God's Grace Read Free Page A

studied repair manuals of the ship’s machinery and electric system. What difference did steering make if there was no dry place to go? He went where the crippled vessel bore him, wondering whether to swim if it sank.
    One tedious, sultry day Cohn thought he was no longer in the Pacific. He couldn’t imagine where he was. What shall I do, alone of all men on this devastated earth?
    He swore he would live on despite the wrathful God who had let him out on a string and would snap him back on a string.
    Once he heard an awesome whirring of wings, and when
Cohn gazed up to behold a resplendent angel, he saw a piece of torn blue sky shaped like a shrunken hand.
    Cohn prayed on his knees. No voice spoke. No wind blew.
     
    One moonlit night, Calvin Cohn, shivering in his sleep, sensed a presence aboard, surely not himself. He sat up thinking of his dead young wife. She had been driving, not Cohn. He mourned her among those he mourned.
    He feared that God, in His butcher’s hat, was about to knock on the door. For the ultimate reason: ““Kiddo, it’s time,”” or hinting, perhaps, to prepare Cohn? He was to be slain, God had said, though not executed. Why, therefore, hadn’t it happened in his sleep rather than out of it? You go to bed and wake up dead. Or was Cohn making much of nothing real, letting fear touch his throat?
    Or was this sense of another presence no more than anticipation of the land in the abated floodwaters; dove bearing in its beak a twig of olive leaf? Or raven croaking, “Land ahoy! Get your pants on”?
    Cohn stared out the porthole glass; moonlight flowing on the night-calm smooth sea. No other sight.
    Before reclining in his berth he drew on his green-and-blue striped sneakers and, taking along his flashlight, peeked into each cabin and lab room below the foredeck. There were creakings and crackings as he prowled from one damp room to another; but no visitors or visitations.
     
    He woke at the sound of a whimper, switched on his torch, and strained to hear.

     
    Cohn imagined it might be some broken thing creakily swaying back and forth in the night breeze, but it sounded like a mewling baby nearby. There had been none such aboard, nor baby’s mother.
    Holding a lit candle in his hand, Cohn laid his ear against each cabin door. Might it be a cat? He hadn’t encountered one on the boat. Was it, then, no more than a cry in a dream?
    As he was standing in his cabin, a scream in the distance shook him. Bird screeching at ship approaching shore? Impossible—there were no living birds. In Genesis, God, at the time of the First Flood, had destroyed every living thing, had burned, drowned, or starved them, except those spared on the Ark. Yet if Cohn was alive so might a single bird or mouse be.
    In the morning he posted a message on the bulletin board in the games room. “Whoever you may be, kindly contact Calvin Cohn in A-11. No harm will befall you.”
    Afterwards, he heated up a pot of water on the gas stove and then and there gave up shaving. All supplies were short. Cohn piped out the fresh water that remained in the leaky storage tank he had unsuccessfully soldered, and let it pour into a wooden barrel he had found in the scullery. By nightfall almost an eighth of the water in the barrel was gone. That was no bird.
    Who would have drunk it? Cohn feared the question as much as any response. He nailed three boards over the head of the barrel. When he wanted to drink he pried one up, then nailed it down again.
    He was edgy in the galley as he scrambled a panful of
powdered eggs that evening before dark, sensing he was being watched. A human eye? Cohn’s skin crawled. But he had been informed by an Unimpeachable Source that he was the one man left in the world, so he persuaded himself to be calm. Cohn ate his eggs with a stale bun, washing the food down with sips of water. He was reflecting on the pleasures of a cigarette when he wondered if he had detected a slight movement of the cabinet door