Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [114]
"Help turn her over," Swede gasped. "Turn her right side up!"
"You can't make it, Swede," the captain said. "White's finished. He's full of sea water. He's sick!
"I'll go alone," Swede said wildly. "Turn her over, Captain. I've got to go!"
"You can't go, you fool," Langman said. "It'll be dark
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before you get ashore. You'll freeze in those wet clothes. It's too late.''
"It's not too late," Swede cried. "We'll never get a brighter night than tonightfull moon, no clouds, onshore breeze, high tide at seven! Make 'em turn it over, Captain!
"Not if you're going alone," Captain Dean said.
Swede, on his knees, caught the captain's hand. "Don't do it for me!" he implored. "Do it for these others!" He swung an oakum-swathed hand in a semicircle to include all those stooped, bearded, wild-looking creatures. I was afraid to look among them for Neal.
Harry Hallion shuffled across the slippery seaweed to stand beside Swede and the captain. "I'll go with him," he told the captain. "I can swim. White couldn't. If Swede feels the way he does, I think we can make it."
The captain eyed him dubiously.
"Anything's better than this," Hallion said. "You're wasting time. Get her turned over for us."
Captain Dean motioned to us to help him drag the raft from the water and turn her right side up. Swede, half sobbing and half laughing, scuttled among our legs like a shaggy dog, wanting to help, trying to help, but only succeeding in getting in our way.
She slid up easily on the seaweed, and we turned her gently for fear of smashing her. The mast and the hammock-sails were gone, but the pulpits hadn't been dislodged.
"Push her in!" Swede shouted, and there was a terrible urgency in his voice. "We don't need a sail! Get her in before the tide turns!"
He rolled himself onto the raft, rose to his knees, un-
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knotted the lashings of the oar still fastened to her side, and shook the oar at us like a spear.
We slid her into the water, and as she left the ledge Hallion crawled in with White's oar.
A swell from the south raised her. Miraculously she slipped down it, toward the mouth of the little cove. A cross-swell from the north pushed her to the west and she cleared the mouth of the cove, Swede and Hallion thrashing the water with their makeshift oars.
Behind me someone prayed, the same incoherent prayer that had risen so often to my own lipsOh God Oh God Oh God Oh God ...
I felt sick all over at the smallness of that miserable raft, the cold immensity of that heaving ocean, the far far frosty distance over which the raft must float, the seeming pitifulness of those two human specksyet who was to feel sick when those two specks were in truth, and unknown to themselves, great in spirit, and therefore happy!
There was distance and haziness between the raft and Boon Island when Swede turned, raised his oar and waved it. I looked for Neal. He wasn't among those who knelt on ledges or clung to boulders, following the slow movement of the raft with straining eyes, urging it on, urging it on. Neal would, I knew, have felt that same empty sickness I had felt.
I got myself back to the tent. Neal was sitting beside Chips Bullock, holding one of Chips's hands in both of his.
"He was alive when I came in," Neal said. "He held out his hand to me and I took it. He didn't say anything, but his eyes asked. I told him about the raft. I think it made him feel better."
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Chips's eyes were closed. His face was peaceful, and I was glad he was gone. He hadn't died alone in a hole on the rock, with someone who couldn't speak to him, as he had feared he might if Langman, on Election Day, had become our captain.
There was coming and going in the tent. At dusk, the captain said, the raft seemed to be halfway to land. Sometimes it would go from sight: then rise again on a wave. Nobody talked about it. We were exhausted. Also around high tide time, the wind rose and howled around the