The Island

by Peter Benchley

  “Hush!” Nau said. He bent down and scooped Justin up and swung him onto his shoulders.

  “He is not yet a man,” said Hizzoner.

  “Soon.” Nau spoke to the woman. “Goody Sansdents, how would you it were done?”

  Maynard screamed, “I don’t want to die!” He looked up and saw his son teetering on the shoulders of the tall man. Justin gazed down at him and wept silently.

  The woman slurred, “Woold him!”

  “Nay!” Nau laughed. “I’ll not woold a noble man.”

  “I’ll woold him myself, then. Give me the strap. And for a favor, I’ll eat the eyes when they pop free.”

  “I say I’ll not have him woolded. He cannot face death without his eyes. He must see his destiny. Build a fire on his belly, and see what kind of man he be.”

  The woman argued. “He tore the eye from Roche.”

  “Aye, but Roche was not of good blood. A stew of Portugee and zambo.”

  “If he be so noble, let me keep him. I need my service.”

  “There are catamites for the likes of you. Service is yours for the taking.”

  “Catamites!” The woman spat in the sand “This one can give me what Roche could not: a noble son.”

  Nau’s grin faded. “He is to die.” He looked to Hizzoner for corroboration.

  Hizzoner nodded. “That is the way.”

  The woman snatched a dagger from Nau’s belt, dodged around behind the big man, and stood beside Maynard, the knife poised over his groin. “The covenant says the disposition is mine. Thus I dispose.” The woman’s hand flew downward.

  Maynard closed his eyes, awaiting a pain he could not imagine.

  With a single stroke, the woman slit Maynard’s bathing suit from waistband to crotch. She grabbed his genitals. “This I will have!” She glared defiantly at Nau, then at Hizzoner. “I will breed a line for the future to sing about. It is my right.”

  The clearing was silent.

  Maynard’s pulse beat against his eardrums. The pains came and went in waves. He saw the woman’s hand buried in his crotch, but he felt nothing from her tight grip: The burning in his shoulders and hips overwhelmed all other feeling.

  Hizzoner spoke first. “The covenant rules. It is her right.”

  “But the way . . .” Nau began.

  “The way is custom, the covenant is law. The covenant says she can dispose.”

  “But dispose does . . .”

  “. . . does not mean kill, not by the strictest letter.”

  Nau was not pleased. With one hand, he removed Justin from his shoulders and dropped him to the sand. He said to the woman, “He may live until the day you are adjudged to be with child. He is your chattel. If he once transgresses, the curse will be on you. With these hands”—he held his fists before the woman’s face—“I will rip your womb from your body and cast it into the sea.”

  Made bold by rum and by her triumph, the woman shook Maynard’s genitals. “And if this performs ill service, I will cast it into the sea.” She laughed, and a ripple of relieved laughter spread through the clearing.

  “You do not die well,” Nau said to Maynard. “What did you do in life?”

  “I write.”

  “A scrivener? Perhaps you’ll do double service, then. There has been no scribe since Esquemeling.”

  “Esquemeling? You know about Esquemeling?”

  Hizzoner interrupted, waving an admonitory finger in Maynard’s face. “Ye must know that woman has dominion over you. Do right to the widow. Esdras 2:20.”

  “Cut him down,” Nau said, and turned away.

  Justin did not follow. He stayed by his father as two men cut Maynard’s bonds and lowered him to the sand.

  From the edge of the clearing, Nau commanded, “Come, lad! He’s your father no longer. He lives only as catamite to the hag.”

  Barely conscious, Maynard saw Justin hesitate, sensed his dilemma. “Go,” he whispered. “Do anything. Roll with it. Stay alive.” Maynard resisted the fog until he saw Justin obey. Then he fainted.

  He did not know how long he slept, for his sleep was restless and bothered by dreams of mayhem terrifying in their realism. At times he was hot, and he felt his face bathed by liquid and his nostrils stung with the smell of vinegar; at times cold, and he felt the scratchy texture of coarse cloth against his raw skin.

  He awoke during a night, naked on his back on a mat of woven grass. He was in a grass-and-mud hut, an eight-by-eight-foot hemisphere. When he tried to move, he felt restraints, and he saw that his arms and legs were covered with vegetable poultices. The pain had subsided into a dull ache.

  The woman sat beside him, cross-legged on the dirt floor, stirring something in a bowl. She had changed from the black coat into a gray poncho, had washed the charcoal from her face, and had cut off her waxed hair. What remained was a soft inch or two of brownish-blond turf. Maynard could not tell how old she was. Her angular face was creased and cracked from salt air and sun. Her fingers moved stiffly, arthritically, and her knuckles were swollen. But in a humid climate, arthritis often came to the very young. Her breasts—what little he could see of their outline beneath the poncho—were high and firm, and the flesh on her legs was lean. Allowing for the probability that weather and primitive living had aged her beyond her years, he guessed she could be thirty or thirty-five years old.

  The light in the hut came from a rubber-covered flashlight that was propped between two bricks on the floor.

  He pointed at the flashlight and said, “Where’d that come from?”

  “A prize. Roche took it. A rich one it was. Two whole boxes of 6-12. Peaches. Nuts, too. And rum! He was hot for a week. They all were.”

  “What happens when the batteries die?”

  “They die. Like all things. Others come along.” She passed food to him. “Eat”

  It was a slab of fish, raw, salted, and dried, but still slimy.

  “You don’t cook food?”

  “You’re mad. You think I want to lose my tongue?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Fires are dangerous. A green-wood fire during the day merits a flogging. For a fire at night, they cut your tongue.”

  “Why are fires dangerous?”

  “You are ignorant as well as craven. They would see us.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “They,” she said. “The others.”

  Maynard raised the piece of fish to his mouth. He held his breath and tried to chew it. It was rubbery and caked with grit. He couldn’t swallow. He picked the fish from his mouth and dropped it in the dirt. “I’m not very hungry.”

  “I thought as much,” she said. “I’ll fix that by and by.”

  Maynard lay back and moved his limbs. The pain was ebbing. “What’s in these?” He patted one of the poultices.

  “Spirea.” She poured liquid from a clay jug into the bowl in her lap and continued to stir.

  Spirea, Maynard thought. Where had he read about spirea? Morison, Ernie Bradford, Homer? None of them, but Homer triggered the mnemonic. Spirea was a shrub whose bark was used by the ancient Greeks as an analgesic. Nowadays its extract was known as salicylic acid. Aspirin. Where had she learned about spirea?

  With careful casualness, he asked. “Is this a . . . religious retreat here?”

  “What?”

  “Are you folks . . . you know . . . members of a cult of some kind?”

  “What?”

  Maynard abandoned indirection. “What the hell is this place?”

  “You’re still sotted from the pain.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “This place is our home,” she said, as to a small child. “These people are my people.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Always.”

  He looked into her eyes, searching for a hint of a lie or a joke or a tease.

  She smiled at him, hiding nothing.

  “Were you born here?”

  She hesitated, apparently unsure.
“I have always been here.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I have been a woman a hundred times,” she said. “It was celebrated.”

  “What do you . . . ?” Maynard stopped. Perhaps she was referring to menstrual cycles. A hundred periods, a hundred months—a little more than eight years. She had her first period at, say, twelve. She was, maybe, twenty.

  “You have no children.”

  “I had two, but they were killed.”

  “Why?”

  “They were poorly. It was seen.” She stopped stirring, and set the bowl on the ground. “Roche provided, but he was always poxed.” She spat. “Pig.” She reached for something behind her, in the darkness. It was a pewter canister, about a foot long, with a wooden plunger on one end. “You are my last chance.”

  “For a child?”

  “A good child.”

  “If you don’t . . . ?”

  She fit a nozzle onto the open end of the canister and screwed it tight. “I cease being a woman. I join the sisterhood.”

  “Of what? Nuns?”

  “Nuns!” she laughed. “Prostitutes.”

  “They force you to become a prostitute?”

  “There is no forcing. It is the way.” She dipped the nozzle into the bowl and pulled back the plunger, drawing the thick liquid up into the canister. “Roll over. On your knees.”

  Maynard didn’t move.

  “Roll over!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “You are not well. You will not eat. You have poisons.” She brandished the canister. “This will clean you out.”

  Maynard slid backward, against the wall of the hut. “You want to put that . . . Oh no, thanks anyway.”

  “You need a physic.”

  “You’re not sticking that thing . . .” In the shadowy darkness, he did not see her move until she was on him. Her bony knee pressed into his sternum. She held a short-bladed knife under his chin and forced his head back.

  “You are alive because I suffer it,” she said. “The others would have you dead. You do well to remember. I need you, but I can take you to the edge of death, and bring you back, and take you to the edge again. I can teach you pain.” She moved off him. “Roll over.”

  Slowly, he rolled onto his stomach and brought his knees up under him. “What’s in that thing?” he asked weakly.

  “Fish oil and medicines.” She raised his hips and spread his cheeks. “The elders say it cures everything—shufflefoot, strabismus, even pox.” She chuckled sagely. “But their ways are old-fashioned. A clyster gives a good cleansing and relieves the poisons. Nothing more.”

  Maynard closed his eyes and squeezed his temples. The sharp, cold nozzle slid up his rectum. It jabbed his prostate, and he felt a burning surge in his penis. As the nozzle probed deeper, the gratitude he had felt to the woman, the relief at being alive, began to wane.

  She pushed the plunger. Maynard’s insides flooded.

  “There,” she said when the pump was empty. She slapped his butt, and he collapsed onto the mat.

  He lay, gasping, with his face in the dirt. A fleeting vision of Dena Gaines crossed his mind. Did she do this? For fun?

  His bowels cramped, rejecting the fish oil. He struggled to his knees. “Where . . . ?”

  The woman had anticipated his need. She stood at the entrance to the hut, holding back the skin that covered the doorway. “Follow me.”

  Clutching his stomach, struggling to keep his sphincter closed, Maynard staggered out into the night. He followed the woman through the underbrush until she stopped and pointed to an open trench, two feet wide, twenty or thirty feet long. A symphony of bug sounds was broadcast from the trench.

  Maynard did not know how to use the trench, but he had no time to ask questions. He straddled it and squatted, and his intestines erupted.

  The woman stood beside him, hands on hips, admiring.

  Dignity, Maynard thought as through a mist of nausea, he regarded the woman. Die with dignity but live like a pig. His bowels heaved in spasms, and he groaned. A burst of air exploded from his guts.

  “Now you’re fit,” the woman said.

  “I think I’m gonna die.”

  “Not yet. You’ve yet to serve your purpose. Come.” She took his hand and pulled him away from the trench.

  “You’re kidding,” he said. Oil oozed down his legs.

  She led him through a maze of narrow, overgrown paths. The bugs followed. Mosquitoes swarmed on his back; flies buzzed around his legs and settled at the corners of his mouth, where they drank from his drool. He was too weak to brush them away. He heard voices in the distance—subdued, conversational—but saw no one.

  They emerged from the underbrush onto a beach. She led him into the water and bathed him, rubbing wet sand over his soiled legs, rinsing him in salt foam.

  She took him back to the hut and ordered him to lie on the mat. She pulled the animal skin across the doorway, trapping myraid gnats inside the hut. “No wind tonight,” she said. “The wind is all that keeps this land from bedlam.” She scooped a handful of something from a pot and knelt beside Maynard.

  Alarmed, Maynard asked, “What’s that stuff?”

  “Hog grease.”

  “Where are you gonna put it?”

  “Everywhere.” She laughed. “It’s all I have to keep the bugs at bay. Roche could have taken a ration of 6-12 from that last prize. He had a good choice. But he chose rum.”

  She removed her poncho and, naked, smeared the grease all over her body. Her skin glistened in the flashlight beam.

  To Maynard, the pork fat smelled like childhood Sunday mornings, when his father would cook bacon and sausage and fry eggs in the residue.

  “Where is my son?”

  “With the other boys.”

  “Are there many?”

  “Now, only two. And the girl, Mary. The number changes.” She sat back and swabbed grease on the insides of her thighs.

  “What will they do with him?”

  “Do? Nothing. They will teach him to do for himself.”

  “Are there others like me?”

  She shook her head. “You are the only one, the only one ever, alive.”

  “Why?”

  “The covenant says, a grown man, a grown person, is corrupt. Only the young are pure.”

  “What covenant are you talking about?”

  “You will learn . . . if you live to.” She filled her hand from the pot and began gently to rub grease onto Maynard’s face. She greased his neck and his chest and his legs and his feet and between his toes. She missed nothing. Her fingers were soothing, and as she kneaded his thighs, he drifted toward sleep. He snored.

  She snapped the back of her hand across his mouth. Her knuckles opened cracks in his parched lips. She glanced at his startled eyes, then scooped more grease from the pot and slathered it on his genitals. “You’ll not sleep yet.”

  “But . . . I couldn’t!”

  “Yes, you can. I’ll show you.”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “Ripe? No. But we must prepare for the day.”

  C H A P T E R

  1 1

  “It looks like mush,” he said, gazing into the earthenware bowl.

  “It is mush. Cassava-root mush and mushed bananas. Good for you.”

  “I’m not very . . .” He stopped, for he saw that she had put down her sewing and was reaching for the clyster pump. He ate. She smiled and resumed sewing.

  The cassava was white and pasty and tasteless; the bananas were overripe, almost pure sugar. What taste there was in the mush came from ground nutmeg.

  If the mush was palatable, her sewing was nauseating. Using a sturdy sailmaker’s needle, she was stitching together a garment from shreds of freshly killed, uncured animal skins that exuded a fetid stench.

  “What are you making?”

  “Trousers. For you. I cannot have you frying your bum.”

  “You don’t cure the skins?”

  “Why? The sun and
the water cure them. When they cure on the wearer, they suit him better.” She pinched two edges of flesh together, and juice ran down her fingers.

  The odor made Maynard’s lip curl. “They smell like death.”

  “Aye.” She looked up. “What else?”

  The skin covering the doorway was pulled back, and Nau stooped and entered the hut. He carried a wooden chest, with brass handles on either end. A length of half-inch chain lay atop the chest. He sat the chest on the ground and shoveled the chain toward the woman.

  She looked at the chain and at Nau. It seemed to Maynard that she wanted to argue, but instead she said, “As you wish.”

  “I’ll not put in peril threescore people,” Nau said sharply, “just so you may indulge your . . . pet.” He turned to Maynard and slapped the chest. “Here, scribe. Make order of this. Our assigns will thank you.”

  “Where’s my son?”

  “You have no son. You have nothing. Soon you will be nothing, not in this world.” Nau’s eyes were cold, giving nothing, encouraging Maynard to look away.

  He refused. “I want to see him.”

  “Sometime, perhaps, if he chooses. I will ask him.” He backed to the doorway and said to the woman, “Get to work, Goody. When you are a whore, you may live like a whore. As long as you are a woman, you will work like a woman.” He left.

  Maynard saw the woman’s hands shake as she took a final stitch in the hides. Angrily, she threw them into the dirt.

  He wanted to say something consoling, but he did not know what. He tried: “ ‘Goody’ is a nice name.”

  “ ‘Goody’ is no name,” she said. “It is an attachment, from the old days: ‘Good wife.’ My name is Beth.” She lifted an end of the chain. “Come here.”

  She wrapped the chain twice around his neck, stood and fed the free end over the main brace in the roof of the hut, then joined the two ends with a shiny new combination padlock. She snapped the shackle and spun the three little combination wheels.

  “Do you really think . . . ?” Maynard began.

  “He is concerned. Now he need not be concerned. If you try to flee, you must take the whole house with you.”

  “Do you ever think about fleeing?”

  “From what?” she said. “To what?”

  “This isn’t much of a life for you.”