Neil tried to joke lightly with her about his arm and her ministrations, but she seemed solemn and withdrawn.
“You’re sure you want to keep trying to do without the sling?” she asked after they’d finished the examination and wrapped the elbow again with gauze.
“Yes. I think that’s the best way to put pressure on myself to use the arm more normally.”
“All right. But the infection’s still there.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Frank suddenly interjected. “Put some mercurochrome and a Band-Aid on it, and let him be. People dying all over the world and you’re worrying about Neil’s sore elbow.”
Jeanne looked up at Frank, who kept his back to them, and then glanced fearfully at Neil. She moved away from him and stood up.
“She also spent half the day with the Brumburgers,” Neil said to Frank’s back.
“At least they’re dying,” Frank shot back, half-turning. “Can’t you take care of yourself anymore?”
In the awkward silence that followed Jeanne gathered up the medicine kit and hung the lantern back from the roof.
“I promise either to heal myself or to go terminal as soon as possible,” Neil finally rejoined.
“And you, Jeanne,” Frank said, ignoring Neil’s remark and stopping her on her away down to the main cabin. “Don’t waste so much time with the Brumburgers. You’re got your own life to live.”
“I thought I was living it,” she replied coolly.
“You’re not,” Frank countered loudly. “You’re spending all your time with Lisa and Skippy and cleaning up vomit and mothering Neil and not a second on yourself.”
Neil saw Jeanne watching Frank closely, seeming to study him.
“I’m sorry, Frank,” she said. “I suppose I am compulsively doing things whether they need doing or not. I’ll try to relax.”
Frank stared at her, seeming as surprised as Neil by her abrupt acquiescence.
“Well…it’s just that I want you to be happy,” Frank finally said.
“I know,” she replied. Then she stepped down into the main cabin.
Later, after she’d gone over to her own cabin to sleep, Frank stopped Neil as he was headed for bed.
“That’s one incredible woman,” he said to Neil.
“Yes,” said Neil.
“If I don’t accomplish anything else in the rest of my life except see to it that she’s been taken care of, I think I’d be satisfied.”
Neil looked into Frank’s intent, confiding face and felt a distant stab of fear.
“She… she’s a fine woman,” he said.
“I hate to see her martyring herself,” Frank went on. “She’s working much too hard.”
“Maybe it’s better for her now than thinking,” Neil commented.
“Maybe,” Frank said and took a deep breath. “Jesus, what a world. Just when things were beginning to look good, we get three breathing corpses.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You think it’ll ever end?”
Neil looked into Frank’s face, less intent now and somewhat distracted, and without thinking answered simply, “No.”
And he went to bed.
At dawn the next day Sam came up from his cabin to report that his wife and daughter were dead. He made this announcement to Neil apologetically, as if he were confessing that he’d broken someone’s teacup. He and Neil discussed their deaths briefly and concluded that they should be immediately buried at sea. Land was visible four miles to the south, and Neil was worried about both pirates and Bahamian government boats.
By six thirty everyone except Jim and Katya, who were in their berths after an early morning at the helm, had finished a spare breakfast and was ready for the burial. Jeanne, concerned about the effect on Skippy of seeing bodies tossed casually into the ocean, asked Lisa to keep him occupied in the forepeak.
The adults gathered self-consciously in the cockpit outside Frank’s cabin and looked morosely at the covered bodies of the two women, which were stretched out along the cockpit seat. Jeanne had wrapped them together in a clean sheet, and Neil weighted the bodies with an old dinghy anchor.
Sam Brumburger was Jewish, but his wife was not, and he had told them he had no strong feelings about how she should be buried, only that he wanted to say the words over them before they were committed to the sea.
As he watched and listened Neil was struck by the grotesqueness of this funeral. Everyone, including Sam, was dressed in bathing suits or cutoffs or jeans and either bare-chested or wearing T-shirts. Vagabond was sailing along under cloudless blue skies through sparkling blue water. Only an unpleasant odor—either from the bodies or Frank’s cabin—reminded him of death.
Sam spoke again with that almost painful objectivity that his own death seemed to give him. He talked emotionlessly of the troubles he and his wife and daughter had had, their weaknesses, his, as if they were traditional parts of a eulogy. He was like an historian summing up a doomed civilization. Sam seemed to be not just burying his wife, but himself also. He was summing up before the Lord his being, offering it without apology.
“Human beings don’t plan to die,” he was saying. “They get picked up, incredulous and protesting, and leave the stage like a vaudevillian getting the hook. In some ways Ingrid and I’ve been lucky: we got to say our good-byes, sing our final song, and walk off the stage under our own power, knowing precisely where we were going.
“So, Lord, we commit Ingrid’s body to the sea. I thank you for her life. I thank you for her death.”
At first when Sam stopped speaking, Neil was not sure that he was really finished. Then he nodded at Frank, and Neil joined Frank in lifting up the shrouded bodies, first to the edge of the combing and then, with a quick thrust, into the sea.
Sam had stood with his head lowered as they did this, and he did not raise it to watch the bodies swirl astern, slowly sinking. Jeanne came up and gently embraced him, held him for five or six seconds, and then wordlessly went back into the wheelhouse. Neil, surprised by his mild revulsion at seeing Jeanne hugging the dying man, then went up and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder.
“That was fine, Sam,” he said, feeling awkwardly that he sounded as if Sam had just done a good job hauling anchor.
The others, too, after saying a brief word to Sam, moved onto the central part of the boat. It was Neil who, turning back to adjust the mainsheet, saw Sam Brumburger climbing up out of the cockpit. Neil saw him, one leg already over, straddling Vagabond’s combing, moving clumsily and weakly, knew what he was doing, knew he could stop him, but didn’t. As he watched, Sam pulled his other leg up onto the combing, looked down into the water rushing past, then pushed himself off into the sea.
“Hey!” Frank shouted from behind Neil and then rushed past into the cockpit.
Sam’s head bobbed up briefly in the wake of Vagabond’s starboard hull, then disappeared. Frank stared after him.
When Neil turned into the wheelhouse, he saw Captain Olly steering Vagabond as if nothing had happened.
“Good man, Sam,” Captain Olly said, staring forward. “Got himself a good death too.”
For Neil, Olly’s wisdom made only the smallest dent in the horror.
The low smudge of land lying on the horizon dead ahead grew slowly toward them through the hot, still morning. They had listened at eight to news of destruction and starvation throughout the world that made their recent losses and current privations seem insignificant, yet Neil sensed that his ship approached the land reluctantly, with more fear than hope. They’d had no rain and foresaw none through the next day anyway, and Neil felt they had to try to duck into an outer cay for water if the opportunity arose. Jim was reading a guide to the Bahamas, trying to determine which islands had fresh water and which didn’t, but the writers of the guide had never anticipated anyone’s wanting to get water on uninhabited islands when it was available at any port. Neil doubted that any of the small islands would have springs or wells. Any hope they’d had earlier of sailing into Hopetown or Marsh Harbor for supplies had been dashed by the government edict that all foreign vessels had to clear customs and surrender their weapons in Nassau or Freeport.