To Build A Shipt - Don Berry Read online

  At first Sam himself could not work; he was kept running from first light, explaining this, demonstrating that, pointing out something else. We ‘shipwrights' were an enormous burden to him, and I almost think he could have done it faster all by himself. In time, of course, we no longer had to ask for instructions between each stroke of the ax, and it went better.

  The first few weeks I went home at night aching in every tendon, with my head swirling in a fog of unfamiliarity. It was not surprising that a skilled trade should have its secrets, its special techniques. What astonished me was that it was all secrets, all special. Every movement was prescribed, every stroke of the adze had been perfected through the years until there was one proper way to do it, and no other. I do not believe there were two pieces in the entire ship of the same shape. Everything was unique, formed with meticulous care according to certain rules and criteria which often escaped me.

  Take, for example, the frames themselves. Each frame was built up from seven precisely out elements called futtocks, laboriously fitted together in a series of overlapping joints to form a double thickness from the floor futtock to top timber. And no two of them alike. Only one frame in the entire hull was permitted to have square edges, what Sam called the "dead-flat timber." All the others had to be beveled off to fit the curve of the hull forward and aft of the midships frame, and it all had to be calculated with a nicety of precision I found almost incomprehensible. Sometimes it seemed I had spent the best part of my life leaning over the sand while Sam drew pictures and explained patiently.

  "Ben, it's just logic. The hull curves fore-and-aft, right? The frames got to fit the curve, is all. Look." And he would draw.

  "The dead-flat timber can be square, but the rest got to bevel."

  And that was merely one bevel, to fit the curve of the hull fore and aft. Each frame also had another, varying from top to bottom. Anywhere from four to six degrees difference of angle that must be faired into a smooth curve for the planking to follow. Each individual framing member was such a complex series of subtle curves that a man couldn't hold it all in his mind—and yet it made a whole. When a frame was finished you could look at it and see that it was a beautiful thing.

  "Beautiful" was a word Sam used often, in the same way he used "rule": as an ultimate argument from which there was no appeal.

  "That's the way it's beautiful," he'd say. "There ain't nothin' ugly in a ship."

  That's the way it's beautiful . . ." It was the final criterion of all, I suppose, but I was still young enough that it made me a little uncomfortable. I felt like a man going through a ritual, an unvarying ritual performed according to the ancient, fixed laws of the goddess. Questioning after "practical" reasons for everything eventually came to seem a kind of heresy, even to me. It was done this way because the priests had always done it this way since the world began. It was what pleased the goddess.

  When they first panicky strangeness had worn off I settled down to the work with a grim joy. I learned that an ax could be used with precision to hew a line with the exactitude of a saw. I learned to love the sweetly double-curved shipwright's adze, so puzzling in the beginning. At first I couldn't even figure out how to grab hold of the damn thing, and yet when I learned to swing it between my spread legs the handle's complex curves fit the motion perfectly and allowed the smoothing cut to go with perfect accuracy and grace.

  And the goddess began to live. Because of us or in spite of us or independent of us, I didn't know. But she began to live and grow and take shape before our very eyes, and we became a part of her mysteries.

  * * *

  We were almost halfway through the framing when Sam fell in love, or went mad.

  He was running from one side of the Ship to the other, checking that Number Twelve was square with the keel both vertically and horizontally. As the ways themselves were slanted for the launching, true vertical would not do, of course. A small triangle of wood, the angle-board, was held to the back of the frame. It was so cut that when the plumb bob suspended from its peak hung straight along the back edge of the board, the frame was vertical to the keel. Then it had to be horned in.

  Why this was such a satisfying experience, I don't know. The horning batten was a long strip of lumber, fixed to the sternpost on a pivot. It was simply swung in an arc like a great compass, and when both edges of the frame were on the same arc it was square across the keel.

  When Sam sang out, "All_right, boys, we'll horn 'er," I got a bumpy feeling of excitement and anticipation. Then the long batten was swung and Sam fussed with each side of the frame until he was content and called, "All right, boys, tie 'er down, now." And Number Twelve was done and solid and somehow perfect, and the anticpation was satisfied until the next frame was lifted into place.

  It was while Number Thirteen was just being hauled over that Sam fell in love. The two of us were standing beside the hull, absently watching the frame come. I suddenly heard Sam gasp, and my first thought was that he had spotted something wrong. We had already had to remake two frames because they didn't satisfy him. He grabbed my elbow, and I followed his eyes. He was looking beyond the Ship at our perpetual group of spectators. There were at this time around a dozen. Four or five were ‘our' Indians, the others were a group who had come up from Netarts Bay to see what we were doing with the old hulk they'd sold us for twelve dollars.

  "Ben," Sam said, "Ben, who's that?"

  "Who's what, Sam?"

  He clutched my elbow even tighter, until it hurt. "Over to the side, standing over to the side."

  I looked, and recognized a young fellow I knew, a boy of about twenty named Cockshaten or some such. I hadn't seen him since just before we'd laid the keel, when he'd come up trying to swap for a knife.

  "That' s just Cock Hat, Sam," I said, puzzled. "You seen him around surely, he's one of our people."

  "No," Sam said tensely. "No, Ben—the woman, the woman."

  "Expect that's his woman," I said, shrugging. "I heard he got a girl up from one of the tribes down the coast. It was a couple of—Sam—Sam, what's the matter?"

  "My god," he whispered, "my god."

  He sounded so strange he scared me. I looked closer at the woman, but there was nothing in particular to notice about her. She was about sixteen or seventeen, I guess. Anyway young enough she hadn't gotten too sloppy yet. Typical coast Indian face, broad and flat, dumpy short legs like all canoe people, long black hair falling loose and greasy around her shoulders. Just an indian girl like a dozen others in the village.

  "My god," Sam whispered again, and his voice sounded half strangled. "She's—she's beautiful."

  "Who?" I asked stupidly.

  Sam jerked his hand away from my elbow as though he'd been touching a snake. He suddenly looked up at me, unbelieving and hostile. He stared at me with such pitiless intensity that I had to look away.

  After a moment he turned away again, almost dazed, and looked back at Cock Hat and his woman. Cock Hat was pointing at something.

  "Sam—Sam, what's got into you? What's the matter?"

  He didn't answer, but started to move very slowly toward them. He didn't even seem to be aware he.was walking.

  "Sam!" He was really scaring me now, he didn't seem to be in control of himself. I didn't know what to do if he'd suddenly gone crazy.

  "Listen!" Vaughn hollered in a big, petulant voice.

  "Are we going to hold this thing all day?"

  The three men had by this time raised Number Thirteen frame into position and were waiting patiently for Sam to horn it. Sam stopped at the sound of Vaughn's voice, but he did not turn. He stared so intently at Cock Hat and the girl that I almost expected to see them, disappear.

  Just then two of the Indians from Netarts started a lively argument about something or other, and Cock Hat and his woman went over to see what it was about. They merged into the small group of gesticulating men. Sam watched them go, standing immobile with his fists clenched. He didn't know what to do. He was ripped between the imperativ
e of horning the frame and the even more violent need to look at the girl. I ran over to him, and he shook my hand off.

  "Sam, listen-" I started.

  "Cet away, you," he said viciously. "You don't see? He bit his lip and looked down at the ground. "You just can't see," he said again, softly.

  "Well, hell," Vaughn hollered sarcastically. "I don't care if we get this frame up or not. We working today or not, is all I'm asking you."

  "Take it easy, Sam," I said. "Jesus, take it easy."

  He started to walk slowly toward the Ship, his fists still clenched at his sides, his arms stiff.

  "Well, .it's about time," Vaughn said. "I thought you was never-"

  "Shut up, Vaughn," I said. I was half panicky. I didn't understand what was happening and I wanted it all to stop.

  "Listen, Ben, you don't have to—"

  "Just shut up, Vaughn. ]ust don't say anything? I almost pleaded: with him, and he looked at me with puzzlement. "Listen, Sam," I said.

  Sam shook his head, looking at the ground. "You don't see," he repeated. "She's—perfect."

  "It's just an Indian girl, Sam, hell, there's—"

  He wasn't listening. "She's the only perfect thing I ever seen in this world," he said, almost to himself.

  It was the only time I'd ever heard him use the word. I suppose I should have known it meant trouble, but it was so unreasonable I couldn't take it seriously; I was just panicky. The girl was only a girl, no different from any of the others who drifted around to watch us work.

  Sam horned the frame, but his mind wasn't with it. He had a haunted look, he didn't seem to care. And after Thirteen he said he was sick and going home. So we all quit work, though there were still a good two hours of light left. Vaughn and the others had missed most of it, aud were very sympathetic about Sam's being sick.

  "He best take care of himself," Vaughn said. "`Without him we're lost. Do him good to rest a little bit."

  "Yes, I suppose."

  "He really drives himself, Sam does."

  I don't remember what I said, just something to fill up the silence. We all drifted off home. By the time I'd gotten to my cabin I'd about convinced myself that I was imagining things. There was absolutely nothing about that girl that could get Sam so upset, it was something he had in his mind. Maybe he was sick, that was the only reasonable explanation.

  I was siill young enough to look for the reasonable explanation. And stupid enough not to realize that there is no creature on the face of the earth so dangerous as a man who is searching for perfection.

  SIX

  1

  There is no question but that framing is the best part of building, the most beautiful part. Each day produces something new to be seen, a new growth, something of mysterious significance you only half catch out of the corner of your eye.

  As a child in its first years changes with baffling speed, so the Ship grew in framing. Before your eyes the squalling bundle of flesh becomes an infant, then a child, then a young person, and it all goes so incredibly fast. Later it slows, and there is no visible change from one month to the next, and later still, from one year to the next.

  But in the beginning all life is consumed with a wild eagerness to fulfill itself, to take its proper form. All else is swept aside in the hurricane pressure to grow, an irresistible rush toward finality.

  With the Ship it was the same. The complexity of curves and angles that grew steadily from the stacks of rough-cut lumber were transfigured by the simple act of making them a part of the whole structure.

  In becoming necessary to the whole they lost their uniqueness, and became something even more. The wing of a bird, no matter how graceful its lines, fulfills itself and become real only as part of the bird. These intricately shaped pieces of wood were the organs and muscles and limbs and skeleton of the Ship and achieved their meaning only as part of her body. There was no way to avoid the conviction that she grew like any other life, rather than being constructed.

  In the end we became merely witnesses at a miracle, as a mother is witness to the miracle of birth. We were necessary, as is the mother, but past a certain point the life that is rushing to create itself becomes the unquestioned master; the mother has no choice when labor has begun, we had no choice. The goddess was using us to birth herself. We were no more than the instruments of her self-creation.

  There was a satisfaction I cannot describe, participating in this miracle. Isolated, each frame with its staggering complexity of curves and angles and fairings and joints seemed almost arbitrary. Beautiful but incomplete. But when it was horned in and trued along her keel, each stroke of the adze was transformed into an unchangeable necessity. No curve overwhelmed you by itself: but as it became a part of her body the beauty grasped you by the throat and made it hard to breathe. How this could continue undiminished, day after day, I do not know. By any reasonable standard I should have been far beyond the point of sensing beauty.

  For I paid—as we all paid—in the coin of an aching back and a mind wracked with fatigue. A kind of fatigue different from any I had ever known. It was the first time in my life that my working day was spent making only one sort of motion, the long swing of the ax and the shorte stroke of the adze. Suddenly the burden of my working hours was thrown on one set of muscles, and it broke me.

  Night brought no relief, for it was filled with images of the Ship. When my body ceased building at dusk my mind began, working through the darkness of the night, following the spidery, fevered trails of dream. She filled me, she dominated me, twenty-four hours of each day. Waking and sleeping became ambiguous terms without real signification; the only reality was the Ship, the magical rite that consumed and fused us all. I had never known what it was to work.

  The summer days were long and rich, and we worked whenever there was light to see. Fourteen, sixteen hours at first. But we knew the days were imperceptibly shortening as the season drew on, and the knowledge drove us even harder to profit from the light we had. At the end of the day I was no more than half alive, but rebelled fiercely against the necessity of stopping in the failing light. By the pre-dawn glow that silhouetted her frames against the pale sky I was already restless and anxious to get my hands on the tools again.

  As the framing moved steadily on, Little Sam looked like a haunted man. His eyes were vast and dazed and circled with dark as though someone had thumbed a soot into the sockets. I heard no more about the woman, and so forgot her as best I could. I could not see what she had to do with the Ship, and was impatient to wrench that useless image from my mind, to fill myself wholly with the goddess. And in any case Sam's condition called for no particualr sympathy, nor did it even seem remarkable. We were all about the same, we were all haunted men. The condition of any individual was irrelevant, unless it interfered with his work. Sam worked as before; that was the only reality I was willing to acknowledge.

  We burned. We had been converted into the white-hot instruments of the Ship, and the only meaning to life was work. The madmen of the goddess, and we accepted it joyously, and all the rest was no more than the rustling of wind in the beach grasses.

  About midway in the framing I had quit going home at all. There seemed to be a huge emptiness in the cabin, something missing. Almost as though someone had died, and I kept expecting to see her there. What was missing was, of co1u·se, simply the physical presence of the Ship, and that was easily solved. I took some blankets down by the ways and installed myself in her very shadow. It was too close to the water to be entirely comfortable. The frequent night fogs crept through my blankets and I was chilly even in the summer nights. But the compensations—the compensations were worth any amount of damp.

  When I turned restlessly in the night and opened my eyes—she was there beside me. I saw her by moonlight and starlight and in the dying glow of my fire. I saw the fog drifting gray and silent among the black bones of her frame. I saw her in a thousand ways none of the others had ever seen her. And when there was no light at all, she was there. I fe
lt her, there, looming up out of the blackness into blackness, the beauty and the power of her, and I could sleep more content. I saw her in the first light of morning, while the rest of them were rubbing sleep out of their eyes and thinking about something to fill their bellies and looking at the dead lumber of their cabins. I kindled my own fire and warmed us both a little from the night. I never had to take my eyes off her. And when the others came back to her, I had the secret satisfaction that I had never left her. I was more faithful than they.

  It made them furious that I had thought of it first, of course. They funned me a lot, told me I was too tired even to go home, told me my cabin had burned down or was getting mildewed or half a thousand other things that didn't move me at all. But they knew I was right.

  The first one that finally gave in and admitted it was, of all people, that butt-head Eb Thomas. It was one night just at dusk, a dead moment of peace and content when we looked over what we had done during the day and thought about tomorrow. To my recollection we had just tied in Number Seventeen.

  Thomas drifted over to where I was sitting and thumped himself heavily down on the ground beside me. Ostentatiously he hauled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead.

  "Whoo, what a day," he said.

  "No worse'n any other," I told him right out. I glanced over at him to let him know I wasn't about to listen to any more stories about his head-eating beasts in Africa.

  "I'm beat right down to the boots," he said.

  I didn't say anything. He wasn't any more tired than anybody else, he was just feeling sorry for himself or something. When he saw I wasn't going to go along he got right down to business.

  "Say, Ben," he said causally, "you wouldn't have maybe an extra blanket lyin' around, would you?"

  "No, I got no extra blanket, what do you think? I ain't running any hotel down here, you know."