Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [70]
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verses on the wall of a privy. If the captain had treated them with the violence their conduct deserved, their skulls would have cracked like plover eggs.
It was easy to see that Langman, Mellen and White had conspired together. They used the same words: the same impossible false arguments, and I, like a fool, still couldn't understand why. I thought they behaved as they did because they were wrong-headed. God only knows why so many humans are afflicted with that terrible disease, or failing, or whatever it is; but I did know that wrong-headed men are responsible for nearly all the world's troubles; and so I thought Langman, Mellen and White were wrong-headed because they couldn't help themselves.
The captain had been right all the time, for the two ships paid no more attention to us than as though we'd been a fishing schooner. We ran safely through the strait that separates Aran from the main, and next day, August 13th, we rounded the red cliffs at the northern entrance of Donegal Bay. By nightfall we were anchored in the snug harbor of Killybegs, surrounded by the greenest hills I ever hope to see. On the slopes of all the hills were black and white cattle on whose milk and cream and butter, which even Cooky Sipper couldn't spoil, we lived in luxury.
We lay in the harbor of Killybegs for six weeks, not from choice, but because Captain Dean said we had to wait for cool weather before loading a thousand firkins of butter and the three hundred cheeses which he proposed to sell to the citizens of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Otherwise both cheese and butter might spoil.
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Portsmouth people, Captain Dean claimed, were the best people in the worldthe kindest, the most hospitable, the most generous, the most appreciative, the most civilized of any people anywhere in America and he'd run no risk of offering them rancid butter.
England, he said, except for its Langmans and gipsies, its beggars and whores, its thieves, snobs, toadies, fops, rakes, gambling schemes, press gangs, wasn't half bad; but if it weren't for his brother Jasper and his obligation to sail ships in accordance with Jasper's plans, he would get himself a home in Portsmouth.
"Sometimes," he said in his solid, mild way, "I think Englishmen are all a pack of bastards; but Portsmouth people aren't. They don't think the way we do. It's something about the climate, probably. Those who can stand it have something happen to them. Even the lobsters grow two big claws."
For the first time since that terrible twenty-ninth of July, Neal Butler's smile came back to him in Killybegs. When he finished his copying of The Seaman's Secrets, Captain Dean set him to drawing the coast line of America from a worn Mercator's Projection, starting with Cape Sable in Nova Scotia and working as far south as New York.
Perhaps the prospect of America helped Neal to forget the happenings of July 29th: perhaps the scents and the sights and the soundsthe calmness and remotenessof that placid pretty harbor of Killybegs started him talking to the captain about fish. But talk he did, and soon, with the captain's permission, he and Swede were thick as porridge with a dozen fishermen, so that they knew where to go to fish, and kept the galley well supplied.
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Soon, too, except for one thing, he was himself again. When he wasn't running errands for Captain Dean and cleaning our cabins, or carefully laying off the American coast in his notebook, he was helping Swede scale the guns, or learning the care and the use of a plane and an adze from Chips Bullock, giving him a hand at knocking together the water casks; or he was in the galley, peering at the messes Cooky Sipper concocted.
Yes, he was himself again except for just one thing. Heve wouldn't talk about the theatre or anything that had happened to him during his life in