human
Reuben, you know too much. Won't you tell the rest, Ben? So many things--tell me more about my father, and--all the rest. Will you not?
gpt
I will try.... She was far over to starboard, running from the squall, until we got the tops'l furled. Dummy and Ledyard saw to that--or better say your father did, for it was his voice, not mine, that made them jump to it, and I to the helm, so to lash it and then go back to your father for what little I could do. So much happened, and all in a moment. All that I spent minutes in telling--why, I don't suppose more than one minute passed from the time the squall struck to the time I was unlocking the irons. Then much less than a minute, and I was lashing the helm, Dummy and Ledyard aloft--in that bit of time Manuel died. Ledyard had broken French Jack's leg with a capstan bar when Jack came up through the hatch. Tom Ball shot poor Joey Mills, and Ledyard grappled with Ball, beat the wind out of him I guess--a man's work. When the squall hit us, only an instant after Jack shot your father, Jack was washed overboard, and Ledyard--helped Ball to follow him, I believe. All that I didn't see; Ledyard told me later. I saw Manuel die. It was while I was at the helm, and she settling steady as you please on that starboard tack. Poor soul, he'd stayed at the masthead through it all, and clung to it through the first stroke of the storm, and now was trying to come down, and it wasn't wind or rain that made him fall, but his own sudden shaking--or maybe he thought Dummy was coming to get him, but I don't believe that. He fell clear of the side, sank and never rose, and _Artemis_ swept on by the empty waters where I could see nothing of him.... Shawn was not washed over. His dead hand had gripped the rail. Later I had much trouble freeing it so to give him a decent sea-burial; and maybe that was when I truly said him a farewell, and his hand so unwilling to let her go.
human
Don't alway be turning me the right side of your face. I tell you it does not trouble me.
gpt
The scar would trouble most girls, Charity. Well, so I lashed the helm and went back to the Captain, who was losing blood at a fearful rate, and then I was a frantic time scrabbling in the locker for a cord to bind the leg and stop the flow. I was obliged to pull the cord with all my power before it would stop. The bullet had completely shattered the bone. I don't think a surgeon could have set it. He said so himself, and commanded me to cut the leg away below the break.
human
The blood was not flowing but spurting?
gpt
Ay, Ru. Could anything have been done?
human
Not that I know of, under those conditions. Not with the anterior tibial artery spouting and the bone shattered. You were fortunate he lived beyond that day. You did as he ordered?
gpt
I did, and he lived twenty days. I asked him if I might not bring him rum from the cabin before I cut it, and he thundered at me, No, in God's name no, and thrust my knife back in my hand, and I cut as quickly and cleanly as I might. Then he thanked me, and bade me help him up the companion ladder to the quarterdeck. There he remained for all of our homeward voyage, by the helm to give me guidance--and the same a fair passage with no dirty weather except a little off the Bermudas, nothing bad. He took the tiller himself at times, to relieve me, during the first days. On the fourth day, I think it was, we could see the wound had begun to mortify, and later he was sometimes out of his wits and rambling, but he would alway come clear of that and tell me once more how he would live until we came into harbor--seeing that nothing except his word stood between me and Copp's Hill. He wrote an account of it all and signed it with a great flourish--that was a quiet and a sunny day--but he feared that would not be enough. Determined he was to speak that word for Dummy and me, and he did so. Charity, I had never thought your father a compassionate man, but--we learn, sometimes.
human
He--I don't know. I don't know what to say.
gpt
Perhaps he changed, as it seems we all do.... My clothes were washed overside, by the way. I came into Boston harbor and to Uncle John's house wearing a suit of Shawn's garments too small for me.
human
Yes, little brother, they were too small for you, now that's no lie.
gpt
Don't ever laugh at him!
human
I was never farther from laughing. You killed your wolf....
gpt
Ben, what of Ledyard? He did not come home with you.
human
Nay, Charity, he did not. Ledyard, who felt so great a dread of hanging--oh, it happened in the night, Charity, and the quiet, when we'd come clear of that bad weather off the Bermudas and were sailing free under a fair southeasterly and hoping to raise the Cape in a day or two. Your father was sleeping in the fever of his sickness. Dummy came to me in the dark, whimpering and pointing. He took the helm while I went forward, half knowing what I was to find, but I was a long time finding it. Ledyard had climbed out on the bowsprit with a length of rope. The rope slipped backward after he fell, and so his face came close against the face of the white goddess. I have never seen her look so careless and so proud.
gpt
For the deity of the moon that may be a way of kindness.
human
Maybe, Reuben, maybe....
gpt
She's taken better men, said Captain Jenks, and shrugged and groaned.
human
All the same I never thought he had it in him. That was all Captain Jenks ever said of Matthew Ledyard. Ben in the undemanding hours of the days that followed could yet inquire: Where is the way where light dwelleth? And where does the self end and the universe begin? But it was plain--more than ever plain in this calm place where land and ocean met and the war between them was only the joyful-tragic music of breakers on firm sand--plain that he must ask those questions again and many times again: of Reuben, of Charity, of others not yet known, most often of himself, and would discover many answers, until the unimaginable time when all questions arrived at silence as they had for John Kenny. Answers bearing illumination seemed closer in this place than ever before--
gpt
My garden,