God's Grace Read online

  Cohn thought: He was the Author of the universe. Each man was a story unto himself, it seemed. He liked beginnings and endings. He enjoyed endings based on beginnings, and beginnings on endings. He liked to guess out endings and watch them go awry. At first He liked the juicy parts where people were torn between good and evil; but later the stories may have let Him down: how often, without seeming to try, the evil triumphed. It wasn’t an effect; it was an embarrassing condition: His insufficient creation. Man was subtly conceived but less well executed. Body and soul hung badly together.

  Maybe next time.

  Cohn said Kaddish.

  When he recovered from his radiation illness, he had acquired a light-brown beard and slim, tanned body, but his short legs, from childhood a bit bent, seemed more so. No cows, no calcium. One day he journeyed with Buz by rubber raft to the coral atoll on the northwestern side of the island to see what they might recover from the wreck of Rebekah Q. Many useful objects were too large for transportation by raft, but they could pile up small things, about a four-hundred-pound load each trip.

  The cave was a sloping half mile from the southern shore of the island, on the opposite side from the reefs; and it was best to carry in supplies by raft around the island rather than attempt to lug them through the rain forest by tortuous, all-but-impossible routes. Cohn had made five trips to the beached boat, before he became ill, and had gathered many useful objects. Given his uncertain destiny, he felt he ought not pass up any serviceable item.

  He paddled at the forward-port corner, and Buz imitated his friend, wielding his aluminum oar in the starboard corner. Or if the chimp dozed off, Cohn, with difficulty, rowed alone.

  A breeze had risen and the water was choppy; it took half the morning to arrive at the reef. The grounded vessel, broken in two and lying broadside the sea, was still there, sprayed by waves chopping against the bony atoll.

  Cohn had previously taken back with him The Works of William Shakespeare, his old Pentateuch, a one-volume encyclopedia, a college dictionary, and a copy—there were eight in his cabin—of Dr. Walther Bünder’s The Great Apes, a classic textbook containing three excellent chapters on the life cycle of the chimpanzee.

  Now he set aside Morris Fishbein’s Medical Adviser, The Joys of Simple Cookery, How to do Satisfying Carpentry, and several volumes on paleontology and geology, plus two novels that had once belonged to his wife, may she rest in peace. He had, for entertainment’s sake, considered and discarded A Manual of Sexual Skills for Singles, found in Dr. Bünder’s bottom dresser drawer.

  Buz kept for himself a can opener, after he had succeeded in raggedly opening a tin of Portuguese sardines in oil, of which he ate every little fish without offering Cohn a bite.

  The ape insisted on dragging along the holding cage he had inhabited and to which he was affectionately attached. They packed the raft as best they could, for fear of overloading leaving behind on the atoll four gallons of linseed oil, a large jar of vitamin C, also Cohn’s portable typewriter because he doubted he would write another letter. As for a journal, if he should keep one, he preferred to do it in his handwriting.

  He tried to persuade Buz to abandon his silly cage, but the chimp, hooting, on the verge of displaying anger, would not yield. After their return journey in calmer waters, Buz tugged and lugged his cage along the shore and up the long rise to the cave; and he stored it under the stone ledge where Cohn kept what was left of his lumber, a dirty-clothes basket, plus several brooms and a dust mop he had collected.

  The next time they returned to the reef—on a cloudy morning after a week of rain—Cohn wondered if they had come to the wrong one, for the vessel was gone. But it was the right reef and the vessel was gone.

  The oil, vitamins, and portable typewriter had been washed away. And Cohn felt sadness at the final loss of the ship, the last home he had had in a homeless world. He forgave Buz for wanting to retain his holding cage.

  To explore the island, Cohn made trips in stages by raft, and forays into the interior, hiking with Buz. The chimp’s ordinary mode of locomotion was knuckle-walking, but he enjoyed brachiating, was talented at it, though no gibbon—hadn’t their almost flying skills. He would, however, climb into the crown of a tall tree and fling himself forward, grasping arm-thick liana vines to hold himself aloft before dropping into the next tree. Cohn admired his skill in plunging from one to another without stopping to think about it.

  In the rain forest Buz left Cohn behind, a compass in his hand, trying to hack his way out of the dense undergrowth that made hash of his clothes. Cohn wielded a fine, exquisitely sharp, French saber from the Franco-Prussian War that the chimp had discovered, and borrowed from Dr. Bünder’s trunk.

  The massive equatorial rain forest was canopied with interwoven branches of leaves festooned with mossy looping vines, through which sunlight barely filtered. The effect was of lit green gloom over a shadowy forest floor. Saplings smothered each other in their struggle to arrive at light.

  Parts of the forest floor were covered with flowers. Cohn caught glimpses of vermilion, white, and yellow blossoms. Man and beast had expired but not flowers; the Lord loved their fragrance and color. But who were the pollinators? unless there was a little bee around—God’s grace—fructifying the little flowers? How vegetation existed without insects or other small creatures to pollinate plants, Cohn didn’t know but could guess: the Lord Himself had creatively taken over. Even the distorted fruits Cohn had found on many trees on his arrival had reassumed their natural forms. ““Grow,”” He said, because that was His nature. And trees and flowers blossomed and bloomed.

  The Lord enjoyed beginnings and He usually began by phasing some things out—to make room. Creation soon created crowds. What was He maybe into now? A touch of life without death? Bacteria, for instance, also continued to exist. Maybe this island was Paradise, although where was everybody who had been rumored to be rentless in eternity? No visible living creature moved through the outsize vegetation, only a lone Jewish gentleman and a defenseless, orphaned chimp he had, by chance, befriended on a doomed oceanography vessel.

  It took them about two weeks to encircle the island in their yellow raft, camping on land at night, eating from wild fruit trees and root patches, sucking sugar cane; and where there were no streams or waterholes, drinking fresh water Buz found in tree holes. They had begun this journey on the beach below Cohn’s cave and had paddled east, then north at the highlands. The island was shaped like a broken stubby flask, it seemed to Cohn. Its bottom had split off in the recent Devastation and sunk into the sea.

  On the northern coast as they paddled west, the shoreline was indented by a series of coves and short bays with coarse, sandy beaches; and where the mouth of the flask appeared, a half-dozen atolls shielded the shore.

  Every so often they had drawn the raft up on the beach and commenced a fossil dig nearby for a day or so. Cohn kept extensive notes on the bones they unearthed. He was interested in bone movement. And he searched for hominids and found varieties of small ancient animals. He had discovered some surprising samples and felt he ought to knock out an article or two, if for no other reason than to keep up the habit. He wished he had saved his typewriter from the sea, the loss a result of momentary confusion. Buz enjoyed making small holes bigger and breaking rocks with Cohn’s hammer. When his eye lit on an interesting bone he beckoned Cohn over to make the identification. To date they had found six teeth of Eohippus—an extraordinary find, two chimp leg bones and a gorilla jaw, possibly from Pliocene times. Also a Jurassic mouse, and an ancient giant raccoon from the Miocene epoch. It was a pretty old island.

  Cohn guessed from the vegetation that it lay somewhere in what had once been the Indian Ocean, perhaps off the southern coast of old Africa, possibly over a more or less dead volcano that had bubbled up in the ocean bed. Too bad he had left behind all his diving equipment.

  The island, he figured, was about twenty miles in length, and maybe six miles across, except at its midpoint where it seeme
d to bulge to nine or ten; and at its northeastern end, where it shrank to two across for three miles or so—the mouth of the flask.

  Thinking of names, he considered calling it Broken End Island. He also thought of Chimpan Zee in honor of his young friend, and at last settled for Cohn’s Island. On a narrow mid-island beach he set up a sign stating the name of the place; but when they were once more embarked on the raft Cohn had second thoughts and felt he ought to remove the sign next time around, lest the Lord accuse him of hubris.

  Cohn supposed that the island had been four or five miles longer than at present. On the Day of Devastation an earthquake struck, and a portion of the highland mass split off and sank into the sea. What was left of the land had been overwhelmed by a tidal wave—the first stage of the World Flood, from which it had slowly, recently, recovered.

  Perhaps the island inhabitants, in fishing and farming villages sloping down the hills, had rushed in panic to higher ground, and as they ran were swept by the tidal wave into the ocean; as were those who, in panic, had remained where they were.

  Cohn, as they had rowed the raft around to the northern coast from the east, had beheld a forest of brown dead-leaved tops of trees rising in the mild waves touching the rockbound shore. He thought he could see, in the near distance, a drowned village under water.

  Could the Lord see it?

  The late-autumn rains—cold, pulpy raindrops—poured tor-rentially; and soon, in a second or third growing season, streams of small orange, pink, and huge purple flowers Cohn had never laid eyes on before sprang up on the earth.

  The rain went on, with a few dry periods, from possibly October to December, and March through May—Cohn did not know because he kept no calendar; his watch had stopped, he would not wind it up. It extended time not to hack it to bits and pieces. Perhaps this was closer to the Lord’s duration. He was not much concerned with minutes, or hours, and after Creation, with days, except the Sabbath. His comfortable unit of existence was the universe enduring.

  In the afternoon, the rain lightened and Cohn would go forth in his woolen brown poncho and rain-repellent fur hat to search for fruit.

  Buz, who swam when he had to, could not stand the wet; it depressed him. When the rain was heavy he sat semi-catatonically in the cave, staring at the water streaming down. It poured as a solid sheet of wet, blurring the trees. When it let up they went forth together, and if they happened to be caught in a renewed downpour, the chimp sheltered himself under a thick-leaved tree, his hands crossed on his chest, his head bent, body hair shedding water. It was as though he mourned when it rained.

  Cohn wanted to know why.

  The ape hooted.

  Cohn prepared a map of fruit trees with footnotes saying when and how they bore fruit. The palms yielded oil, coconuts, dates, round hard red nuts. Buz collected coconuts and carried them to the cave—four in his arms against his chest. Cohn, after tapping them open with a claw hammer, milked each and saved the juice in a jug as a refreshing drink and tasty flavoring agent. And then he hammered the coconut pulp into a delicious paste, flavored with vanilla or chocolate, that they relished as candy.

  Buz led Cohn to a small grove of yellow banana trees whose plentiful fruit they ate, ripe, and sometimes fried; and that Cohn fermented in a barrel vat into a pleasant beer that Buz was fond of. When available they collected mangoes—to which Cohn had discovered he was allergic; and figs, passion fruit, oranges, but no lemons—none grew on the island—all of which, except the mangoes, he cut up and mixed with chunks of coconut and pieces of cassava into a delicious salad. He built a trap in the cold stream beyond the pool and used it as an icebox. They ate twice daily; nobody suffered hunger.

  Despite the mortal insult the earth had endured, it yielded fruit and flowers, a fact that said a good word for God. Cohn had become a fructivore, except when fruit was unripe or unavailable—fortunately not for long, because they picked and stored it for reasonably lengthy periods.

  When there was nothing else to cat they opened tins of sardines or tuna fish. Though the young ape relished these specialties, Cohn felt he was violating an ethic if he ate them. He had pledged himself never to ingest what had once been a living creature.

  Therefore he boiled up rice, and with the flour from the ship, baked—since there was no yeast—matzo-like unleavened breadcakes on flat stones in the wood fire on the round stone ledge. The large cave acted as a ventilator, and once in a while a not always comfortable damp draft blew out of it.

  Buz ate the thin, often burnt breadcakes in small portions, unable to work up an appetite for Cohn’s rice and bread cookery unless he added a fistful of leaves to the collation—his little salad.

  The late autumn months were a dreary time of damp and cold on the island. Cohn hadn’t expected the chill. He wore long johns, wool socks, and his overcoat on two sweaters; and he permitted Buz to borrow his poncho if he wanted it. Cohn suspected that something unusual had altered the climate, perhaps ashes of the destroyed world imprisoned in winds in the atmosphere.

  That meant hotter and colder than ordinary weather; and he sometimes wondered whether vegetation would continue to endure if God looked away a few celestial seconds. And whether the rain forest would turn black and expire. Cohn was concerned that a new ice age might be in the making, not usually likely on an equatorial island of this size and climatology; but the Lord had His mysterious ways and was not about to explain them.

  Cohn insulated the cave as best he could, with two sacks of cement and some rocks he broke up with his hammer; he filled the opening between the caves to a height of six feet. That left space for ventilation, especially important when the wood they burned was wet and smoked heavily. But the cave was comfortable and on dry days smelled of grass; and on wet days smelled like a wet forest. For himself he had added short legs to the cot he had constructed, and made of it a bed of split saplings covered with a layer of mimosa leaves, and a canvas sheet with his overcoat as blankets.

  Buz, when it wasn’t raining, preferred to rest in a nearby acacia; and when it rained at night he slept in his holding cage, despite the fact that he had grown three inches since he and his friend had met. His head, when Cohn pulled him up by his hands, reached to Cohn’s chest, appreciably narrower than Buz’s. Though his legs were naturally bent, the chimp covered ground rapidly, sustaining his balance with ease, and propelling himself forward with his knuckles touching the ground. When they raced for fun, invariably Cohn fell behind.

  They played tag, hide-and-seek, nut-in-the-hole, an aggie game he had taught him that Buz liked extraordinarily well, although he rolled his nut clumsily and Cohn often let him win by rolling his own so forcefully it shot past the hole. Victory, however arranged, made no difference to Buz so long as he won. He grunted as he ate, danced on occasion, and if Cohn tickled him, responded by tickling Cohn. Cohn enjoyed laughing helplessly—it fitted the scheme of things. And he often thought what a fine friend Buz would make if he could talk.

  As spring neared, Cohn, wearing an old army cap to protect his head in the sun, worked with rocks and dead tree limbs to divert the stream that flowed from the waterfall across the savanna below the farther hills. Cohn dammed it and fed the water as irrigation to a rice paddy he had constructed after reading an article and studying a picture in his encyclopedia; and he seeded it with rice sprouts he had grown in the cave. Within about four months he harvested a crop of rice and planted another. So long as the Lord was in a genial mood there would be rice forever. Cohn played with thoughts of immortality.

  He also planted—from seeds he had collected and saved—yams and black-eyed beans. Unfortunately there was no lettuce or tomatoes anywhere on the island. Cohn relished salad but could not enjoy leaf salads, passing them up when Buz arrived with his offerings. He presented him, too—from his mouth into Cohn’s palm—with a chewed-up green gob of leaves; but Cohn was not tempted.

  Buz now and then assisted with the gardening. His fingers weren’t subtle and he was inefficient in planting, whe
n Cohn, on his insistence, let him help. Buz cupped a small mound of beans in his palm but found it difficult to insert them individually into the soft soil; so he chewed up some and flung the rest away. Cohn thought he might be of more help in harvesting.

  But Buz was comparatively handy with a few tools. He liked plunging the point of his can opener into the top of a can, working it raggedly around until the tin was cut and he could get his fingers under the lid. He had learned to slice fruit with a knife and he used a hammer fairly accurately. All Cohn had to do was tap the tip of a nail into wood and Buz would drive it in all the way.

  Cohn crafted things. He carved wood with a jackknife and chisel, and made bowls, platters, pitchers. He carved a variety of wooden flowers and animals for remembrance. He wove fibers of cactus into stiff little cloths he wasn’t sure what to do with, and gathered and polished stones.

  One day he fixed up a small hammock for Buz, converting a topcoat of Dr. Bünder’s. He tied it between two live oak saplings, and Buz lay in it, swinging gently until he fell off to sleep. The chimp liked sunbathing in his hammock. He also enjoyed sniffing Cohn’s bare feet as he lay in his hammock contemplating his fate.

  Would He have given me Buz if He intended to slay me?

  That night in the cave, Cohn said the island was shaped like a short, stubby bottle.

  Buz pantomimed he disagreed, a grunt with a shake of the head. He pantomimed peeling a banana.

  “A little like one, maybe,” Cohn nodded, “but a lot more like a stubby bottle, in my eye.”

  A banana, Buz insisted.

  Cohn had brought from the Rebekah Q five of Dr. Bünder’s fairly legible, waterlogged notebooks. He had discovered in one of them approximately forty partially blurred small drawings of sign-language images the scientist had taught the chimp. Cohn practiced as many signs as he could read.