I think that when Captain Dean called me from the tent
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at dawn on the day after Swede and Harry Hallion had gone floating off on the raft, and Chips Bullock had died, he knew what that day would bring forth, and I think he was struggling desperately to find the inner strength to face it.
Captain Dean was what is known as civilized. He recognized and detested the bad days that selfish and greedy men, civil war, French influences, gambling, bad laws and worse law enforcement had brought upon England. On Boon Island he had willingly done physical things that those beneath him hadn't the moral strength to do. He had endured without anger the cowardice of Saver and Gray-stock: the helplessness of his own brother; the malicious opposition of Langman, White and Mellen. He had ventured out into the black cold of midnight in the hope of catching a seal unaware. He had washed our ulcerated legs and feet with urine: persuaded his unwilling crew to pick oakum for their own protection: almost paralyzed his hands to dredge up mussels for us; and now I think he foresaw that a worse trial was upon him-one that would require him to ignore standards that civilization builds up within a decent man.
As I crawled from the tent, Captain Dean stopped to speak to the men. "We'll make the full circuit of the island," he said. "Tide's high at eight. When it starts to fall, I want Chips's body on the ledge nearest the tent. White, that salt water you swallowed yesterday hasn't hurt you. You're still the strongestyou and Langman. Drag out Chips's body. Put it on the ledge. When Mr. Whitworth and I come back, we'll say a prayer over it and roll it in the water."
He followed me out. The tide was higher than we had
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ever seen it. The breakers, pounding and bellowing, were close and enormous.
"There's no doubt about it," Captain Dean said. "There have been spring tides that washed right over this island. There must have been."
He looked back at the tent. There was no sign of movement within its sagging sides.
We made our slow circuit of the island, watching for floating objects or anything usable cast up by the sea. There was nothing in sightnothing except the seals that reared head and shoulders from waves to follow our every movement with insatiable curiosity: little black and white sea-swallows, skittering from wave to wave with limp feet trailing, and everywhere an infinity of sea ducks, swimming in vast shoals; chunky round black ones with white cheeks: little slender brown ones with bristly combs, diligently raising pointed beaks to heaven and genuflecting to each otherand all complacently ignoring us.
Our rounds completed, the captain peered intently toward the distant mainland, then glanced disconsolately toward the tent.
"They haven't done as I told 'em," he said. "They haven't taken him out."
When I didn't answer, he said, "Go in yourself, Miles. I can't allow them to disobey orders like this."
I went to the tent and pulled aside the flap. Earlier, when I had crawled out, they were lying down, huddled together, as motionless as Chips Bullock.
Now only Chips lay there. The others, even Saver and Graystock, were sitting up. I sensed a feverish excitement.
"Why didn't you take Chips out?" I asked. "The captain said to put him on the ledge."
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"We haven't the strength," Langman said. "We're weak from lack of food."
I looked from one to another. Neal crawled out from among them and stood beside me. "They want to eat him," he said. "They're afraid to ask the captain. They want you to do it."
"I never said any such thing!" Langman said. "I'd never eat a fellow creature."
"We'll get mussels for you at low tide," I reminded them.
"Mussels!" Henry Dean exclaimed. I gag whenever I try to swallow one!"
"Look, Whitworth," Graystock said, "those mussels make every last one of us sick! The captain'll do whatever you ask him to do. Ask him to let us have Chips. There's no use wasting him, the way we wasted Cooky!"
Well, there was no use lying to myself. When the captain rolled Cooky into the sea, I'd almost protestedalmost, but I hadn't quite dared. I hadn't let myself formulate clearly in my mind that there was no good reason why we shouldn't have eaten him.
I stood looking from them to the body of Chips Bullock. I had no feeling at all except pity for Captain Dean.
When he came in among us I said, "Captain, these people want to eat Chips Bullock."
"Not me!" Langman said.
"Captain," I said, "we ate a seagull last week. Mr. Langman killed it, and Mr. Langman ate a mouthful of it, like the rest of us. He was glad to get it and so were we."
"What's that got to do with it?" Langman asked sharply.
"It's got this to do with it," I said. "Gulls are scaven-
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gers. They eat anything dead. The one we ate might have eaten part of Cooky Sipper."
"Everyone in England eats eels," Christopher Gray said. "Eels eat anything that's dead."
"You'll never catch me eating the body of a fellow human," Langman said. "My conscience would never let me rest."
"You've already got more on your conscience than any one man should be called on to endure," Captain Dean said.
"Eating a man would be a sin," Langman protested. "If I agreed to it, I'd be forever damned."
"It's a terrible thing," Captain Dean agreed, "but in my opinion it's not as much of a sin as swearing to a lie that robs a man of his good name. You've lied about the insurance my brother and I carried on the Nottingham. You lied when you said I purposely ran the Nottingham ashore. I think you're damned already."
Langman eyed the captain sourly.
"Captain," Christopher Gray said, "Hallion lived with Indians in Nova Scotia, and Hallion said that when one Indian killed another in battle, he ate the dead Indian's heart. Hallion said Indians thought it gave 'em courage."
"We could use a few Indians' hearts on Boon Island," Captain Dean said. "I think all of us could! We've lost the only one who didn't need to eat an Indian's heart ... Swede Butler."
"Are you accusing us of cowardice?" Langman asked.
"Mr. Langman," the captain said, "I ordered you and George White to drag Chips Bullock's body to the ledge nearest the sea. Why didn't you do it?"
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"I told Mr. Whitworth," Langman said. "We're too weak."
"If you're too weak to do that, you're weak from hunger. And if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything. I know. Yesterday I tried, like a dog, to eat my own frozen excrement. I think you didn't move Chips because you secretly wanted to eat him but lacked the courage to say so."
"I'll never eat a fellow human," Langman repeated.
"We'll vote," Captain Dean said. "We'll vote whether or not we'll eat this body. Neal, you're youngest, but you won't vote until after all the others."
"I want to vote," Neal said. "My father would have voted Yes, and that's how I vote."
"Mr. Langman?" asked the captain.
"Never shall it be"
"All right," the captain said. "You vote No. Christopher Gray?"
"I vote Yes," Gray said. "Captain, we're almost dead from lack of meat."
"Henry Dean?" the captain asked.
"Yes," his brother said.
"Charles Graystock?" the captain asked. "I'm in no doubt about you or Saver."
"Yes!" Graystock shouted.
"And Saver?"
Saver said Yes in strong, firm tones. Nobody could have guessed, from the quality of their voices, that from the moment we dropped from the Nottingham's foremast onto the seaweed of Boon Island, those two had been the malingerers, resented by all, perpetual thorns in the captain's flesh, refusing to work; sullen, even, when fed with mussels gathered by others.
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"Now let's see," the captain said, "that's five in favor of eating. That only leaves three to voteWhitworth, George White, Nicholas Mellen. So there's no need to vote further. We'll eat him."
"What about you?" Langman asked.
The captain ignored h
im, and I knew why. The. captain didn't want to vote Yes; but if he had, Langman, at the first opportunity, would have taken oath that the eating of Chips Bullock had been done at the captain's suggestion. He might even have implied that the captain killed Chips in order to eat him. That was the sort of person Langman was. Unfortunately there'll always be Langmans in this world, to set people and nations against each otherto condemn the good and extol the badto spread sly rumors and spit on the truth.
There was something horrible about the open excitement of Saver and Graystock when the captain agreed to the eating of Chips, but ironically I was not horrified by the inner relief I felt myself.
I was even puzzled by the steadfast refusal, on the part of those who had most feverishly urged the eating, to help carry the body from the tent.
When Neal and I offered to help the captain, he waved us sharply aside. He wanted the others, the responsible ones, to do it; but when he gave the necessary orders, they lay in their places like dogs that, even though whipped, refuse to carry out their masters' orders. Their eyes rolled up at him, exactly like those of cowering dogs, and it was plain that no orders, no prayers, no punishment, would persuade them to take part in the act they'd begged the captain to permit.
In the end, Neal and I helped him drag out the body.
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He had tried to do it alone, but it was too much for him. Even with our help it was almost too much for all three of us, so that when the body lay on the cold ledge, we were numb mentally and physically, and the captain took us back to the tent, where he lay with eyes closed, until the men again wailingly asked for meat.
At half tide he roused himself, and instantly the men were silent, watching him, their eyes stubborn. They wouldn't help. They just wouldn't help.
We had the saw, made so laboriously from the cutlass, and we had our knives. We had nothing else except spun yarn, taken from the tent, and two squares of canvas, cut from the boulder-weighted slack we had left when the tent was built.
''First," the captain said, "I'll make a bag of the clothes and put 'em in that rock crevice yonder. Then I'll wrap the head in the clothes, and the feet and the hands and the skinand the other things. And the bones. We'll have to bone out the meat, so we can wrap it and cut it into equal pieces. We'll put the clothes in a crevice with boulders piled over it. We'll make a cross out of two pieces of wood and wedge it in the boulders."
His mention of the cross made us feel better.
He hefted the cutlass-saw.
"Now," he said, "I want the two of you to go to the north side of the island. See whether anything's come ashore. Look at the mainland for signs of boats. I've got things to do, and I'm reconciled to doing them. To me, this is meat."
He touched Chips's body with the tip of the saw; then
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continued, "Eventually it will be meat to both of you: something over which to say grace. Nothing more. Until then I'll do what has to be done, but I'll do it alone. You aren't reconciled yet; and what I'm doing, I'm doing for your fathers' sake as well as for your own."
When Neal and I hesitated, he impatiently waved us away. "I'll need help in skinning and boning out," he said. "When I'm ready, I'll wave and you can come back."
The labor of skinning a human body is beyond belief. Perhaps a surgeon would make nothing of it. It might seem simple to a butcher. To us, with our scarred and half-frozen fingers and hands, it was next to impossible.
When in exasperation I cursed my helplessness, Captain Dean urged me on. "We can't stop," he said. "If we stop now and wait till tomorrow to finish, it may freeze so solid we can't do anything with it."
The skin wasn't like a rabbit pelt or a deerskin, that can be raised a little at the neck and then pulled off cleanly from the whole body. This skin had adhesions, so that when it was raised at the neck, it had to be pared away from the flesh beneath by continuous slicing and slashing. Also, unlike an animal's skin, it was tender in spots, so that it was forever ripping or being pierced by our knives.
I thanked God we were no longer hampered by the gulls. If they had been about us, as they had been before Langman killed that progenitor of all gulls, they would have swooped upon us to snatch the flesh from our very hands and soar away, yelling in triumph.
The tide was on the make before the meat had been
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stripped from the leg bones and arm bones, and laid off from the ribs and back. All these were rolled by Neal in tight cylinders and tied with rope yarn.
We wedged the bones into the crevice in such a way that no seal or gull could dislodge the boulders above them.
Even then we weren't finished, for the rolls, the slabs of meat from belly and buttocks, the liver, the heart and the fat-encased kidneys had to be sunk in an even deeper crevice nearer the tent, covered with three feet of seaweed to guard against freezing, and the seaweed in turn topped by a double layer of boulders.
We worked in silence, except when Neal brought the kidneys back to the captain, after washing them in salt water.
"Keep those on top of everything," the captain said. "That fat is just as good as mutton tallow. Maybe we can use it for poultices."
When we returned exhausted and depressed to the tent to feed those comrades who had lain there, sunk in helplessness because of some frightened quirk of their disgusting brains, Langman, White and Mellen, as able-bodied as any of us, refused to eat.
"An insult," Langman mumbled, "to the spirit of a friend."
"Langman," Captain Dean said, "my duty by you is done. Eat or don't eat, as you please. But my duty to the rest of us is not done, and if I hear any more talk out of you about this meat being anybody's spirit, you'll rue the day!"
"Are you threatening me?" Langman asked.
"Yes, I'm threatening you," Captain Dean said. "If you pour out your spleen on these others, I'll protect them by
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stopping your mouth. This meat I'm offering is nobody's spirit. It's beef. It was animated once by a soul and a spirit, but the soul and the spirit have gone from this island, leaving only beef behind."
He threw up his hands in disgust at Langman's mutterings, drew his knife and carefully divided the rolled meat into slices.
"Listen carefully," he said, before he handed out the slices. "We have enough beef for a week, if we're careful. If Langman, White and Mellen don't eat, we'll have enough for a longer time. But this you must do: you must scrape the beef to a pulp, and with each piece of pulp you must chew seaweed. You mustn't gulp it down. You must not gulp it down."
He handed around the meat, and the tent was filled with the soft sound of scraping and chewing, audible above the angry roaring of the breakers.
I tried to remember what Captain Dean had said about being reconciled. I expected to be revolted by the meat and the seaweed, but I wasn't. It wasn't offensive. It wasn't nauseating. It had no more taste than raw beef or raw venison.
All I could think of was Langman, meatless, staring out from the darkness with hard and hating eyes, and once I thought I felt Chips Bullock behind me, a little stooped, his head lowered, laughing that silent, belly-shaking laugh of his at Langman, Mellen and White.
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