Captain Adam

by Chidsey, Donald Barr, 1902-1981

  He did not feel that this was personal, so to speak; for he had already thanked the Lord in his pravers for having spared the schooner; and now he was able to make it a good show to see. He raised an arm, raised his voice too:

  He finished on a quieter, more assured note:

  "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord."

  He closed the volume, and lowered his head and kept his eyes shut a moment—not in prayer but because he was overwhelmed by the eloquence. The Book often did that to him.

  He opened his eyes, looking up, and saw, where a moment before had been clear blue sky, a storm.

  This in itself was not unusual. Given the latitude and the season, you were bound to have storms—dark ones, noisy ones, not very dangerous storms, each brief. They came singly, also massed. Wall-like to see, some straight, others wobbling, they would march in a menacing manner clear across the firmament, to get, most of 'em, nowhere. There was nothing surreptitious about them: you could see them for miles, and hear them almost as far. For they were crammed with rain, these breathlessly low clouds, and set up a deafening clatter as they moved.

  The limits of any one of these storms were most marvelously clear-cut. In this they were not unlike summer thundershowers at home, only more so. By no means all of them, or even all of the ones that started for the schooner as though drawn by an immense magnet, struck Goodwill to Men. The hands—though Adam frowned on the practice—used to sit on the main hatch and watch them approach and lay bets on whether or not they would hit. Sometimes one would pass within a few feet of the vessel, so that you thought you could reach out and get your hand wet, and the downpour would be such that you could not see the horizon on that side, though elsewhere the sea was smooth and bright; yet not a drop would fall on deck. When one did envelop the Goodwill to Men it would be in a gray hissing mist, and there was nothing you could do but hang on and wait it out: they never lasted for more than a few minutes. Even if somebody was standing right next to you and you shouted at him, he couldn't hear you. You could not see from gunwale to gunwale. Then suddenly it would all be gone—all except a frantic scampering of water in the scuppers, with the sun shining on it already, and the receding clack-and-slap of rain on the surface of the sea. Then there would not be even that, and you would find it hard to believe that there had ever been any disturbance in this exquisitely beautiful day.

  What Adam saw now was a greater and more horrible thing: a wall or column of darkness rushing toward them, but no rain drops with it, only a low ominous moaning. Surely it was moving faster than any tropical rainstorm, for already it was almost upon them. 78

  He had never seen anything like it. None of them had. The moaning swelled to a high howl. The air around them tingled, taut with expectancy, and got bright, even iridescent, like a swelling soap bubble just before it bursts.

  The seas had been running short and even, satiny of the surface, showing no white. But now, abruptly, all around the schooner the water leapt high, the waves tumbling every-which-way, as though half a dozen swift ocean currents converged at just this spot.

  There was a spitting sound and they saw flashes of lightning close and low, blue lightning, some of the hands said afterward; others said yellow.

  Then darkness.

  All hands were on deck, as they always were for prayers, and that was a blessing; for in such weather the forecastle hatch habitually was left open, so that when the storm hit it filled the forecasde almost instantly with water, and if any man had been in there at the time he'd have been drowned like a rat.

  Everybody it seemed spotted the storm at the same moment, and they all sprang into action. Resolved Forbes and his skipper were shouting orders in the time they had; but the hands knew what to do anyway.

  The boy Rellison ran aft for the tiller, where it was his trick.

  Jethro Gardner had been doing some work on the long boat at the time of the call to prayers, and in consequence this was not lashed. Grabbing a line, Jeth ran for it. The long boat was heavy; and if it took over, in a blow like this, it could do a powerful lot of smashing.

  The mate, shouting orders, made for the main halyards. Others went for the fore halyards or forward to the jibs. They were going to strike every inch of canvas—if they were given a chance.

  As for Adam, he went for Lady Maisie.

  Her cabin hatch* was closed. He knew this, having closed it at her request—she complained that the vwnd would riffle her finery hung down there—when he was about to conduct her forward for prayers. They'd not have time to get to it, open it, stuff her down that steep ladder, make fast the hatch. She must be sheltered somewhere here.

  She opened her mouth to say something, but he shook his head. He hooked a leg behind her legs and shoved her so that she sat down thud-dingly, her back against the starboard grating. "Hang on!" and he started away; but he remembered the irons and turned back. It was at this grating that Waters and Peterson had been chained, and the irons still hung there. If they got to whanging back and forth, as they might well do, they could brain her.

  So he made his passenger fast. Before she knew what he was doing,

  before even she had got over the jolt of being thrown down on her backside, he had locked two shackles on each ankle, two on each wrist. Good. That would hold both irons and lady in place.

  He was racing aft when the storm hit.

  It was incredible that any disturbance of nature could catch up to them so swiftly in the vast peaceful sea, equally incredible that its onset should be like an explosion. It slammed Adam Long against the starboard gunwale, tipped him up, came near to toppling him over. He hung, gasping, for a terrible moment. All he could see was a lather of water inches from his face. The schooner must have been all but on her beam-ends. Would she broach-to? She'd snap her sticks if she did, perhaps even turn upside-down, squashing the life out of all of them.

  He wriggled back to the deck, fought his way aft. The Rellison boy desperately clinging to the tiller was being snapped back and forth like a rag. He was trying hard, he was sobbing. He just didn't have the muscle. Adam reached him barely in time. With their combined weight they got her over, and Goodwill, shuddering, righted herself.

  Nobody remembered much about the actual duration of that storm afterward. It seemed long to most. But it might have lasted merely minutes. Descriptions differed wildly. Even the names of the storm differed: some swore that it was a waterspout, others called it a white squall, while Seth Selden was not the only one who was wont to refer to it as the Visitation. Some said it rained pitchforks, others that there was no rain at all. It was wet enough in all conscience, for the seas thamped over the schooner again and again. A few said that there was thunder. They were all agreed that there was lightning, closer-up than any of them had ever known, though there were many opinions of the shapes it took, the colors it showed.

  Adam spent most of the storm hanging on to the tiller, bucking it, bracing it, side by side with young Abel Rellison, who, to give him credit, never faltered. Back and forth they went, back and forth, fighting. They lost all sense of time. They couldn't see much—no other men at all. They didn't even try to shout at one another but saved their wind.

  And this, reflected Adam, is the same lad who a few hours ago was thinking of bashing my skull in—and this is the very stick he was thinking of doing it with!

  He grinned at young Rellison, who grinned back. They struggled on.

  The let-up was abrupt, and it was cruel, more of a shock, physically, than the onset. A couple of the men almost fainted. The boy Rellison flopped down on the deck. Adam went forward.

  The sticks remained, also the bowsprit. Most of the standing rigging still stood. The long boat was gone, and it must have been its departure that had torn out a good fifteen feet of the larboard gunwale amidships,

  leaving nothing but splinters. The foremast boom was gone but the sail itself had
been saved. The mainsail, too, had been saved; it must have been by a tremendous effort. Both jibs were gone.

  John Bond had dislocated his left wrist. Jethro Gardner's right leg had been smashed, badly, while he tussled wdth the long boat. They were all banged and bruised a good bit.

  Adam hiked Lady Maisie's skirt and petticoat down, then went for the key. It took some time, the forecastle being flooded. When he returned, and was releasing her, she nodded toward Jeth Gardner, in a swoon now.

  "We must carry him to my cabin. He's a brave man, Adam."

  "Aye," said the skipper, who would take such a thing for granted of Jeth Gardner. "Well, now you've seen what the sea can do, you'll understand why we all hate it so."

  "La, 'twas exciting," said Maisie.

  n There, among the perfumes and pomatum, the spikenard and

  rice powder, where rosewater rocked in its jars, and from a score of pegs silk and satin and flimsy frilled muslin swung with the movement of the schooner. Bosun Gardner lay in a bunk until recently the domain of Resolved Forbes. It was there that Adam broke the news to him.

  Likely enough Jeth was expecting it, but this was not the reason why he made it easier to say. Lying there, he had been grumping. Adam would have worried still more about the state of the bosun's health if he hadn't grumped. A Jeth who found the world satisfactory would be a Jeth on the very threshold of extinction.

  "Been down here two days and nights now, and you got to get me out, Cap'n. Ain't no place for a man."

  Adam grinned.

  "What's the matter with this cabin?"

  "Might've been all right when you and Mr. Forbes was here, but not now. Oh, she means first-rate! It was chirk of her to think of it, and I appreciate that and all. But I can't stay here."

  "What's the matter with this cabin?" Adam asked again.

  "Well, for one thing, it stinks."

  "Coming from a man who's spent most of his life in forecastles—"

  "I'm used to that kind of smell. I ain't used to this—" and he waved his hand to indicate the bottles, the jars.

  They were alone. Three would have crowded the place uncomfortably, even indecently if the Honorable Maisie Treadway was one, and the rule was that whenever anybody wanted to visit with the patient, the lady, called down to, would come up first.

  Of course they all did visit.

  "They ain't fretting about me," the bosun growled. "They just want to get a look at them corsets hanging up there."

  "Jeth," Adam said now, "do you think this vessel's under a spell?"

  "No, not any more I don't. Did used to. But not since we come through that crazy storm without snapping a stick."

  Adam said slowly: "We're losing the services of a cracker jack bosun."

  "Not for long. I'll be ramming around again right soon, I expect." He looked up suddenly. "Or won't I?"

  That gave Adam an opening in which to say what he had come to say, but it chanced that he wanted a little more palaver first.

  "Do you think Lady Maisie's a witch, Jeth?"

  "She could be, but I don't think so. You ought to know."

  "I don't think so either. But I can see where anybody else might."

  "Aye, she's a dreadful attractive female."

  "Aye," said Adam.

  Jethro hitched himself up in the bunk, or tried to, but gave it up, wincing, when a crash of pain reminded him of his leg.

  "That brings me to the other reason I want to get out of here, Cap'n. I'm used to close quarters all right, but not with a woman, and especially a woman like this. Oh, it ain't her fault! She's been mighty kind with me and not pushy. Hangs up a couple of skirts for a curtain whenever she changes any of her clothes, which she's doing just about all the time. Talks to me, to keep me from thinking about things. But I do think about things just the same. Can't help it."

  Jethro Gardner actually was blushing.

  "It ain't healthy. Don't like to talk about a thing like this, Cap'n. But you understand. It's goldarn hard on a man, all the time."

  "I understand," said Adam Long.

  "That's the other reason why I want to get out."

  Adam nodded.

  "We'll get you out. Right awav. We were going to anyway."

  "Oh?"

  Jeth was studying his face. Adam kept looking at the other bunk, his erstwhile own, piled high now with frilly fabrics, ribbons, kerchiefs. That was where she slept.

  Jeth paused a moment, so's to be sure of his voice.

  "You mean you don't like the way my leg is, then?"

  "No, I don't, Jeth. Neither do the others." 82

  "And you reckon we ought to—ought—"

  "I think we should, Jeth. That's what the others think, too. They've all looked at it. Course, we won't do it if you don't say go ahead."

  "But that's what you think, yourself?"

  "Aye."

  "Want another look at it?"

  "Yes, I do."

  A few minutes later: "Still feel that way, Cap'n?"

  "I do, Jeth. I truthful do. Down here in this hot climate— And we certainly don't want you to die on us."

  "Don't want to die myself, comes to that." He was silent a moment. "There's God's plenty of knives, but what about the bone?"

  "I got a saw, in my carpenter's kit."

  "Oh—You'll do this yourself, Cap'n? Personally?"

  "I wouldn't ask anybody else to."

  "No, you wouldn't. That's the way you are. All right—if you're going to do it yourself I'll say go ahead. But I wish you'd sprung it on me, sort of. It'll take some time to hot up an iron."

  "One's all hotted up out there right now, Jeth."

  "Oh."

  Adam drew a bottle from under his shirt. It was half full of rum, the half Seth Selden had left. Adam took the cork out.

  "You'll be using a bit of this?"

  "A hit of it?" Jeth took the botde. "You can just throw that cork away, Cap'n. Throw it right away."

  "May God guide me," Adam said somberly to Maisie a litde later. "And keep your hatch shut. He's sure to scream."

  "You've never done anything like this before?"

  "No."

  "You'll need more courage than he will."

  "Aye."

  This was the first time he had ever been in the cabin with her, and it sure was close quarters, as Jeth had said, especially with all those things on the wall and piled around. It would have been impossible not to brush her, at least. He didn't try. He glanced up through the hatch to assure himself that only the legs of the man who was waiting with Adam's carpenter's kit were visible. Then deliberately he put his arms around Maisie and kissed her on the mouth.

  It was more wonderful, even, than he had dared to hope. She had wanted him to do it. He knew that, felt it. Like him, she staggered back a bit afterward, as though the kiss had taken strength out of her legs, as indeed it had.

  They didn't look at one another.

  "G-God be wi' ye, Adam."

  "Aye," he said, and went up the ladder.

  The cutting itself was unexpectedly easy. But the sawing was hard, the bone. That round slimy surface slipped and splintered.

  Jeth made moans, some he probably didn't even know about, but that was all. They had him spread-eagled on the main hatch, a man at each arm, a man at each leg. Not until the iron was brought over, spicking and spitting, fresh out of the fire, red-to-turning-to-white all up and down, did Jethro open his mouth as a signal that he wanted the stick of wood they'd whittled for him. They put this into his mouth, and he fastened his teeth on it, and he closed his eyes.

  This part Adam did fast. He had to, because of the blood, which for all their precautions was gushing. But he had to do it fast anyway, if he was going to do it at all.

  He didn't vomit afterward, nor did Jeth Gardner faint. But there wasn't much idle chit-chat aboard the Goodwill to Men that evening.

  The skipper took the graveyard watch, seeking stillness, knowing that he wouldn't be able to sleep. Nobody was blaming him for anything;
and indeed he had done a good job of it, considering; but he thought that he would never shake the feeling of that saw out of his hands, nor force from his ears the hissing of the blood when they cauterized the stump.

  He had not seen Maisie since sundown. Her slide was open, her candle out. He stared thoughtfully at the square of blackness there in the deck, dwelling in his mind on how close she was. Was she asleep? This was an exceptionally quiet night; the moon was high, the seas low. He could hear the schooner working in her customary way, the sounds any sailing man hears without noticing them unless they change or cease—the squeal of timbers, occasionally the clunk of a block on deck, the hum of air in the shrouds, the shush at the bows, and the persistent, hollow, chuckling gurgle of the wake. Below these he fancied sometimes that he could hear Maisie breathing.

  He rose, loosely lashed the tiller, which was steady anyway, and walked around the deck several times on bare feet.

  When he'd pass it he would eye the black square that was the entrance to the cabin. What was she thinking of? Or was she asleep? But he believed that she was awake, lying motionless down there.

  The jury boom kicked and fussed a bit, and he reset it, glad of something to do. Goodwill to Men, largely because of this jury job—a good enough job in its way but by no means what Jeth Gardner would have 84

  turned out—under a greatly shortened foresail was not making her usual speed. Still she was graceful, and stepped daintily through the sea.

  Nobody else was up and around. Adam, who had dismissed the tiller-man, had the deck to himself.

  He roamed.

  Now here was that black hole before him again, the square of darkness. Seemed like he always came back to it, no matter which way he walked. He stood spread-legged looking down at it. Though the deck was washed by the moon, none of this appeared able to penetrate the opening, which looked packed with a darkness that was not merely an absence of light.

  It suggested a pit. Was it a pit? The pit? Was that man lost who lowered himself into it?