Reading practice 13

"Let the dead bury their dead."

The words rang in the boy's ears as he trudged through the inhospitable₁ jungle, vines snarling around his ankles. Over and over again, he heard the captain shout, "Full speed ahead let the dead bury their dead."

Now the captain was gone and the boy felt alone despite his companions, now leading him through the alien jungle. He wondered what the words meant. How can the dead do anything? How can the dead have dead of their own?

These thoughts circled the boy's head, intermingled with the events of the last days. Again he heard the roar of the storm, felt the ship bucking and braying beneath his feet. The typhoon had come out of nowhere, it had seemed; even the captain, who surely knew everything, was taken aback by its sudden appearance.

"Avast and hold the mainsail!" he shouted to the crew. "Stav fast and let the dead bury their dead!"

The boy had held fast, even as the ship had come apart. Even as the lightning lit up the sky like the fireworks the boy had heard about, but never seen. Even as the thunder filled the air, shaking the very timbers of the ship with its bellowing ferocity. The walls of water rose up, crashing over the deck, then receded for an instant of calm before rising up as a dark mountain to once again besiege the small ship.

These memories would come to the boy in a split-second, filling his brain before he had a chance to consciously remember what had happened. Then they would recede, just as the storm had eventually receded, and the jungle would return. the monotonous trudging. day after day₂ amid the vines and trees that were nothing like his second home on the ocean.

Sometimes, the boy would think back to before the storm, and even before the ship, to his life on land—the stultifying life on the farm where he felt landlocked before he even understood what that word signified. He thought of his mother and father, frail and worn-looking. He believed his parents did all they could to create a home for him, but his mother's sad, creased face and his father's cracked hands crowded out all other childhood memories. They filled the boy's sky, just as the thunder had, and were just as devastating, in their own way, as the storm.

For the boy, his birthplace's rocky ground yielded only a life he could not live and a place he could not love. But the sea was softer, a malleable place in which an enterprising lad could reinvent himself. So the boy had run off to sea. He vowed to leave the land forever to live atop the ocean. Now he had learned the hardness of the sea₃, he thought, as he jerked his mind back to the jungle.

Soon, his thoughts drifted back to his blissful days upon the ship. Although he had come aboard as a stowaway, the captain took him in and gave him daily lessons in reading the stars and plotting the ship's course. "Ignorance is dangerous, not only aboard ship but also in life," the captain warned. The eager boy soon grew familiar with the night's sky and knew the maps in the captain's quarters as well as he knew his own reflection. He had felt so secure in the captain's knowledge and in his own growing understanding.

But if the captain could be caught unawares, how could the boy ever feel safe again?₄ How could he trust that everything the captain had said wouldn't lead to the same disastrous end?

"Let the dead bury their dead." Well, he had seen the dead after the storm. As the remaining crew members had urged him away from the wreckage, finally having to pull him by his arms to force his legs to move, the words "Let the dead bury their dead" appeared unbidden in his mind. But what did those words mean? Searching his memory, the boy was shocked to find that after the shipwreck, his mind's eye could no longer distinguish the captain from any other man—the cook, the lowest deckhand, or even the boy's father. Was that what the captain meant by "their dead"—that all the dead₅ belonged to one another?

He walked mechanically, pace after pace, leading him away from the remains of his home and the only man he had ever loved. Toward what? He had no knowledge of what lay ahead. But still his legs moved, seemingly of their own accord, his heart continued to beat, his lungs continued to fill with air. His mind continued to retrace his life, and with the beating of his heart and the filling of his lungs, still he walked.

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₇

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₁₀