Cool Cape May 2021-22

[48] excerpt from the cape
The magician down by the pond would not agree with him on many matters, and this had
been responsible for the neighborhood ill feeling. So things continued as they were until
after warm weather had come. But the important point was this: what one ship had done
another could do.
Other ships had passed the cape. One was the Half Moon of Captain Henry Hudson,
exploring new waterways on his way to the great river and bay which would bear his name.
Bypassing the cape, leaving the naming of it to Captain Cornelius Mey, of the ship Glad
Tidings.
It was in April, eight years later, when Minyanata was sixteen and John McJack an
uncertain 23 that McJack came ashore on a piece of timber, about a mile from the point of
the cape and four miles below Wawakna’s camp, up on the bluff.
For more than three hours McJack lay on the beach without even the strength to pull
himself the rest of the way out of the water. Half unconscious, he lay with the waves lapping
about his waist, then his knees, and then his ankles as the tide receded, leaving him on the
hard-packed sand.
The skin of his arms was bloody from gripping a broken timber while the wind howled
and the waves buried him in the rush of water. As he slowly moved his arms across the sand
of the beach, he heard the crunch as the ship crashed the bar in the thunder squall, the
cracking of the planking, and the screams of the crew.
McJack dug his hands into the sand and pulled them back painfully to his side and
then stretched them over his head again as if he were swimming. He groaned, opened his
eyes, and saw the beach, the marsh, the high ground, and the forest.
“Praise to god and all his saints who brought me through.” He raised himself slowly to
his knees and added, “And the saints help all who didn’t make it,” as he saw the litter from the
wreck along the edge of the water. A few feet away from him lay the timber with the crooked
handle of his adze emerging, its blade sunk deep in the wood.
“And what is this?” he asked himself as he drew his hand across the sand and collected
shiny colored stones in his fingers. “Be I lucky enough to land on a bejeweled beach?”
But his exhaustion made his interest short-lived. The sun was setting, and he realized
that soon the tide would come back in an effort to reclaim him. He crawled himself beyond
the reach of the water where the sand was soft and soon fell asleep.
The next morning, stiff and sore from the night and starved after more than a day
without food, he stood on the beach where the forest came clear to the shore, watching the
birds come over the water. He was appalled by his loneliness. Except for the visible birds
and the invisible beasts, his world seemed empty of living things. But McJack shrugged his
shoulders and gave thanks for his adze to the saints an ’all, and raked some clams from
among the stones. He wandered down the beach and drank from a little stream.
There was wreckage, broken boards and timbers and pieces of sail, but, thanking the
saints again, no bodies. “Best they should rest where they be,” McJack decided. “Mayhap
they be better than me, at that.” He had no doubt that the woods were full of wild animals,
and probably wild men. Probably they were watching him that minute. He decided it was
fortunate the saints were on his side.
He found some canvas and enough lumber to make himself a hut between the reach
of the tide and the line of the forest. And that night falling asleep with an empty stomach,
he was grateful for his canvas-covered shelter, though he crouched and shivered. There were
strange sounds in the dark. An owl. A fox yelped shrilly. And once when McJack had dozed
a little because the owl and the fox and the night were still, there came a scream from the
dark.
“Saints help me now!” pleaded John McJack. “It’s the devil let loose in the land, and all,
to set me teeth a’ chatter with the fright. Or mayhap it were the banshee call: Saints send the