The Boatmaker

by John Benditt

  As the brothers’ meals shrink to nothing, the snow subsides. The days begin to be more than a brief interlude between acts of darkness. Tentatively at first, the animals leave the barns. The earth unfreezes. Snow comes again, but not as heavily, and it melts quickly. The brothers walk the fields, seeing where fences need repairing. They plan the first plantings and prepare to move the bees back out under the trees.

  One evening, as they prepare for the evening meal, Father Robert joins them. The priest has not joined the brothers for a meal in weeks and has done so only occasionally over the winter. The boatmaker is far from the inner circle of the New Land, but even he has heard the murmured gossip from Neck and one or two others. Some say the priest has been fasting much of the winter—not every day, but many days in a row. Others say he is not fasting at all, that he is gone for long periods to the capital, where he meets in secret with supporters of the New Land: wealthy and powerful benefactors who believe in the priest and his mission of purging, renewal and purification.

  When the priest enters the hall, he does look thinner to the boatmaker’s eyes. He was never fat, but his face, which had been rounded, is more sharply defined, his eyes a heightened blue like the sky of a perfect summer day. He is pale, but it is a paleness underlain by fire.

  “Brothers,” he says, towering over them where they sit at their benches, “kneel and pray with me.”

  There is a shuffling of sandals and benches as thirty or more monks stand and then kneel as a herd.

  “Father, hear our prayer from this New Land dedicated to You. The season for planting draws close. We ask You to make us ready, not only to sow but also to receive seed. We would be fertile in Your name, Father—this land and these men. Bless the beasts of the field whom You have entrusted into our care. Bless us, who have placed ourselves in Yours. Give us Your Grace so that this harvest is fruitful. Bring us a yield beyond what earthly hands can make, what earthly eyes can see. Grant our request that this season be the beginning of a special planting, cultivation and harvest. In Your name, amen.”

  “Amen” rumbles from the throats of the kneeling monks in an unmusical chorus. The boatmaker, who bows his head only sometimes during prayers, and rarely keeps his eyes closed, has the feeling Neck is watching him.

  Not long after Father Robert’s prayer, the rituals of plowing and sowing begin. The brothers work long hours, collapsing exhausted at night with little conversation, sometimes dispensing even with prayers and reading from the Gospels. When the planting is done, there is a lull, and the brothers sleep deeply in the fresh spring nights. The days lengthen and warm; female animals are heavily pregnant.

  As the first shoots come out of the earth, the boatmaker finds in himself a love for what is growing from the earth that he has never known before. In particular, the lettuces draw him. There are six or seven varieties, from small mottled dark-green leaves that will form a head no bigger than a man’s fist all the way to big pale floppy heads that will be capable of filling a child’s arms when they are ripe. Each variety forms in its own way and at its own pace. The way each one knows exactly what it is fascinates the boatmaker.

  He spends hours making sure that each plant has a good mound of dirt around it, that each pyramid is moistened at the right time, that caterpillars and slugs are picked off young plants, chopped to pieces and returned to the earth. He fights an ongoing war with insects and with hares. Some nights he sits under a big oak near the lettuce field, dozing, shotgun across his knees, waiting for the hares. But they rarely appear when he is there.

  During the day, Neck comes to him carrying a heavy old wooden bucket with a ladle in it. The water is drawn from a small springhouse enclosing a spring that bubbles up at all seasons within a low circle of stone. Neck stops to offer the boatmaker cool, clear water and chat before moving on to his next task.

  Though the misshapen man is not the brightest or shrewdest brother on the New Land, he seems to have more of the confidence of the young priest than anyone else. At Father Robert’s order he goes all over the community, even into the capital. And everywhere he goes, Neck carries his belief in Father Robert. His faith in the priest and his cause is a light that connects all the brothers. To the eye, Neck seems like a creature from underground: neckless, snuffling and blind. Yet he is capable of bringing light up into the day where other men, less broken, dwell.

  Aside from Neck, offering cool springwater from his bucket, the boatmaker talks to few of the brothers. Yet he is never alone. Around him the others are tending vegetables, orchards, goats, the chickens in their runs, the bees in their hives under a grove not far from where he walks slowly up and down the rows of lettuces with his hoe and watering can.

  At their meals, which are growing steadily richer with the fruits of the season, the brothers listen to the Gospels. On Sundays they gather in the white church to hear Father Robert preach in front of the big round window with its polar map. The priest returns again and again to the virtues of silence and obedience, which go together like root and leaf. But as he listens, the boatmaker does not feel obedient. He knows he may never be, no matter how hard he tries. Silence, however, is in his nature. It is one of the reasons being at the New Land makes him feel he has come home.

  As the year turns forward and the lettuces bloom, Father Robert shows special interest in the New Land’s newest brother. From time to time he invites the boatmaker up to his office overlooking the central square. His office is on the second floor of the administration building, the only stone building on the grounds, quite old, made of the same dark brown stone used to build the Mint and many of the other royal buildings in the capital. When Neck calls him, the boatmaker tilts his hoe into his wheelbarrow, brushes his hands on his robe and walks slowly through fields now green and lush, past the springhouse, past the chapel, into the square.

  He climbs stone stairs to the second floor and enters the office. The priest is sitting behind a heavy desk of dark mahogany. He looks up as the boatmaker comes in, puts some papers in a folder, closes it and gestures the boatmaker to sit. A carafe and tumblers stand on a side table of the same dark wood.

  The priest gets up, fills a glass and hands it to the boatmaker. Moisture condenses in fat drops on the rounded glass ridges of the pitcher. The water from the spring is cold and delicious, with a metallic taste from deep in the earth. The priest goes back behind his desk and sits down. Father Robert never seems to hurry; his deliberate movements are part of his power. Often in the priest’s presence the boatmaker feels he is being weighed and measured. That makes him suspicious. Yet he is grateful to Father Robert for bringing him to the New Land: for the calm, for the silence, the brotherhood—and because he feels no need to drink.

  As he drinks his springwater, the boatmaker takes in the secretary against the wall behind the priest. It is a beautiful piece of work, probably a hundred years old and taller than a man. Most of the wood is walnut, inlaid with oak and woods the boatmaker has never seen, from trees that do not grow on the Mainland. Above are shelves behind glass-fronted doors, held by a lock with an old-fashioned key protruding. Below the shelves is a desk. The writing surface folds up to conceal drawers and pigeonholes.

  “You like this secretary?” asks the priest, bringing the tips of his fingers together in front of his chest to form a globe.

  The boatmaker says nothing.

  “Of course you do. You are a man of wood—and it is a beautiful piece of work. From the famous House of Lippsted, no less.” He looks intently at the man from Small Island.

  The boatmaker is silent. He says nothing. The priest continues as if he has not expected an answer.

  “Yes, a beautiful piece of work. Not a nail, not a screw in it. No metal but the key, lock and hinges for the doors. Made not just with wood—but with secrets. Clever. Clever as the devil. Ironic that it should be here.” The priest smiles a knowing smile and swivels to face the secretary.

  The two men, one blond, one dark, look into their own reflections in the glass-fronted
doors, as if this piece of furniture, with its immaculate craftsmanship, made in a workshop thirty miles away, could tell them why they are sitting here.

  “If only the Jews had stuck to making furniture,” says the priest, swiveling to face the boatmaker, “we would all be so much better off. But they cannot stay away from money.”

  The boatmaker has no more interest in Jews and money. When he came to the New Land he left all those questions behind.

  “But I didn’t ask you here to talk about furniture. Or about the Jews. Or even about the House of Lippsted. I wanted to find out how you are doing on the New Land.”

  “I am grateful to you, Father, for bringing me here.”

  “So you have said. And that is a worthy sentiment. But before long you may have a chance to show your gratitude in a more concrete way.”

  “More concrete?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “That is a longer conversation. For another time,” says the priest. He leans back in his chair, brings his fingertips together in the globe. The look he had in the hospital returns: an evaluation of the boatmaker against a great body of unshared knowledge.

  The boatmaker has intense feelings for the young priest. Gratitude. Devotion. A willingness to do anything for the man who brought him here to the green shoots of lettuce, the springhouse and the silent companionship of his brothers. He feels embarrassed at how little of this he is able to express. He knows he has said before that he is grateful. Why can’t he say more of what he feels? He knows he is stubborn. He is sure he is far from being saved.

  “We will speak soon, my son,” the priest says, his blue eyes sharp. “Until then, do me one favor.”

  “What is that, Father?”

  “Please pay close attention to your dreams.”

  “My dreams?”

  “You do dream, don’t you? I think everyone does, from time to time.”

  “Yes, sometimes.” From his life, the boatmaker remembers only a few dreams, the dream of the blue wolf by far the most important.

  “As a favor to me, pay close attention to your dreams. When you have something to tell me, you may come here at any time.”

  As he stands to leave, the boatmaker notices something he hadn’t seen when he entered. On a corner of the broad mahogany desk is a copy of The Brotherhood, the newspaper the tall man at the Mint was reading. He wants to ask the priest about the paper: who publishes it, who reads it, what connects the violent man at the Mint to this young man of peace. He stops himself. There is a barrier around Father Robert that does not invite questions. The boatmaker walks out and down the stairs, sweating under his robe.

  It is a fine day. Hot and spacious, good for things that are growing. In the field, the lettuces are green and strong, anticipating summer. The boatmaker walks between the heads, some light, some mottled, some dark. He is still moved by the young leaves. His feelings for them are different from the feelings he has for wood. Wood calls him to shape, act, make: It calls forth his power. The lettuces he simply allows to have their way, providing as much of the right soil and moisture as he can, protecting them from insects and hares. The rest, they do on their own.

  As he goes up and down the rows of leaves, thinking about the talk he has just had with the young priest, he sees the hare has been back. Some of the young heads are gone. Some show scalloped indentations. The boatmaker decides he will spend the night under the oak tree near the field, with a shotgun in the lap of his robe. There will be a large moon. And it should be clear, a good night to put an end to the hare once and for all.

  He has come to believe there is only one hare: a big gray-brown animal, a cunning trespasser, a wily survivor who knows enough not to take everything at once, never to be seen in daylight. Although the brothers do not eat the animals they raise, a hare is different. It would go a long way in the kitchen. Even the fur would be useful as a collar for Father Robert’s cloak in winter, soft brown and white against black wool almost as fine as silk.

  The boatmaker feels rather than hears Neck come up behind him with the bucket. He turns around, and the neckless man offers him springwater. He takes one ladle, then another. When Neck turns to go toward the springhouse to refill his bucket, the boatmaker puts down his hoe and walks with him. They pass the beehives, which are under the trees and out of direct sunlight. A brother wearing heavy gloves and a veiled helmet moves slowly among the hives, holding a piece of honeycomb. The bees’ low hum mixes with the wind in the trees.

  Inside the springhouse it is dark and quiet, with the smell of wood that is always wet. The men take off their robes, get down on their knees, reach into the clear cold spring, splash themselves, then sit on the low stone wall surrounding the water, wearing only sandals. They sit awhile in silence, listening to the water gurgle. “What did the father say?” Neck asks.

  “He asked me to attend to my dreams.”

  “He did?” Neck seems interested. The incline of his head is now just right, like a stopped clock at the moment it is correct.

  “I don’t dream much. I don’t want to disappoint him.”

  “You won’t disappoint him. Father Robert is rarely wrong. He sees more than others do in us—because he loves us.”

  The boatmaker considers this for a moment. Then he asks: “How did you come to be here?”

  “Like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was in hospital—the one you were in. Maybe even the same room. I’m not sure. This was quite a few years ago. I was still a boy. And already I wasn’t a beauty. Never did have much of a neck.” He laughs.

  “I was kicked in the head by a horse on my father’s farm. So now, not only do I not have a neck, but my head is permanently off to one side. And not only that, even if I recover and live, maybe I won’t be right in the head. Not that I was so very swift before.” He laughs a laugh without bitterness.

  “While I was in the hospital, my parents decided they had had enough of me. God will forgive them. They had enough troubles already. Plenty of troubles.”

  The boatmaker is angry at the cowardice of Neck’s parents, surprised that his friend is not. The two men get up and put on their robes. Neck fills his bucket and they step out of the springhouse and stand in the sun. The warmth feels good after the cold water.

  “Father Robert found me in the hospital and brought me here when I was healed enough to come. The New Land was just starting. There were only a few brothers. All that was here was the main building. Father Robert made all of this happen,” Neck says, gesturing to the fields with his ladle.

  “He’s powerful, you know. And I don’t just mean spiritual power. He has that. But he has more. I know he seems like he’s just a young priest, but he gets things done. In the real world. He has powerful friends. He is pure—but not unworldly. He knows a great deal that you and I can only guess at. And we don’t need to know. He knows it for us. Don’t worry about disappointing him. He sees who you are. I’m sure of it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have asked what he asked.”

  That night the boatmaker sits under the oak tree, shotgun on his knees, waiting for the cunning old hare to show itself. He doesn’t care for guns: the noise, the way they jump. He prefers tools for working in wood, which make no sound and respond to the pressure of a hand. If you work with those tools long enough, they become part of you, like an arm or a finger. He can’t imagine a shotgun ever becoming part of him. Still, every man on Small Island knows how to use one. And he’s not unhappy to have the weight of it in his lap as he sits between the roots of the oak, promising himself he will stay awake until the hare appears. It’s a warm clear night with a yellow moon, almost full, rising over the lip of the earth. The wind whispers the oak leaves. The bees are quiet.

  He wakes with a start under the fat moon, now up over the horizon and turning silver. A big brown hare is making his way between the green heads, snuffling and chewing forward. In waking, the boatmaker must have made a sound, because the hare leaps away in a huge bound. The
boatmaker raises the shotgun and fires at the place where the hare was, then discharges the other barrel out of sheer disgust at himself for having fallen asleep. Wisps of smoke curl toward the moon.

  As he sits holding the cooling gun, he realizes he has woken out of a powerful dream. In his dream he was alone in the springhouse. The water was the same as in daylight: clear and gurgling. But a huge round wooden pole, like one of the posts of the telegraph the king is sending into every corner of the kingdom, rose out of the earth next to the spring. The post went up high into the darkness near the roof. The legs and feet of a man tied to the pole were hanging down.

  The boatmaker cannot see the face or the upper body, hidden in darkness near the roof of the springhouse, but he knows that it is Jesus Christ, dressed in the robe of a brother on the New Land. The robe lifts slowly of its own accord to reveal calves, knees and feet. In each calf the flesh has opened like a wound. But there is no blood. Instead, salmon spill from the parted flesh, first one or two, nosing their way out, then more and more until an entire school is pouring, falling with a continuous splash into the spring. The far wall of the springhouse lifts, and the boatmaker can see that the spring now extends all the way to the sea. The salmon, thousands now, a gigantic school, roil the water, thrashing and swimming, breaking the surface in a spray that covers their flashing silver bodies, a churning mass on their way to an invisible home.

  CHAPTER 14

  Two days pass before the boatmaker is ready to go to Father Robert and speak of his dream. At dinner in the refectory he half-hears Neck reading from Matthew about the lilies that neither spin nor toil yet are arrayed more finely than Solomon. At night, the hare raids the lettuces, but the boatmaker is no longer at war.