Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [122]
"I never said today was Sunday," Langman said.
"You said, 'This day,' " Gray repeated, "and 'This day' means Sunday."
"I never did," Langman said, "and if I did, 'This day' doesn't mean anything except this day. This day can be any day."
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Gray, enraged, lunged at him, and they thrashed ineffectually around our odoriferous oakum floor.
We caught Gray and set him upright. Forgetting Lang-man, he picked numbly at the hemp before him.
The captain came in among us and gave us our slices of beef.
"Any smoke?" Henry Dean asked.
"None that I could see," the captain said. He looked apologetically at Neal.
Langman sneered. "You wouldn't have seen it, even if you had one of Newton's reflecting telescopes. Any fool would know they never got ashore."
"Keep your mouth shut," Captain Dean said.
"That's not part of our bargain," Langman said. "First thing I know, you'll tell me I can't have meat unless I stop hearing and seeing and smelling."
The captain groaned in disgust and collapsed heavily beside his coil of cordage, only to rise again when Mellen and White, without warning, belabored each other.
The captain pulled them apart and sat between them. "What's all this?" he said. "Why waste your strength on each other?"
"Nobody can call me a liar," Mellen said, "just because I recall one or two things that happened when I was with Woodes Rogers."
"I was there," White protested. "He talked about how a beautiful woman cooked for him when we stopped in Brazil to give the ship a pair of boot tops."
"Well, she was!" Mellen insisted. "Shaped like a fairy queen."
"Fairy queen hell," White said. "I saw 'em. They looked like cows and smelled like pigs, all of 'em!"
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White and Mellen cursed each other.
The thought came to me that their dispositions had changed, and their voices, too. Their voices were breathless, squealing, like pigs struggling at a trough. I wondered whether the meat had done it, or the salty ice we chewed to quench our thirst, or the unending cold, or our inner fears of the eternity that had drawn so close.
I pulled at Neal's sleeve, and we went out on the rock. We looked all along the coast for smoke. Like the captain, we saw nothing.
"Neal," I said, "it might help these men if you recited parts of plays to them."
Neal shook his head.
"Why not?" I said. "It might keep them quiet."
"No, it wouldn't," Neal said. "Nothing would keep them quiet. They'd laugh at any part of any play, because plays aren't worth believing. Nothing's true except this." He swept his arm from the tent toward the ocean and the mainland.
There wasn't much I could say.
"Anyway," Neal said, "I've forgotten everything. I don't want to remember, and I never will. I'll only remember that my father hated the stage and wanted to keep me from it. I want to forget my name, even. I want it to be what it should beMoses. That's what my father and my mother named me.
"If I'd never gone near the theatreif I hadn't done what my father didn't want me to dothe Nottingham wouldn't have sailed when she did. She wouldn't have gone to Killybegs to take on butter and cheese. She'd never have struck this island. It's all my fault."
"Look, Neal," I said, "If you want to start thinking that
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way, you can trace every bad thing in the world back to some little incident that nobody was to blame for. Instead of blaming yourself, blame the circumstances that brought that nasty little fop to Greenwich. Blame the thing that made him a fop in the first place."
Neal's eyes had a hunted look. I think if there'd been a hole on that barren rock into which he could have crawled, he'd have crept there to get away from me, from Captain Dean, from his memories, from the eternal thundering of the breakers all around us.
"I know how you feel," I said, "and I'm glad you do. My father was right, too, and I wish I could tell him so. I can