Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [121]
Tough as the meat was, there wasn't one of us who couldn't have eaten three times our allotment, and Langman even demanded more as a reward for picking oakum all day.
"Look here, Langman," Captain Dean said. "You undertook to pick oakum for the same amount of meat that the rest of us have. If I give you more, I'll have to give more to everyone else. Then, before we know it, there won't be any for anyone."
Langman argued senselessly that he and Mellen and White were entitled to more because they had refused to eat the day before, when all the rest of us had eaten.
"Whose fault was that?" Captain Dean asked.
"It was yours," Langman said, "because you didn't tell us the meat was beef until we'd made up our minds it was something else."
The captain, however, was adamant. "All right," he said, "but you're asking for too much, and it's bad for you to eat too much. Not wicked: not sinful. No more sinful
Page 306
than eating seaweed. But you refused your ration yesterday and you've had your ration for today. Now you can keep right on working.''
He only left the tent to drag in more cordage for us to pick apart and make into oakum; and while we made it, he wove it. By dark that Friday he had woven a thatch of oakum that covered the top of the tent and extended two-thirds down the southeastern side.
So thanks to Chips Bullock and to Langman's slippery conscience, we were not only fed, but were free, all night long, of the rivulets of icy water that had trickled down upon us all through that snowy, rainy day.
Page 307
December 30th, Saturday
"Have somebody light a firetwo fireson the beach," Captain Dean had told Swede before he set off on the raft; and for days our minds, if they could indeed have been called minds, were centered on hunting for smoke on the mainland.
Because of Friday's rain and snow, we couldn't see Cape Neddick or the beaches; but on Saturday the snow and rain stopped, and land was once more visiblea land of dark pines, long sands, forbidding cliffs, with no trace of smoke discernible anywhere.
Neal was out of the tent at dawn, studying that shore line.
We did what we could to buoy up his hopesand ours, too.
"Yesterday was so rainy," Captain Dean said, "that there wouldn't have been dry wood on the beach."
Neal glanced at him, and the captain looked away.
"They might have had to go far before they found a house," I said. "Two or three days might pass before fires could be lit."
Page 308
Neal didn't reply. He just crept back into the tent and went to picking oakum.
I don't know what happens to the minds of prisoners or of men in circumstances such as ours; but I suspect they move more slowly, alwaysmore and more slowly, until they scarcely move at all. If that weren't soif their minds worked actively on their situations, their lives would be unendurable and they'd die.
While there was a possibility of seeing smoke, we seemed content to sit and pick oakum: to wait until the captain had finished carving more beef for us: to wait until the next time someone went to the tent-flap to scan the land for a wisp of smoke.
We were like sleepers half awake, who mutter disjointed sentences, utter words that seem to a dreamer to be intelligible. Like those aroused from dreams, we resented attempts to make sense from our mumblings.
Altercations broke out unexpectedly. When Langman gabbled something about "This day our daily bread," Christopher Gray, the gunner, flew at him.
"What you want to talk that way for?" Gray demanded.
"What way?" Langman asked.
"You said 'This day,' " Gray said. "That means that this day's Sunday, but you know it ain't.