; and in fact he wished fervently that if he was alive he'd die, whereas if he was dead it would change. In all solemnity he would rather take his changes in the everlasting Place of Punishment than go on this way.

Again and again he crept to the sea and submerged himself, permitting the brine to dry on his body afterward. It never gave him any relief, but still he did it.

A couple of times, when he could not contain himself, he tried to swallow sea water. Each time he brought it up, violently, and retched for a long while afterward, which weakened him even further.

He worked as much as he could, mostly at night. He made the center of the island his headquarters, and with his bare hands scooped out a sort of crater there, the walls some three feet high. This would keep his fire—if he ever got a fire—from being wuffed out in the first breeze. It gave him a little later shade in the morning, a little earlier shade in the afternoon. He also continued his efforts to weave some sort of blanket or hat or cover, but these were flimsy objects at best and not to be relied upon.

It dismayed him to learn that he could seldom read from the Book. He had counted upon the Book to be a substantial support in his last hours; and a feeling of warm delight, almost of bliss, had flooded him when the pirates conceded him this possession. But now he found that at night, even when the moon was out, he could not read without a great watering of the eyes, something that had never happened to him before, and which blurred his vision, smearing the words; whereas in the daytime the glare of the sun was so fierce that it caused his head to feel as though 250

something was bounding and thumping around inside of it, and when he looked at the Book it seemed far, far away, held by hands that could not possibly be his, as though he was looking at it and at the hands through the wrong end of a spyglass. He had this same eerie feeling when he tried to weave grass and strands of seaweed in the daytime: he could see his hands 'way down there, and watch the fingers move clumsily, but they didn't seem to bear any relation to Adam Long himself. At another time this would have given him the creeps, this unnatural sensation. Now it only saddened him. He shook his head. He did read from the Book anyway, but it wasn't really reading, rather holding the thing there and looking down toward it with his eyes half closed, while he murmured and mumbled verse after verse that he knew by heart.

The dreams were not horrible. They didn't soothe; and indeed many seemed downright silly; but at least they didn't scare him. They were about Newport.

Before there was a tavern in that town some of the men had used to sit around out at Gibson's mill, and talk about things—talk gravely and slowly, their voices increased in volume in order to be heard over the sound of the turning stones, but not high-pitched—while, whenever he found a chance, the Duchess' brat, unnoticed in a corner, listened. Adam could hear the swish of water, the rumble-bumble of the stones, the grain's slow crunch, and through it all the voices of the serious men of Newport, seriously stating their views: he could hear these more clearly than he heard the slap of waves on the shore—even when he opened his eyes to peer once more at a wobbly horizon, he could hear the sounds and he could smell the dry clean smells and feel the coolness of Gibson's mill.

There was a place where some of the men had built a plank bridge over Pittasquawk Creek, and sometimes when he was on an errand out that way, carrying or fetching something for Mr. Sedgewick, the Long boy had used to nip under this bridge for a little while. There wasn't much room, and he'd sit with his knees scrounched up underneath his chin, not doing anything, not fishing, or even thinking, just sitting there. No matter how warm the day, it had always been cool under the Pittasquawk bridge. Sunlight slipping between the planks used to lie in strips across the satin surface of the water, which otherwhere was dark—though not so dark that you couldn't see into its depths. Adam used to stare at the smooth small shiny stones down there, and at a frog which, submerged, would stare soberly back at him. The frog had such sticky-out eyes that they looked as if they might break off and go rolling away. It never moved, unless an oxcart went over the bridge, setting up a great banging of the planks and causing dust to sift down through the slits and onto the water. This always frightened the frog, which disappeared. It used to

frighten the Long boy, too, but he'd stay where he was all the same; and after a while the echoes would die, the dust would be carried languidly away, the strips of sunlight on the surface of the water would straighten themselves, and the frog, reassured, would come back and would sit down again and would stare long and seriously at Adam Long, who'd stare back. It was better than fishing, any day.

This was the sort of dream he'd dream, if dreaming it was.

There was always coolness in it, often snow. For instance, when he'd seem to see again the men filing into the meeting house for town meeting, it was always in wintertime and there was snow on the ground. He could hear them scrape it from their boots over the wooden scrapers or kick it off against the end of the steps. He'd remember, too, how he used to scratch his initials and pictures into the rime of a windowpane—not so much the appearance of these scratchings as the sound his nail made and the feel of the writing clear up his forearm. He'd used to try to tramp out his initials, "A.L.," on the grass of a frosty morning, too. That never worked well, but it did make a delightful clinky crinkly sound under his feet. And what in this world gives more glee and satisfaction than the writing of your initials into snow with your own steaming urine at night? He didn't have any "i" to dot, as some of the kids did. Or else Adam would remember, and vividly, how on the way home from school afternoons when there was snow they would dare one another to "make an angel" by falling backward into a drift with arms outspread.

Sometimes he was asleep while things hke this sauntered smokelike through his mind, and sometimes he might have been awake. When you were dying anyway it didn't make much difference.

^^Cy It could have been on the third night, more likely it was the

\J ^ fourth, that he heard the sound.

He was lying on his back, arms folded over his breast, while he studied the starry sweep of Heaven. Now and then he would close his eyes, then open them again, groggily amazed that he was still alive. He hoped that it wouldn't rain, since rain might keep him breathing for hours longer, conceivably even for another day; and he didn't want that. He was ready to die now. He truly hoped that it would be tonight, and believed it would. He didn't want to see the sun rise again. He hated the sun.