Part 19

By the time they were ranged beside the others again, along the fuselage, the anxious pale faces turned to them, the bodies floundering and awash, the colour had gone from the watery world. There was only a brief green streak of twilight where the sun had gone. To the east the waves were black against the tremendous looming purple of the night. Stars were quivering in the enormous rondure of the sky that overhead took on a strange metallic blue and cast upon them a faint luminance that was less than light and only a little less than dark. By it they could see their own dark shapes, the black parallels of the wings. On the black water the white crests flashed and lengthened and disappeared, ghostly in the dark. The waves snarled now as they leaped toward them. The hissing spray stung like thrown pebbles as it struck their blistered, puffy faces. There was a little relief in the darkness, for the sun no longer burned into their eyeballs, but in its place the phantoms of the black lonely water started about them and the blood went thin.

“I suppose now”--Mrs. Kinney’s voice came suddenly and a little shrill, from the shadow she had become--“now that it’s dark, nobody can see to pick us up, even if a boat did come?”

No one spoke. It was what everyone had been thinking, Ronny was sure. But it had not been spoken before in so many words.

Then Bill said simply, “It’s not likely, Mrs. Kinney. But in the morning it will be different. They’ll have heard from Bimini, and the boats will be out sure. We’ve been drifting a bit or they would have found us sooner.”

No one spoke again. They set themselves somehow to endure the night.

Through the noise of the wind humming and shrieking in the wires and of the waves hissing and slapping against the wood, Ronny could hear few sounds which would indicate that human life was here, clinging perilously to what was almost wreckage. His arm ached dully and continuously as he held it tight over the edge of the cockpit, and his bumped and floating body smarted in places where the skin had been rubbed off. Yet he was growing queerly drowsy. His eyelids drooped and a hazy swimming took the place of thought within his head. He must even have dozed once or twice, for a sharp pain in his elbow roused him or a slap of choking water in the face, and he recognized miserably again, what, for a second of blur, he had forgotten--the lost floundering in the dark, the misery in him and in the figures about him.

Once or twice he heard Colonel Kinney speaking gently to his wife and her sharp whimper, as if she, too, had wakened abruptly from a wretched doze, perhaps one in which she had dreamed of warmth and safety and being dry, to the reality of the roaring and sinister dark. Once he heard Gloria swearing to herself, as if unable to stand it any longer, and then stopping abruptly, knowing that it did no good.

The stars were gold and silver overhead in the vast dark vault, and it seemed to Ronny that their tangled and glittering patterns were dragged slowly across up there, like a remote panorama for how many human eyes below them, raised in agony and mute endurance. Only decoration, after all. He must have dozed again, hanging by the other elbow, cheek almost in the water, for presently he started out of oblivion with a hand on his shoulder.

It was Bill, his voice low and humble.

“Look here, buddy,” he said slowly and with difficulty, “we’ll have to look out. They’ve begun to slip off. Mrs. Cargill’s wire keeps coming unfastened and your father went down once. Coming up with him I hit my head a bit. Would you stick around and watch them while I catch my breath?”

“Hurt bad, Bill?” Ronny whispered anxiously. “Here, hang on to this edge. Hook your elbow over. Take your time, old man. I’ll be on the job.”

He swam slowly down the side, catching here and there at a foot. “Don’t mind. It’s me,” he said hastily. He counted the dark heads and shoulders out of the ghostly foam. One, Colonel Kinney; two, Mrs. Kinney; three, Gloria; four, his fa---- that head disappeared even as he looked. Instantly he dived, groping downward in the strangling, rushing depths. There was only water in his frantic reaching fingers. Then he felt hair, a shoulder, caught at a thrashing arm. They came to the surface together, staring into each other’s shadowy faces, gasping.

“Dad,” Ronny whispered in agony, “did the wire come off? You must have let go. For heaven’s sake, be careful. You can’t tell when----”

For a moment longer the bulk of Andrew Burgess hung and shook a little in the dimness. “Thanks--old boy,” he said then. “Guess I wasn’t holding on tight enough. Yet hanging on--hanging on’s--not much worth while.”

“Hush, Dad. Don’t.” Ronny whispered. “They’ll hear you. Think how we’ll talk about this when we get back. Just think of the experience of it.”

His father said nothing. Ronny hung and watched the stars and tried not to think of those boiling black depths he had encountered, or of the queer tone in his father’s voice, or of hot, yellow scrambled eggs. The wind played three distinct wailing notes among the wires, high when the plane was tossed higher on a crest, low and humming in the hollows. The jerk and ache along his arms helped to keep him alert now. He hoped that Bill would be all right. Then Mrs. Kinney cried out, either in a doze or waking from it, and Ronny ached with pity for her, because she sounded like a frightened child trying hard to be good. Ronny could hear the patient fatherly drone of Colonel Kinney’s voice, trying to console her. His own father changed his position restlessly, and then Gloria, in one of those restless moments which passed among them all like a long shudder. The night crawled on.

There was no way of knowing what time it was and yet it might not be more than ten o’clock, Ronny thought. People ashore were just leaving hotels to go out for the evening, or dressing gaily for a dance. How strange it was--they here; those other people over there, hundreds of them, thousands of them, laughing and well fed and happy, walking around on pavements under bright lights. He could see them vividly, hear the murmur of their voices, the scuffing of their feet on sidewalks; and yet they could not think of the six here, even imagine them, or their helpless plight in the black devouring ocean, unless there were headlines in a morning paper. How queer things were.

And the stars far overhead moved slightly and slowly on their steady courses, and the black water lifted and lashed and fell, lifted and fell, lifted and fell, and the wind hummed its three notes interminably. Ronny’s head swam a little with a creeping weariness. His body was clammy inside and out, and it was extraordinary how his arms could ache.

Then Gloria’s wire went loose and she slipped down with a choked gasp and her head went under, and Ronny dived for her--dived with desperation, so that he crashed full into her down there in the strong surge, and came up with her weight caught in his arms. She coughed and tried to swim a little and spluttered and tried to conceal from him that she was crying in sheer wet misery. Then he could not find her piece of wire. It must have gone down, too. He put one arm around her and held her tightly while she recovered herself. Their wet bodies close together warmed each other feebly, and he was grateful for it. Her shivering stopped slowly and she put out a hand to a strut and held on, so that he was relieved of her weight. He took off what was left of his shirt and tied it around her and around the strut but warned her hoarsely not to trust it too much, torn and sodden as it was.

Then he dozed a little, locking his grip and jerking it tight again before it quite relaxed. It seemed to him that a second of real sleep, half a second of sleep, would be an oblivion so delicious that it would make up for everything. It was always just ahead--just ahead--and then salt water smacked in his face and he was wide awake again and his father’s head had disappeared, and he had to dive twice before he brought him safely back again and held him while he recovered from the longer immersion.

A fear that was not like any fear he had known yet clutched coldly at his heart. Was it really a possibility--could it be possible!--that he might lose someone down there? Was death really so near to any one of them in this casual adventure?

The stars slid a little; the waters hissed; the wind screamed. Time was an interminable agony, welding impossible moment to impossible moment that crawled, crawled, crawled. Gloria slipped in again, and then his father, and then Colonel Kinney, losing his wire, and Ronny dived again and again. He had lost track of the number of times. He was not even sure which one it was he hauled heavily to the surface, clinging to him and coughing weakly. Now his right leg was getting cramped. The pain shot up the stiffened muscle, needlelike and searing. Suppose it caught him down there next, when he most needed all the strength he had? He was ashamed to rouse Bill, but he had to, and he heard his own voice, husky and humble, as Bill’s had been.

Bill roused instantly and took charge. Ronny hooked his arm over the cockpit edge, and the doze that moved upon him was delightful. Yet it seemed only a moment when Bill was calling him again, exhausted, and the stars were altered and it was hours later.

As Ronny moved out to be among the others, and Bill hung gasping, he counted them carefully, to make sure they were all there. His hands lingered on a shoulder, and he saw that it was his father. After a moment his father’s voice came to him wearily. “Still--hanging--on,” he said. “Don’t go doing--too much now. We--depend on--you and Bill--a lot.”

The night went like that, passing so slowly, with such a minute succession of incidents, of wretchedness, that it seemed impossible that it could ever end or change above a half-drowned world.

So that when Ronny, floundering on a wave top, with one arm holding up Gloria, happened to see in the east a streak of pale colour, he stared at it for a long time with puzzled, bloodshot eyes, wondering dully what it could be. The glow widened, the sky and sea around it turned pale gray. A streak of burning gold swelled into that. And Ronny cried out suddenly, in his surprise, “Look; it’s morning!”

The tender light fell on faces sodden and strained almost beyond recognition. But even as the light grew white and radiant over the crested wave tops and the strange emerald of the waters, animation came into the faces and they were once more his father and Gloria and Mrs. Kinney and the colonel and Bill.

As if light were the supreme necessity, the supreme miracle, they sought it. It was hope; it was food; it was safety; it was life. A faint burst of animation, exclamation, broken words, feeble, husky laughter passed among them like a renewed pledge. They were once more capable of watching the sea to the west, where any moment now a boat might come. Yet no boat came. The flash of spray was only the edge of a higher wave. The drone was only the wind in the wires. Bill, lifting himself up with greater difficulty now, peered out above them over an empty sea.

Presently the reassuring warmth of the sun had changed to the agonizing glare of yesterday. Their faces were a raw crimson against which the wave edges were knife cuts. Their salt-crusted lips were swollen and cracked. Their eyes were bloodshot and inflamed. Ronny and Bill managed to find rags enough about them to make masks to tie over the faces of the four. Ronny and Bill dared not mask themselves. They had to be on the alert now, both of them. For now that the flash of hope was over and the sun glared nearer and nearer to noon, the others slipped down more easily into the blue depths. It was easier to find them there now, that was all.

It must have been afternoon when Colonel Kinney, slipping down almost without a splash, eluded Ronny’s grasp. Beneath the surface the big body was only a whirling shadow which Ronny caught lightly once and lost. When Ronny’s lungs seemed bursting he shot to the surface empty-handed, with despairing eyes for Bill’s anxious look. One full breath and he was down again, fighting down amidst the strong heave and swirl of the waters, and Bill was with him. Twice they clutched each other fiercely. There was no other shape.

Gasping dreadfully the two hung together on the fuselage, staring into each other’s eyes. There was nothing to be said. Ronny was thankful for the mask over Mrs. Kinney’s eyes. She need not know yet. She was like a dead thing, hanging there, half held by the wire about her, with one hand locked about a strut. She clung as if by no volition of her own, but only the gripping tenacity of the life within her, straining to go on. The sun beat down upon them. The wind screamed steadily in the wires. The eternal water roared and hissed. No one had said anything for hours and hours.

It was late afternoon. “Ron,” whispered his father feebly through his mask, “where’s the colonel?”

“Gone,” said Ronny after a moment. “I--lost him.”

His father tore off his mask suddenly. Beneath it the contorted swollen features were almost unrecognizable. “He’s lucky,” his father rasped. “Why not? Why not?”

“Hush, Dad,” Ronny said patiently, “they’ll hear you. There’ll be a boat before long. There must be.”

Andrew Burgess said nothing more. Ronny stared at the haggard, bitter face where the stiff gray hairs bristled about the chin. It smote through his numbed brain suddenly that his father--his splendid father--was an old, old man.

The sunset flared hideously down upon them. Another night came slowly from the west. And Gloria, tearing off her mask, leaned back abruptly in the rag that held her, and tore free. Her lips strained back from her gaunt face in a queer tense smile and she threw both hands over her head and went down suddenly, before Ronny could guess what she had intended. And below there was only the swirl and the silvery bubbles of his own and Bill’s frantic search.

When they came back again it was almost night, and Ronny was shaken by a paroxysm of grief which he had not even strength enough to express in sobs. He remembered vaguely how beautiful she had been on that morning, ages ago, when he was a boy, before the flight began.

In that night his father disappeared. It was a night such as Ronny had never dreamed possible. He and Bill were left alone in all the lost world, hanging mute and feeble on each side of the faintly warm figure of Mrs. Kinney. Her wire still held. With the mask off, under the stars, her face was not so ravaged as the others. From time to time she moaned a little and they took turns in chafing gently her clammy hands and feet. She was something infinitely precious that they had left to care for, in the whirling chaos in their minds, in the roaring black about them and the high black over them, punctuated with the glittering smear of stars.

When the sun at last broke up the permanence of that night they blinked their salt-incrusted eyes at each other unbelievably, to see the sun, to see that they were still there--three nameless, shapeless beings, under the incredible light.

Ronny turned his head presently to see a boat come surging toward them with a great fan of spray at the bow--a boat with men in it, with young, dry, smooth faces looking anxiously at them, and waving. Ronny watched it come with no emotion whatsoever. He had always known that it would come. But now that hardly mattered.

When hands clutched and hauled him up, he fought them until he saw they had clutched also Bill and Mrs. Kinney. He felt himself in a dry boat, with something to drink burning in his throat. But he felt nothing. There was nothing to feel. Until they told him, gently, that Mrs. Kinney had been dead for very many hours. Then he cried with terrible retching sobs, vaguely ashamed that Bill should see him so.

“DONE GOT OVER”

BY ALMA AND PAUL ELLERBE

From _Collier’s_

Woodie Simmons walked past the house three times before he found courage to open the gate. He was trying to decide what he was going to say. His mind switched; no sooner had he chosen sentences than he forgot them and thought of others. He went up the walk at last because he was afraid that if he delayed longer he wouldn’t be able to think of any at all.

There were four-o’clocks on either side of the walk, their blossoms furled into tight little yellow and red fists, and beyond them prince’s feather, nasturtiums, a chinaberry tree, and a syringa bush all mixed in with tomatoes (the kind that bear small fruit, like red marbles), collards, mint, jimson weeds and white and yellow dog fennel. The Rev. Zachariah Draper spent but little time on things like gardening. But his congregation kept his house in good repair. It was the best in the Negro section of Lower Habersham.

Woodie knocked. There was the sound of a tilted chair let down to the floor, and then of a heavy foot, and Draper came into the doorless hallway that ran through the middle of the house with the slinging slouch that had always made Woodie think of an enormous, sore-footed cat. He had been afraid of the preacher all his life.

“Good-morning,” he said, as simply as he could, but he knew his voice had a stilted sound.

Draper straightened and fumbled with his collar, which was unbuttoned. He buttoned it and made a pompous bow. “Howdy, suh? What can Ah do fer yer?”

The boy had the miserable consciousness that he had been mistaken for a white man. He was tall for his seventeen years, with a coffee-and-cream coloured skin; the light shone from behind him; he and Draper had not met for five years, and he wore the kind of clothes that in that place only white men wore: a gray tweed suit, tan Oxford shoes and blue socks, a clean white collar, a blue cravat and a sailor straw hat. He was intensely conscious of them, but they were all he had.

“It--it’s jest Woodie Simmons, Brudder Zach,” he stammered, dropping desperately into the vernacular in an attempt at conciliation. “Don’t yer know me?”

Draper came nearer, and the morning sun shone on his boldly modelled, lustful face until it gleamed like oiled black marble. His huge body seemed to exude health and strength, along with a rank, unpleasant odour of its own and the smell of snuff. He wore enormous carpet slippers on his bare feet, blue overalls, a dirty white stiff shirt without a cravat, and the greenish black frock coat which was his inevitable badge of office. He tilted back his head, his lips curled away from his snuff-chinked teeth and bluish gums, something lightened in his live black eyes and he broke into a great whoop of laughter.

The volume and unexpectedness of it startled the boy. He shrank back as if he had been pushed. His anger rose, but fear and grief made him weak.

“Li’l Woodie Simmons!” Draper roared. “Li’l’ pickaninny Woodie, dressed up lak’ _dat_!” He drew an immense blue handkerchief with white polka dots on it from the tails of his coat and wiped his eyes and blew his nose, watching Woodie the while with a malignant shrewdness beneath his feigned amusement. He enjoyed the boy’s discomfort and wanted to prolong it. “Tell me, son, do de Yankee white man what’s payin’ fer yer at dat school up North throw in dem clo’es?”

“He--he pays all my expenses. All the boys dress thisaway. And--and everybody else in the town.”

“Do tell! Ah thought mebbe dey’d done made yer er perfesser or somethin’. And now yer’s done gradyerwaited yerse’f, is yer gwine take de colonel’s place down ter de bank, or be de chief er _po_lice, or what?”

Woodie’s eyes filled with tears. He trembled like a colt in a thunderstorm--he was leggy and sensitive and slender like a colt. “Brother Zack,” he said timidly, “my father--died--last night.”

A swift change went over the preacher. His easy, bantering air disappeared. He bent forward an intent grave face. Always and innately dramatic, he listened in every line.

“There’s nobody but--but you to preach--at his funeral. Will you--will you please do it?”

Draper gazed at the boy for a long moment. “Tampa Simmons daid!” he said slowly. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, nodding his head to emphasize the words. “Tampa Simmons _daid_!”

He still seemed to be listening, but now to something inside himself. His unseeing eyes were turned inward. A change went over his face and illumined his eye. He regarded Woodie with stern dignity. The boy knew the issue had been settled, but not how.

“Yer paw was er backslider an’ er Philly-stine. He turned his back on ’ligion. He fought me up an’ he fought me down, ever since de day Ah first come ter de Ole Ship er Zion, fifteen years ago. Ah wrastled wid um in de presence uv de Lawd, an’ he scandalized mah name.”

It was the deep, sure barytone that had won him half his battles. He could turn it on like an organ stop whenever he needed it. It had a strangely moving quality. Woodie felt it in the flesh of his back.

“But de Sperret says ter me: ‘Bury um from de Ole Ship an’ preach ter his funeral.’ Ah feel de Sperret movin’ in mah heart, an’ dat what it say: ‘Bury um from de Ole Ship an’ preach ter his funeral.’ Yer can tell yer maw Ah’ll do it.”

Woodie told her two hours later, after he had bought food in the town, made arrangements for the funeral to be held the next morning at nine o’clock--the hour set by Draper--notified their friends, and jogged the three miles back home on the old white mule that had gone down the furrows ahead of his father ever since he could remember.

“Praise de name er Jesus!” she said gently in her soft voice. “Glory be ter Gawd! Ah never thought he’d do it!”

She turned her face to the whitewashed wall where she lay on her bed and began to cry quietly to herself, from relief. Before Woodie could leave the room she had gone to sleep, for the first time in forty-eight hours.