The Far Reaches

by Homer Hickam

  “Right pretty, Sister,” Sampson said as if from far away.

  “Jesus was a Jew,” she said. “He came to fulfill yer people’s destiny.”

  “That was good of him,” Sampson replied sleepily, his veins coursing with morphine.

  “Sampson, I’ll ask you again,” Josh said. “What’s it to be? Below the knee or just the foot?”

  “Just the foot, sir. Thank you.”

  Josh took Sister Mary Kathleen, Ready, and Nango aside. “A knife like a K-bar, even with an edge, is barely useful as a cutting tool. It’s going to be tough getting it through the bone, and I fear all the crunching might bring the boy awake. He must be held down.”

  Nango said, “Fella boys hold. No worry-worry, Jahtalo.”

  The fella boys placed two sturdy breadfruit planks (the outrigger was astonishingly well supplied with odds and ends) across the gunwales, shoving them together to make a makeshift table. Sampson was laid across it; then Sister Mary Kathleen washed the marine’s infected foot and leg, using the copra soap Nango produced from yet another dilly bag.

  Josh studied the afflicted foot from several angles. “What’s your opinion, Sister?”

  “Me opinion is that a Coast Guard officer has no business cutting off a man’s foot, but here we are and there ye are.”

  Josh laughed. “I told a little lie, Sister. I never cut a man’s leg off before, although I did have to amputate a man’s arm once upon a time. It was one of Colonel Burr’s marines on the old Comanche”

  “Is that what started yer argument with the colonel?”

  “It didn’t help it. But our main contention was we fell in love with the same woman, the fairest maiden ever to walk across the tundra. God, how I loved her. I even married her.”

  “Faith. The poor girl. What became of her?”

  Josh looked away, into the emptiness of life and its equal fullness. “She was murdered. It’s a long story.”

  “I should be pleased to hear it, though I suspect ’tis not the time.”

  “No, Sister,” Josh answered forthrightly. “’Tis the time to cut off a man’s leg.”

  “His foot only, if ye please.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am. His foot only it is, and God help Sampson for having such a poor surgeon.”

  “Well, at least he will have a good nurse,” she answered with a shy smile. “Now raise yer knife, Captain, and let us get about today’s work.”

  And so they did.

  Sampson came awake in the night, and Sister Mary Kathleen held the lamp so Josh could inspect him while Ready watched from the shadows. “All’s well, Sampson,” Josh told the boy, who was staring at him with owl’s eyes, still dilated from the morphine.

  “How much did you take off, sir?”

  “Just the foot, as you said.”

  “I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. You have soft bones, Private. It’s all that easy living you marines practice.”

  Sampson blinked a couple of times. “I thought I was a corporal,” he noted.

  “I demoted you for letting yourself get gangrene.”

  “I’m glad. The responsibility of rank was wearing me down.” Sampson looked up at the nun, whose expression, by the light of the lantern, was one of quiet joy. “Thank you, Sister. I know you had a big part in this mess.”

  “I just mopped up a bit. Now, sleep a bit more, why don’t ye?”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am. I feel like I could sleep a hundred years.”

  Josh and the nun watched over Sampson until he began to breathe easier and they knew he was asleep. “You did well, Sister,” Josh said in honest admiration.

  Sister Mary Kathleen was tired but pleased at the result of their labors. She smiled up at Josh, thanking him with her smile and her eyes. Hidden in the shadows, Ready was astonished when she said, “Ye are a good man, Captain Thurlow, at least when ye put yer mind to it.”

  “Why, thank you, ma’am. I’ve always loved a backhanded compliment.” “Sampson not finish?” Nango asked from his steering position at the mast.

  “Sampson not finish,” Josh replied proudly.

  “Sampson not finish,” Ready muttered under his breath in mockery “Ye are a good man, Captain Thurlow,” he added, also mocking the nun. His expression hardened into petulant outrage. During the surgery, he had been given nothing to do besides being a spectator. Once he’d asked if he could help, but neither Josh nor Sister Mary Kathleen had even given him the courtesy of a reply. They were too busy, not with the surgery, in Ready’s opinion, but flirting with each other. She had oh so tenderly mopped Josh’s brow, then encouraged him when he’d hesitated, the big lug claiming to be nearly worn out from cutting through bone with the K-bar. In Ready’s opinion, it had been nothing but butchery, and if Sampson lived, it wasn’t anything the captain or the nun had done.

  Nango was in high spirits. “Ah. Good fella Jahtalo!” he exclaimed. “You swoop swoop blade tumas good.”

  Josh nodded, accepting the compliment, then cocked his head to peer approvingly at the nun. Under his attention, she smiled at him again, and he responded with a big, thoroughly delighted grin. “All right, Nango,” he said grandly. “Let us proceed now to the Far Reaches. Does that suit you, Sister?”

  “Aye, it does, Captain, surely it does.”

  And fly they did, Sister Mary Kathleen laughing gaily as the outrigger bounded crisply from wave to wave, and Josh grinning broadly beneath the great sail, his sandy brown hair ruffled by an eager breeze. Nango and the fella boys even broke into song, while Ready, having fallen asleep, was startled awake as he felt the first stirring of an awful jealousy.

  PART IV

  The Far Reaches

  Out of the deep I call

  To thee, O Lord, to thee.

  Before thy throne of grace I fall;

  Be merciful to me.

  Out of the deep I cry,

  The woeful deep of sin,

  Of evil done in days gone by,

  Of evil now within.

  —HENRY WILLIAMS BAKER, A HYMN

  26

  It was seen two hours before dawn, a flickering glow that meant something was burning on the distant edge of the coal-black sea. Josh studied the trembling sliver of light while Nango worked the sails and called quietly to his fella boys to pull taut the lines and to move back from the bow and mind the pontoon. They complied, their wide eyes never leaving the thin glimmer toward which the outrigger was aimed. “Far Reaches belong this way,” Nango said in a low voice meant for Josh.

  “What think you?” Josh asked, his eyes riveted on the fire.

  Nango wiped his face with his big hand and then peered at the quivering ember. “Island Burubu,” he said reluctantly. “She burn.”

  Josh kept studying the yellow streak, trying to discern the size of the fire and what might be fueling it. It was not unknown for villages and the bush on Pacific islands to fall prey to accidental fire. An overturned kerosene lantern, a celebratory fire built too high during a kava-drenched ceremony, the jungle being burned off for farmland, there were any number of possibilities. Josh recalled now that when he’d been cabin boy on the trading schooner Bathsheba, he’d seen such glimmers in the night, and that had been in these very waters. More often than not, Captain Fairplay bypassed the burning islands and Josh never discovered what caused the flames. But he recalled the Bathsheba once anchoring in a lagoon before the smoking remnants of a village and the captain oddly chuckling at the sight. “Damn fools have burned themselves down again,” he’d sworn. Josh, new to the Pacific then, had stared wide-eyed at the destruction, not a hut, house, or chicken coop left standing, and thought surely the village was doomed. But after going ashore, he saw that reconstruction was already well along, the people cheerfully working together to rebuild. “Like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” Captain Fairplay had remarked, grinning and shaking his head at the foolishness of mankind in general.

  Josh recalled those days, those comparatively untroubled, hal
cyon days, when he’d sailed aboard the Bathsheba. It was his father, Keeper Jack, who’d sent Josh to the Pacific to work for Fairplay, an old friend of the family. In the Keeper’s opinion, such would provide his eldest son an opportunity to understand there was more to the sea, much more, than the Atlantic off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Josh hadn’t wanted to go, couldn’t imagine being that far from Killakeet, but the Keeper wouldn’t hear his objections and ordered him off on his adventure. It had proved to be a wondrous year even though it had ultimately seen Josh a victim of shipwreck. He’d survived, of course, and even though he’d been scared more than a few times during his stint along that tropical sea, he’d always been grateful to his father for making him go.

  Josh rubbed his eyes, willing that the fire would prove to be an illusion, but when he looked again, the amber smear was still there with all its un-happy implications. Here he was, back in the waters of his youth, and he was older, but was he wiser? He had learned to kill and was immersed men-tally and physically in a great war, but Josh doubted he had gained much wisdom in the process. He wished now, while studying that fire in the darkness, that he might have alongside him the mentors of his life, Captain Fairplay, Captain Falcon, and, of course, his father, the Keeper, so that he could ask them what he should do. But perhaps, he thought further, they are here, and they are telling me their opinion, if I but listen. Josh considered a truism that someone had told him somewhere, maybe even in a bar: that a good teacher never left his pupil, not really, and that the lessons were embedded, just waiting until they were required. Those old men, Josh thought with a sad smile, they had been the best teachers there were. So what would you do? he asked them, and sure enough, they answered, each in turn, Captains Fairplay and Falcon and the Keeper. Josh took a breath, fancying that he caught a whiff of smoke, then made his decision. “Pull down your sail, Nango,” he said. “Whistle up the others to do the same. We’ll wait for dawn before getting any closer.”

  “You’re thinking Jap, sir?” Ready asked, hearing Josh’s order and coming forward.

  There was something in the bosun’s tone that irritated Josh, perhaps because he’d just seanced with the great men of his life. “Well, Bosun,” he growled, “I ain’t thinking Germans or Italians.”

  Ready was thus rebuked, and it stung. Without comment, he helped the fella boys lower the sail, then sat down, his mind swamped with righteous indignation. Then he took stock. Ready was an honest man, usually, and recognized that Captain Thurlow was merely being his normal self, that is to say with his common tendency toward arrogance. So why, Ready asked himself, was the captain so bothersome? Ready searched for the source of his annoyance and then confessed to himself that it was surely jealousy Ready was jealous that the nun seemed to be in awe of Josh Thurlow, even with all his dictatorial ways, while she had never expressed the slightest admiration for Ready himself. Ready’s anger therefore crept toward the nun, for what was clearly bad judgment on her part. Not only did she have them all on a fool’s errand, but she esteemed Captain Thurlow, who was, after all, nothing but a big bully, always had been, not to mention (though somebody should!) a lecher with a tendency toward drunkenness. Ready decided his best course was to be through with the both of them. They could admire each other, do anything together they wanted! Henceforth, he would do only what he was told, and the nun, well, she could go to hell! J wish I was home, Ready determined at the end of his internal rant. If I ever make it back to Killakeet, I’ll never leave it again. Then he pulled up his knees and lowered his head onto them and tried to recall his mother’s sweet face and forget Sister Mary Kathleen’s pretty (but foolish) Irish mug.

  Nango’s whistles soon had the other outriggers to their bare poles, and the sea, free to exert its will, pushed them slowly down-current, away from the burning smear. With nothing to do, the fella boys sensibly laid themselves down and went to sleep. There was no sound from the nun’s hut, so Josh assumed she slept as well. Ready apparently was also dozing, his head on his knees. Josh sat down and soon was fast asleep himself. Some hours later, he was wakened by a flying fish that had flung itself into the outrigger like a silver knife, landing at Ready’s bare feet. The bosun awoke, picked up the fish, inspected it, and tossed it over his shoulder into the sea. Then he rose and came forward, yawning and stretching.

  “I wonder what was chasing it?” Josh mused.

  “Tuna maybe,” Ready answered. “Good water for tuna, this.”

  “You were always the best fisherman of any of the boys,” Josh said. “I recall it was almost like you could feel the fish in the water. It’s a gift only a few men have.” When Ready made no reply, just stood there, Josh briefly wondered if he had done or said anything to upset the bosun. He quickly concluded it was unlikely, Ready being the most sensible of fellows, and himself typically so evenhanded. So he asked, “What’s your opinion of that fire, Bosun?”

  “You want my opinion, sir? Maybe they’re cooking copra. Or maybe there’s a big celebration and that’s their dancing fires.”

  “If that’s your opinion,” Josh replied, “you’re dead wrong.”

  Ready shrugged. “Nothing new there, Captain. I can hardly remember when I was right, especially in your opinion.”

  Josh noted the bosun’s grumpy reply and was moved to explain his position. “Those fires ain’t right for copra. They’d be burning lower and more of a yellow coloration. I doubt anybody’s dancing around them, neither. Too big. It’s the war, and I don’t see why you would say it’s something else.”

  Ready was silent for a long second, then replied, “Maybe it’s because this war don’t make sense to me no more.”

  Josh was astonished at the bosun’s declaration. “Have you forgotten Pearl Harbor?”

  “No, sir. I haven’t forgotten it, but I guess it’s been cleaned up by now.” “Three thousand of our boys killed, a lot of them trapped underwater. There’s no way that can ever be cleaned up.”

  “We just got a thousand more killed on Tarawa, sir, and I guess a couple of thousand bad wounded. Tell me what sense that makes.”

  “Don’t be simple,” Josh growled, then struggled to find a proper metaphor. “Say a man knocks down your door, shoots your kids, rapes your wife, loots your house. What do you do? Shake his hand? No, you fight and kill him even if you get knocked around doing it. That’s what we’re doing out here, fighting and killing the men who attacked us without warning. Sure, we’re taking our lumps, but war makes as much sense as anything else when it needs to be done. So what’s really going through your head, Bosun? Let’s hear it.”

  “There’s nothing in my head,” Ready answered. “Nothing at all.” “Don’t play the fool!” Josh snapped. He discovered he was truly angry. Imagine! The war being questioned!

  “Captain, the problem with you is—oh, never mind. It’s like talking to that flying fish I threw overboard.”

  Josh started to unleash a sharp rebuke, reminding Ready of his manners before a superior officer, but Nango interrupted the arguing Americans with a warning: “Jahtalo! Bo! Look-see!”

  Josh and Ready looked and saw. A moving light, now two, appeared from the flaming glimmer, then moved steadily eastward. “Japanese barges heading to Ruka,” Josh said. “I’d stake my life on it.”

  “We go Burubu now, Jahtalo?”

  “No, Nango. We wait. If those are Japonee, I want to give them time to sail far away.” Josh watched the moving lights a little longer, then turned to Ready to continue the argument, which he intended to turn into instruction and the bosun’s return to discipline. He was disappointed when he saw that the bosun had gone to his sleeping place, pulled up his knees, and rested his head on them again. Josh watched him and tried to imagine what might be causing his ill humor. It’s that nun, Josh concluded. think he wants her, but he’ll never have her, so it’s tearing him up inside.

  Satisfied that he had identified Ready’s problem, Josh sat down to give it all a good think, to see if he could find a solution that would make the b
osun happy and keep the peace between them. Six seconds later, he was fast asleep.

  27

  The sun bolted from the sea, startling Josh when it bore into his face like a white-hot barb. Shielding his eyes and rising with a deep ache in his right knee while unsuccessfully trying to recall what he’d been thinking about before he went to sleep, he looked at the sea, which stretched out before him, undulating and endless. The glow of the flames on the horizon he re-called now had vanished in the furious glare of the morning sun, replaced by a column of blue-gray smoke that rose crookedly against the clear sky. Josh was pleased to see that all the outriggers were still on their bare poles. Nango, dozing at the masthead, came suddenly awake, raising his big head and calling out, “We go Burubu now, Jahtalo?”

  “Not yet,” Josh answered, wishing with all his might for a cup of coffee. His mouth tasted like putty and his mind was befogged, surely a job for a fresh cup of Java. Without hope, he asked Nango if he had any that he’d kept hidden.

  “No, Jahtalo,” Nango replied, grieving for the American in obvious need. “But I have tea.”

  Josh sighed. “Could you brew me a cup, then? Make it strong.”

  The other outrigger captains, hearing the voices, beseechingly began to hail: “Burubu, she burn! We go, Jahtalo!”

  “Not yet!” Josh yelled at them as Nango busied himself with the little kerosene stove. Before long, the pot was bubbling, and not too many minutes afterward, Nango handed Josh a tin cup filled with tea, which proved to be hot and bitter but just the ticket.