To Build A Shipt - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  For the first time in my life I understood what it felt like to be rooted to one place, to be stable, and it was a strange feeling. The next year, or maybe the year after, I planned to replace the greased paper at the window with real glass. I probably spent hours debating it all in my mind, worrying that real glass might change it, might spoil the present perfection, for I could not understand on what that perfection was based. Having something you love is a dangerous thing, because change becomes your enemy. Loving something, a man is the natural prey of fear.

  The summer of '52 was more like an explosion than a season. The dead and sullen skies gave way to the sun, as though Cod this year had decided to get along without any spring at all. The sun of June was like a razor, stripping off the crust of wet and dark we had lived with for endless months. Day after day it rolled up behind the Coast Range peaks, flooding them with fire, then pouring down across the half-moon bay like a tidal wave of heat and energy. The days were long and light, but went more quickly. There were suddenly ten thousand things a man wanted to do, and not enough time to begin any of them.

  I think it must be a thing that happens only in a country like Oregon, where the winter crushes you into the ground and makes you something only half alive. The rush of summer makes you ten feet tall, and you can stand in the morning and feel the strength roll up out of your belly, drawn by the power of the sun. The ferns of the river—bottom land rustled in the soft breezes that came sliding off the bay and whispered success success to anyone who had the ears to hear. I was twenty-three years of age, I had my first home, and I was stepping across the threshold of a brand-new life, so big I could hardly believe it. There are not many moments like that in the life of a man.

  I worked, I cleared, I planted seed potatoes, I plotted great things in the dusky sanctuary of my own cabin. It seemed unimportant that no man on the Bay had tasted bread or real coffee since January, that shoes were wearing out, that when a saw blade jammed and broke it was a catastrophe for all of us. There was a joy and a power in the air that made all these things seem minor.

  In the fall of that first year I met our lifeline to the Outside, Captain Means. Means was a tall and genial Yankee, trying to pass the time between cradle and grave as pleasantly as possible, by his own statement. He had no grand ambitions of becoming rich on the backs of us settlers, in spite of the thirty dollars a ton freight charge he made. When I thought of some of his stories of doubling Cape Horn, thirty dollars seemed little enough. It was just the way it was; everything was expensive these days. The time was gone when a man went into a new country without money, without contacts, without anything. The world had changed, and in the middle of the Nineteenth Century after Our Lord contact with the civilized world was the most important thing there was.

  Means brought in his freight every fall, and it was not enough, it was never enough. Others than myself had been caught up in the magic of the Bay, and settlers gradually came in from Outside to look it over. They always came in the summer, and of course there was not enough provision for the newcomers in the goods that had been ordered a full year before. We were short of everything. Our supplies were always a year behind our population. People drifted in, and by the middle of the winter the necessaries began giving out. Flour, coffee, sugar, clothing—one by one every item went in short supply and then became non-existent. We faced every spring the same way, hopelessly behind and as primitive as the year before. And so there were many who drifted right on out again. Some stuck, and I was one of them.

  Means did his best. He often brought more goods than had been ordered, but he was never able to predict how much would be needed. And there was a limit, certainly, to the degree he could personally finance the settlement of the Bay. Those who came in never had any cash money, no more than I had myself when I came. If they'd had money they'd have stayed home and spent it. Means knew it, but he did what he could, and there was no question in anyone's mind that our lives were dependent on the lone New Englander.

  In point of importance, Means' trade was more with the Indians than with us. It was natural—they had a great deal more to offer, and the rate of exchange was better. He paid one pint of whisky for ten salmon, and the whisky was diluted by half with water. This was a harmonious combination of good will and good business on the part of the Captain. As he said, strong liquor was notoriously damaging to the Indians, and humanitarianism dictated moderation. Then too, water was cheaper than whisky and bought just as many fish. It was very practical and well thought out, and benefited all.

  The winter '52-'53 passed. I will say little about it. It was an Oregon winter. The summer of '53 was bad. There was a heavy frost on the third day of July, which made our celebration of the Glorious Fourth almost dismal, if such a thing was possible. But more worrying than dancing was done. All of us were thinking about our potatoes, and wondering if they would survive. There were two more frosts in the course of that vicious summer, and while the potatoes survived, they were extremely-small. This was depressing, but as we had word that the rest of Oregon was even worse off we felt the Bay was good enough for us.

  There was the faintest suggestion of a cloud on my own well-being, but I wasn't certain if I really resented it or not. The plain fact was that after two years I had still not been able to satisfy my curiosity about Joe Champion, the man who lived in a tree. My terrible craving to see this thing with my own eyes remained as strong as ever, but I was blocked at every turn. I became very sensitive and determined on the subject.

  At first I had assumed it would all come about very naturally. But it never did, in spite of opportunities I skillfully created. For some reason I was quite ashamed of my enormous curiosity and didn't want anybody to know about it. They all seemed to take it for granted that Joe lived in a tree and I didn't want to appear any less worldly than Vaughn, say, who apparently never gave it a thought. I myself thought about it a lot. Again and again I went over the image in my mind, the image of him hanging upside down from his limb and looking around, until it was clearer to me than most of the things I had really seen in my life.

  But from all appearances, Joe didn't receive in his tree, and a man certainly couldn't say "I want to see you up your tree, Joe." At least I couldn't. The practical aspects of life in a tree tormented me; how did a man live when he lived in a tree? Didn't he ever get dizzy? Didn't he ever fall? Did he feel a companionship with the birds? The closest I ever got was by means of a sly question I had invented over long and brooding evenings. It was a question which would lead into conversation and explanation quite naturally, without my showing undue interest in how Joe lived. Very casually once, I asked him if he had a ladder, as though I wanted to borrow it or something. He said, "No."

  No. That was all. He didn't have a ladder. He must shinny up the damned thing every night of his life. What if he was tired? What if he was drunk? I didn't know. Maybe I would never know. It preyed on my mind.

  On the other hand, there is no denying that over the months Joe's tree became a cherished sort of thing for me. It gave me something to look forward to, for one thing. And above all—I suppose it will sound foolish, but it's true—it gave me a sense of mysterious purpose. I had the almost perpetual feeling that I was right on the edge of a discovery of enormous importance. The day I actually saw Joe up in his tree would be a day of huge significance. It would probably change the course of my life entirely, because I felt sure that I would understand things about the world I had not understood before. To touch this way of living, to cross the frontier of mysterious worlds, to be initiated into the secrets of the man who lived in a tree. No human being could remain unchanged by an experience like that. It was something I felt compelled to understand, to comprehend, and I knew that I would understand my own life the better because of it. If I could see it. If I could only see it. For better or worse, Joe's tree had become inextricably woven into my own sense of the meaning of the world. My life was unquestionably richer for it. And I suppose this sense of hidden worlds to be unveiled be
came more precious to me as our lives became—not more comfortable, perhaps, but more conventional, more civilized. By the winter of '53-'54 there was an actual mail service from Astoria, and we felt less isolated, less cut off from the Outside. It was not official, of course, but it was just as good as if the government had organized it. Once a month an Indian boy would go off up the beach to the post office at Astoria, a round trip of about a hundred and forty miles. For this journey he charged only five dollars, which was certainly worth the price. News from Outside was more precious than gold. As the Indians held writing in a kind of superstitious awe there was never any difficulty with our postman. They were all greatly impressed with the "talking-paper," as they called it. We assured our messenger that if he got drunk or did anything wrong, the "talking-paper" would surely tell us, and this was sufficient to prevent any mishaps.

  I myself never received any mail, as I had no one to write me. But I was in some obscure way as happy as the rest when the mail arrived; it was a kind of monthly holiday. For several days everyone was happy. I suppose it was simply the assurance that the Outside still existed. Living in the Bay, it was easy to doubt.

  I was thus astonished when Vaughn came knocking at my door just after the April mail in '54. He was clutching a letter in his hand and looking as miserable as I have ever seen a man look. Nobody should look that way just after the mail has come, it wasn't normal.

  "Vaughn, what's the—you look sick."

  He pushed past me and sat at the table in the center of my little room. It was the first time I had ever seen him speechless. He stared at the fire and fingered his letter. Several times he started to say something, and couldn't get the words out. Finally he slid the letter along the table and returned his attention to the fire. "Read it, Ben," he told me. "Just read it, is all."

  I picked it up and unfolded the sheet. On the outside it was addressed to MR. WARREN VAUGHN TILLAMOOK COUNTRY OREGON Hold at Astoria. The writing was beautiful and regular, written out by a real professional.

  At first I couldn't understand why Vaughn was so upset. It was just a dunning letter, asking for rapid settlement of some debts. There were always half a dozen of them in every mail. There was nothing to do with them but bleach out the paper so we could use it for our own letters. This one wasn't even very nasty, as some such were. They were in considerable haste, they said, to "settle the estate." It was not until the very end that I realized what "estate" they were talking about—and what it meant to us.

  Captain Means was dead.

  2

  Two nights later we got together at Vaughn's place, ten or fifteen of us. You would have thought we came for a burying, which was not too far from the truth.

  In the two days I had had to think about it, it seemed inevitable that a burying there would be, the interment of the Bay and everything it meant. It changed things for me. Until then the potato coffee and the bark linings of my shoes, the lack of bread and flour and sugar half the year—it had all been a damned nuisance, but tolerable. Tolerable because it was temporary, tolerable as a price to pay for the life I was building myself at the Bay. But now—it was wasted. If the Bay collapsed as a settlement, the inconveniences of the last two years were suddenly unbearable. I had wasted twenty-four months of my life, thrown it away. At times like that a man tends to forget the joys. Joy is a present thing; it changes a man and then is gone. But the hardships were for the sake of the future, they were an investment suddenly stolen from us.

  Vaughn's cabin had two rooms, which was why it was selected for the meeting. A mute line of men sat around the walls of the main room with the firelight flickering at their eyes and casting deep shadows at their cheeks. I think every man there was counting the cups of parched-potato coffee he had drunk in order to build something out of this Bay. For my own part I had never had any sense of Having A Mission to make a community here—not until the dream suddenly collapsed and slipped out through my fingers as Means' life had slipped away from him so many thousands of miles away. Beverly, Maine. Where the hell was Beverly, Maine? Why should something that happened there mean the end of everything here?

  The men in the cabin were those who had stuck. Through the rain and depression of the winters, the disastrous summer of '53, stuck through everything that had been thrown at them. They could not give up the Bay now, for in doing so they would admit they had been fools to stay as long as they had.

  "Well, boys," Vaughn said. "What do we do now?" He was slumped at the table, in the center, his hands in his pockets and his legs outstretched.

  Eb Thomas cleared his throat.."Seems like the question is, where do we go, now."

  "Hell, we can make it," I said. "What do we need Means for? We can pack stuff down from Astoria, we can make it somehow."

  "Next time you go, Ben, bring me a hundred pounds of flour, two hundred of sugar and a cast-iron stove. If you got room in your pack."

  "Eb's got horses."

  "How many horses you figure it takes to make a shipload?"

  The rest of the men looked hopefully at me while I was talking, then away.

  "There's other captains than Means," somebody said.

  "Yeah, but I'm damn scared they're all smarter than him too," Vaughn said. "You know there's not one in a thousand'll risk his vessel on our bar. There's enough business on the Columbia that no man has to risk himself to take off our little bit of stuff. We hit it lucky with Means. Now we hit it unlucky, is all."

  "Luck, hell," one of the men muttered. "This here Bay's cursed, nothin' works right. There ain't no way in, there ain't no way out. It's a goddam prison is what it is, a damn green prison."

  "Get the hell out, then," another man snapped. "You don't want to ante up, get out of the game."

  "All right, all right," Vaughn said. "That ain't doin' no good."

  "He don't have to—"

  "A1l right, all right."

  In my mind there was no way to avoid seeing that the first man was right in a way. You could look at the Bay as a prison. But in my belly I was with the second; prison it might be, but it was ours, and all we had.

  Whatever the reality might be, we had our image and it was the image that made us jump.

  "If we had a ship of our own——"

  "We wouldn't of been payin' thirty dollars a ton to Means in the first place," Vaughn finished for him. "We ain't got one. Less'n one of you boys got eight or ten thousand dollars stacked away home."

  "Jesus god, would a ship cost that much?"

  "Tell you the truth," Vaughn admitted, "I don't know. But it'd cost what we ain't got, money. The figures don't make no mind."

  "Hell," I said, trying to cheer things up a little. "I know where there's one we could have for free."

  "Where's that?"

  "Up the other side of Neahkahnie Mountain. Name of the Shark. She needs a little work, though."

  It was good enough for a grin, at least. The Shark was a British man o' war that had run aground about ten years before up on the Columbia bar. She broke up and a part of her drifted clear down around Neahkahnie. The people from Clatsop Plains had made off with the copper bolts that were left and burned the wood. There was still a lot of iron up there and the image of this rusty junk as the solution to our problems was absurd enough to cut some of the mean and evil feeling in the air.

  "If that's what you want," Vaughn said, "there's a whole half a ship lyin' down at Netarts Bay, and she only busted up in '51."

  "Can't call that seaworthy," I said.

  "No," Vaughn admitted. "Right now she ain't much more'n pieces of rust tied together with imagination."

  "Just stick a little wood in there between the rust and you'd never know the difference," I said negligently.

  "Not much."

  "Wood we got," someone else said bitterly. "I damn near broke my back clearin' today. Listen, Ben, you couldn't give me a hand one of—"

  He broke off, because Vaughn had suddenly lurched up from the table and was staring ahead of him as if he'd seen a dead man
come to life. We all followed his eyes, but there was nothing to see but the wall.

  "Listen," he said. "Listen, we'll do it."

  "Do what, what the hell are you—"

  "We'll build a ship. We'll build our own goddam ship!"

  He wheeled around, excited. "Listen, you said it. There's fittings lyin' around on the goddam beach! There's ships been breakin' up on this coast for a couple hundred years and half of 'em drift down here to get buried. Wood we got, you said that, you said it all, we got everything we need, we'll build our own damn ship!"

  He was so excited he hopped. The rest of us were simply—stunned. "We'd been horseplaying, was all, to take our minds off the misery of having to leave the Bay. Now the joke had turned into something else, suddenly, and we didn't know what to make of it.

  "Everything we got, except brains. VVhat the hell do I know about building boats? I plow, is what I do."

  "Sam!" Vaughn hollered, still hopping. "Sam Sam Sam! He knows all about it, it's his trade, he knows it all. We'll do it, we'll do it!"

  I began to get excited, too. When Vaughn started jumping, everybody started jumping, it was his personality that did it. You could see it on their faces, you could see the idea igniting powder. The sullen-faced farmers looked at each other in astonishment and tried to figure it all out. We all started jabbering at once, and out of the boiling there came the question that really counted.

  "But will Sam do it?"

  "He'll do it," Vaughn said confidently. "He's no deserter, not Sam."

  "Deserter, deserter? Hell, Vaughn, I can't follow you nine-tenths of the time. This ain't the army or nothing?"

  "By god it is!" Vaughn said, standing very straight at the table. "I hereby declare WAR!" He slammed his fist down on the table, WHAM, and it shook on its legs and we were almost deafened.