Authors: Homer Hickam
The house was empty, silent to all but his own quiet movements as he made coffee, then hooked a gourd of water to his hip and gathered the other things he would need. Manda was with Rose's sister. She would be all right. He had sat with her for a while the previous evening and explained as best he could that something had happened to her mother and her brother but that he was going to find them and she was not to worry. It had made Manda sad, but children in those latitudes had an accepting manner about them, understanding that time rolled on, that there was no way of turning it back, that what happened simply happened, and there was no hope of changing it.
They are blessed that way,
Josh thought.
Josh passed Chief Kalapa, who stood in the doorway of his house. They did not speak. Nor did he speak to Mr. Bucknell as he passed the government house, though the old Britisher tipped his hat from his makeshift desk and his stacks of useless paperwork. Josh climbed the path up the great mountain, oblivious to the beauty of the blooming oleander and the waving elephant ears of the giant philodendron. He took no note of the myriad colorful birds in the high branches above, nor even heard their twittering songs, as he made his way to the Beach of the Dead Whales. For there, he thought, he would find his precious wife and beloved son, tossed up as jetsam by the odd current that carried all discarded things from the village.
In the late morning, he reached the ridge above the beach where once he had searched for ambergris and had instead received a lesson in humility and truth from Rose. He studied the cove far below, sorting through the bones and the other debris. His facial expression fixed in stone, his eyes claimed what he had come to find, though dreaded. For a moment, he thought that he might be overwhelmed by his grief, that he wouldn't be able to do what must be done. He searched for strength but there was little he could find. He felt hollow, depleted, and briefly wished that he might descend into insanity and not return. Better to wander through life with his eyes rolling and his mind empty than live with the self-loathing that pressed down on him like the taunting hand of a petulant giant.
A shadow passed over him, and he looked up to see what had made it. The sun blistered his eyes, but through it he saw what he somehow knew he would see. “Hello, Purdy,” he said, putting down the shovel he carried and unslinging the rifle on his shoulder. “Come closer, my dear friend.”
If indeed it was Purdy, the pelican complacently drifted in lazy circles, its great wings outstretched. “Why did you let this happen?” Josh demanded of it, then squeezed off his shot.
The rifle barked, the sound instantly absorbed by the great roar of the
sea smashing into the beach below, echoing up through the cove. The pelican, though surely struck, did not fall. Instead, it vanished, and then Josh was aware that something else had joined him, something small but impossible to ignore. It was a megapode, a vulturelike bird that walked on big webbed feet and could not fly, and Josh feared that he recognized it. “Is that you, Dave?”
If it was Dave, the mascot bird of Josh's crew back on Melagi, it did not signify it in any way. It climbed up on a small cairn of rocks and turned its head, presenting Josh with one of its big black eyes, inviting him to look inside.
“I will not look inside your eye,” Josh told it. “I do not trust what you've shown me, neither the past nor the future nor the present, for it is seen through your own wicked light.”
The megapode vanished. Josh felt abandoned, then realized with a start it was the way he was supposed to feel, along with everyone on the earth. “But why?” he asked heaven. Heaven did not deign to reply.
Josh followed the path until he reached the beach, and then he walked to his wife and his son. They were lying as if asleep, their heads resting on the wet sand, the sea washing gently at their feet. Nearby was the remnant of their canoe. The scars on it showed clearly the marks of the barge's propeller blades. Josh wept now and struck himself in the forehead with the flat of his hand, for this was the way of these islands. He looked for a shell with a sharp edge and used it to cut his forehead along his hairline, then felt the hot trickle of blood flow down his face. Then he sat down beside them and put his arms around his knees and drew them up and lowered his head, not to pray but to seek the strength within himself to do what needed next to be done.
After a while, he raised his head, sensing he and his wife and his son were no longer alone. It was
her.
He knew without looking, though it proved not to be Ready O'Neal's wife, as he first thought, but Sister Mary Kathleen, her white habit flowing like a flag of surrender in the wind, her pretty Irish face framed by her wimple, corona, and veil. She knelt between Rose and Turu, her knees in the wet sand, her lips atremble in prayer. She touched them, then made the sign of the cross. Then, rising effortlessly, she began to take off her clothing. First came the headdress, then the cowl, the cincture, the scapular, and finally the habit. Underneath, she wore Marine Corps utilities and Marine Corps boots, brought with her from Tarawa. She tore a strip from her habit and tied it around her forehead. All the rest of her nun's clothing she threw into the sea. “Let me tell you something of me family,” she said. “Me old pap, to start.”
“You told me once he was a farmer,” he replied as if they were in a dream.
“Aye, he was,” she acknowledged, “but he was also in the army that crawled through the Irish night, murdering the filthy occupiers. And a meaner, crueler man did not exist when he was at war.”
She blinked into the salty air. “He would come home with his pistols stinking of burnt powder, and we kids would know he had been out killing the Black and Tans. Me mum, she would cry, but she never told him to quit, no. She believed in what he did, y'see, though it were a mortal sin according to the priest. All of the priests.
“There was the local constabulary,” she went on. “Pap hated them the most, for these were his countrymen and they kept the British heel on our necks. He planned many a day for what he finally did to them. He and his fellows waited in the forest's edge near the chapel while the constab boys were at mass. When they came out, Pap alone stepped from the trees and confronted them, called them traitors, then shot one of them down. Then the others of his army stepped out and finished off the rest. When the priest came out of the chapel, Pap killed him, too, saying he had no right to give the Blessed Sacrament to such creatures as the constabs.”
A windblown tear streamed across her rosy cheek. “The Black and Tans came for him a day later. Before our eyes, they shot him in the back of his head, then carried him off to be hung from the tree outside the chapel. When they cut him down, no priest would say a mass for him. We buried him, knowing he was bound for hell. Yet I have little doubt he preferred hell rather than the heaven of a God he had come to distrust.”
She shook her head. “His blood, it runs through me veins.”
“Yet you became a nun,” Josh said.
“Yes, in the hope that God would provide me old man some comfort, even in hell. But then I came to love being a nun. There was no deceit in my heart when I wore the Church's cloth. It was my vocation, that which I believed was meant for me, that which made me happier than anything in life. Yet it was taken from me. God took it.”
Josh looked out to sea, studying the distant line that marked the meeting of water and sky, then said, “Let me tell you something of my family. My father is the lighthouse keeper on Killakeet Island. He is a peaceful, gentle man, and he raised me to be the same as he. But, since it is a very small is-land, and everyone gossips, he could not hide the truth of my family. The Thurlows, from the beginning of the settlement on the Outer Banks, were wreckers who lived off the flotsam and jetsam of wrecked ships. Sometimes, they couldn't wait for the weather and the awful shoals to do their
dirty work. The Thurlow family, all of them, men, women, and children, would go out into the dark and carry lanterns and walk back and forth on the beach. To a passing ship, it looked as if the lanterns were aboard boats safe in the stream. Unsuspecting captains would come near, only to strike Killakeet Shoals. Whether the sailors aboard drowned or not, few of them lived to see the new sun.”
Josh continued: “The worst of the old wreckers was Josiah Thurlow, my great-grandfather. He was ruthless in his quest for treasure, even if it only meant a pair of ill-fitting shoes taken off a dead sailor. To stop the wreckers, especially the terrible Thurlows, the government built a great lighthouse on Killakeet and offered old Josiah the lightkeeper's job. He took it, though some say he never gave up his murderous ways.” Josh paused and then said, “His blood runs through my veins.”
“Did you try to be a good man like your father?”
Josh smiled. “No man could hope to be like my father. He's no saint, loves the girls too much for that, yet he is as good a man as there is. I do my best, that's all I will say.”
All that could be heard was the keening of the gulls and the grumble of the sea. Finally, she asked, “Where shall they rest?”
He gestured toward the towering cliff. “Up there. Rose loved the view of this bay.”
“I will say prayers over their graves, if you wish it.”
“I do not wish it.”
“Then may I say good-bye to them?”
“Yes.”
“I should like the honor of carrying your son to his last resting place.” Josh studied her, then nodded his approval.
Josh tamped the dirt on Rose's grave with the back of the shovel, then leaned on its handle and was quiet until the lump in his throat subsided enough to allow him to speak. “Good-bye, Rose,” he said. “You were a good wife. Good-bye, Turu. You were a good son, none better. I will miss you both forever.” He tossed the shovel down and looked at Kathleen. “Why are you dressed that way?” he asked, as if noticing for the first time the combat utilities she wore and the rifle she carried.
“Because I have seen the light,” she answered. “I finally understand that God loves war. I don't know why. Maybe without war, peace has no value. No matter. I am acceding to His wishes, which He has kept making plain,
though I have for so long refused to listen.” She looked across the sea, toward the pink and golden clouds that drifted so prettily and peacefully there. For just a moment, there was something of hesitation in her expression, a softening of her eyes; then she seemed to settle herself, to prepare. “For all the weeks after I escaped, I kept trying to get someone to chase the colonel away so I could have me little Monessa. But no one would do it. So I decided to go back to Yoshu, to give in to his demands, at least until I could find a way to escape with me child. It was why I married Ready, to use his love to get what I wanted. I am filled with deceit, Captain, and so very wicked.”
“You shanghaied me, which was wicked, and perhaps so was your marriage to a man you didn't love. But what happened on Ruka, all that was forced on you by a cruel man.”
“Thank ye, but ye are wrong. I sinned beyond measure on that island. And now, Captain, I will tell it to ye. My greatest sin.”
So Kathleen told him her story, of her sin beyond sins, and when she was finished, Josh stood silent and shocked for a long time. Finally, he asked, “Who else knows this?”
“The marine priest. I told Mori and Rose early on about me baby, but the rest of it? Nay, Captain, only a priest could hear such a wicked thing. And now ye know.”
“Why did you tell me?”
“Because I wanted you to know that I am dirt, and unworthy of yer concern. I am a grand sinner, Captain, but I can fight.”
“Fight?” Josh shook his head. “When the submarine returns, Colonel Burr will go to Australia. He will request bombers to smash Ruka.”
“Aye, and their bombs will murder the people there and me baby. Nay, Captain. I beg ye. Think what God has done. He has killed yer wife and yer son. He has allowed me to sink into depravity. He is telling us what He wants if we will but listen. Let us go to Ruka and kill the Japanese, or be killed. Maybe we'll win, and maybe I'll get me baby back. Or maybe we will die. I doubt that God cares. He only wishes us to fight. Finally, I understand this is His way”
Josh looked at the twin graves and something broke inside him, something that had never been real, something he realized he had invented to hide the awful truth of the kind of man he was. He steadied himself and allowed his dreams to fade until they disappeared altogether. “I don't know much about what God wants, Kathleen,” he said, “but I do know this. Ever since I came to this island, I have tried to run away from Colonel Yoshu. I forgot the lesson Captain Falcon taught me so well on the ice. You do not
run from evil. To hesitate allows it to grow. You go full throttle right at it, and when you get close enough, you reach inside its rotten breast and tear its heart out.” He picked up his rifle. “It's time to go,” he said roughly.
She shouldered her rifle. “Where are we going?”
Josh looked at her, then past her, to all that he had done, and all that he would have to do. “To war, Kathleen. We go to war.”
In the darkness, the deep darkness of what seemed an endless night, Josh sat beside his daughter inside his sister-in-law's house. Manda's cousins were beside her, all asleep. Josh pulled the cotton quilt over Manda's bare shoulders, then leaned over and kissed her cheek. The evening before, after the other raiders had gone to rest prior to disembarkation, Josh had talked to Manda of many things, but mostly his reasons for going to Ruka. He'd explained that the bad men who had killed her mother and brother had to be punished.
Manda had looked up at him with her big luminous eyes, and the longing expression that reminded him so much of Rose, and had asked, in her innocence, “Will hurting these men let Mama and Turu come home?”
“No,” he answered honestly. “Nothing can do that.”