by Homer Hickam
“He doesn’t need a doctor,” Burr archly replied. “A long sea voyage, that’s what would revitalize our Captain Thurlow here, not the ministrations of some pill pusher.”
The nun felt Josh’s brow. It was scalding to her touch, and she also observed that his wounds were oozing yellow pus and watery blood. “He’s dying!” she announced.
“Oh, now, Sister,” Burr chuckled. “Hardly. Old Josh’s asleep, that’s all. But before he took his nap, he and I had the most interesting conversation. It seems he would like to accompany you to your Far Reaches, to scout out the situation, and then, at such time he is able to make it back to these waters, which I anticipate to be a very long time, if ever, he may lecture us about all that he has learned. For all I know, he will recommend we send marines in force to defeat the Japanese on your islands. Of course, I debated with him, saying how much he was required for the war effort right here at my side, but Thurlow is a stubborn fellow, you know, and I have reluctantly agreed to let him go. You may take him when you’re ready, as long as it’s pretty much toot sweet.”
The nun seemed poised to argue but, after a long second of meditation, subsided. “May I at least have clean dressings and what medicines you might have for him?”
Burr wiped his forehead with his bandana, blew his nose, and then called out to his clerk. “Sergeant-Private? Go round up a corpsman. Tell him to help the good sister here with Captain Thurlow and to give her whatever she requires. Tell him I could use some aspirin and quinine, too. Fever’s got me, and this one feels like a doozy”
The clerk charged off, and then Burr staggered a bit, before leaning against the pillbox wall. Fever when it came to him always came on padded feet, like a stealthy cat, but then it dug in its claws and drew blood. “I spoke with the Holy Joe priest you confessed to, Sister,” he said, blinking through the sweat running down into his eyes. He dabbed his brow with his soggy bandana, then wrung it out, the sweat pattering around his boots. “The man seemed a little shaken to me. What did you tell him? Although I ordered him twice to confide in me, couching it in terms of helping the war effort, not to mention any future promotions for him, he still wouldn’t do it. I will see him broken, of course, so you might as well tell me what sins you confessed that so stressed the poor padre.”
“Why do ye care, Colonel?” Sister Mary Kathleen calmly inquired. “What are my sins to ye?”
Burr took a deep breath, desperate for oxygen, but there was only the foul air of dead men. “Sister, help me.”
“How can I? Tell me what ye need.”
“I need you.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “In what manner?”
Burr’s uniform was soaked with sweat. His knees were unhinged, near collapse. The fever was fully on him, its claws tearing away at his flesh. “I need you to explain to me the ways of heaven and earth,” he croaked. “I sense you know everything.”
Shocked, she snapped, “I know no such thing!”
“Please, Sister! I am in hell, don’t you understand? Save me!”
“No!” she yelped. “I am not the one ye seek!”
“Help me, please God!” Burr gasped, then staggered out of the pillbox and disappeared into the darkness.
Trembling from fear and shock at the colonel’s outburst, Sister Mary Kathleen waited until she regained her composure, then knelt beside the big, fever-wracked captain and placed her hands together in prayer. She prayed to Saint Monessa for all the dead men of Tarawa, and particularly for Josh Thurlow, and then she prayed for Colonel Burr. Finally and most fervently, she prayed for herself and asked the little saint to please intercede with God, who surely was otherwise too busy to notice her, and, please, Saint Monessa, help her complete her mission to recover the precious thing God had given her and, because of the weakness of her flesh and spirit, she had lost.
She expected no immediate reply to her prayers and therefore was all the more surprised when she got one. There was what seemed to be a child’s voice in her head, and it said, Go, and take Captain Thurlow with you.
So she did.
19
Ready had come to believe that the world was going to stay dark forever and that the sun would never rise. Perhaps, he thought, when he heard the labored breaths and shuffling footsteps that told him the Japanese were coming again, he was already dead and hell was the absence of light. Then the K-bars and bayonets clashed, gunshots popped, there were shouts and cries and gurgles, and he knew he was still alive, though hanging on by the merest chance. The beach fell silent once more except for the whimpering of the sea against the sand and the last breaths of men. Ready called out, “Marines?” The answers came back: “Tucker here.” “Sampson, Whimper Fi.” Garcia hissed, “Still with you, Bosun!”
They had been assaulted three times by teams of four Japanese each, and those twelve men now lay dead in the sand around them. Another assault was surely on its way. Ready looked off to the east, willing the sun to rise, which it did, coincidentally It was a brilliant sunrise, sudden as usual in those latitudes, a molten red ball flashing hot light across a sea that instantly turned from a sullen gray to a most glorious and transparent blue.
“Will you look at that that!” Ready exclaimed, and the three marines looked and saw three snowy white sails skimming with graceful purpose across what seemed the edge of the world. One detached from the others and glided toward the beach. Fearing for its safety, Ready jumped up and down and waved his arms. “Go back!” he yelled, but the little boat kept sailing toward them, and then it seemed the entire island exploded in a wash of fire and brimstone that sucked the very breath from Ready’s lungs.
20
The sails were raised on the outriggers, and Sister Mary Kathleen, for the first time in days, took a deep breath without the accompanying stench of dead men. She silently thanked God for fresh air and freedom while her fella boys thanked the spirits of the sea with a song that rose and fell with the waves. The outriggers were all designed the same, built from the wood of the breadfruit tree and consisting of a hull, a sail, an outrigger float, a lee platform, and a small hut in the stern. Outriggers built in the Far Reaches were known throughout the Pacific as fast and durable. They did not so much sail on the sea as skim above it, their passage marked only by the hiss of spray. Now, to Sister Mary Kathleen’s delight, the wind was propelling the outriggers as silently and quickly over the water as if the finger of God were pushing them.
God lived in the spray and the wind, she thought, as much as he lived in the ancient rites performed by priests. It was times such as these that she wondered if her church held all the answers as to the nature of God and the world he had made. Certainly, when she had first arrived in the Far Reaches, good Father Ballester had expressed those very doubts.
She recalled now her many conversations with the old priest, and the stories he’d told. Most of them were pleasant, given as the white-haired old man delicately sipped his whiskey—stories of his garden, and the geography of the islands, and his home back in Ireland, and how it would have been so much better for the world if the Irish had created a vast empire, rather than the English. But some of the things he’d said to her were unsettling. He had concluded, he confided, that some things in the catechism were contradictory, and other things simply made no sense. He believed, after much study, that many parts of the Bible were just so many fairy tales. He even expressed doubts as to the divinity of Christ. “But what other religion is there, my dear,” he had opined, “that can bring peace and love to the people around the world? Perhaps it is simply the best religion we have, and our duty to bring it to the heathens, even if it isn’t true.”
She had argued with him, gently, of course, for it was not proper for a young nun to confront an old, experienced priest, even if he was expressing heresy. Usually, she was able to lead him off into a tangent, easy to do as he loved to talk about the early days of the church in the Far Reaches. He could wax on for hours about how he and the other priests, all young then, of course, had coaxed the n
ative people into wearing proper clothing rather than walking around naked, and how they had explained to them the righteousness of marriage before coitus, and the wrongness of ritualized war and the occasional bashing of heads for sport. “It is a terrible toil we have, Sister,” he’d said. “These fella boys, they accept our baptism and our mass, they learn to cross themselves and say all the proper words, then they go right back to doing what they were doing before we came. I’d rather they resisted than the sham they show us.”
“Why the sham?” she had asked in all innocence.
“Because they know we are persistent and they take the easy way,” the priest replied with what was clearly a heavy and frustrated heart. “They know the English have the gunpowder to back us up, so giving in is the way they resist. They intend to outlast us, that’s what I think, then go back to their heathen ways after we’re gone.”
“But we will never leave, will we?”
Father Ballester had shrugged and smiled a sad, tired smile. “We will grow old and then we will die, Sister. And naught will come to replace us. ‘Tis our fate, I’m thinking, but never breathe a word of my opinion to the other priests or sisters, I pray.”
Why Father Ballester chose her to share such doubts and heretical philosophies, she did not know. There was too much she didn’t know or understand, except the one thing. She believed in God, and He had given her a test, a terrible test, and she had failed it. Now she supposed He had given her another, and this time she would not fail. She would die first.
But wasn’t such thinking surely yet another aspect of her awful pride? She recalled Father Donnelly, the American priest on Tarawa sent to her by Colonel Burr, when she had confessed that particular little venial sin. He had smiled and said, “Well, we Irish have to be especially watchful against pride, don’t we?”
“We do, Father,” she’d replied humbly.
The priest, who was from Boston, had continued conversationally, “An Irish convent must be a tough place.”
“Nay, it is a place to learn,” she’d answered.
“What was an example of your penances?” he’d asked.
And so, because she was proud she had endured it, thus adding to her sins, she had told him of the penance of the begging of the soup, where she knelt at the knee of each nun in turn at the dinner table and, with her empty bowl, begged for a spoonful of soup, just one, until at last she had enough to eat. “The sisters had eaten from their bowls, and some of them had tooth decay or false teeth or bad gums,” she explained. “Yet I took the bowl back to my place at the table, and I ate every drop.”
“I would have puked,” Father Donnelly vowed. “We don’t do things like that in the United States.”
“Then how can ye be strong enough to do all that is to be done?” she’d asked, a brazen question for a nun to a priest, even an American one.
He seemed to take no umbrage. “What other sins besides pride do you have for me, Sister? Let us have your confession.”
And so she had told him her sins, including her greatest sin, and watched the blood drain from his shocked face, this from a priest who had spent the day roaming an island awash in blood and draped with thousands of dead men. “You are lost!” he’d cried at the end of her confession. “What penance could I possibly give you great enough to match this…thing?”
“This one, Father.” Then she pressed upon him what she required.
The priest replied in a voice turned cold as ice that he would do what he could. Then she’d left him because she could no longer face the terrible loathing it was certain he had for her as a nun, a woman, and a human being.
And now all she could do was to penance herself in her own way, to lie prostrate upon the floor of life and beg for the soup of wisdom, to fix in her mind that she was of no importance except for what she had to do to save the gift given to her through pain and mortification. Within her hut, as the outriggers skimmed along, she said her prayers, her Our Fathers, her Hail Marys, and her Glorias, and, of course, her special prayers to little Saint Monessa. Then she climbed out of the hut and walked forward and looked toward the next island up from Betio. It was then she saw them, a little knot of men on the beach that included a new friend.
“Ply on, Nango, Moru, Kapura, Valuta!” Sister Mary Kathleen urged her fella boys as they sailed and paddled the outrigger toward a shore suddenly covered with flames and sulfurous smoke. “On, ye good fellas!”
The crew of the outrigger responded to the nun’s urgings with deep, hearty grunts at each dip of their paddles while Nango, captain and navigator, minded the sail pumped full of wind. “Into thy hell we proceed, devil Satan,” Sister Mary Kathleen exulted over the hiss of the sea spray and the tortured creak of the rigging. “Praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost! Mary, Mother of God, we beseech ye yer protection! In yer perfect hands, we are not afraid!” Then she put her hand to her mouth, realizing that she had reached a most inappropriate level of ecstasy, one denied her in her vocation. “Sail on, sweet canoe,” she whispered, tamping down her enthusiasm as best she could.
A great wind came then, a mighty blow that swept the beach clear of smoke and seemed to lift the hull of the outrigger and send it flying ever faster. Now Sister Mary Kathleen saw many marines, their rifles held high, crossing the shallow water between the islands. There were more going ashore in their slab-sided vessels, the ramps dropping and men running out. Artillery rounds were falling in a crescendo, and a tank bellowed its cannon as it roared through the shallows past another tank that was stalled. Japanese soldiers were climbing out of their holes everywhere and were rushing to meet the invaders. Another complement of Japanese was racing down the beach. She willed calm, even in the turmoil of the approaching battle, and stood brazenly on the bow, an easy target.
21
Ready had done everything he could to keep the outrigger from coming so near, especially after he saw the nun aboard it. Surely the Japanese and maybe even the marines would shoot the native boat full of holes. Yet it came on, unscathed, sailing close to the beach, until its crew turned its sail to dump the wind.
“Is that boat here for us?” Sampson asked.
“It sure is!” Ready cried joyfully, “and look who’s aboard it.”
“Why, it’s that nun!” Garcia said accurately.
“Let’s swim, boys,” Ready said. “It’s our only chance.”
The marines, however, seemed reluctant to swim. They slowly waded into the surf, their rifles held over their heads. Ready, halfway to the outrigger, turned and yelled at them. “Throw them rifles down and swim, you jarheads!”
This they promptly did, also tossing away their helmets, and dog-paddled to the outrigger, where they were hauled aboard. Then Ready lifted his hands and was pulled aloft by a big native man, who dropped him onto the mats lining the bottom of the hull. When he climbed to his feet, he saw the nun standing on the bow, completely vulnerable to shot and shell. “Sister, get down, please!” he said, and even as he said it, the sea fairly exploded all around with bullets from the Japanese on the beach.
The nun calmly turned to him and said, with a certain smile, “No worry-worry, Bosun O’Neal. I think today is not my day to die. Or yours.” Then she spoke quietly to the big tattooed man holding the sheet that controlled the set of the sail. “Sail on, Nango, me old friend.”
Nango grinned and made an adjustment, and instantly the outrigger’s sail filled with wind, and the boat began to skim over the water, curving toward the open sea. Nango nodded to Ready, one sailor recognizing another.
Before long the noise of the battle dwindled and all that could be heard was the whispering of the sea and the spirited wind snapping the sail and thrumming the rigging. It was only then that Ready noticed the big naked man lying in the stern, his legs akimbo, his jaw slack, his face pale, and his eyes shot with blood. “Captain Thurlow!” he cried in disbelief and knelt beside him and touched his shoulder just to see if he was real or part of a dream.
The nun came then, kne
eling on the mats. “Your captain is sore sick, Bosun. I fear for his life. His wounds are infected. I have salved them but to no avail.”
“I have sulfa in my bag,” Ready replied. “If it didn’t get too wet, it should take care of these scrapes. Anyhow, Josh Thurlow’s a tough bird, Sister, and make no mistake.”
She smiled at him, a smile that made Ready’s heart skip a delighted beat. “Yer devoted to yer captain,” she observed approvingly.
Ready blushed. “We grew up in the same place, ma’am, on Killakeet Island off North Carolina. He’s like my brother except when he’s ordering me and everybody else around.”
“Then, Bosun, you and me, we’ll take care of yer brother, won’t we?” At that moment, Ready would have agreed to take care of the entire world as long as it was beside this beautiful little Irish girl who also happened to be a nun. “Yes we will, ma’am,” he said and felt at that moment an odd, though quite pleasant, twinge in his heart, a twinge he had not felt in many a year, if ever.
PART III
The Voyage
When the mists have rolled in splendor
From the beauty of the hills,
And the sunlight falls in gladness
On the rivers and the rills,
We recall our Father’s promise
In the rainbow of the spray:
We shall know each other better
When the mists have rolled away.
—ANNIE HERBERT, A HYMN
22
Three days passed and the outriggers sailed on, three tiny dots on an endless sea driven by an endless wind beneath an endless sky In the oven of the sun, the occupants barely moved, and the outrigger captains dozed, the sheet controlling the sail tucked between their toes. At nightfall, when the stars spread above them like a snowy blanket, a fresh breeze flowed off the sea and into the hulls, bringing coolness and stirring life. It was then the fella boys sang songs of their home islands and the sea and of the dream-world that surely existed alongside the world that could be seen and felt. Sometimes they would bring out a small drum and thump against its hide cover to keep rhythm with the songs. It was a pleasant time, though Ready often wondered what the words in the songs meant. He wished he had his fiddle, for he was a consummate player, and sometimes imagined he was holding it and playing some sad Killakeet tune. He could almost hear its strains in his head, and the banjo and the jug and guitar the crew aboard the old Maudie Jane used to play, once so long ago when Ready and Captain Thurlow and the other boys of Killakeet were plying the great blue river of the Gulf Stream, out where the big fish danced their eternal dance of life and death, and German U-boats had sunk so many ships and killed so many men. Thoughts of Killakeet were joyful and painful all at once; though he tried not to be unmanly, he found himself on many a dark night wiping away tears when his memories came on too strong.