Captain Adam

by Chidsey, Donald Barr, 1902-1981

  "A fine way to go and meet your Creator," he told himself after a

  while, and he forced himself to get up and make one more trip around the island.

  He was glad when the sun went down. He reckoned that this would be the last time he'd watch that happen, but he was glad all the same, for the sun had been merciless.

  He went back to the center of the island, to that pathetic little well that contained the threads from his shirt, the least-soft stones, the belt buckle. He lay down.

  It must be that he slept, after all; for when he was stung in the palm of an outflung hand he sat up suddenly, blinlcing, bewildered. It burned. But what could sting him here? What animals, what insects could there be?

  He must seek them out. There might be a smitch of wetness in each. He must somehow catch them.

  Then he was stung again in the same hand, and immediately afterward on his forehead, and on his chin. The truth came: It was rainins)-

  mHe sprang to his feet, flinging off his clothes. All around him beautiful luscious large wet drops of water were biffing the sand and rubble—and were instantly lost. He spread his clothes out so that no part of one article would overlap the other, and then threw himself on the ground, where he lay now on his back, now on his belly, but always, in moving, rolling to a fresh spot, so that he could squeeze the under side of his body as close as possible to whatever moisture the earth might have soaked up, while the upper side was being doused from above. He laughed and wept at the same time.

  It was no more than a shower but it was a heavy one. Twice Adam wrung his clothes out above his gaping mouth; yet when the rain ceased they were blessedly soaked once more.

  He rose. He felt wonderful, and was even singing.

  He had been a fool for fussing with the possibilities of fire while ignoring the chance of rain. What he should have done was collect every shell and even every flat stone with any sort of concave surface, and have these ready, tilted toward Heaven, waiting. He would do this now. There still was precious water in his clothes, water that should be stored away before the sun rose.

  The shower had scrubbed the sky but there was no moon, only star-

  shine. Nevertheless Adam Long searched every square inch of that island, moving on hands and knees. He gathered more than thirty shells, a few of them little bigger than thimbles. He placed them in a series of circles around his "fireplace" in the middle of the island, where the boldest encroaching wave couldn't reach them.

  By this time the sun was up, and he knew that his treasure would not keep unless it was somehow shaded. He squeezed the clothes out for the third time, catching the water, treating each pear-shaped prize with a solicitude virtually sacerdotal.

  Afterward he put the damp clothes on, except his undershirt, and they felt good against his no-longer-itchy skin: they even stirred him to shiver a bit, at first.

  He fetched a great deal of seaweed, which he laid out to dry. He uprooted more grass. Weaving now one of these materials and now the other, and sometimes the two together, he experimented with thatch. His undershirt was spread over the thickest of the muddle of shells-with-water, but it was by no means large enough, and anyway he sought a substitute, an alternate, for he told himself that no good mariner would set forth without at least one spare suit of sails.

  His fingers soon were slippery with sweat, his back ached, and he was dizzy, swaying where he sat, sometimes missing a stroke entirely: he seemed to have lost all sense of distance. His stomach hurt, too, though surely there was nothing left in it either to bring up or to pass off.

  After a while his hands began to shake, and he couldn't even see what he was working on. He put the flimsy thing down, and opened and shut his hands very hard several times. It did no good. Mumbling like a pig, sometimes sobbing a mite, he covered the filled shells. He remembered doing that. Afterward he must have collapsed: he must have toppled over like a drunkard, to lie still.

  When he woke it was dark, and he was in the same place, probably in the same position, excruciatingly stiff, and even more hungry and thirsty than before.

  He saw at once that his thatch mat had been blown away, exposing the shells, some of which had been tipped, while into others sand had drifted, sopping up the water. However, at least a dozen remained, and he drank the contents of two of these very slowly, carefully.

  He rose, and began to go around the island again, seeking more grass and more seaweed.

  ". . . the night cometh, when no man can work more." What was that: John? Luke? It was one of the Gospels anyway. With Adam Long it was the other way 'round: when the day came, when the sun rose again, ferocious and triumphant, Adam, stunned by its heat, moved sluggishly when he moved at all. Only in the night could he work. Even

  then he doddered, unsure of himself, barely crawling from place to place, so that he must have looked like an old, old man, if there had been anybody to see him.

  This was the time of dreams, whether day or night. There were hours on end when he was not sure whether he slept or was awake, indeed when he wasn't even sure he was not dead—and didn't care. Never morbid, yet sometimes he had thought about death, as every man should. He had pondered chiefly the physical aspects of it, wondering what the sensation would be. When you died would you instantly have a different feeling, no limbs, no skin, but be a soaring soul that could not collide wdth anything, couldn't bump? Would you shoot upward, making for Heaven with a speed that would have killed a living person? As you neared the Judgment Seat—horizontally? rising?—would there be a great roaring in your ears and would your face be flayed by a terrible light? Maybe it wouldn't be anything like that at all? Maybe you'd simply, quietly, without any movement, realize that you were there? Adam did not know. All he knew was that if death was anything like what he was now, it was a most uncomfortable state to be in; and in fact he wished fervently that if he was alive he'd die, whereas if he was dead it would change. In all solemnity he would rather take his changes in the everlasting Place of Punishment than go on this way.

  Again and again he crept to the sea and submerged himself, permitting the brine to dry on his body afterward. It never gave him any relief, but still he did it.

  A couple of times, when he could not contain himself, he tried to swallow sea water. Each time he brought it up, violently, and retched for a long while afterward, which weakened him even further.

  He worked as much as he could, mostly at night. He made the center of the island his headquarters, and with his bare hands scooped out a sort of crater there, the walls some three feet high. This would keep his fire—if he ever got a fire—from being wuffed out in the first breeze. It gave him a little later shade in the morning, a little earlier shade in the afternoon. He also continued his efforts to weave some sort of blanket or hat or cover, but these were flimsy objects at best and not to be relied upon.

  It dismayed him to learn that he could seldom read from the Book. He had counted upon the Book to be a substantial support in his last hours; and a feeling of warm delight, almost of bliss, had flooded him when the pirates conceded him this possession. But now he found that at night, even when the moon was out, he could not read without a great watering of the eyes, something that had never happened to him before, and which blurred his vision, smearing the words; whereas in the daytime the glare of the sun was so fierce that it caused his head to feel as though 250

  something was bounding and thumping around inside of it, and when he looked at the Book it seemed far, far away, held by hands that could not possibly be his, as though he was looking at it and at the hands through the wrong end of a spyglass. He had this same eerie feeling when he tried to weave grass and strands of seaweed in the daytime: he could see his hands 'way down there, and watch the fingers move clumsily, but they didn't seem to bear any relation to Adam Long himself. At another time this would have given him the creeps, this unnatural sensation. Now it only saddened him. He shook his head. He did read from the Book anyway, but it wasn't really reading, rather holding the thing
there and looking down toward it with his eyes half closed, while he murmured and mumbled verse after verse that he knew by heart.

  The dreams were not horrible. They didn't soothe; and indeed many seemed downright silly; but at least they didn't scare him. They were about Newport.

  Before there was a tavern in that town some of the men had used to sit around out at Gibson's mill, and talk about things—talk gravely and slowly, their voices increased in volume in order to be heard over the sound of the turning stones, but not high-pitched—while, whenever he found a chance, the Duchess' brat, unnoticed in a corner, listened. Adam could hear the swish of water, the rumble-bumble of the stones, the grain's slow crunch, and through it all the voices of the serious men of Newport, seriously stating their views: he could hear these more clearly than he heard the slap of waves on the shore—even when he opened his eyes to peer once more at a wobbly horizon, he could hear the sounds and he could smell the dry clean smells and feel the coolness of Gibson's mill.

  There was a place where some of the men had built a plank bridge over Pittasquawk Creek, and sometimes when he was on an errand out that way, carrying or fetching something for Mr. Sedgewick, the Long boy had used to nip under this bridge for a little while. There wasn't much room, and he'd sit with his knees scrounched up underneath his chin, not doing anything, not fishing, or even thinking, just sitting there. No matter how warm the day, it had always been cool under the Pittasquawk bridge. Sunlight slipping between the planks used to lie in strips across the satin surface of the water, which otherwhere was dark—though not so dark that you couldn't see into its depths. Adam used to stare at the smooth small shiny stones down there, and at a frog which, submerged, would stare soberly back at him. The frog had such sticky-out eyes that they looked as if they might break off and go rolling away. It never moved, unless an oxcart went over the bridge, setting up a great banging of the planks and causing dust to sift down through the slits and onto the water. This always frightened the frog, which disappeared. It used to

  frighten the Long boy, too, but he'd stay where he was all the same; and after a while the echoes would die, the dust would be carried languidly away, the strips of sunlight on the surface of the water would straighten themselves, and the frog, reassured, would come back and would sit down again and would stare long and seriously at Adam Long, who'd stare back. It was better than fishing, any day.

  This was the sort of dream he'd dream, if dreaming it was.

  There was always coolness in it, often snow. For instance, when he'd seem to see again the men filing into the meeting house for town meeting, it was always in wintertime and there was snow on the ground. He could hear them scrape it from their boots over the wooden scrapers or kick it off against the end of the steps. He'd remember, too, how he used to scratch his initials and pictures into the rime of a windowpane—not so much the appearance of these scratchings as the sound his nail made and the feel of the writing clear up his forearm. He'd used to try to tramp out his initials, "A.L.," on the grass of a frosty morning, too. That never worked well, but it did make a delightful clinky crinkly sound under his feet. And what in this world gives more glee and satisfaction than the writing of your initials into snow with your own steaming urine at night? He didn't have any "i" to dot, as some of the kids did. Or else Adam would remember, and vividly, how on the way home from school afternoons when there was snow they would dare one another to "make an angel" by falling backward into a drift with arms outspread.

  Sometimes he was asleep while things hke this sauntered smokelike through his mind, and sometimes he might have been awake. When you were dying anyway it didn't make much difference.

  ^^Cy It could have been on the third night, more likely it was the

  J ^ fourth, that he heard the sound.

  He was lying on his back, arms folded over his breast, while he studied the starry sweep of Heaven. Now and then he would close his eyes, then open them again, groggily amazed that he was still alive. He hoped that it wouldn't rain, since rain might keep him breathing for hours longer, conceivably even for another day; and he didn't want that. He was ready to die now. He truly hoped that it would be tonight, and believed it would. He didn't want to see the sun rise again. He hated the sun.

  The sound changed everything. He sat up. He wouldn't have supposed a minute before that he'd be able to sit up again. His heart beat fast.

  It was a scrapy sound, underlaid by a tinkle of tiny pebbles being 252

  batted together, the whole suggesting that a heavy object was being dragged in a slow and furtive manner across the beach. It was steady: it did not stop and start.

  He could not see what caused it, for the sound came from one of the few stretches of beach not visible from his headquarters here in the center of the island; but it was not far away.

  The sea all around was completely clear, it was blank. But he could still hear that sound.

  He crept toward it. He peered over the top of a small dune—just in time to see something low but very wide and ponderous plop into the water and disappear.

  The Devil? It was his first thought, of course, but he quickly discarded it. Everybody knew that the Evil One had a fondness for appearance in the guise of something that retreats, thus luring his humanly inquisitive victim toward him. Nor did Adam think himself so pure that he was impervious to the Devil. What he had done with Elnathan Evans remained on his conscience, for instance, as did indeed, though to a lesser extent, since it was different here, what he had done with Maisie. He was not prepared, the way a man ought to be, to meet his Maker. But he was as much prepared as he could be, now.

  No, it wasn't arrogance but just the opposite quality, that of humbleness, which caused Adam to dismiss the thought that the Devil might be pursuing him. That the Duchess' brat should be at heart veritably humble was a notion many a Newporter would have larded with scorn, for in Newport they esteemed him a cocky lad. Yet it was the truth that Adam Long did not think himself of sufficient importance to attract such a personage as the Prince of Darkness to an out-of-the-way place. He knew that in the eyes of God one immortal soul is equal to another, any other; and because he was a man he had a soul, howsoever battered it might be. He knew, too, that Satan or any of Satan's more reputable minions could travel astounding distances in almost no time at all, moved of course by magic. But even then he didn't believe that he was about to be tempted. The Devil had better things to do—or, to put it another way, worse things.

  A boat? He had perhaps wildly hoped this, for a split-second. But a boat doesn't slip quietly out of sight into the sea.

  A log seemed most likely; and if that's what it had been he ought to get down there and be ready to catch it when it was rolled up on shore again. But it did not come back. There was no break in the water except what the little waves made. A log would—

  Suddenly it flashed upon Adam what he had seen.

  A turtlel

  They come big in those waters, some of them a quarter of a ton, and

  to anybody's taste they're a delicacy. Adam had eaten green turtle many times at Providence, where it and buccan, smoked beef, were favored food. He knew nothing about how they were caught or how butchered, but he did know that there was a great deal of meat in a turtle. There would be a great deal of blood, too.

  The thought of that blood must have dizzied him even beyond his ordinary state of confusion, for he squatted there staring at the place where the turtle had disappeared for many minutes before he began to ask himself why it had come out of the sea in the first place. Well, he had heard that the female turtle goes ashore only to lay her eggs, which she buries in the sand. Eggs! Slavering, shaking like a man with a fever, he crept down to the beach. But though he crawled for hours, his face close to the sand, peering, squinting, sniffing like a dog that seeks a buried bone, he could find no trace of eggs or a nest.

  The moon rose, but Adam didn't rely on his eyesight. He dug with his hands. Again and again he ran sand and stones through his fingers. He div
ided that whole section of the beach into imaginary squares, and riffled each, and patted it. He enlarged his field. Having been over it once, he went over it again. His fingers cut, his eyes watering, he sobbed —but he continued to search. The dreams were gone now. He scrabbled.

  Even when the sun came back, he did not cease to work. He didn't even go to the center of the island for his hat, a carelessness that was his undoing. He never truly quit that task. He simply became aware, after a while, that he was no longer working and was in fact lying flat. His head was a turmoil of pain. If he'd had anything to be sick with, he would have been violently sick; as it was, his innards hurt like fire. All his muscles ached, all his bones and joints. He rolled over—it took mighty near all of his strength—and learned that the sun his enemy was low.

  He wanted to give up. He wanted just to close his eyes and relax, drifting into death the way they say a man does when he freezes.

  He didn't. Somehow he struggled to his knees again, and somehow went back and forth over the beach, setting it to rights, filling holes he had made, smoothing the surface, straightening the sand, tidying. There wasn't any nest. That turtle somehow had been scared away. It might come back tonight. Do turtles smell? They certainly see. This one, if it returned, must note no change.

  Each movement an exquisite agony, Adam dragged himself to the leeward end of this beach, where he lay on his belly, placing sharp stones under his chin in an effort to keep himself from relaxing. He watched the beach. He watched— He didn't stir, but just lay there looking along that beach, striving to keep his eyes open. He did not think of anything save those eyes. He believed that his pain was too acute to let him sleep,