Nation Read Free

answer. He was holding it as an act of faith, to show God that he would not desert Him and hoped that in return God would not desert Captain Roberts. He swung the wheel as he began the next verse, and lightning illuminated a path across the restless wave—and there, in the light of the burning sky, was a gap, a valley or cleft in the wall of rock, like the miracle of the Red Sea, thought Captain Roberts, only, of course, the other way around.
    The next flash of lightning showed that the gap was full of forest. But the wave would hit it at treetop height. It’d slow down. They might just be saved, even now, in the very jaws of Hell. And here they came….
    And so it was that the schooner Sweet Judy sailed though a rain forest, with Captain Roberts, inspired to instant creativity, making up a new verse explicably missing from the original hymn: “Oh Thou who built’st the mountains high, To be the pillars of the sky—” He wasn’t totally certain about built’st , but bidd’st was apparently acceptable— “Who gave the mighty forests birth” —branches cracked like gunshots under the keel, thick vines snatched at what remained of the masts—
    “And made a Garden of the Earth” —fruit and leaves rained down on the deck, but a shudder meant that a broken tree had ripped away part of the hull, spilling the ballast— “We pray to Thee to stretch Thy hand” —Captain Roberts gripped the useless wheel tighter, and laughed at the roaring dark— “To those in peril on the land.”
    And three great fig trees, whose buttressed roots had withstood centuries of cyclones, raced out of the future and came as a big surprise. His last thought was: Perhaps who raised the mountains high would have been a better line in the circums—
    Captain Roberts went to Heaven, which wasn’t everything that he’d expected, and as the receding water gently marooned the wreck of the Sweet Judy on the forest floor, only one soul was left alive. Or possibly two, if you like parrots.
     
    On the day the world ended Mau was on his way home. It was a journey of more than twenty miles. But he knew the way, oh yes. If you didn’t know the way, you weren’t a man. And he was a man…well, nearly. He’d lived for a month on the island of the boys, hadn’t he? Just surviving on that place was enough to make you a man….
    Well, surviving and then getting back.
    No one ever told you about the Boys’ Island, not properly. You picked up stuff as you grew, but there was one thing you learned very soon:
    The point about the Boys’ Island was that you got away from the Boys’ Island. You left your boy soul there and were given a man soul when you got back to the Nation.
    You had to get back—otherwise something terrible happened: If you didn’t get back in thirty days, they came and fetched you, and you’d never be a man, not really. The boys said it would be better to drown than be fetched. Everyone would know you’d failed, and you’d probably never get a wife, and if you did get a wife, she’d be a woman none of the real men wanted, with bad teeth and smelly breath.
    Mau had lain awake for weeks worrying about this. You were allowed to take only your knife to the island, and he had nightmares about building a canoe in thirty days with just a knife. It couldn’t be done. But all the men in the Nation had done it, so there had to be a way, didn’t there?
    On his second day on the Boys’ Island he’d found it.
    There was a god anchor in the middle of the island, a brown stone cube half buried in sand and soil. Heavy vines grew over it and wrapped around a huge tabago tree. Carved deeply into the tree’s dry bark, in the language for children, were the signs: MEN HELP OTHER MEN . Next to it, wedged into the wood, was an alaki , a carved black stone on a long handle. Hold it one way, it was an axe. Hold it the other, it was an adze, good for hollowing out a log.
    He pulled out the axe and learned the lesson. So had many other boys;