God's Grace Read online

  If only it would rain again, no deluge, just enough to store up some precious water. Maybe he oughtn’t to have kept Buz on ship, who ate as though starved, and if given a chance drank twice as much water as Cohn. Ought he to have kicked the ape overboard? Should he—to preserve himself? Could he?

  As he was contemplating desperate measures, the sky darkened. Cohn lugged up on deck the all-but-empty water barrel, and Buz carried up a copper frying pan he had found below. He banged the clattering instrument as though summoning a rain God.

  And as if the rain God had himself appeared, the wind rose with a wail and in minutes the black, thickened sky poured water on water. The rising waves lifted the battered schooner on swelling seas, then dropped it low. Now the rudderless vessel plunged through fierce, roiling currents, driven southward by the hurricane.

  A howling wind raged. Cohn had tightly tied the ashen-faced chimpanzee to the broken mast, as the Rebekah Q dipped and rose, from ocean pit to sky, in the hissing waves. They watched the storm with shut eyes, the drenched little chimp whimpering after he had thrown up.

  Cohn, shivering within himself, feared they’d be washed into the heaving sea. Drowning would be the end of it, the last wet page of life. Today may be the day He slays us, though why does He complicate it so when He can knock us off with one small lightning bolt? Mission completed, the earth cleansed of living creatures, except maybe an underweight cockroach under a wooden sink in Bombay, that He will knock off with His spray gun the next time it exposes its frantic antennaed head. What makes Him so theatrical? Cohn wondered. He enjoys performance, spectacle—people in peril His most entertaining circus. He loves sad stories, with casts of thousands. Cohn hid his anger at The Lord, turning it low, then hid his thoughts.

  After hours of anguished enduring, Calvin Cohn watched the slow night unfold as the wind gently subsided. The sea grew quiet, the storm abated. A white star hung like a lucent pearl in the clearing sky. The chimp had revived and was listening with interest to his borborygmus. Any voice interested him. They had sailed southeast after south and were now drifting north-northeast. Cohn guessed they had voyaged out of the Pacific, but where in the world are we?

  In the morning the sun blazed like a flaming bronze mirror. Cohn untied himself and Buz, whereupon the little chimp embraced him in his hairy arms. And they kissed. In his expressive mood Buz inserted two fingers under his neck cloth and tugged at something; he handed Cohn a small silver cross on a broken chain, perhaps as a gift.

  One God is sufficient, thought Cohn. But instead of casting it into the water he slipped it into his pocket.

  The chimp hastily rehearsed his repertoire of language signs, none of which Cohn knew, though he was able to guess out a couple of the more obvious ones. And the barrel on the deck was brimming with rainwater, slightly salted. It seemed as though the ship itself sought the end of its voyage but had trouble arriving upon it.

  The sinking boat was leaking through its rusty hull. If they lasted one more day he’d be surprised. And where was land? As if to say look! two violet-blue jacaranda blossoms appeared on the lavender water, trailed by a palm frond and two green-leaved bamboo shoots.

  And he spied four dead rainbow fish; had assumed they were alive until he shook out the bottom of a paper bag of bread crumbs on the glazed water. The fish did not flicker. The air was heavily humid. Cohn focused his binoculars into the hazy distance and saw moving fog. No birds present, not an albatross or pelican, or anything smaller.

  He inspected their yellow rubber raft and gathered supplies and objects of craft and art to take ashore, granting they arrived at a shore. He collected several precious books, and the water in ten-gallon jugs. Cohn had hand-picked, from cabin to cabin, piles of clothing for all seasons; all the provisions he could carry; also a portable wind-up phonograph with a dozen uncracked records, seventy-eights, long ago the property of his father the rabbi who had once been a cantor; plus yards of lumber and a full tool chest, with gimlets and awls. And he took with him a small off-white urn containing his pregnant wife’s ashes. She had been cremated before the universal cremation, her will, not Cohn’s; she had seemed always to know what was coming next.

  That night, while Buz and Cohn were asleep in their upper and lower beds, the vessel shuddered, splintered, and cracked stupendously as it went grindingly aground. The chimp was pitched out of his berth and began to hoot in the dark; but Cohn got a candle lit and calmed him, saying they would no longer be at the mercy of a foundering ship.

  At dawn Buz slid down a rope as Cohn climbed down the tilted ship’s ladder, stepping on the blackened surface of a coral reef on whose algae-covered mass the Rebekah Q, jaggedly broken in two, was pulled up tight. Across a narrow channel lay a strip of coastal land, possibly an island.

  Buz stepped into the water, and to Cohn’s great surprise, began swimming across the channel to the verdant thick-treed shore. A chimp paddling on his back? A genius chimp, Cohn reflected.

  They’d be like brothers, if not father and son.

  Arriving on shore, the dripping ape thumbed his comic nose at Cohn, and sauntering forward, plunged into the steaming rain forest without so much as a glance backward.

  Hours later, having brought in the yellow raft laden with supplies to the green shore, then hidden them in the saw-toothed tall grass, an exhausted Cohn followed Buz into the forest. He figured God had, at long length, permitted him to go on living, otherwise He wouldn’t have let Cohn leave the wrecked vessel and make for shore.

  The Lord, baruch Ha-shem, had moved from His Judgment to His Mercy seat. Cohn would fast. Today must be Yom Kippur.

  Cohn’s Island

  His first night on the island—the massive silence was unreal—Cohn spent in a scarlet-blossomed candelabrum tree, although there were no wild beasts to hide from. In the rain forest no birds sang or insects buzzed; no snakes slithered on their bellies; no moths, bats, or lizards had survived. No friend Buz, for that matter; Cohn had seen no sign of the young ape. How desolate the world was; how bleak experience, when only one experienced.

  Where were the dead? He had come across yards of scattered bones. None were fossils. All were skeletons of animals that had perished in the Devastation, among them an undersize leopard and a lady chimpanzee. He found no bones of men, felt a renewal of abandonment, but kept himself busy exploring the island.

  In the morning he discovered—there where the rain forest curved behind a rocky, hilly area, and flowed north—several caves in a striated yellow sandstone escarpment, and Cohn chose the largest, a double-caverned chamber, to shelter himself. The escarpment, as high as a five-story tenement backed against a parapet of green and lilac hills, was a many-ledged bluff topped by masses of wild ferns, mossy epiphytic saplings, and cord-thick vines dripping down its face.

  Cohn ascended the escarpment, practically a walk-up. From a terraced enclosure like a small balcony two-thirds of the way up, he paused for a view of the woodsy neighborhood—the rain forest, a wall of steaming vegetation in the west moving north; and toward east a sparser woodland of flowering trees and thick-grassed fields extending to the southern shore of the island, lined with varieties of wild palm.

  From the left side of the escarpment, which looked like a fortress from the shore, a waterfall resembling a horse’s bushy tail fell, forming a foaming pool where it hit the rocky ground. The pool overflowed into a downward sloping savanna, beyond which the rain forest grew over a section of hills to the northern sea, where Cohn and Buz had landed on a coral reef.

  After this initially unsettling yet engrossing view of his domain, Cohn’s disposition improved.

  He set to work diligently clearing the anterior, and smaller, of the two caves, carrying out shovel loads of black mud; he tore out armfuls of entangled dead vines; and hauled buckets of rocks and wet sand. Cohn unearthed two stone ledges, one along the rear of the cave where it opened into the larger cavern; the other an almost rounded table of sandstone extending from the left wall as one entered the cave, a
n all-purpose work platform on which he figured he would prepare food, assemble and repair objects he might need; and on which he could build cooking fires.

  The cave, surely eighteen feet high, ten broad, and twenty feet deep, showed no high-water line of the Flood. That appeared on the face of the escarpment about thirty feet up. Despite the humid heat Cohn lit a fire to bake out the cave. He had dragged in a quantity of lumber, transported with great difficulty from the reef—a pile of boards of mixed woods and lengths that he managed to fit under the long rock ledge; and in a week he set to work constructing a wall of shelves ten feet by twelve high and wide, and two deep, where he stored his possessions, such as they were, and would keep whatever else he might collect. It occurred to Cohn he seemed to be assuming a future, for better or worse.

  Using the fine tools he had carted along from the oceanographic vessel, which included a surveyor’s telescope, he built himself a rough small table, sturdy cot, and a primitive rocker with water-barrel staves; then Cohn constructed an outside hut not far from a small stand of white acacia trees about thirty feet from the cave. The hut was walled with split saplings on three sides, and the fourth was left open because he liked to look at a grassy, wooded area that sloped to the sea.

  His hut was covered with a bamboo roof insulated from the heat by a thatch of palm fronds interwoven with strips of bark. When Cohn tired of the cave—his bedroom, kitchen, and living area—he sat in the hut, more like an open porch and revery room. There he had strung up a canvas hammock he had made from a sail, where he often lay, reflecting on his lonely fate.

  Can I call this a life?

  Better than death.

  Why bother?

  “Because I breathe.”

  When the humidity grew intolerable he rested in the cool cave, lit at night by a kerosene lamp. He considered constructing a gate across the oval opening, but why get involved if there were no inconvenient animals around? And gate or no gate the Lord knew where he lived, if He felt like dropping in to talk with His little mistake.

  A week or two after his arrival on the island Cohn was struck by a nauseating illness, felt ghastly, headachy to the pits of his eyes, shivered feverishly. He vomited continuously though he ate nothing to vomit. Cohn sweated; he stank. He lost hair in dreadful quantities; it fell from his head as he lay on the floor on an old overcoat. He lost his short brown beard, chest and pubic hair, every bit on his body.

  Cohn guessed he was afflicted by radiation poisoning, or had been affected—perhaps in addition—by excessive bursts of X-rays trespassing in the shredded ozone. Is it the Swiss-cheese ozone or the will of God that makes me ill? Maybe He knows I’m still angry at Him? Cohn thought he had better watch his thoughts. He who knoweth the voice of the bird way up there isn’t above knowing what C. Cohn thinks. I’d better stay out of his ESP and/or Knowing Eye. But sick as I am I won’t knock on His perilous door, even if I knew where it is. Let Him look me up if He’s in the mood for instant benediction.

  Cohn doctored himself as best he could, with aspirin and sips of stale water. To coat his stomach he chewed grains of raw rice, though it did no apparent good. He vomited anything he imbibed; fouled himself disgracefully; felt abandoned, outcast, bleak. Nobody was present to cluck in sympathy at poor Cohn’s fate. He could not stand very much more of the same. ““Live quickly,”” the Lord had said. ““A few deep breaths and go your way.”” Calvin Cohn, as though in agreement, slipped out of consciousness of the world it was.

  During a long night of delirium, with morbid intervals of awareness and no desire to go on, cursing the woman who had given him birth and anybody who had assisted in the enterprise, Cohn woke in the drafty front cave to the sensuous presence (Mama forgive me) of a hand lifting his aching head. It then seemed to the sick man that a delicious elixir of coconut was flowing down his parched throat.

  In the glowing dark he was teased by a thought that he was being assisted and fed by a heavy-breathing, grunting, black god, holding half a fragrant coconut to his wasted lips as Cohn gulped; or was he still delirious and the experience illusion, dreamthought ?

  “Buz?” he murmured and got no response. Cohn reached forth to touch the god, if god it was, or beast; a hand withdrew and his head struck the ground. The pain, flashing a dozen lightnings, confused him.

  In the morning two ripe red bananas lay by his side, and with them four soft oranges. Cohn reached for one, cupping it in his gaunt hands, deeply breathing its orange fragrance as the warm fumes rose in his head. He bit the skin and sucked the fruit dry. Going by this statement of his senses, Cohn lived on. He had one constant dream: he was alone in the world if not elsewhere.

  His nausea returned but not the creature (or whoever) that had fed him. Cohn, still seriously ill, heaved up the fruity contents of his stomach and sank into a coma. How long it endured he didn’t know. Or whether he had had a visitor or visitors. When he came out of it, he could not separate experience from what might have been. Anyway, here was Cohn lying on the warm ground in bright sun, in open view of the cloudless island sky. Whoever-he-was had dragged or carried him in his soiled overcoat out of the cave into the grass before his hut, where the acacias grew at the edge of the woods and field that led to the sea.

  For days it seemed to Cohn he lay there barely able to stir, staring at the sky, hoping to recover health and existence. Whoever-his-protector continued to provide fruit of several sorts, plus acacia leaves for decoration—and as of yesterday, washed rootstocks of cassava. Cohn, having nothing else to occupy him, forced himself to chew the bitter, starchy root, sensing it nourished him. He had lost a great deal of weight and was afraid to look at any part of himself. But he felt a hot breeze wander over him, indicating he had substance; and when Cohn touched his head to see if it was still there, he could feel a growing fluff of hair. Fortunately it rarely rained as he lay outside; at times drizzled.

  Each day fruit and washed root appeared. If he awoke early to see who was feeding him, invariably there was no delivery. He fell asleep and when he awakened later his portion was present, together with a broken piece of sugar cane. Cohn daily thanked his benefactor but hadn’t the pleasure of making his or her acquaintance.

  One morning, after devouring a breakfast of five pieces of fruit, Cohn got up and dunked himself in the fresh-water pool formed by the horsetail waterfall, from which a spring flowed into the savanna beyond the side of the escarpment. Here Cohn had bathed shortly after arriving in this part of the island, as though to celebrate his arrival; and now he bathed to cleanse himself of his illness.

  He dried his legs, sitting on a warm large rock in the sun, and drew on a white silk shirt of Dr. Bünder’s, his own denims, and blue-and-green sneakers. Cohn liked being dressed; Adam probably had got to enjoy his fig leaf.

  Afterwards Calvin Cohn sat in his rocker in the open but couldn’t work up energy to read. He shut his eyes and was dreaming of sleep when he heard a rustle in one of the white-flowered acacias. Glancing up, he saw to his happy surprise Buz himself sitting on a low bough, paying no attention to his former friend and mentor. He was eating a small, wrinkled, plum-like fruit with a greenish center. Cohn, an old encyclopedia hand, recognized it as passion fruit. Buz held four bunched in his pink palm. He still wore his decaying neck cloth as though out of affection. His supple toes held to the tree limb. The chimp’s phallus and fleshy scrotum were visible, a more than respectable apparatus for a boy his age.

  When Buz saw Cohn observing him he let out an instinctive squawk and chattered angrily at the fuzzy creature below; then, as if recognition had lit a lamp, hooted conversationally. Cohn spoke a few words of welcome home, refraining from mentioning the ape’s desertion of him or engaging in a complaint of his recent woes.

  He had noticed that Buz’s shaggy coat adorned him in tufts and patches, and that the hair on his head had thinned out and left him slightly bald. He wasn’t as skinny as Cohn but had obviously been ill.

  Buz, in courteous acknowledgment of Cohn’s greetings, to
ssed down one of his passion fruits; it struck him on the head, and though it was a pitless fruit, knocked him cold. The ape, after eating those he held in his palm, curiously inspected Cohn’s supine body and at last climbed down to attend him.

  Cohn said Kaddish for one hundred souls whose names he had picked at random in a heavily thumbed copy of a Manhattan telephone directory he had snatched from the sea-battered Rebekah Q. He kept it for company in the cave as a sort of “Book of the Dead.”

  He often felt an urge to read all those names aloud. The Dead must be acknowledged if one respected life. He would say Kaddish at least once for everyone in the book, although, technically speaking, to do so one needed the presence of ten live Jews. Yet, since there were not ten in the world, there was no sin saying it via only one man. Who was counting?

  God said nothing.

  Cohn said Kaddish.

  There’s a legend in Midrash that Moses did not want to die despite his so-called old age. He was against it, respectfully, of course.

  “Master of the World! Let me stay like a bird that flies on the four winds and gathers its food every day, and at eventide returns to the nest. Let me be like one of them!”

  ““With all due regard for services rendered,”” God said, “”nothing doing. You’re asking too much. That mixes everything up. First things first.””

  Cohn said Kaddish.

  If we were bound to come to this dreadful end, why did the All-knowing God create us?

  Some sages said: In order to reflect His light. He liked to know He was present

  Some said: In order to create justice on earth; at least to give it a try.