by Don Berry
Then—very suddenly, it seemed—the world drew in. It was like poking a sea anemone with a stick and watching it close abruptly. There was no one at Astoria, there was no one at Netarts. All the ants piled back into the hill, and for the first time there was a focus for all that
had been happening at random.
The focus was a shy little man who was lately spending much of his time in his rickety cabin, staring at a model he had made and turning it over in his hands.
FIVE
1
The laying of the keel was set for June 18th. It was the Sabbath, but by common, if silent, agreement nobody mentioned it and we planned to go ahead pretending we had forgotten. At that point we thought nothing in the world could stop us. We were wrong. I have since wondered if our intention to begin on a Sunday was in some way a bad omen. In any event, we were suddenly stopped, and by an act of God. The night of the 17th we learned of the first deaths among the settlers. Our ring of mountains isolated us from much, but man's oldest companion had found his way in.
A man named Cornwall, from Missouri, had taken up a claim at the far north of the Bay. This was quite recently, I believe sometime during the previous winter. His cabin was not even finished yet, having no floor but the earth and only a blanket for a door. This was mostly because Cornwall was often away and had no time to finish it.
He was a married man, and a preacher. He lived up there with his wife and a son of about sixteen years of age. At first we had been pleased to see them come, as families were what we needed, but we soon learned that the Reverend Cornwall was not at all concerned with us or our little community. He was an "illuminated" and his cabin was simply a base of rest between preaching voyages. Often he would go all the way into the Valley, stopping at every cabin he ran across and preaching for his supper. As a result we saw very little of him and did
not know him well."
He arrived at my house in the middle of the night, pounding heavily on the door. I lit a lamp and let him in. I knew the man by sight, but at first I did not recognize him. His face was slack and loose, and in the light of the camphine lamp his eyes had a strange, wild quality that frightened me. He was pale as a ghost, his face and clothing covered over with a fine veil of ashes. He moved slowly, as though his body were very heavy, and looked around him crazily.
"They're gone. God took them."
"Who?"
"My wife, my son. God took them to punish me. His will is mysterious."
This kind of talk has always made me nervous, as there is no reply to it, there is never anything to say. Finally I built up the fire a little and got the story from him.
On returning from a preach in the evening, he had found his cabin a mass of smoking, charred rubble. There was nothing left at all. The crazy fool had poked around in the still smoking cinders, burning his hands quite badly, and had found the burned bodies of his wife and son.
Fire was something we were all afraid of. At this time all our chimneys were of wood, there was not a brick or stone chimney closer than Astoria. Chimney fires were not rare, but they were usually caught before becoming serious. In this case, the victims had apparently been suffocated by the smoke before they had awakened.
My first reaction to this tragedy was not humanitarian. I wondered only what it would mean to the Ship. Everything that happened in the world was related to the Ship in some way; else it made no sense, it was not understandable. What was the disaster of a lifetime for poor Cornwall was, for me, an annoyance, because I knew immediately it would mean a delay in the laying of the keel. I am not proud of this. But at this time—and for the only time in my life—I had a clear and solid understanding of Good and Evil. Good was what helped the Ship; Evil was what hindered it. I had a way to measure.
I was at the same time very sorry for Cornwall, but I didn't see what I could do. It is absurd for a young man who has no real notion of death to be comforting an older one who has just lost the only living creatures who mean anything to him. In brutal fact, the great enigma did not touch me at all, it simply embarrassed me and annoyed me.
While I did not realize it at the time, Cornwall was more fortunate than most, in some respects. He had satisfactory answers to the most terrible of questions posed by death; Cornwall knew why. God had taken them away, and it was punishment for his sins. The significance was clear, and he was left with only the grief of his loss. No matter how intense, grief is not as shattering for a man as that wild incomprehension that shakes his understanding of the world.
As soon as it was light I took Cornwall with me to Vaughn's place, which seemed the natural thing to do. He could help no more than I, of course, but I wished to share the responsibility of this man's pain.
There was nothing any of us could do, and yet the tragedy could not be simply ignored. In the end a half-dozen of us returned with Cornwall to his cabin, paying some obscure moral debt with simple physical movement.
The journey was useless, of course, and unpleasant in the extreme. From what Cornwall told us, both his wife and son had been overcome not in their beds but in the middle of the single room, probably while trying to reach the door. It seemed odd that with no more than a blanket for a door such a suffocating density of smoke could accumulate, but this was obviously what had happened. We had no way to judge, as Cornwall had dragged the bodies from the ashes and they were lying some little distance from the cabin when we arrived.
None of us had ever seen a burned human being before, and it was this that made it so terrible. The crown of the son's head was also crushed, probably by a falling roof beam, but whether it had occurred before or after his death was impossible to tell.
We buried the two of them in a place chosen by Cornwall, apparently at random, and he prayed over them. It was an awful sight, this broken man on his knees by the freshly turned earth, his body covered with the gray of the ashes and his face marked only by tiny lines of flesh color where his tears had washed away the soot and ashes. It was like something from the Old Testament, there was an unreal cruelty and agony about it. In that moment it was easy to believe in a God of vengeance.
Cornwall turned us all away and remained weeping at the graves. We were not reluctant to leave; there are some things a man should not see, as it makes the rest of life seem futile.
I have found one thing about death, one thing of which I am sure. In my every contact with death since that time, I have found one element of the ridiculous. No one ever notices, because of their preoccupation with the serious. But I have come to look for it, and it is always that element of absurdity I remember later. Perhaps I am a cold man.
In the case of the poor Cornwall family it was a frying pan, a heavy castiron frying pan. It rested in the exact center of the ashes, undamaged and face up. It almost looked as though it were being heated on a fire too large for it, or as though all the ashes had miraculously boiled out of that single pan. It was centered with such absurd precision I could not get it out of my mind, and all the way back to my own cabin I thought about that frying pall, lonely and still and perfect in the midst of desolation and mortality.
2
The disaster slipped away from our minds very quickly, and it kept us from working for only one day. At that, some of the men went ahead anyway. William Hendrickson and Peter Morgan both worked while we were at Cornwall's place, and the rest of us were slightly envious.
Just after we had finished with the blacksmith shop and kiln and road and hauling and cutting and burning we had set up a frame for a whipsaw, or rather pit-and-frame. In principle a whipsaw is simple enough, but in practice we found it like everything else; full of unexpected complications. The pit was about seven feet deep, and the log to be sawed projected out over the edge. The sawyer stood down in the pit, under the log. His job was to haul down on the huge saw, and when he had finished his stroke the blade was drawn up again by the spring. In this case the spring was a flexible sapling mounted upright in the framing members. This sapling had to be replaced from time to time
as it lost its spring or broke, and there was competition among the men as to whose spring would last the longest. Once the blade was well started in the log it tended to go straight, but getting the start was difficult. I will say here that William Hendrickson and Peter Morgan sawed out every timber and plank in the Ship on that rig, from keel to decking. They worked like fools, and were able to average aat least three hundred feet a day.
That first day, the laying of the keel, set a pattern that was to be repeated for all the rest of the time. We arrived at the ways ready to pick up the keel and lay it down where Sam said. We figured we could at least get started on the framing by noon.
Sam was there at the ways ahead of us, and he had brought his model along. There were no more plans than that. It was almost impossible to believe, but Sam claimed that every piece that would go in the real Ship was in that model, and it was a question of scaling up. He had it sitting on a big fir butt near the ways, and we'ed all crowded around in awe. He had taken off the deck and part of the planking, so we could see inside. It was like a picture of a person's insides I had once seen, full of mysterious objects and curves and connections I did not understand. I had a moment of panic, considering that complexity, and I do not believe I was alone.
"Well, Sam," I said. "The big day. Let's get that keel down."
Sam nodded abstractedly. I looked around the ways and saw no lumber that looked like the keel I had vaguely in my mind.
"Yus," Sam said. He paced nervously up and down beside the timbers, muttering to himself.
The rest of us stood and watched him. Finally he stopped the walking and turned to face us. He looked at everybody in turn—I think he was searching for a glimmer of intelligence—and finally directed his words to Vaughn and me, who were standing side by side.
"I think we can scarf her in three," he said hopefully.
Neither Vaughn nor I said anything, and it made Sam reconsider, frowning.
"Maybe take four?" he said in a questioning tone, as though we had suggested it. "Yus, four. Thirty-seven and a half feet."
Vaughn cleared his throat. "Sam," he said. "`What does scarf mean?"
He had more nerve than the rest of us, Vaughn did. I'd have gone ahead and scarfed it without knowing what it meant rather than ask. At this point I was obsessed by a fear of offending Sam or discouraging him.
"Half a dozen kinds," the little man said. "More. I flat-scarfed the model, you can see that, but we best hook_scarf here." He looked up apologetically. "It's just that the model's so small and all . . ."
Vaughn and I bent over the model, peering inside to see if we could see anything that looked right off like a flat scarf. The rest of the gang shuffled their feet and looked embarrassed.
"I seen a Chinese scarf once," Sam said meditatively. "No nibs at all and no angles. Just a sweet curve. It was real nice."
Finally Vaughn sighed, glanced at me, and straightened up. "Sam," he said quietly, "we best get it all straight right now. There ain't a man standing here that knows anything about a scarf except you wrap it around your neck. We're here to work, you know that, you seen we're willin' to work. But we don't know nothing. You got to be the brain for us all, you got to tell us everything, like babies."
Strangely enough, Sam was neither surprised nor disappointed. "Yus," he muttered apologetically. "Yus, you tol' me that before. I forgot. I'll tell you." He looked absently at the ways, more to avoid meeting our eyes than anything else. "Yus," he said again softly. "We'll build her anyway, we will."
"What'd you say, Sam?"
"Look here." Sam took a long scriber and pointed down through the open deck of the model, touching the keel where an almost imperceptible line of joining showed.
"This keel's spliced together out of different pieces. That's what you call a scarf, the splice. It runs diagonal across the timber. If you make a flat diagonal, you got two shim edges, and that rots out. We'll nib the join, and there's another nib in the middle for holding fore-and-aft movement. That way she can't slide. He drew a little design for us in the dirt at the base of the stump:
"We got to lit it together perfect, then," Vaughn said.
"That's it." Sam bobbed his head.
Vaughn frowned. "That there's real cabinetmaker's work, he said.
"That there's shipwright's work, Vaughn," Sam said. "You said you was here to work if I told you what to do, I'm tellin' you, then. And I'll tell you a scarf joint's about the easiest thing you'll have to do. You make up your mind right now."
Sam's tone was amazingly strong for him, but Vaughn did not take offense.
"All right, Sam," he said quietly. "There ain't no question, there's never been no question. How do we start?"
Sam looked at Vaughn, then at me, then at the rest of the crew. He seemed to consider the whole problem all over again. Fifteen men watched him as a cat watches a fly on the wall. He was not even aware of us. Suddenly he squatted down on his haunches, still holding the scriber absently in his hands.
"Each scarf got to span at least two frames. The length is at least five times the thickness of the timber. The nibs got to be one-eighth the thickness of the timber, the center one, too."
"Why?" I said without thinking.
"That's the rule," Sam said, standing up. "That's the way it's right."
"I mean, is that—"
"You build a ship the way you build her," Sam said.
He turned away from me. I had never seen him this way. He talked different, he moved different, nothing was like the Little Sam whose gnomish face I had first seen ducking out of sight behind a gray window. He walked over to the timbers and kicked one of them.
"Thaler!"
"Yes, Sam." I jumped.
"Get an ax."
I grabbed an ax as fast as I could and ran over to the timber.
"I'm going to show you how to make a scarf joint, Ben."
And the first chip that flew was from my ax. I realized it just as the chip hit the ground, and I had such an explosion of happiness in my belly I couldn't believe it. I hastily grabbed the chip up and stuck it in my pocket.
Sam was scribing lines on the squared-off timber, showing me where to make the next cut. I saw him through a kind of haze. The first stroke was mine. Me, Ben Thaler.
3
All this activity did not fail to make a grand impression on the Indians. From the first day we were provided with an attentive audience, and at times it was difficult to constrain them to act merely as audience; they wanted to help. Until firm rules were established they tended to wander all over, poking interestedly in every corner, pointing and chattering to each other like so many squirrels. Their own custom was that any work in progress was subject to scrutiny and comment by everyone else, and they could not understand why we objected to the criticism, which was undoubtedly intended to raise the level of our work.
After some time I got used to being on display and thought no more of it. Except for once, quite a bit later, when the frames were almost all up. I was in the interior of the hull and happened to glance out through the framing, whose members were about ten inches apart. An old squaw was lifting a baby up so the child could see better. It was the exact gesture I had seen made by a white woman at a monkey cage. Looking out through the frames—holding them, in fact, like bars—I had a rather uncomfortable sensation for a moment.
We had no difficulty with ‘our' Indians, as their chief Kilchis was very cooperative. This chief, or tyee, as they called him, was one of the strangest men I have ever encountered. For one thing I think I have never known a more intelligent man of any color. Secondly, the was clearly Negro by race. He stood perhaps six feet three and weighed well over two hundred pounds. As these coastal people are small of stature he towered over them like a mountain. I don't believe there was one who reached as high as his shoulder. I never had a satisfactory explanation of how this obviously African gentleman came to be ruling a tribe of Indians on the Oregon coast. They had several wholly unreasonable traditions to explain it, but at root
they were totally indifferent to his origins as long as he was a good chief. In any case, I have noted that Indian traditions serve a certain purpose, and literal truth is not the important consideration. It is the same with us, I believe, as history tells us only what we have already made up our minds to believe. But the Indians were more openly uninterested in the truth, or perhaps their idea of it differed from our own.
Kilchis had very exact ideas of what he expected from the whites, almost as though there were a contract between us all. In fact, I believe this was the case, as he often asked me when the white tyee with the beard was going to return. Some years in the past he had apparently been visited by a white man, and an agreement had been reached between the two of them concerning the settlement of the Bay. What had happened in the interim I do not know, but the great black man expected the agreement to be kept. As he was scrupulously fair there was no great problem. I have often wondered what became of that bearded white tyee, and pondered on the fragility of man's schemes.
Kilchis himself came often to the Ship, and he was allowed to inspect whatever he liked. I will never forget his enormous frame, draped in a bearskin robe, stooping among the timbers to examine a join or standing back to observe the whole. I was very fond of the old fellow, and I think we all were. He was a very worthy man, and I firmly believe that had he been white he would have made a far better President of the United States than many of the scoundrels we have had in that office.
But to return to the Ship. In the weeks that followed my first, magical ax-blow I was thrown into a world of such complexity that I nearly drowned in it. Little Sam seemed suddenly to have lost his ability to speak English, and instead communicated only in a wholly mysterious language, a jargon of terms—and actions to match them—that was infuriating and baffling. In moments of fatigue and depression I clearly remember having the strong impression that Sam was inventing words out of personal malice. It did not seem possible that such an enormous body of language and detail could exist without a man even having a notion it was there.
