Survival and Community Theme Analysis

Benjamin Honey—American, Bantu, Igbo—born enslaved—freed or fled at fifteen, only he ever knew—ship’s carpenter, aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his wife, Patience, née Raferty, Galway girl, in 1793.

[…] I held that foolish flag as high as I could, and the water rose up my shoulder, and the water rose up to my raised elbow, and the water rose up my forearm, and the water reached my wrist, and so there was just my one hand holding that motley little tattered flag sticking up above the surface of the flood, and the waters rose up my fingers, and just as my hand was about to disappear and that flag and all us Honeys be swallowed up in the catastrophe, the water stopped rising.

Esther watched Tabby and Lotte and Ethan come up the path. The memory of curling up on her side, still-unnamed Eha in her arms, the water by then alternately pulling and pushing them both toward the depths and back onto the rocks, and her thinking that was cruel—Just drown us now, quick—as ever overwhelmed her, not because it was vague and dim and made her feel like she’d suffered some awful half-recollected disfigurement while practically still a child herself, but because she remembered every single detail of it all and because she did it all on purpose. She shuddered, at the shame of almost having murdered her son and therefore her three grandchildren, but also in gratitude for God having taken all their fates out of her selfish hands.

Or Zachary, she corrected herself. Gratitude for Zachary—or God through Zachary—having taken all their fates out of her selfish young hands.

Bridget had an abashed affection for the man but he seemed like a living memorial, or like a guardian spirit, or quite what she could not say, but that an inner decorum and formality and modesty of manner were required when she was with him, which she loved and which she felt with no one else. He alone made her feel as if her work, her life, in America, the awful trip over the ocean, being away from her mother and father—so far away it barely felt real anymore, felt as if her sorrow and longing were for people and places her imagination had invented—Mr. Hale alone could make her feel as if her job were important enough to bear being an orphan.

He was hot, probably sunburned, again, on his arms and nose and face and his neck, too. The hot sweet hay perfume mingled with the cigarette smoke and he wanted to sit down but there was no natural place to do so in the middle of the field.

There’d been no real need to get onto the tree, but Zachary had said to Eha, Well, get up onto it and see if it’s sound. It’s going to be your house.

Zachary interlocked his hands into a stirrup and Eha put a foot in it and Zachary launched him up onto the trunk. Zachary clambered up like he was a bear scrambling for a beehive full of honey. There was no need for the man and the boy to stand on top of the tree other than for the man to take pleasure in the work and the boy to thrill at the work and his part in it and for the view, for the simple novelty of standing eight feet up on top of the tree they’d just felled with the old saw. Zachary looked at the tree, smiling with transparent pleasure, thinking maybe about the first time he himself had cut down a tree with his father, and he seemed to Eha from that moment on like his own father, his real, blood father.

While the girls helped Bridget, Eha circled a length of rope around Esther’s middle, threading it in and out of the chair’s backrest splats.

Zachary turned away and walked across the island toward where his house and the others were nearly done burning. The men from the mainland had missed Zachary’s tree so he went to it and got inside. He closed his eyes and ran the pads of his fingers across the carvings as if to decipher them by touch. He opened his eyes and followed the radius of each band of pictures. Really, they were crude. Most of the intricacies and nuances of expression and gesture and architecture and decoration had been those of his thoughts while he’d carved. Very little of the finesse of his ideas had made its way into the wood, he saw now. He gathered his candle and cross. He knelt and cupped up a cone of wood shavings and set it burning with his flint and steel. Smoke rose into the darkness of the hollowed trunk then refluxed and began pulsing from the opening. Zachary watched the fire grow until he was certain it would not smother, then headed for the water.

As the light left the sky, John Thorpe saw Zachary Hand to God wading away from the island across the channel, chest-deep in the water. Zachary held what looked like an old faded and patched flag bundled and knotted together by the corners above his head. His silhouette cut through the invisible current of the tide and to Thorpe he looked like a threadbare angel abandoning the wrecked ship over which he’d once been guardian, light fanning across the water behind him as he pushed against the incoming flood.