The Far Reaches

by Homer Hickam

  Then Josh swung his blow while Burr cheerfully pulled the trigger on his forty-five.

  PART II

  The Island of

  Dead Men

  Welcome, happy morning!

  Age to age shall say:

  Hell today is vanquished,

  Heaven is won today!

  Lo! the dead is living,

  God for evermore!

  Him their true Creator,

  All his works adore!

  —VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS, A HYMN

  12

  Bosun Ready O’Neal, wilting beneath a flat, scalding sun, sat on a little hill of sand and watched men moving as if in a dream across the smoky, littered battleground. Their haunted eyes seemed to be seeing past one another, perhaps even into another world. The island of Betio had turned into a graveyard, and though the battle was essentially over, the dying was not.

  Ready flinched at the familiar sharp crack of a Japanese rifle, but no bullet whipped past his head, and no marine fell or even paid attention. The rikusentai were committing suicide in holes and ditches all over the island. Ready had come across a Japanese soldier lying on his back in a ditch that ran through a grove of shattered palms. The Japanese had removed his boots, placed the muzzle of his rifle beneath his chin, and put one of his big toes on the trigger. For a moment, Ready and the young man had looked at one another, and somehow Ready knew he was in the company of a fellow fisherman. In that moment, an entire scenario developed in Ready’s mind: The youth would remove his toe from the trigger and put his rifle down and rise up out of the ditch. Then he and Ready would commandeer a boat and go out past the reef, and there, in the rich, deep water, they would fish and talk about boats and bait and women and all the really important things of this world. But the man, even while he looked into Ready’s eyes in a friendly and almost beseeching manner, jammed his toe against the trigger and the rifle bucked and the top of the man’s head exploded, splattering Ready with blood and brains and skull fragments. After wiping himself off as best he could, Ready walked on through the grove of splintered trees before coming across another remarkable sight. A young woman, dressed all in white, was kneeling, and around her were marines who were also kneeling, their heads down in evident prayer. “Who is she?” he asked a marine who looked like he might know something.

  The marine had his arms loaded with Japanese helmets. “She’s a nun. What did you think she was? I heard somebody say the Japs had her prisoner. You want a Jap helmet? Five bucks.”

  Ready didn’t want a helmet. He was too busy staring at the nun. When she lifted her head from her prayers, he noticed that she had a very sweet face, and he wondered why a woman with such a sweet face would be on this terrible island of dead men. He wanted to watch her for a little longer and maybe ask her that question and many others, but he needed to find his captain. He had last seen Josh Thurlow at the big sand fort in the swirl of battle, but afterward he had disappeared. Ready feared for him, afraid that he might be lying in a hole somewhere, dying or dead.

  “Here, take one of these things anyway,” the marine said, handing Ready a helmet. “You can owe me.”

  Ready took the helmet and then wandered on toward the beach, passing marines loaded with Japanese flags, swords, rifles, pistols, helmets, knives, and even boots. Then, to his joy, he chanced upon his captain. His joy was tempered, however, because Josh Thurlow was naked from head to toe and looked a bit deranged. He was also lifting a shovel as if to strike his old nemesis Colonel Burr, who, somewhat naturally, had drawn his pistol in self-defense. Instinctively, Ready heaved the Japanese helmet and struck Burr in the head. This had the result of knocking Burr to his knees and also deflecting the marine officer’s aim just a tick, a tick that saved Josh Thurlow’s life as the bullet slapped into the sand behind him. Seeing Ready, Josh checked the swing of his shovel. “A man died for me,” he announced, “and he was the only innocent man on this island.”

  “Who would that be, Skipper?” Ready asked as he took the shovel from Josh’s hands.

  “An island man covered with tattoos,” Josh answered distantly, then blinked, as if looking at something very far away. “Then a creature came, a terrible creature who spoke of the love of God, who, by the way, is a rank bastard or else the last three days on this atoll would never have occurred. The creature was dressed all in white and had a pretty face and talked Irish. Devils do that, you know, look like angels and talk Irish. It’s supposed to throw you off.”

  Ready thought about all that for a moment, then perceived who Josh was talking about. “Oh, sir, you just talked to a nun, that’s all. She’s up in a grove of palm trees with some fellows, all praying to beat the band.”

  Streams of sweat carved through the dirt and grime and blood caked on Josh’s body. His legs were trembling and it didn’t look like he would stay upright for much longer. “I’m telling you she’s Old Scratch!” he insisted. “It would be best if somebody killed the thing.”

  Ready smiled what he hoped was a comforting smile. “Aw, she ain’t no devil, sir. Somebody said she was a prisoner of the Japanese.”

  “That’s what I mean, Ready,” Josh said eagerly. “She’s a devil for sartain!”

  While Ready puzzled over his captain’s pronouncements, he noticed that even though Colonel Burr had been knocked to his knees, he still held his pistol. He also had rediscovered his voice. “You’re going to the brig, Thurlow!” he growled, and then his terribly mean and coal-black eyes sought out Ready. “And you’re going with him, Bosun. You assaulted me!”

  Ready ignored the colonel and took Josh by the arm. “Let’s have a corpsman look at you, Captain.”

  “You’re a good man, Ready,” Josh said. “As good as I am evil.”

  “You’ve just got the fever, sir,” Ready answered. “You ain’t much evil at all.”

  Burr struggled to his feet. “Somebody arrest those men!” he demanded.

  “There, there, Colonel,” one of the two majors said consolingly. “There, there.”

  Burr spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the sand, then wiped his mouth while giving the major the evil eye. “You ‘there, there’ me one more time, Major Smith, and I’m going to kick your fucking ‘there, there’ butt across this miserable ‘there, there’ atoll!”

  While Burr was preoccupied with instilling discipline into his staff, Ready led Josh, still naked, off the beach and across the battlefield until they reached a shell crater near the big sand bunker where medical corpsmen were at work on a dozen wounded marines. Without comment, the corpsmen took Josh in, disinfected and bandaged his wounds, forced aspirin down him for the fever, and then, because they had done all they could do, laid him on his back on the hot sand. Stretcher-bearers came and took the wounded marines away, and then the corpsmen left, too, though they promised Ready that other stretcher-bearers would be along to take care of his captain. Ready sat down, took off his shirt to fan Josh, and waited.

  While he fanned and waited, Ready observed the situation around him, which was growing ever more chaotic. There were no officers in sight, and most of the marines seemed to be doing whatever came into their heads. Many of them were looting the Japanese dead; others were simply standing around, looking vacantly at nothing. A few were drinking from jerry cans, which had finally arrived with supposedly oil-free water. It didn’t appear to be an improvement, however, because as soon as they’d drunk their fill, most of the marines fell to their hands and knees and puked it up. Still others squatted over shallow depressions they’d kicked in the sand, trying to get their bowels to move after three days of fear and dehydration. Occasionally, to punctuate the chaos, there was the crack of a Japanese rifle announcing another suicide.

  Thousands of corpses on the tiny atoll were also putting up a powerful stink. Ready pressed a helmet camouflage cover to his mouth and nose, but it did little to filter the awful odor. There was not a breath of a breeze, and Ready thought he might suffocate from the stench. He was grateful when a Seabee bulldozer appear
ed and began shoving sand over a row of Japanese bodies lying in a ditch. Some marines were also digging graves for their dead buddies, the smell forcing them to get the bodies under the sand. Ready thought it was going to be one hell of a job to find out who had been put where. Then he heard an aircraft engine and observed a navy Corsair lazily descending toward the coral airstrip. It flew over another bulldozer busily pushing bodies and battle debris off the runway, then bumped down. A few marines cheered, but most ignored the fighter plane as it coasted along. It stopped at the end of the runway, sat for a moment, then turned around, fired up its engine, and took off again. The Betio airfield, for which so many had died, was open for business.

  Then a marine who’d been watching the Corsair accidentally pulled the pin on a Japanese grenade he had plucked off a body and it detonated, with him going one way, his hand and a good part of his arm the other. His buddies ran out to him, picked him up, and brought him to the crater. Mistaking Ready for a corpsman, one of them said, “Fix him up, Doc,” then left. Since all the real corpsmen had gone elsewhere and there was no one else to do it, Ready grabbed a bandage out of an abandoned medical bag and wrapped it tight around the man’s bloody stump, stabbed a syrette of morphine into his shoulder, pinned the empty needle to his chest, and then watched and waited until he quieted down. Eyes open but apparently uncomprehending, Josh blinked up at the crystal-clear sky and occasionally groaned.

  Ready took a moment to cast up a prayer that the stretcher-bearers would come, and no sooner had he said “Amen” than four men appeared, native men from the looks of them, with brown muscular bodies covered with various tattoos, red lava-lava breechcloths about their waists, and necklaces of cowrie shells and shark’s teeth hanging in deep arcs across their hairless chests. They also bore stretchers. “We take,” one of them said in a deep voice.

  Ready didn’t know what to make of that. He draped his shirt over Josh’s privates and climbed out of the crater. “Take where?”

  “We take,” the man replied. “We say we help. Marine all say OK. We take.”

  Then Ready was roughly gripped on his shoulder and spun around, whereupon he found himself looking at a short gunnery sergeant with a stubby cigar stuck between his teeth. “Corpsman, you are now under my command,” he said. “Get your stuff and come with me.”

  “I ain’t no corpsman, Gunny,” Ready replied, irritated at the presumptuousness of the little man. “I’m a Coast Guard bosun, and I probably out-rank you. That’s Captain Thurlow, my skipper, down in that crater. I’m looking after him. Now get away from me.”

  The gunny was unimpressed by Ready’s explanation. “Stow it, Doc. My God, some of you boys will say or do anything to get out of a little work! Them ain’t Coast Guard utilities you’re wearin’, and they ain’t Coast Guard boots you got on, neither. Now load up your gear and come along like a good little corpsman. I got a detail and you’re part of it whether you like it or not.”

  “I told you I ain’t no corpsman!” Ready snapped, which so impressed the gunny that he slammed the butt of his rifle into Ready’s stomach. Astonished more than hurt, though his breath was knocked clean away, Ready fell to his knees.

  “I told you to get your stuff, Doc. I won’t say it again.”

  As Ready struggled to breathe, a white cloth passed before his eyes. When he looked up, he realized it was the habit of the nun. She had stepped between him and the gunny. “Ye won’t hit him again,” the nun said.

  The gunny was startled by her sudden appearance. “This ain’t none of your business, ma’am,” he said nervously.

  “Nay, ‘tisn’t,” she agreed, “but I could hardly stand by and watch ye whomp yer own man, now, could I?”

  The gunny looked at his boots. “No, ma’am.”

  “I hope you’re properly ashamed, then.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” the gunny said, looking out of the tops of his eyes at her. “I am. I surely am.”

  “Well, then get on with ye!” she demanded.

  The gunny kept his head down. “I’m just going to walk over there beside that pile of dead Japs,” he told her contritely. “You send Doc along to me next couple of minutes, it’ll be good.”

  The nun glanced at the mound of rotting Japanese the gunny had mentioned, took on a wistful expression, then turned to Ready, who had man-aged to climb stiffly to his feet. “Are ye all right now, boyo?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ready answered, smiling crookedly at her pretty face peeking through her cowl, as pretty as any he’d ever seen. He especially ad-mired her eyes, as blue as the Gulf Stream off Killakeet, and he liked the freckles sprinkled across her pert little nose, though he also read in her expression a certain steady resolve. Ready wished at that moment that he was a handsome man, even if the Irish girl was a nun, and surely uninterested in any man, handsome or not. He stepped down in the crater, picked up the corpsman’s bag, inspected its contents, and climbed out.

  Guessing his intentions, the nun was astonished. “Surely you’re not going with that man!”

  Ready shrugged. “I have to. That’s a Marine Corps gunny, ma’am, and they don’t know how to take no for an answer. Anyway, I’ll go until I figure out how to get away In the meantime, would you take care of my skipper? His name’s Josh Thurlow, Captain Josh Thurlow. That’s him, the big lug with nothing but my shirt across his privates. I’m sorry he’s otherwise buck naked, but I guess he got tired of wearing his clothes. He needs to get out to a hospital ship. He’s lost a bit of blood, you see, and he’s real worn out. He’s got fever, too, which he caught on Guadalcanal. Just see to him the best you can, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “I will be pleased to take care of yer captain,” the nun answered. “This is the second time today I have seen him. One of my fella boys even gave up his life for him.”

  “He told me a native man with tattoos died to save him!” Ready exclaimed.

  “His name was Tomoru. He was a very good man, though a bit reckless. I shall miss him, but I know he is in heaven and will never know sorrow again.”

  “That’s a good philosophy in these parts, for sartain,” Ready allowed. “Captain Thurlow is a good man, too, except, well, he’s got a few faults, I suppose … “ Ready realized he was rambling and interrupted himself. “Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it? When the captain comes awake, would you tell him I’ll catch up soon as I can?” He hesitated, then asked, “And will I see you again, I wonder? I hope I will.” When she frowned, Ready quickly added, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t mean to be familiar or nothing.”

  Her frown turned into a smile that warmed Ready’s heart. “Nay, ‘tis fine, Bosun. I was just thinking how to frame my answer, y’see.” Then, after a moment’s thought, she nodded. “I believe we will meet again. In the meantime I will pray for ye, if ye’ll but tell me yer name.”

  “My name’s Ready, ma’am,” he answered eagerly. “Bosun Ready O’Neal of the Coast Guard.”

  A part of his answer clearly delighted her. “O’Neal! Ye don’t mean it! The O’Neals are a fine family, as fine as ever walked an Irish road or plowed an Irish field. I am Sister Mary Kathleen, but once I was naught but Kathleen Shaughnessy, the tenth child of Liam and Maureen Shaughnessy of Ballysaggart in the county Tyrone. We Shaughnessys have always been partial to yer O’Neals.” She looked at him carefully. “Are ye all right, Bosun? Ye look a bit unsteady. Are ye faint?”

  “I am,” he confessed. “It’s been a few days since I got much sleep.”

  “Do ye need to sit down?”

  “I wish I could,” Ready answered and then impulsively stretched his hand out to her. After a moment’s hesitation, she grasped it with both her hands, and he was surprised not only at their strength but at their roughness. A woman with such hands had not spent a life with them clasped in prayer. He released her hands and watched with regret as they disappeared within the shrouds of her deep sleeves. He ached to feel them again.

  He was surprised when she asked, “Will ye help me now, Bosun O�
��Neal?”

  “If I can, ma’am.”

  “I need to see a big man.”

  “A big man, ma’am?”

  “Aye. A man who can order other men around.”

  “You mean like the gunny over there?”

  She shifted her eyes suspiciously toward the little gunny, then shook her head. “Nay, someone much bigger, someone who could gather many men and put them in big boats and sail away with me and me fella boys to an-other place.”

  “What place would that be, ma’am?”

  “To the Far Reaches. There are Japanese there. I want them to surrender, y’see.”

  Ready was allowing her odd pronouncement to sink in—the days and nights of combat had dulled his ability to think clearly—when the gunny started yelling at him, telling him to get his butt in gear. Ready said, “Look, Sister, when he wakes up, maybe Captain Thurlow can help you. He’s got some clout. He even knows the secretary of the navy like a brother.”

  “Now that would be the first hopeful thing I’ve heard in a terrible long time,” she answered, producing her wonderful smile once more. “Thanks be to God. Ye are a kind man, Bosun O’Neal. I knew that the first time I laid me eyes on ye.”

  “I’m glad I’ve said a hopeful thing,” Ready answered, though he doubted it was much more than a thin hope, considering Josh’s present condition.

  “God go with ye, then,” she said.

  “God go with you, too, ma’am, for sartain, although I guess that happens, anyway, you being …well, who you are and all.”

  Her smile turned small and embarrassed. “Aye, Bosun O’Neal. God does look after me, though in His own mysterious way.”

  13

  Ready broke away from the nun and trudged disconsolately to the gunny, who then waved him over to a knot of four sullen marines standing beside a palm tree. The arm of a dead Japanese sniper could be seen hanging from the tattered fronds of the tree, and the marines were standing so as to avoid the dripping blood slowly pattering off the sniper’s fingers.