"What's the matter, ma'am?" the canoeman asked. "I was told by Captain Nason to bring these people here, orders of Captain Furber, and Captain Dean's already been brought here."
"Oh," the woman said, "he frightened us to death, just the look of him. When he stood here and started to speak to us, we screamed and ran out. He went in. I think he's in the kitchen."
"Well, go on in," the canoeman said, "and take these two with you. Treat 'em the same way you'd want Captain Furber to be treated if he'd been cast away on Boon Island for a month."
"Only for twenty-four days," Neal said.
Mrs. Furber looked at Neal: looked away, then studied him carefully. "Only!" she said. "Only twenty-four days! You come in the house, right this minute!"
Captain Dean was in the kitchen, as Mrs. Furber had suspected. On the fire he had found an iron kettle filled with beef stew, and had forked out pieces of beef and turnips
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and potatoes, and had covered the top of the kitchen table with them to let them cool.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," he said to Mrs. Furber. "When you screamed and ran out, I figured the wise thing to do was to stay here instead of running after you and maybe frightening you and the children even more."
He looked at the children in what he doubtless thought was a genial manner; but I knew too well that he was entertaining the same understandable thought that had passed through my headthat they would be tenderer to eat than Chips Bullock had been.
Mrs. Furber's initial horror was passing. "You can't have all that beef and vegetables you've put out on the table," she said sternly. "And just because you're starved is no reason you shouldn't eat like human beings." She brought a bowl and three plates, forked a moderate amount from the table top to each plate; then put the remainder in the bowl.
"Now," she said, "that's all you can have!"
"Ma'am," Neal said. "I'll ask you to put us in the room where we'll stay. We'd better eat there."
"Well I never!" Mrs. Furber exclaimed.
Neal scratched himself deliberately, first his head: then his arm.
"Well," Mrs. Furber said, "we'll put you in the barn. There's three stalls and a summer oven, and lots of hay and blankets. When you're cleaned up, we'll move you to the house."
There was a knock on the door. Mrs. Furber opened it to admit three menDr. Packer and two barbers.
The doctor took one look at us, then beckoned us to
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pick up our plates and follow him. To Mrs. Furber he said, ''Bring us hot water as often as you can. And get tubs. If you've only got one, borrow two from the neighbors."
I can hear Dr. Packer's voice, after all these years, exclaiming over our sores and over our feet. "It's a miracle," he said over and over. "I've got to send word to Boston! Urine and oakum? Seaweed? God knows! But it's a miracle, all the same!"
Warmth, blankets, soft hay on which to lie, clean bodies, shorn heads, shaved faces, white bandages, soothing ointments! I felt as the sailors of Ulysses must have felt, when freed of Circe's spell.
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The Last Chapter
I waked, the next morning, to the sound of jingling, faint and far off, couldn't remember where I was, and sat up straight on my hay-stuffed mattress, half frightened by not hearing the unending roaring of those Boon Island breakers: bewildered by my flannel nightgown, smelling of lavender. Lavender, of all things, instead of the stenches of our Boon Island tent! The jingling sound went on and on.
Captain Dean spoke up from the adjoining stall. "Sleigh bells! People moving around! Probably there'll be a few of 'em come to see us today. Probably they'll want to know all about us. We'd better decide on what we'll tell 'em about Neal."
"That's simple enough, isn't it?" I asked. "He learned to read and write while working for my father. And my father got to know him because Neal's father was in the Naval Hospital."
"Yes," Captain Dean said. "That's close enough. Are you listening, Neal?"
From a third stall Neal politely said he was.
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"Probably," the captain went on cheerfully, "we won't have occasion to say much. Shipwrecked sailors aren't a novelty nowadays, considering how our good country-men in Devon and Cornwall make a business of getting them wrecked. These New Hampshire people aren't much different, probably."
Probably! Probably!
How little Captain Dean knew about America, in spite of the high opinion he'd expressed to us in the harbor of Killybegs concerning the people of Portsmouth.
How little anyone, anywhere, knows about America! About its insatiable curiosity concerning the welfare of others! About its generous eagerness to help strangers achieve the same health and happiness that its own citizens enjoy! About its limitless resources: its enormous latent strength! And above all, about its friendliness to those who deserve its friendship: its implacable detestation of false men and evil measures!
Captain Furber came banging at the door that led from the barn to the woodshed, which in turn opened into the kitchen. With him he carried a kettle of fish chowder, three bowls, a ladle and three spoons.
"Haddock!" Captain Furber said portentously. "The Woman"and I took The Woman to be Mrs. Furber"cooks the heads and bones in one kettle, and the onions and potatoes and fish in another. Then she makes a mess of pork scraps, and breaks up some ship's bread, and mixes 'em all up with the liquor from the bones. Every sea captain in Portsmouth claims his wife makes the best fish chowder in the world, but I'll put The Woman's up against any of 'em. It's the liquor from the heads and the backbones that grows hair on your chest!''
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He ladled the stew into the bowls; then discoursed while we rolled that hot and fragrant chowder over our tongues, crunching the pork scraps through the soft and savory ship's bread, the tender haddock and the melting potatoes. My toes, what there were left of them, would have curled, if that had been possible, at the life-giving sweetness that trickled down my throat.
"The Woman," Captain Furber said, "makes fried pies that would stand a dead Indian right up on his feet. Doc Packer's in there now, eating fried pies. The Woman wanted me to take in a few for you, but Doc Packer said No. There's a couple of nurses coming overGovernor Wentworth authorized 'emand Doc Packer says maybe you can have one fried pie apiece along about four bells."
As a seeming afterthought he said, "There's been people coming around with stuff already, but Doc Packer says they can't come in till after he's looked at you. He says maybe some of 'em can come in after you have your dinner."
"What sort of stuff?" Captain Dean asked.
"Oh, knitted small clothes," Captain Furber said. "Linen shirts. Woolen stockings. Big parcel from Mrs. John Brewsterthe one that was scalped. Good woman. Got a silver plate in her head to close up a hatchet hole. Hair never grew back, so she wears a wig. Kind of starchy-looking woman, but she softens up considerably toward those who've been in trouble. I'll have a table brought in so you can spread things out on it."
Dr. Packer came in, followed by two women in gray dresses. One, the Widow Hubbard, was short and stout and had a luxuriant mustache. The other, Widow Macklin, was tall and cheerful-looking with a cast in one eye that
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made her seem to be examining a distant object when in reality she was looking straight ahead.
"Now then," Dr. Packer said to Captain Dean, "we'll have off these bandages. Colonel Pepperrell sent word he wants to see you as soon as you're fit to be seen. There's some others too. They want to hear all about it. How do they think I'll get around to seeing all my other patients if I yap, yap, yap all day about you!"
The nurses brought buckets and rags, stoked the fire, swept the barn floor and set up a table for the gifts Captain Furber had mentioned.
As the doctor sopped at our legs and feet with rags dipped in the concoction in one of the buckets, he rumbled fretfully about our condition. "Hurt much?" he asked. When we said No: no more than an aching tooth, he demanded further detail
s about the treatment our feet had received after the cutting off of our boots.
"There's something here I ought to get to the bottom of," he mumbled again and again. "You'd lost toenails when you cut off your boots, and some toes came off when you washed 'em in urine. Then you put on pieces of linen and some layers of oakum. Then you went out on the rock and kept getting your feet wet, and had no fire."
We said that was correct.
"Hurt much?" he asked again.
Captain Dean saidand Neal and I agreedthat the most painful of all was when we put our hands in water to loosen mussels. We tried to explain to him the excruciating agony that almost paralyzed us after the fifth or sixth immersion; but pain, of course, can't be described.
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"Mussels, now," the doctor said. "Could mussels have anything to do with it?"
We didn't know.
"And you ate seaweed every day," he ruminated. "Could seaweed be a remedy against frostbite?"
"I don't know why I made 'em eat seaweed," the captain said. "I knew we had to eat it. There wasn't much of anything else till Chips Bullock died. The fat from Chips's kidneys helped us a little. You'd better not forget to mention kidney fat if you make a report to those Boston doctors. It certainly eased the pain in our feet and legs."
"It's annoying," Dr. Packer said. "We can't go out to Boon Island and carry on experiments under the conditions you encountered, because in the first place nobody'd be such an idiot as to go there under those conditions; and in the second place, everybody that went would die before we found out anything. Exasperating!"
"How long before we'll be able to walk?" Captain Dean asked.
"Well," Dr. Packer said, "we could move you to an upstairs room today, if you felt you'd like to get out of this barn and into a comfortable bed."
"I don't want to," Captain Dean said. "I'd feel choked in a comfortable bed. I'd rather stay here, where we can practice walking again with only about half our feet."
Dr. Packer looked relieved. "That's the best thing to dostay where you'll be out from under foot, and handy to the privy."
"How's my brother?" Captain Dean asked. "How's the rest of 'em?"
"Your brother's all right," Dr. Packer said. "He's just
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the same as you. He lost toes, the same as you did; but when they fell off, they sort of healed themselves, just like those lizards down in Antigua, that shed their tails if you so much as look at 'em."
He pronounced it Antigga, so I knew he'd sailed thereprobably in one of Pepperrell's vessels.
"When can I see my brother?" Captain Dean asked.
"Since you'll stay here in the barn," Dr. Packer said, "I think I'll move him over here later today. I don't think much of the sailors he's with. If I tell 'em they can have a certain amount to eat, they eat three times as much."
"Saver and Graystock," the captain said. "I'll be glad to have Henry here where I can keep an eye on him."
The doctor eyed Captain Dean peculiarly. "You've got some others that'll bear watching," he said.
"I know," Captain Dean said. "Langman and Mellen and White."
"If I was you, I wouldn't trust 'em," Dr. Packer said.
The captain snorted. "I don't trust 'em as far as I could throw a whale by the tail."
From my earliest days I had seen, wherever I'd gone in England, beggars of all sorts pleading, imploring, praying for alms, for food, for cast-off clothing; but never had I seen generosity freely offered. Now, in Portsmouth, where beggars were unknown, I saw what I would never have believed, unless I had seen it with my own eyesan out-pouring of all the good things of this earth to people, strangers, who had suffered adversity during the same storms which had howled around the sheltered homes of their benefactors.
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Captain Furber complained and fulminated at the surplus offerings of money, piles of clothing, fur hats, flowered weskits, boots and shoes that accumulated in his best roomthe room unused, except for funerals and weddings, in the front left corner of every large Portsmouth house. No matter how rapidly Widow Hubbard and Widow Macklin sorted them into piles of threeone pile for ourselves, one for Langman, White and Mellen in the Motley house, and the third for Graystock, Saver and Gray in the Swaine housethey continued to accumulate, so that Captain Furber, at Neal's suggestion, tacked to his front door a card reading, "The Grateful Survivors of Boon Island Have More Than Enough."
Another thing for which Neal was responsible was the writing of letters of thanks to those who had left their names with their offerings. "People like to be thanked," Neal said, "but my father said most people forget to teach their children to say 'thank you.' So if Captain Furber will buy us some paper, I'll write the letters."
More people came to see us or call on us than I would have believed lived in Portsmouth. Merchants, sea captains, tavern keepers, King's Councillors, Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth, John Plaisted, Theodore Atkinson, Colonel William Pepperrell, Richard Nason, Robert Almory, Roger Swaine, Edward Toogoodfine men: the finest, barring my father and Captain Dean and Swede Butler, I ever met.
Every one of the men who called upon us without being turned away by Dr. Packer was solicitous about our welfare, and in a few weeks' time I had more offers of positions than I would have had in England in half a century.
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As for Neal, word had gone around concerning the manner of his father's death, and everyone who saw him was instantly seized with the idea of planning his future.
Colonel William Pepperrell and his partner Governor Wentworth came to call on our second day in Portsmouth. Everything, Governor Wentworth said, would be done for us, and at the expense of the Province of New Hampshire. We were entranced by his elegance, his affability, and the attentiveness with which he listened to our answers to his questions. His companion, Colonel Pepperrell, seemed more remotemore interested in scrutinizing the ceiling than in listening to us.
Then Colonel Pepperrell came again alone. Neal, when the colonel walked in, was sitting at our gift-table. The gifts had been pushed away from the end at which he sat, and his pen was scratching diligently at one of his many letters of thanks.
The colonel went to the table, picked up one of the letters and read it aloud:
"Hugh Gunnison, Esqre.
The officers and the crew of the Nottingham Galley wish to express to you their profound gratitude for your sympathy and your kindness to them after their rescue by the citizens of Kittery and Portsmouth from their bitter days on Boon Island.
"John Dean, Master"
Colonel Pepperrell was a broad, powerful man with a bulldog face, and he waved the letter exultantly. "Look at that! I read every word of it, easier than print! Takes
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two men to translate my writing." He narrowed his eyes at Neal. "Where'd you learn to write?"
Neal stood up. "In Greenwich, sir."
"He's to work for my father," I said, "in law and insurance."
"Law!" Colonel Pepperrell cried. "Quibble, quibble, quibble! That's no life for you, my boy! Here, sit down! Sit down! Dr. Packer said he had to trim off half your foot."
Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley Page 35