The Dark Canoe Read Free

Waite, lay on his bunk, reading a book Caleb had loaned him.
    Tom was the diver on our ship, our only diver, until the morning when a mammoth burro clam had fastened on him in ten fathoms of water. After a long struggle he had wrenched himself free from the steel-like jaws, but his left arm had been cruelly cut. For three weeks he hadn’t moved from the forecastle and during that time he had taught my brother Caleb the simple rules of his craft. It was necessary if the search for the Amy Foster went on that somebody knew how to dive in deep water. Since Caleb among us all was the most determined to find the ship, and therefore perhaps the bravest, the task had fallen upon him.
    Tom put down his book. He was four years older than I, quick-tempered, and had a long thin face like a cleaver.
    â€œI’ve been listening to the talk out there at the supper table,” he said. “It appears that most of the crew blame the Indians for the murder, the ones who gave us the gold coins. They think that one or two of them could have crawled up the anchor chain, throttled your brother before he knew what was happening, and then tossed his body into the bay.”
    â€œBert Blanton was not more than fifty feet from the quarterdeck,” I said, “and he heard nothing, not a sound. Nobody heard a sound except Old Man Judd. About that time, he says, he heard the cat yowl. Why would the Indians want to kill Jeremy?”
    â€œYou remember how the chief got mad when Jeremy wouldn’t let him bring the tribe aboard. Well, he might have stayed mad and come back for revenge. They move around quietly and they move fast.”
    â€œI still don’t know why they would want to kill Jeremy.”
    Tom ran a hand over his bad arm. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is you don’t think anyone would want to kill him. You followed Jeremy around as if he was some sort of a god. You couldn’t take a deep breath without asking him first. Well, he wasn’t that perfect by a long shot. There are a lot of men around who would have liked to kill him. Many a time I felt like killing him myself.”
    I gave Tom Waite a sharp, questioning glance.
    â€œJeremy was always so cocksure about everything,” he went on, seemingly unperturbed. “Cocksure and, if he felt like it, pretty cruel. Take the inquiry in Nantucket. One of the board, Mr. Reynolds, asked him why he hadn’t sailed the Amy Foster out of the bay when the storm blew up. And what was Jeremy’s answer? He drew himself up, straightened his coat—the one with the double row of brass buttons and shining gold anchors on the lapels—lifted his chin and smiled the slow, white-toothed smile that always made the ladies swoon. Then he said in his most cultivated voice, the voice he picked up at college, ‘Sir, Captain Caleb Clegg ordered me to stay within the harbor. It was the wrong command, since the bay is shallow and strewn with reefs. Had I been her captain I would have taken the Amy Foster out to the open sea where she would have survived the storm. The fact that she was wrecked on La Perla Reef proves me right, Mr. Reynolds.’”
    â€œWhat’s so cocksure, so cruel about that?’’ I said, angrily.
    â€œIt was cocksure to say that the ship wouldn’t have been wrecked in the open sea. Ships are wrecked there quite often. And it was cruel to put the blame on Caleb, who was sick at the time, if you remember.”
    Tom picked up his book, turned the pages, and put it down. “I don’t like to bring the matter up,” he said, “because…”
    â€œIt wasn’t Caleb who killed Jeremy,” I broke in.
    Yet, as I spoke, I knew that the murderer could have been my brother. From the morning Caleb and Jeremy had fought in the loft of my father’s boat works, over which way a board should be sawn—lengthwise or across—and Caleb had fallen to the ground below, he had hated