To Build A Shipt - Don Berry Read online

  "Well, that's all fine, but war on who?"

  "EVERYBODY! The whole damn world! They tried to stamp us down, they tried to run us out of the Bay, and I declare WAR on everybody but us?"

  "Hooraw!" somebody hollered. "War on everybody!"

  And that was how it was. It may even have been the most absurd war ever declared, which would be saying a good deal. A couple of dozen farmers isolated on the Qregon coast, declaring war. I think we were sensible men when we dragged into Vaughn's cabin that night. We knew we were beaten, we were accepting the inevitable, and we were reluctantly ready to give up to it. But we were no longer sensible when we roared out into the night, howling our defiance at the moon. We had gone mad, declaring war on the whole damned world and its stupid indifference.

  It was the first time I realized the importance of madness in this world of surrenders; for there are times when only the madmen continue to fight.

  3

  I drew the job of asking Sam, as I got along better with him than anyone else in the Bay. Trouble was, I got along better simply because I never asked him anything—it was a silent agreement I had made with him.

  Sam's cabin looked just the same as the first time I had seen it; about to fall down. I think more theoretical money had changed hands over that cabin than any other single item, including food. There was a running wager about the exact date of its collapse, and as no man, was fool enough to bet over two months in advance, this wager was constantly being renewed. I myself owed over a thousand dollars on it, a debt contracted before I became crafty enough to realize that the law of gravity was just another sleight-of-hand trick by God.

  Month after month, bet after bet, Sam's cabin continued to stand, taking the shock of the winter storms that roared across the bay, storms that sometimes lashed spray as high as the door itself. It shook, shuddered, wobbled, creaked—and stood, enduring. Perhaps men build houses in their own image; Sam, too, never seemed likely to last out the next heavy wind, but there was some mysterious rigid core in them both that fended off all natural disaster. I once heard that man gets not what he deserves, but what he resembles. Perhaps that is the answer.

  When Sam let me in I felt as though I were forcing a door with false credentials. He always let me in, and I was the only man at the Bay who could say as much.

  "Well, Sam," I said.

  As was his habit, he had scurried back away from the door after opening, and now sat before the fireplace with his hands clasped. I sighed. It was a bad day to be talking to Sam, he was very shy. It came and went in spasms. I sat beside him on the bench, involuntarily clasping my hands in imitation of his.

  "Well, Sam," I said again, cheerful. "Thought I'd like to talk to you a bit." I watched him out of the corner of my eyes, but he didn't seem to take offense. However, neither did he answer.

  I cleared my throat. "You know, Sam, you know Means is dead."

  He winced, and I knew I had made a bad beginning. I wanted to say that nobody blamed him for Means' lung fever, but it was so absurd I couldn't. Finally I just blundered ahead, on the theory I couldn't do any more harm than I already had.

  "That leaves us in a pretty bad spot here, Sam, I guess you know."

  "Yus." He wrung his fingers together, like twisting a cloth.

  "We were talking, some of us, and I—we thought if we had a boat of our own—I mean, you can see that would solve the problem right there."

  He said nothing.

  "What do you think about it, Sam? You think that's a good idea?"

  He thought about it a long time, trying to work out what he had done wrong. "I suppose," he said worriedly.

  "We thought we might build one."

  "Pretty hard thing to build a boat, Ben. Build it right, you know."

  "That's kind of what I was leading up to, Sam. We don't know much about it. I mean, hell, you know us. Vaughn and me and Thomas and the rest." I laughed a little to put him at his ease.

  "Got to have stuff to build a boat," he said reflectively.

  "I mean-there's stuff you got to have for a thing like that."

  "We figure as how we could get the stuff, pretty much." I told him how it had come up, with my joking about the old Shark, and then about the grounded vessel at Netarts Bay.

  He looked up at me in sudden surprise. "Ben," he said.

  "Ben, you ain't talking about a boat, you're talking about a real ship."

  "Well, there you are, Sam, that's our whole trouble. Hell, we're so dumb we don't even know what to call it."

  He unclasped one hand and scratched the side of his nose, staring into the fire.

  "I'll put it to you square, Sam. I'm not talking very good today. The way it looks, we either get a ship or leave the Bay. Since we got no money, that means we got to do it our own selves."

  When I put it that way, so briefly, I was astonished at our ignorance. A handful of farmers who didn't know a ship from a boat, jumping with both feet into an art that had been perfecting itself for two thousand years or better. It was so utterly mad I could hardly believe my own voice.

  "But we can't do it without you, Sam. That's the whole story right there, we can't do it without you. You can see that."

  He bobbed his head briefly.

  "You ever think about building again, Sam?"

  After a moment's terrifying indecision Sam got up from the bench and went to the back corner of the cabin. There was a kind of cabinet there, a cabinet with real doors. It looked as solid as a mountain, and I had occasionally played with the notion that it held the house up. I had never seen inside.

  Sam took a tiny brass key from his pocket. He glanced once at me, hesitated, then unlocked the big doors and swung them open. I almost fell off the bench.

  There were six shelves inside, and each was lined with a row of small, perfect sailing vessels. The firelight rippled golden along the polished hulls, striking sharp lights from tiny brass fittings. In the darkness of the corner there was an incredible mystery about these swimming reflections almost lost in obscurity. A drawing in fire of a beauty so perfect your eyes would not hold it all. Each was a tiny, wooden—perfection, was the only word. In the rickety cabin the models were as out of places as diamonds in a pig wallow.

  Tenderly Little Sam lifted one down from the top shelf and brought it over to me, cradling it between his two hands like a small and precious living creature. He gave it to me, then turned abruptly and walked to the door. He stood on the threshold, looking out across the broad flat of the bay to the entrance bar where the breakers rumbled and scattered white spume.

  When I had it in my hands I felt as though the breath had been knocked out of me. I was suddenly dropped into a different world, and had my first tugging awareness of the beauty men found in ships; the sweep of cutwater and bowsprit, the tall dignity of the masts webbed in cordage, the rich, pregnant curve of hull. I had never really seen a ship before. The large floating shapes with sails were not part of my life, did not move me. But the model, held in my hand, made it somehow possible for me to comprehend.

  I could scarcely believe it had been made by a human being. My own hands felt clumsy and grotesque in comparison. I looked at the precision of the tiny fittings, the thread lines like spider webs that flew taut from the spars and running gear, crossing and re-crossing, complex as the patterns of a rip tide. The hull was made of individual planks, fastened with what seemed to be thousands of tiny nails that must have been smaller than a needle point. Ahead of the wheel there was a kind of little pulpit, with a compass. Lying on this housing was a sextant, less than half the size of my fingernail. As I turned it in the light I saw a tiny glinting reflection. In this instrument I could probably not even pick up in my gross fingers, Sam had put a glass eyepiece.

  Little Sam came back from the door. "That's what you a call a schooner," he said softly.

  I gave him the model, and watched awestruck as the little man carefully placed it back in its shelf cradle and relocked the cabinet doors. He came back and sat down again to
stare into the fire.

  "Well, Sam," I said hesitantly. "That's—that's pretty fine work."

  ‘"Got lots of spare time," Sam said. "Like ships, I do."

  "I—yes, I guess I can see that, all right." There were no words.

  "You take a schooner'now," Sam said reflectively. "Schooner ain't too hard to handle. Small schooner, a man could learn to handle easier than some. Man that didn't know nothin' to start with."

  "Well, that's us, I guess." I still felt as though I had been kicked in the belly by a mule. After actually holding the model in my hands I was more miserably aware than ever of how perfectly that described us: "men that didn't know nothin'."

  "Look, Sam. I'l1 tell you honest. We got no skill. But we'll work for you. We'll work hard. We'll do what we have to do."

  Sam stretched his neck, birdlike. He surveyed the ceiling, seeming to count the cracks.

  "We'll w0rk," I said again. It was all I could say, all I could offer.

  Sam bit his lip and jerked his head once, looking into the fire with an expression of pain.

  "Hard," he muttered. "Too hard, you got to know."

  "You're the brains, Sam, and we're the hands. We'll work for you like your own hands. Sam, listen, we got guts, we'll work like you never seen human men ever work. We need it so bad, Sam. Is that enough?"

  He shook his head. "No."

  For the first time in my life I got angry at Sam. "You're wrong," I told him flatly. "It's enough."

  He was startled by my tone and looked up, scared.

  "Sam, I'm sorry. But it's got to be enough. It's all we got."

  He looked back down at the fire.

  I got up, feeling miserable. I tried to think of what Vaughn would say, tried to think of something as convincing as Vaughn always was, and I couldn't. I wasn't made that way. I went to the door, thinking I had thrown away our only chance just because I couldn't talk right. It didn't seem fair. It was too important to be spoiled for a thing like that.

  "I wish—I wish you'd think it over anyway, Sam. It means a lot to us. It means everything?

  He reached forward and got the poker, stirring up the coals.

  "Ben," he said. "You're crazy. It's impossible."

  "All right. We're crazy. Maybe when you want the impossible it's better to be crazy."

  He sighed long. He stood the poker carefully back against the fireplace wall and finally turned to me.

  "We'll build it," he said.

  FOUR

  1

  At first it was like the beginning of a love affair. We tended to go around grinning foolishly at each other and running out of words at critical moments, because we shared a secret that nobody else could touch. We were going to build a Ship.

  Vaughn's maniac declaration of war on the world Outside had something to do with it, too. We took a fierce and vengeful pleasure in our secret strength. For the first time I understood some things about the Revolution; things the history books left out. One fact that never gets written down is the feeling a man suddenly gets in his belly that he can change the way things are. With the strength of his back and arms and brain, he can make things different, and he doesn't have to put up with it any more, whatever "it" may be. He knows he can fight, and he secretly knows he will survive anything. There is no other feeling like that known to humankind.

  I think the key to it is the vast conviction that you can push past all normal limits, and still survive. Man is by nature a victim. A victim of the weather, the terrain, other men. But when he knows he can survive anything—he rebels, and is no longer a victim. He feels the power of his own surviving in his belly and it makes him wake up in the middle of the night and turn under his blankets with a secret smile. For the first time he realizes there is more to living than merely submitting.

  So the building of the Ship began as love and hate at once. A man who has had that double charge explode in his belly no longer has room for anything else. He can think of nothing but the image and center of the storm that boils in him, and in our case that storm center was the Ship. She swept everything else out of existence. From the moment we understood the idea, the Ship was more real to us than the rocks of the coast, more real than the waves that rolled in from a thousand miles to destroy themselves against the unmoving continent. She was more real than hunger or cold, food or warmth or any of the trivial things that happen to a man's carcass in the course of a day. And all this occurred before we had even begun work, before we had thrown our bodies into this thing that resembled at once an act of love and an act of war.

  Work we had. None of us could have guessed how much there would be; none of us, except possibly Little Sam, had any idea of how complicated it was, how terribly hard it would be, how insane we were even to try. And by the time we learned, it was far too late. The image of the Ship had us by the throat and shook and shook and drove us beyond ourselves and there was nothing to do but see it through or die. The world turned simple for us; build it or die.

  It was almost the middle of May before we could begin even the preparations. The day after I talked to Sam it started raining. It continued then for nearly two weeks, a good Oregon spring rain that made it difficult for a man to tell if he were still on the beach or had wandered off into the ocean. It set our nerves on edge, and we accumulated enough tension of waiting to give the first day of actual work a half hysterical tone. Vaughn was the only one who didn't mind. He said if the rain continued we could sail straight into the Willamette Valley over the mountains, which would be a saving of time in the end.

  My first job was as packer, working with Eb Thomas. Eb had a claim back toward the foothills and four horses, which we were to use to bring the hardware down from the wrecked Shark. In the two rainy weeks that preceded the trip, Eb and I spent a good many hours arguing about the route. Both of us being firm of mind, we came near to not going at all. By the time it was possible to set out we were well on the way to being life-long enemies. My personal conviction, which changed very little with time, was that Eb Thomas was a butt-headed fool that couldn't find his ass with both hands.

  Once on the trail much of our disagreement smoothed out, as it happened that both of us had been totally wrong about the country we had to cross.

  * * *

  It was a full two days' march up to the wreck, and we got there in the late afternoon. I had never seen the Shark before, just heard of it, and I was surprised. I had in my mind the picture of half a ship, lying tilted over on the shore, and it wasn't anything like that. There was no ship at all. It was a little disappointing from the standpoint of scenery, but there was no denying it was more convenient for us.

  When the people from up north at Clatsop Plains I came down to salvage the copper bolts, they had stacked a lot of the iron junk up high on the beach, out of reach of the tide. There was a very considerable pile of iron knees that had held the deck planking to the frame, neatly lumped there for the taking, just like a store. I suppose I should have thanked them, but frankly I was now considering their salvage of the copper bolts as outright thievery. The wreck of the Shark was clearly ours, because we needed it. We later bought a few of those bolts in Astoria, and it was with a clear and bitter sense of paying for our own property.

  There was no question of returning the same day, so we decided to spend the night right there and load up in the morning. There were only a few hours of light left and there was no use packing up just to unpack again. We figured a half-day extra for the return trip, and neither of us was looking forward to it. In honesty, some of that so-called trail over Neahkahnie Mountain was nothing but a figment of some Indian's imagination, and there is nothing harder to walk on.

  Having decided to wait for morning we had nothing in particular to do for the rest of the day, so we just fooled around on the beach. We picketed the horses under some trees where they could get good grass and wandered off up the beach trying to find sand dollars that weren't broken. I invented an infallible principle of nature, which is as follows:

&n
bsp; If the sand dollar is lying with the flat side up, it is always broken on the other side. If it is lying with a roundish face up, and whole, it is never broken on the other side. No one told me this, I invented it for myself. I have spent much time since then trying to figure out how to make some money from this principle of nature that only I know. I made a nickel that first day from Thomas, betting about it, but he quickly discovered I had a principle of nature on my side and refused to bet any more. That nickel is all I ever made out of it. I have often wondered how much that Newton fellow made for inventing gravity. I hope he did not find it as difficult as to turn a principle of nature into ready cash.

  We filled our pockets with sand dollars, and when we were fully loaded found that we had no particular use for the things except to find them. So we skipped them all across the beach in little contests. I suppose all this sounds useless, which it was, but we had nothing better to do for the moment and it is quite a pleasant way to spend your time.

  Thomas was secretly furious at me about my principle of nature, but he wouldn't let on how mad he was. One of the reasons he was such a butt-head is that he considered himself educated. He had no more formal schooling than myself, but he was a great reader and was constantly claiming to have read books I didn't believe existed. And I noticed that when he talked about those books, he always described the pictures, which made wonder a little.

  In any event, he took vengeance on my principle of nature by giving me lectures on everything else. He would look at a cloud and say, "That reminds me of an elephant, doesn't it you?" And I would say "No," and he would go on and describe about the life of the elephant, as he understood it.

  The queerest thing he told me was about an animal I had never heard of, that he called a "camelopard." (He was reminded of it by a piece of driftwood that looked like a piece of driftwood.)

  "That's a beast that lives in Africa," he said, "and it's the damndest thing you ever saw."

  "You never been in Africa, Thomas, why do you keep on talking about Africa?"

  "If you ain't interested in learning about things, just say so. I saw this in a book in St. Louis. You want to hear about it or no?"