As he sat by her, the ship lifted high on a great slow breast of water, and the spell was broken.
The slack canvas shuddered against the sky. Every rope hummed as if a huge hand had passed down the ship as over a silent harp, calling forth fresh sounds of voyaging.
The calm over, one storm began.
Another followed.
Of the two storms, one ended abruptly—the fever that raged in Kate and burned her to a white dust. A great silence moved in her body and then did not move at all.
The sail mender was brought to dress her for the sea. The motion of his needle flickering in the underwater light of the cabin was like a tropic fish, sharp, thin, infinitely patient, nibbling away at the shroud, skirting the dark, sealing the silence in.
In the final hours of the vast storm above, they brought the white calm from below and let her free in a fall that tore the sea only a moment. Then, without trace, Kate and life were gone.
“Kate, Kate, oh, Kate!”
He could not leave her here, lost to the tidal flows between the Japan Sea and the Golden Gate. Weeping that night, he stormed himself out of the storm. Gripped to the wheel, he circled the ship again and again around that wound that had healed with untimely swiftness. Then he knew a calm that lasted the rest of his days. He never raised his voice or clenched his fist again to any man.
And with that pale voice and unclenched fist, he turned the ship away at last from the unscarred ground, circled the earth, delivered his goods, then turned his face from the sea for all time.
Leaving his ship to nudge the green-mantled dock, he walked and rode inland twelve hundred miles. Blindly, he bought land, blindly he built, with Hanks, not knowing for a long while what he had bought or built. Only knowing that he had always been too old, and had been young for a short hour with Kate, and now was very old indeed and would never chance such an hour again.
So, in mid-continent, a thousand miles from the sea on the east, a thousand miles from the hateful sea on the west, he damned the life and the water he had known, remembering not what had been given but what had been so swiftly taken away.
On this land, then, he walked out and cast forth seed, prepared himself for his first harvest and called himself farmer.
But one night in that first summer of living as far from the sea as any man could get, he was waked by an incredible, a familiar, sound. Trembling in his bed, he whispered, No, no, it can’t be—I’m mad! But . . . listen!
He opened the farmhouse door to look upon the land. He stepped out on the porch, spelled by this thing he had done without knowing it. He held to the porch rail and blinked, wet-eyed, out beyond his house.
There, in the moonlight, hill after slow-rising hill of wheat blew in tidal winds with the motion of waves. An immense Pacific of grain shimmered off beyond seeing, with his house, his now-recognized ship, becalmed in its midst.
He stayed out half the night, striding here, standing there, stunned with the discovery, lost in the deeps of this inland sea. And with the following years, tackle by tackle, timber by timber, the house shaped itself to the size, feel, and thrust of ships he had sailed in crueler winds and deeper waters.
“How long, Hanks, since we last saw water?”
“Twenty years, Captain.”
“No, yesterday morning.”
Coming back through the door, his heart pounded. The wall barometer clouded over, flickered with a faint lightning that played along the rims of his eyelids.
“No coffee, Hanks. Just—a cup of clear water.”
Hanks went away and came back.
“Hanks? Promise. Bury me where she is.”
“But, Captain, she’s—” Hanks stopped. He nodded. “Where she is. Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now give me the cup.”
The water was fresh. It came from the islands beneath the earth. It tasted of sleep.
“One cup. She was right, Hanks, you know. Not to touch land, ever again. She was right. But I brought her one cup of water from the land, and the land was in water that touched her lips. One cup. Oh, if only . . .!”
He shifted it in his rusted hands. A typhoon swarmed from nowhere, filling the cup. It was a black storm raging in a small place.
He raised the cup and drank the typhoon.
“Hanks!” someone cried.
But not he. The typhoon, storming, had gone, and he with it.
The cup fell empty to the floor.
It was a mild morning. The air was sweet and the wind steady. Hanks had worked half the night digging and half the morning filling. Now the work was done. The town minister helped, and then stood back as Hanks jigsawed the final square of sod into place.
Piece after piece, he fitted neatly and tamped and joined. And on each piece, as Hanks had made certain, was the golden, the full rich ripe-grained wheat, as high as a ten-year-old boy.
Hanks bent and put the last piece to rest.
“No marker?” asked the minister.
“Oh, no, sir, and never will be one.”
The minister started to protest, when Hanks took his arm, and walked him up the hill a way, then turned and pointed back.
They stood a long moment. The minister nodded at last, smiled quietly and said, “I see. I understand.”
For there was just the ocean of wheat going on and on forever, vast tides of it blowing in the wind, moving east and ever east beyond, and not a line or seam or ripple to show where the old man sank from sight.
“It was a sea burial,” said the minister.
“It was,” said Hanks. “As I promised. It was, indeed.”
Then they turned and walked off along the hilly shore, saying nothing again until they reached and entered the creaking house.
The End
