Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [87]
"How do you know?" he asked heavily.
"I took him the first oakum we made," Neal said. "I thought it might make him easier. His mouth was filled with phlegm. I tried to get it out, but couldn't." He stared at his hands and added, "His face was black. He must have choked to death."
"I see," Captain Dean said. He examined his damaged fingers, stooped for a stone with which to pry open his knife again; peered at the blade as though he found it strange: then caught up a rope-end and haggled off a fifteen-foot length.
"Well," he said slowly, "go back to your oakum pickers.
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Send White to the shelter. He and I'll take care of Cooky. We'll have to take him to the south shore and put him in the water. There's just a possibility he might float to York and start someone looking for us."
To me he said, "Keep right on as you are. See the others do, too."
He gave me the hammer.
"Couldn't you take his coat for yourself?" Neal asked.
"Why yes," Captain Dean said, "I think it would be all right to take his coat."
They stumbled off together across the icy rocks, and we went on freeing the foretopsail yard of its twisted accumulation of junk.
I was sorry to see them go, because there were a few things that I should have said to Captain Dean.
I wanted to speak about eating. This morning and yesterday morning each one of us had eaten as much seaweed as could be packed into a pint mug, and less than half that amount of cheese. Already my stomach felt gassy and abraded, as though I had been kicked there.
Now the cheese was gone. The captain had spoken about going out at midnight in the hope of finding a seal asleep on the rocks, but I knew a little something about seals from watching them come up the Thames after whitebait.
Neither Captain Dean nor anybody else was going to find a seal sleeping on ledges in this kind of weather, when a single wave could crush a seal against a rock as readily as it could crush a cheese. They slept while floating where waves only rocked them like a cradle.
There was a thought hidden in all this, but it eluded me. My brain, like all the rest of me, was numb from cold and
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wet clothes, which felt as though nothing, not even heat, could ever dry them.
Seals, I thought confusedly, ate anything. They'd certainly eat cheese, and I'd heard that somewhere on the lower Thames a seal had killed a woman and eaten her. If that was so, then a seal would be quick to bite at Cooky Sipper's body, whether it floated or sankwhether it was clothed or unclothed. Therefore there was no reason why Captain Dean shouldn't take Cooky's coat for himself, and the rest of his clothes for those who needed themand there wasn't one of us who didn't need more clothes.
I looked over my shoulder toward the patch of canvas under which we'd sheltered. Captain Dean and George White were dragging Cooky's body over the icy rocks and ledges. The rope was fastened around Cooky's neck, and I was glad to see that the body was unclothed, so there apparently was no need for me to mention those confused thoughts of mine to the captain.
There were some other things, though, that I hadn't said, and it was hard for me to remember what they were. With our cheese gone, we would have nothing to eat, so if the captain wanted Cooky's body to float ashore, it seemed to me, he'd do better to leave the body on a rock, where it would freeze. If it were frozen, it would float, maybe, as a cake of ice floats.
I wondered whether I was right. Only a little of an iceberg shows above water.
"What happens to a frozen body?" I asked Langman.
"What do you mean?" Langman demanded.
"I mean, would Cooky Sipper float if he were frozen?"
"Of course he wouldn't," Langman said.
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"How do you know?" I asked. "Did you ever see a frozen man in the water?"
"No," Langman said, "but he'd sink."
I felt fairly sure that Langman was wrong about this, as about