Of Song and Water (3 page)

“But you'll miss – ”

“Miss what? A lousy band?”

“Miss me.”

“Have fun at the wedding,” he says. “Tell your sister I'm sorry.”

Departures and arrivals echo through the station.

“I work here,” she says. “It isn't so easy to leave.”

“I'm not asking you to quit,” he says. “It wouldn't make sense anyway. This whole thing's a long shot.”

“I know that,” she says.

Jen stands in front of the door, shivering in her thin jacket. She doesn't say anything about the nausea or the test.

A blast of wind pushes him against the bus. “It's time,” he says.

“Are you going?”

He's struck dumb by her stubbornness. He kisses her on the mouth and then steps onto the bus. She begins to follow him, moving like a sleepwalker, but he turns and the shock of his turning startles her. She backs away from the door and another passenger rushes aboard.

The boat beneath him seems to lurch. Still no sound except for a vague whisper. “It's bitter cold,” he says out loud. His words trail off and disappear. He slips the bottle of vodka into his pocket. “It's bitter cold,” he says again.

The flashlight flickers, begins to fade. He picks it up and bangs it on his leg. It goes out. He unscrews it a little, setting off slow waves of pain in his fingers. He tightens it up and pushes the switch back and forth. “Jesus,” he says.

A faint glow creeps in where the boom tent is open. All the rest is darkness. In the absence of light, the canvas above him appears to recede; it becomes for him an immense black ceiling, a night sky without stars. He searches for a point of reference, peering at the empty heavens, unable to comprehend the meaning of his position. Something like this has happened before. He feels the familiar strain on his neck, knows that in looking up he will see nothing but a blank slate. A touch of vertigo washes over him then, spins him slowly at first. He's aware of the deck rolling beneath his feet, the fixed objects of his world sliding away, and a weight on his body, not so much gravity now as water, as if he were drowning, caught in the vortices of a sinking ship.

HE SEES himself as a boy, as Jason, kneeling on the starboard seat of his father's sloop, a stiff wind out of the northwest making him shiver.

His father says, “Prepare to come about – use the winch handle.”

He tries but turns it the wrong way. He knows where the edge of the lake should be, but he can't distinguish between sky and water. There's only one light in the distance.

“Jason,” says his father, “I don't want you going below. Your grandfather's not there.”

The galley's dark. The mark to be fetched is Port Austin Reef. The boat leans and picks up speed.

He realizes that if not for his grandfather, he would still be in bed – no order to tumble out, no reason to set sail in the middle of the night. He feels anxious and out of sorts and hears his dad saying for the second time, “Your grandfather has no face.”

He looks up. No moon. Not a single star. Barely visible is a low ceiling of gray clouds. The sky shudders from one horizon to the other. No face, he thinks. Heaven has no face and my grandfather has no face. Dad says it's so.

The eyes in the photograph, fixed on something outside the frame, are discerning and troubled. He likes the mustache and believes that in the future he'll grow his own. Someone printed H.M. in the corner of the picture. Handkerchiefs and cuff links bear the same letters. So do the trophies in the glass case. On the trophy for the singlehander's race is HAVELOCK MOORE. It's a strong sound. He says to almost everyone he meets, “Havelock Moore is my grandfather's name. My dad calls him H.M.” He suspects that H.M. is the only man his father fears.

“There'll be no going below,” his father says again. “I need you to give a hand.”

He wants to get out of the wind, but with the weatherboards in place and the hood closed and latched, he's stuck. He accepts the fact that Havelock's not
in the cabin. Havelock's not in his berth – the old man's sleeping somewhere else.

Over the wind, he hears his father say, “If you found H.M. on the street, you wouldn't know it was him.”

He tries to understand, but the words create a white space in his mind. The whiteness scares him. Needing to fill it, he recalls the old photograph – first the initials, then the face, and finally the eyes, black pools touched by a spark of light.

“No stars tonight,” he says, looking up.

“Just as well,” says his father.

The face in the picture is full of deep sadness. How can it be that Havelock Moore has no face?

“It's gone,” says his father.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it is.”

I'm sailing in a plastic tub, he thinks. It's smaller than my grandfather's ketch. He remembers going in headfirst when the big boat rose and fell. He'd like to do it all over again – prove to everyone, once and for all, that he's no longer a boy.

 

HE SEES himself on the ketch and his grandfather's face unworried.

“This is an old man's ship,” says Havelock. “It isn't for racing. She's made of wood and she's proud. Fiberglass is cheap. You can't call it a boat when it's built of such stuff.” He scratches his nose and smiles. “Your dad's sloop is a white whale. I'd call it a plastic tub.”

Havelock looms overhead, trying to explain the vagaries of wind. “You must keep your canvas on the verge of luffing,” he says. “It's easy to pull in a sail too far by mistake. If you do, the boat'll stall.”

They watch the forward edge of the jib.

“A Moore never sinks,” says Havelock.

He smiles at the old man and nods.

Havelock says, “Be proud of your name. A good name guarantees success. Jason was a great hero. He sailed the world looking for the Golden Fleece.” The jib begins to ripple. In the next instant, Havelock makes the correction. “Mind the telltales, too.”

He follows his grandfather's order and worries that his eyes aren't big enough. He can watch only one part at a time. He has to know about wind and where he's going. And somewhere there's a Golden Fleece. He wonders what it is and whether or not he should be looking for it. On the ketch there's too much to do, too much to think about.

On land, his grandfather doesn't do everything at once. He sits at the kitchen table and sorts the mail into three piles: letters, bills, and solicitations. If it's personal, he holds it in his hand for a while, examines the return address and the stamp. Finally, he opens it with his pocketknife, careful not to damage the envelope. On the water, though, his actions overlap. He trims and steers and checks his bearing all in the same breath.

Conditions on the lake change quickly. There's no rocking in a steady wind. But in calm, the swells come up and the ketch rolls and the sails flap and jerk. He stumbles and grabs a lifeline.

“Enough noise,” says Havelock. “Lower the sails and let go the anchor.”

He knows he's too small to help. He's been out many times, but the sun still hurts his eyes. It's hot on the water with no wind, he thinks. He enjoys the ketch rising and falling, the deck slanting like a floor in a fun house. He wants to jump when the deck lifts him up to see how high he can spring. On his shoulder, he feels his grandfather's hand. He turns and finds suddenly that there's nothing either behind him or below.

He soars spread-eagled through the air and then plummets, all the heat and glare collapsing into cold and dark. He doesn't thrash or kick. He falls through
water, the lake filling him until he is deaf, until he is mute, and then his body stops, suspended between two worlds. Though it's impossible to explain later, something here takes hold of him, buoying him up, so that slowly at first, through no effort of his own, he starts to climb. An ache for breath, for speech, swells in his throat. He begins to think. He breaks the surface, arms and legs moving, and sees his grandfather's face.

“Sink or swim is the only way,” says Havelock. “You can scuttle the boat, but a Moore never sinks.”

 

I'M ON a white whale, he thinks. One hour out and searching for deep water. Havelock's not in the cabin. Havelock's not in his berth. He sees his father looking up, navigating without stars. The wind drives the sloop on a broad reach.

“There's no turning back,” says his father. “It won't keep. He'd want it this way.”

After the reef, the bottom yawns. The water is deep and goes deeper still. He wonders what depth his father is hoping for. He dreams bright gardens of fish and then a circle of sailboats – red, yellow, and blue – floating on the air. He listens to the hull slicing the lake, to the steady sigh. My grandfather had a face, he thinks. He journeyed upriver, through the narrows, to sail on an inland sea. Huron was the lake he loved.

The boat turns into the wind. It stalls and they douse the sails.

Now the hood slides back and the weatherboards come out. He follows his father down into the cabin. In the berth is a long canvas bag lashed with line and weighted with heavy stones. They haul it up the companionway. They let it rest in the cockpit, catching their breath. Facing each other, they lift it over the starboard winch and balance it on the gunwale. The boat rocks like a cradle. He knows why he is here. He puts one knee on the starboard seat. His father
holds the bag with both hands. “I'm sorry,” he says. “You were disheartened on this boat. It should've been the ketch that carried you.” And then his father lets go and the bag rolls over into darkness.

 

HUMBUG feels colder than before. Snowflakes shimmer in the gap of pale light. He shudders. He senses a subtle shift, a change. The refuge he seeks is not to be found. Perhaps he's come here too late on too many nights. Perhaps he's used it up, overstayed his welcome. Somehow, he's ill at ease. The marina's empty, he knows. No cars in the parking lot when he arrived. Not a soul stopping by to check on covers or equipment.

A thud rises from below. It's like a log striking the hull. Sailors are superstitious, he thinks, but I'm not a sailor. He waits. He hears himself breathing and feels the bottle of vodka resting on his hip. A wind starts in from the channel. Maybe that was it – a current of air nudging the boat. Now sheet metal and cinder block drone.

Nearby, three or four boats stand against winter with their masts and rigging in place, and in the wind they make a strange music, shafts and crosstrees keening, stays and shrouds whining, the slapping of loose lines. To the trained ear, these are the sounds of danger, of foreboding, of foul or heavy weather. And these are the very sounds that his father managed to ignore.

Those that sailed with the great Dorian Moore said he could read the sky better than any man. He could taste rain long before it fell. So he defied instinct and experience, made himself deaf to the alarm, when he slipped out at dusk under a press of sail, the storm gathering in the west.

A vessel isn't built to be empty. It's appalling to see it, to bear down on a grounded boat and find everything in place but its captain. It was stranded like a beached whale. He couldn't sail it back with his father adrift – with his father inconceivably lost. It was too soon. Too sudden. A less ghostly disaster
would've been easier. Why not a wreck in the cove at Great Duck Island? Why not a rudder torn away on Hangdog Reef? But a reef, he realized, might've been worse. His father had been very clear about the challenge and temptation of reefs. With a reef dead ahead, a sailor might gamble. He might trust the water to reveal its mystery, risking the hazard of green shapes, gray knees of granite, driven toward lust, greed, avarice, envy, though there's never much warning.

He hears the noise again, a thud from below, a fist hitting a wall or a door closing. He should leave. He wants to sleep, to dream. It's bitter cold, he thinks, and I am sick at heart. Maureen won't find him here. Heather knows where he is, but she sleeps the sleep of the young. He hears the sound of wood groaning, as if the boat were settling for the first time in its cradle. The wind is up. He's had too much to drink. Going down the ladder will be difficult. He slides forward and lifts himself off the starboard seat. Another thud. The cabin calls to him. A black cave.

On the water, he's the embarrassing son of Dorian Moore. He's no better on land. He remembers walking with his father in a city park, where a man in a priest's collar stood preaching beneath a tree. “Lord, create in us changed lives,” said the man, “even as we drink deep, and thirst, and drink again – whatever the cost.”

He watched his father listening to the prayer.

He saw his father's confidence, the purposeful stride, the steady gaze, and the hands, waterworn but strong, scored by taut lines and the constant hauling.

“The boy's hands,” Otis had said, “are made for a fingerboard and strings.”

His father worried out loud. “Whatever skill or talent you're given,” he said, “use it for its own sake. Don't cheapen it. Don't use it to go somewhere or get things.”

He stares into the dark cabin. He can't see his hands. He rubs them together. Chewed up and worthless, he thinks.

He works his way to the opening in the canvas. He crouches on the deck and peers at the windswept yard. A footfall thumps in his ear. Someone is on the companionway.

He turns. He sees his father climbing up from below.

He shuts his eyes and tries to clear his head. When he looks again, his father is still there, water dripping from his face.

He gasps. He puts out his hand but fears losing his balance, tumbling backward and down the ladder to be found beneath the keel in a broken heap. He believes that he's gone too far, spent too many nights sitting on the starboard seat drinking vodka. What will Heather do when she catches her foot on a frozen lump? Or will he shatter, scattering across the ground like the pieces of a tedious puzzle? What can he do but choose? The only way is to choose – take sides with truth or memory, sanity or madness, the real or the imagined.