Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [117]
"Mr. Langman?" asked the captain.
"Never shall it be"
"All right," the captain said. "You vote No. Christopher Gray?"
"I vote Yes," Gray said. "Captain, we're almost dead from lack of meat."
"Henry Dean?" the captain asked.
"Yes," his brother said.
"Charles Graystock?" the captain asked. "I'm in no doubt about you or Saver."
"Yes!" Graystock shouted.
"And Saver?"
Saver said Yes in strong, firm tones. Nobody could have guessed, from the quality of their voices, that from the moment we dropped from the Nottingham's foremast onto the seaweed of Boon Island, those two had been the malingerers, resented by all, perpetual thorns in the captain's flesh, refusing to work; sullen, even, when fed with mussels gathered by others.
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"Now let's see," the captain said, "that's five in favor of eating. That only leaves three to voteWhitworth, George White, Nicholas Mellen. So there's no need to vote further. We'll eat him."
"What about you?" Langman asked.
The captain ignored him, and I knew why. The. captain didn't want to vote Yes; but if he had, Langman, at the first opportunity, would have taken oath that the eating of Chips Bullock had been done at the captain's suggestion. He might even have implied that the captain killed Chips in order to eat him. That was the sort of person Langman was. Unfortunately there'll always be Langmans in this world, to set people and nations against each otherto condemn the good and extol the badto spread sly rumors and spit on the truth.
There was something horrible about the open excitement of Saver and Graystock when the captain agreed to the eating of Chips, but ironically I was not horrified by the inner relief I felt myself.
I was even puzzled by the steadfast refusal, on the part of those who had most feverishly urged the eating, to help carry the body from the tent.
When Neal and I offered to help the captain, he waved us sharply aside. He wanted the others, the responsible ones, to do it; but when he gave the necessary orders, they lay in their places like dogs that, even though whipped, refuse to carry out their masters' orders. Their eyes rolled up at him, exactly like those of cowering dogs, and it was plain that no orders, no prayers, no punishment, would persuade them to take part in the act they'd begged the captain to permit.
In the end, Neal and I helped him drag out the body.
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He had tried to do it alone, but it was too much for him. Even with our help it was almost too much for all three of us, so that when the body lay on the cold ledge, we were numb mentally and physically, and the captain took us back to the tent, where he lay with eyes closed, until the men again wailingly asked for meat.
At half tide he roused himself, and instantly the men were silent, watching him, their eyes stubborn. They wouldn't help. They just wouldn't help.
We had the saw, made so laboriously from the cutlass, and we had our knives. We had nothing else except spun yarn, taken from the tent, and two squares of canvas, cut from the boulder-weighted slack we had left when the tent was built.
''First," the captain said, "I'll make a bag of the clothes and put 'em in that rock crevice yonder. Then I'll wrap the head in the clothes, and the feet and the hands and the skinand the other things. And the bones. We'll have to bone out the meat, so we can wrap it and cut it into equal pieces. We'll put the clothes in a crevice with boulders piled over it. We'll make a cross out of two pieces of wood and wedge it in the boulders."
His mention of the cross made us feel better.
He hefted the cutlass-saw.
"Now," he said, "I want the two of you to go to the north side of the island. See whether anything's come ashore. Look at the mainland for signs of boats. I've got things to do, and I'm reconciled to doing them. To me, this is meat."
He touched Chips's body with the tip of the saw; then
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continued,