By The Sea, Book Three: Laura (8 page)

That night Neil slept soundly, confident
once more that neither he nor his mother was going to be killed,
and Laura and Billy stayed up late drawing up a list of work to be
done to prepare the
Virginia
for her longest journey
yet.

"Some of the starboard lanyards seem a touch
rotted," Laura said as she noted the problem on her growing list.
"And at least one of the deadeyes they're rove through is split
almost in two."

"And the middle rudder pintle looks like it
might be pulling away from the transom," Billy added. "I seen it
when we was fishin' off the stern the other day."

"We can't fix that in time!" cried Laura.
"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

Billy shrugged. "Maybe it ain't
serious."

And so it went, with every conceivable
repair item being added to a much-too-long list. After Billy
finally went off to bed, Laura stared at her list thoughtfully.
They had two weeks. She carefully tore the list into two: a primary
and a secondary.

They had two weeks.

Laura stared some more, then tore the
primary list into two and threw out the original secondary one.
Yes. They could be ready in time.

Work began on Monday. Laura sent Billy up
the foremast to go over every linear inch of rigging, looking for
frayed or rotten sections. After he came down she had him hoist her
up in the bosun's seat to check his findings. That night they
huddled over the list in the lamplit galley, backs stiff, legs
aching, pelvic bones worn raw from sitting and bracing on the small
oak bosun's seat high above deck level. On Tuesday they tackled the
mainmast.

Billy spent the next several days after that
underwater, scrubbing the
Virginia's
foul bottom. There were
patches of barnacles everywhere, and he hacked away at them the
best he could with the breath he possessed. When he climbed back
aboard at the end of the day wrinkled and exhausted, Laura winced
and turned away. It had to be done.

"Mama!" begged Neil on the fourth day. "Can
I at least go for a little row around the harbor—before the sea
breeze makes up?"

Laura was patching their old and very tired
gollywobbler, a light-weather sail that had seen better years. She
looked up at her son—eight years old, and doing the work of a grown
man—and said, "Do you think you've really fixed the leak above your
berth?"

He nodded vigorously. "Oh yes. You could see
where the seam was split wide open."

"Because we'll be taking seas across the bow
a lot more of the time, and if it leaks down into your bed, I don't
want you to come creeping aft into our berth, saying yours is too
wet."

Neil thought about that. "But without Daddy
there will be room for me, won't there?" His eyes held hers in a
plaintive look.

Laura put down her palm and needle and
sighed. "No, there won't be room for you there anymore, darling.
You're much too grown-up for that. You have your own berth now,
just like Billy, just like the new crew member will have. And some
day when you marry, you'll have a bigger berth like I do, and your
wife will stay in it with you. But for now, you get to sleep alone,
just like the rest of the grown-up crew."

Laura never knew how to handle Neil's
frequent little forays for affection. He was a little too attached
to her, that she knew; it was one of the reasons she had begun to
think that sooner or later they would have to move ashore. But that
was tomorrow's problem.

"Anyway, you've been
very
grown-up
about tackling your work list, and I think you've earned the
morning off. Don't you?"

The crushed look of rejection began to fade
from Neil's face. "You bet I have," he agreed, somewhat
mollified.

"Do I get a hug before you go?" asked Laura,
holding her arms out to him.

A little stiffly, Neil allowed his mother to
embrace him. She watched him scramble over the side for his dory,
her little stripling with the sweet high voice of a child and the
tortured thought processes of a Supreme Court justice. If only he
didn't weigh every little thing.
Ah, well,
she thought,
turning back to the torn gollywobbler,
it's just a
stage.

The day passed for Laura like all the others
that week—with one eye on the repair, one eye on the list. The only
interruption came in the form of a steady stream of applicants for
the job of first mate. By noon Laura had interviewed and quickly
dismissed four of them: an unemployed baker, a millworker eager to
see the world, and two ordinary seamen. As usual, no one had
bothered to be guided by her list of qualifications. Not one among
them had ever been aboard a sailing vessel.

"I'm worried," Laura admitted to Billy after
the last one had been sent politely packing. "Who in the world
understands coasting schooners nowadays? What if we can't find
anyone?"

"Then you and me'll do it. Didn't we sail
the
Ginny
ourselves, just about, when Sam busted his wrist
that time?"

"That was a downhill run in twelve knots of
wind from Gloucester to Camden, Billy. I could've done
that
trip myself."

"See? What'd I tell you?" He beamed
encouragingly.

"Billy—oh, Billy. Never mind." Laura tweaked
his cap down over his eyes and took her lunch, a thick slab of
bread smeared over with pork fat, over to a cool spot in the shadow
of the foremast.

Before she sat down for her precious midday
break, she scanned Brenton Cove for Neil's dory; he'd been hovering
much too close to the
Rainbow,
she'd noticed earlier. Sam
had given explicit directions that his family were to keep their
distance and let him get on with his training. Laura had understood
Sam's attitude completely; but Neil, as he always did, saw
rejection where there was none. To him it was a case of his father
choosing the rich man's
Rainbow
over the poor family's
Virginia;
of preferring his twenty-five teammates to his
single, solitary son. So whenever he could he would sneak up to the
Rainbow:
he wanted to know why
.

But he wasn't there now, and Laura sat down
to lunch.

The day was hazy, not quite foggy, and
muggy, the kind of day that dulls the reflexes and makes reversals
intolerable. Billy had been suffering a series of such reversals
all morning long; he was trying to repair the
Virginia's
small portable donkey-engine, used to help lift heavy cargo on
board. But Billy, unlike most males, was born without the necessary
genes to put mechanical objects right. Every once in a while a
robust curse came drifting over to Laura, who feared and despised
the little engine even more than Billy did. She pretended not to
hear him.

She was leaning against the mast, eyes
half-closed savoring one last moment of respite from The List, when
she noticed someone sauntering down the wharf toward the
Virginia.
A sailor walks along a wharf differently from a
lubber: he stays closer to it, somehow, as if it might lurch to
port or starboard on a gust of wind. And he holds his body with a
certain tension, ready to roll with the dock, should a sudden sea
lift them both together on their beam-ends. It makes no difference
to him that the dock is firmly anchored to the sea bottom by dozens
of pilings: a sailor, a true man of the sea, is always
compensating.

When Laura had last seen the man it was dark
and she had had other things on her mind than whether he derived
from the land or the sea.

"Good afternoon," he said simply, looking
somehow even more disreputable in the noonday sun. "May I come
aboard?"

"There is no dance tonight," Laura said,
feeling her cheeks go hot and the faded bruises on her arms
suddenly throb in sympathy. "Or ever again."

"Oh, I assumed that," he said easily. "You
are
Laura Powers, are you not?"

She nodded.

"Do you still need a mate?"

"Why do you ask?" she said, wondering. But
she felt bound to add, "The position hasn't been filled yet."

"Good. I think I may be your man."

Him
? His confidence rankled her. So
she stood up, walked over to the boarding steps as self-assuredly
as she knew how, and said, "Before you even trouble to come aboard,
may I ask if you've any experience on a coasting schooner?"

"No," he answered honestly enough. "But I
was mate on a schooner-yacht—she was a hundred and forty-odd
feet—during the Pacific leg of an around-the-world cruise."

"Oh." She faltered, then rallied. "But not
the whole way around? I suppose you managed to put her up on a
reef?"

He took in Laura's testiness, then answered
calmly, "No. The owner fell overboard in Tonga—just outside the
harbor at Neiafu, Vava'u—and drowned. The yacht changed hands and
the new owner brought his own captain and crew."

Tonga. Vava'u. The names sounded as ordinary
on his lips as Boston and Providence.

"Oh? How did the owner fall overboard?" she
asked, without having any idea why.

"Not because I pushed him, if that's what
you mean. He was drunk."

"Oh? So he's dead?" she said, continuing to
listen to herself with amazement. "Then how can I check him out as
a reference?"

"I didn't offer him as a reference."

"Well, if you're not going to
cooperate—"

"Lady! I thought you were looking for a
first mate, not a second character for a one-man play." He allowed
himself a short, ironic laugh. "This has been very ... educational.
Bye." He threw her a jaunty salute and turned to leave.

"Wait!"

He stopped and she said, "I
am
looking for a first mate. If you want to talk about it …."

He seemed to consider whether he wanted to
or not anymore, leaving Laura with absolutely nothing to do but
stare at her feet or try to guess how old he was. She stared at her
feet.

He came aboard, which caused her immense
relief—a reaction she needed to analyze further—and they went aft
to the cockpit, right past Billy, who was hovering over the
donkey-engine like an irritated prospector over a balky pack mule.
The two men nodded, Laura held her breath, and Billy went back to
cursing the machine; he did not recognize their guest of the
previous week.

Laura sat down rather demurely (considering
that she was wearing Sam's pants, drawn in at the waist with a
length of manila line), took a deep breath, and launched into the
interview. She explained her husband's absence and the contract in
a few words, skipping the business of the angry Bahamian locals,
and when her applicant signaled his interest in taking on the job,
said, "I am sorry. I haven't even asked your name."

He'd been glancing around the schooner
observantly as she was speaking. Now he turned and said, "Colin
Durant."

"Colin Durant." She turned the name over
slowly, like the pages of a foreign-language dictionary. His eyes,
she saw, were heavily lashed, his cheekbones high. Yes, he might
have French in him. But her visceral response was to distrust him,
starting with his name: it sounded made up to her. "Where are you
from, Mr. Durant?"

He smiled and said, "That's a tough one. Can
we start with something easier, like, can I fix that sputtering
donkey-engine?"

She set her chin in the way she had. "No, we
can start with where are you from?"

A veil dropped over his chameleon eyes, and
the green in them retreated behind the brown. "I was born in
Nantes, spent my childhood in Brest, my teenage years in
Guadeloupe, and the time after that"—he shrugged—"all over."

"Where did you learn to sail?"

"All over."

"Where did you learn to speak English?"

"All over."

"You don't have an accent."

"You're not listening." He shifted into the
devastatingly charming lilt of a Frenchman just off the boat: "At
what hour leaves the next bus for, how do you say, the Flat
Bush?"

Startled by the transformation, Laura burst
into nervous, instantly infatuated laughter. But she did not
believe him. "You're an American," she insisted, still smiling.

The eyebrows lifted slightly. "Suit
yourself."

For a moment she was silent. "What do you
know about celestial navigation?" she finally asked, cool and
formal once more.

"Not my strong suit," he admitted. "I know
which way is up on a sextant; I get by. On the other hand, I
consider myself a positive genius at dead-reckoning," he added
without a smile.

Another Sam. Laura distrusted
dead-reckoning. It was too intuitive for her, almost an art. She
preferred precise observations of celestial bodies to tell her
where she was on the ocean. On the other hand, her confidence did
tend to sink on a cloudy day. Colin Durant, like her husband, would
complement her navigational skills well. It was very annoying.

She looked for another way out of having to
hire him. Desperate as she was, at the moment Laura was ranking him
dead last as a candidate.

"Would you be comfortable going aloft?" she
asked suddenly. "Billy, there, often needs help when the weather
pipes up."

He seemed amused by the question. "Would you
like a demonstration?"

"No—no, I believe you. You would have to
share the crew's quarters forward, of course; there is no private
stateroom for the mate."

He nodded.

"The food is very simple; we aren't a
yacht."

"Indeed."

In a burst of desperate candor she added, "I
feel bound to tell you that there may be trouble at the other end."
She told him about the disgruntled Bahamians.

To no avail. He wanted the job. "All right
then, Mr. Durant. Naturally I will need to complete my interviews.
Where may I reach you?"

"Christ!" was all he said. Apparently it had
not occurred to him that Laura would consider anyone else. But he
recovered his
sang-froid
and said, "You can write to me in
care of the YMCA here in town."