Heartbroke Bay (15 page)

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Authors: Lynn D'urso

BOOK: Heartbroke Bay
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Tara
drops between swells and rises, and at the top of each wave Hannah stares to windward. The sky is streaked with angry red fingers of cloud, and the sea boils in a scene of such cold, violent beauty that she watches without wincing as pellets of flung water sting her face.
Michael jiggles the mainsheet and plays with the staysail, bracing himself with one foot against the cockpit coaming as he adjusts the balance of the helm. A piece of light cord run from tiller to cleat holds the rudder just so, and he soon has
Tara
sailing herself to windward.
Behind them the coastline grows distant and the winter-clad peaks are white and rose-colored with alpenglow. In the north, to starboard, two stern peaks rise above a line of lesser mountains. Mount Fairweather is sharp and hard against the sky, Mount Saint Elias shouldered and muscled; both are improbably massive, rising so high that they glow with soft pink light long after the sun has disappeared and the sea writhes in darkness.
Belowdecks the cabin is turvied, a funhouse of angles and pitches, where passage is had by walking on wind-heeled walls and clutching at handholds. The night is long; sleep comes riddled with shallow dreams.
Michael stays on deck, huddled in sweaters, feeling the lift and run of the sea beneath him. The others take turns lying curled behind lee-clothes, broad panels of canvas fastened along the length of a tilting bunk’s edge and lashed to eyes in the cabin top, designed to keep a sleeper from tumbling to the deck. Harky chooses to lie clutching at the floor, fearful that the cloth will give under his weight. Dutch lies unmoving, his eyes cramped shut, hands gripping his blankets, and by candlelight Hannah sees his lips moving—whether from fear or in search of the desperate solace of silent prayer, she cannot tell.
As the numberless waves pass under
Tara
’s keel the hull thunders, drumming louder and louder. The wind continues to build, and by that interval of night when darkness is total and time no longer passes, Michael decides to shorten sail. There is a flurry of effort, with much cursing and flapping of loose canvas as he wrestles in a reef alone.
With the coming of dawn, the weather eases quickly. Hannah lies listening to the rattle of blocks and lines mingle with the snores of her husband. When the hatch slides back and Michael’s face appears, it is tousled, red-eyed, and smiling. His chin is shadowed with a dark growth of beard, and he rubs it, saying, “Beautiful morning. Any chance of getting a hot cup of tea?”
The air is crisp and damp, and Hannah shivers in clothes moist with salt, the smell of kerosene from the burning stove coming with her as she brings up the tea, moving quietly to avoid waking the sleepers. Michael takes a deep drink, smiles, and holds out the mug to her in offering. Taking it, Hannah feels something intimate and forbidden in the quiet sharing. The cup feels alive and warm in her hands.
“Might as well get moving,” says Michael. He gives the helm over to Hannah before climbing onto the cabin top to shake out the reef. The cutter shudders and stands upright; the headsail flaps, rising as it sweeps the foredeck and bellies full of air.
Tara
heels, lunges as if spurred, under way again.
At noon Michael opens a varnished cherrywood box and removes a sextant, a watch, and a tablet. After giving the timepiece and tablet to Hannah, he hands her a pen, stands, wraps an arm around a shroud, and raises the instrument to his eye. Calling out “mark” as he captures the sun on the sextant’s mirrored horizon, he instructs her to note the time, then the declination of the sun as he reads its measurement from a scale engraved in brass. This is repeated until an average can be distilled from the numbers to place them accurately on the globe.
The cutter is still one hundred miles from their goal, but now stands at such an angle to the wind that a single tack should carry them straight downwind into Lituya Bay.
3 April 1898
58 degrees, 12 minutes N.
137 degrees, 15 minutes W.
 
 
Dear Diary,
Note how I now write in the language of the sailor, in latitude and longitude, and minutes of arc. I have learned my sheets from my halyards, port from starboard, and can steer without leaving what Mr. Severts calls a “snakey wake”—for which, I must admit, I feel quite proud of myself! There is such wonder and elation in the act of sailing that were I a man, I am sure I would be satisfied with a life at sea.
My sense of time has become elastic as we bore on through the stormy night and into this day without pause. It is remarkable to consider that we departed our last anchorage only twenty-four hours ago, when it seems to have been any number of days or even none at all, like something experienced in another place or time. It feels as if that particular method of measurement—breaking days into twenty-four hours, a light and a dark—is useful only in that it allows the mathematical magic of navigation, in which Mr. Severts has been wonderfully patient in instructing me. All in all, between my newfound skills and his companionship, I am finding this voyage quite thrilling.
SEVEN
The evening wind clocks round to the west and eases to a zephyr, stroking the fabric of the sea into dark ripples. The swell dies away.
Tara
moves slowly under a slack curve of sails, accompanied by the languorous rattle of blocks and lines.
Hannah and Michael prepare a hot, thick stew, boiling barley, carrots, and potatoes together with meat from a can before spooning the mixture into blue metal bowls. Hans and Harky take turns steering and eating, holding the bowls in their laps.
“Feels good,” rumbles Harky, wrapping his hands around the heat of the bowl. Dutch stirs under a bundle of blankets, grunting a disinterest in food.
The last limb of the sun drops out of sight, and Hans points to a first star shining low in the east, a bright sparkle of blue near the edge of the horizon. The temperature drops rapidly. Slowly at first, then with increasing frequency, random stars begin to pepper the sky, filling in the dark spaces. Michael sorts a certain star from the constellations and points.
“That’s Polaris, the North Star,” he says, going on to explain that this is the pole star, fixed in position directly above the axis of the Earth. All other constellations—Ursa Major, Orion, Cassiopeia—travel in ceaseless arcs around it, each accompanied by its own confederacy of attendant stars.
“Follow it. Keep it dead on the bow, and it will pull us due north, straight into Lituya Bay.” Hannah stares, holding her breath in wonder at the feel of the world spinning above and beneath her, and a sea that stretches beyond the horizon to the stars.
The night passes, midwatch and dogwatch, with Polaris dancing before them.
Tara
nods to a low swell from astern. In the darkness, Hannah hears the high-pitched keening and pipings of night-hunting seabirds in the void beyond the reach of the binnacle light and sees the sharp, angular shadow of an albatross, asleep on the wing, blot out the stars.
The swell rises with the dawn, and
Tara
sails into fog. The sun becomes a silver pearl that comes and goes. The air is thick with moisture, and the crew peers into emptiness until Michael digs in a locker, emerges with a brass trumpet and blows, pausing between notes to listen for replies.
The wind steadies into something tangible, a body with being and intentions. The sails grow potbellied and full, dragging the boat behind them until the speed of their passage wets everything with beads of cold water that drip down their necks and wet their faces.
Michael’s trumpet wails, and everyone listens, hushed and straining, for any response that may promise they are not alone in the void. Only kittiwakes scream back in surprise. The ocean swells, drops, and rises beneath them; above, a patch of blue sky comes and goes. But around is only a blanket of gray wool that leaves them blind.
Sightless, they imagine the sound of breaking surf up ahead; Michael checks and rechecks the chart for dangers. Estimating their position from the sum of time, speed, and direction, he marks a small, tentative circle on a line representing the cutter’s travel, then points and says, “We are here.”
The world remains unseen. The minutes pass like hours, and the hours without change, until suddenly the wind gusts, curls, and gusts harder again before lying down with a somnolent murmur.
The seas continue to rise.
“There’s more wind coming,” says Michael. “I can feel it in this swell.”
His jaw works in concentration. Plow lines mark his forehead. The fog whispers through the rigging in tattered streams.
“Wind’ll clear this out,” he says hopefully, pointing at the invisible horizon with his chin. “If it doesn’t, we’ll have to lower the sails and drift. Can’t risk running ashore.” He is leery of the habits of fog: The mist has its whims and a penchant for pranks that can draw unwary sailors to their doom.
Turning up his collar, he tells of being lost as a boy with his father, who was drunk and left the compass behind; of how they drifted for days, eating raw cod and licking dew from the sleeves of their oilskins while the currents shuttled them aimlessly to and fro through blind shoals and reefs, the surf breaking all the while around them; and of how on the fifth night the moon rose and drove away the fog, revealing the silhouette of their home island lying dark against the stars less than three miles away, the tide’s aimless urging having deposited them only a short row from where their voyage had begun.
“And there was my mother, in the middle of the night, with a lantern on the beach to guide us in and a pot of oats waiting on the stove.” What he does not tell is how his father shifted the blame for the forgotten compass onto his son’s small shoulders and beat his slender legs with a knotted rope until the welts broke and ran with blood. Or of how his mother had cried out in protest and Francis Severts called her an English whore, then split her lip for good measure. Neither does he speak of how later, after the fog closed down again, his mother had called him to the cowshed, and helped him out of his pants to daub liniment on his wounds, while muttering against the damned hunchbacked Irish pullet, against whom they must ally if they were to survive.

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