Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) (25 page)

45

O
n that high-summer morning in late July, the sky sucked me into its blue soup like a willing and thirsty fly. “You okay?” Daddy yelled from the
Florine
's stern. I sat in a tall deck chair with a pillow against the back in the wheelhouse, taking her
down the channel while Daddy baited traps and tossed them overboard. I was helping because Sam was too sick to come aboard. He had what would be diagnosed as liver cancer, but none of us knew that yet.

I hollered to Daddy, “I'm okay,” over the flock of gulls that spoke in loud tongues for Daddy to toss them bait. The
Florine
's engine growled as if she was hung over and paying for it.

“Take your pills?” Daddy yelled.

“Yes,” I lied. I was trying to get by without them because they made me sleepy. I wore pain like an itchy wool sweater. Besides, the doctor had told me I might have back and leg troubles all my life, and I didn't want to be tired, to boot.

Daddy tossed a trap into the greedy harbor's mouth. In my head, I followed it down to the bottom, to where some scavenging lobster would get wind of it and follow its claws into the funnel. If it was too small, it would eat and leave. If not, it would have to cancel its appointments and hope that its relatives would divvy up its belongings.

A larger boat, the
Molly B
, passed us on the left. We waved, they waved, and I waited for the wake to rock us sideways over the hill of the swell, then down into the gullies. I slowed the engine and eased back in my chair.

Daddy came into the wheelhouse when we reached the end of his line. I took the engine to a crawl. She coughed, but guttered along.

“Good day,” Daddy said. He took off his black rubber gloves, opened his thermos, and poured coffee into the little red cup that topped it.

“How long have you had that thermos?” I asked him.

“Since before you was born,” he said. “Grand got me this lunchbox when I was in high school. Same thermos as then,” he said. “That's hard to do without breaking it.”

“Guess it is,” I said. “I broke about three in grade school.”

“I remember,” Daddy said. He took a sip of coffee and puckered up. I gave him a sympathetic look and he winked at me. “I'm used to it,” he said. “Stella can cook some good, but her coffee's always been too strong. Eh, what the hell.”

“Can't you teach her how to make a decent cup?”

“I could,” he said. “But why bother?” He shrugged. “Got to get along,” he said. “Stella's been good to me.”

I surprised myself when I said, “She has been good. She's taken care of you.”

He smiled at me as if I'd given him a present he'd asked for but didn't expect. He nodded and said, “You find someone like that, you take care of each other. Best thing you can do for you and for them.”

Daddy looked out the front window of the wheelhouse. One big, freckled finger curled itself around the thin red handle of the little cup. A bubble of tenderness floated from my toes to my head. I thought, I will knit this picture into my brain forever. I'll put it alongside the time Bud and I dove down to the bottom of the mooring, all the times Grand and I waved in the boats, and the time Carlie pointed out the horizon to me.

Then the
Florine
's engine sputtered and quit.

“Damn it,” Daddy said. “She's been running rough. Let me give her a try,” he said. I climbed down from the chair, being careful not to wrench my back or my leg, and stepped to the other side of the wheelhouse. Daddy turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. Not even a clunk.

“Well, hell,” he said. “Guess I got to tinker with the bitch.”

“Let's eat lunch first,” I said. “Sit in the sun.” The fickle gulls now hovered around the
Molly B
, way over by the edge of the horizon.

I went out onto the deck and opened the cooler we'd brought along. The sun massaged the back of my neck with warm fingers and it felt so good, I groaned. I breathed in salty air, drunk with summer. I unfolded a lawn chair and lowered myself into it, sprawling my legs out in front of me.

Daddy dropped anchor, then sat across from me on an overturned bait pail. “Good idea,” he said. “Give her a rest. Maybe that's what she needs.”

“Maybe you need a rest, too,” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “I'm tough.” He squinted into the sun and I saw where one of his top teeth was a funny color, almost blue.

“You got a bad tooth?” I asked.

“Yeah. Stella wants me to see to it, but it don't bother me yet. Looks kind of funny, but then, so do I.”

I bit into my peanut butter and jam sandwich and slugged down cold milk. We didn't talk, just ate. Being quiet, with the motor off, is probably the reason we saw the whale. It breached about ten feet from the boat, made a bow out of its long, shiny back, swam on the surface for a minute, then sank.

“Minke,” Daddy said.

We waited, and the minke swam back alongside the boat. We could see it as clear as if it were above the waves, the way its body moved smooth and silent. Then it rose, exhaled from its blowhole, and arched toward the
Molly B
.

“Kick dive,” Daddy said.

The giant tail fin slapped the water, blessing Daddy and me with salty spray.

We let it dry on our skins as we finished lunch. I raised my face to the sun and Daddy got up, walked to the middle of the boat, and opened the trapdoor to the engine crawl space.

“We'll fix her up, then haul on the way home,” he said. He lowered himself down and I put his toolbox next to him.

I fell asleep in the chair soon after he started working on the engine. The sun and general well-being lulled me away and I sank down, down, down with the whale, swimming with the whole ocean ahead of me and the rest of it behind.

When I woke, the sun had moved from the top of the sky to somewhere around two o'clock. My back hurt and my face burned. I didn't hear the engine. Damn, I thought, we'll have to radio in for some help.

“Hey, Daddy,” I called. I struggled up out of the chair and limped over to the trapdoor by the engine. “Haven't you got that bitch fixed yet?”

He was looking up at the sky, braced against the back of the hatch, his hand open on the deck, a wrench across his palm.

“What are you doing?” I said.

He kept looking at the sky, so steady that I looked up. I saw nothing. “What are you looking at?” I asked. He didn't answer.

And then I knew.

My heart throbbed in deep, painful jerks.

“Daddy?” I touched his face. It was clammy and wet with sweat that he would never wipe with a hankie again. I jerked my hand away and began to wail in wide loops like a little girl, sending seagulls over to study me before winging away again.

I don't know how long I dropped tears down onto my dead father's face. But after a while, I stopped and studied the expression on it because he looked both happy and surprised, as if someone he hadn't seen in a long time had come by. I followed his eyes up again, and got caught in the layers of blue that separated us from space.

“She found you, didn't she, Daddy,” I said. “She came for you.” I swiped tears off my face with a fist. “It's about time,” I said to Carlie. “It's about goddamned time.” Then I thought about Daddy and Carlie dancing in the kitchen, her small feet on his big ones as he lifted her around in a clumsy waltz. I let them dance all the way through “Love Me Tender” before I thought about calling for help.

I looked at my watch. It was about three o'clock. Daddy had died between about one o'clock and two thirty or so. “I should have been there,” I said. Then I heard Daddy's voice, clear as the sky above, say, “Nothing you could have done, Florine. It's all right. Right as rain.” And Carlie said, “You'll be all right, my little criminal.”

The horizon was clear of boats except for a tanker inching its tiny way along the line between sea and sky. I went to the radio. I should have called the Coast Guard, I suppose, but the time for emergencies had passed. I called into Ray's store and Glen answered.

“This is Florine,” I said. “I'm out on the boat with Daddy. Glen, he's died. Heart attack, I think. I need you to send someone out to get us. The engine quit.”

“Holy shit,” Glen said.

“I know,” I said.

“Holy shit,” Glen said again, and then he said, “Oh, no.” I heard the sadness in his voice, and that's when it hit me that he wasn't just mine, that he belonged to The Point and everyone in it. Stella. Oh God, Stella.

“Glen,” I said, my voice shaking, “he was trying to fix the engine. I took a nap and when I woke up, he was gone. Please send someone out. Please be gentle with Stella.”

I sat with Daddy for almost another hour. We'd gone pretty far out, as far as his line extended. Some boats motored past me, but I didn't call out to them. I stroked the top of Daddy's head with the tips of my fingers, letting sorrow wash over me, riding it up and over and down. Up and over and down. Down and over and up.

Finally, Bert, Glen, and Bud pulled up next to us in the
Maddie Dee
.

Bud clambered over the side and I went to him like a baby. He held me and let me go on, rubbing my back, kissing my hair, saying, “It's okay,” as if I had fallen down on a gravel road and skinned my knee.

Finally he whispered, “I got to help out,” and he walked back to the trapdoor, where Bert and Glen stood. Bert said in a voice that was none too steady, “We got to move him and try and start up the boat. Pretty sure I know what ails her. Florine, honey, you and Glen go back in the
Maddie Dee
. Bud and I will bring your father home.”

“I don't want to leave him,” I said.

“He's gone, darling,” Bert said. “You ain't leaving him.”

Bud said, “Why don't Glen stay? I'll take Florine back.”

Bert looked surprised and then he didn't, and he nodded.

Bud steered the
Maddie Dee
back to home with me in between him and the wheel. I leaned back into him and he held me and the boat steady as we neared The Point. The wharf was crowded with people come to greet Daddy.

“I can't do this,” I said.

“You don't have to do it alone,” Bud said. “You got us to help you.”

Then I remembered the whale.

“What kind?” Bud asked.

“Minke.”

“Supposed to be good luck,” he said. “Or maybe not.”

46

S
tella went out of her mind. She was there on the wharf when Bud and I docked, and she threw herself on me and shrieked, “It can't be true. Say it's not true. Oh my god, Florine, we've lost him.” Despite her skinniness, when she launched herself at me I cried out, not just from the loss, but because she hurt my back. Dottie was on the dock with tears running down her own cheeks, but she took the time to unwind Stella from me.

Later, when Bert and Glen had brought Daddy into port and burial arrangements had been set in motion, Stella, when she could talk, said she wanted Daddy to be buried in their plot on the hill by the church near to Grand. They'd planned this a while back, she said, which surprised me, but then, I hadn't been paying attention.

“There's room for you,” she told me the day after they brought Daddy in and took him up to the funeral parlor. “You can be buried between Grand and Leeman, if you want.”

“Don't know where I'll be buried,” I said. “Hope that time is a long way off.”

“Well, that's where we'll be, if you don't have anywhere else to go,” she said. “You'll always be welcome.”

I hoped the hell there would be more to my life than ending up like that. But I had something else on my mind. I took a deep breath, and said, “Now, don't go all weird on me, but what would you think of giving Daddy a burial at sea?”

“What?” she cried.

“Daddy loved the ocean better than anything,” I said. “I'm wondering how you would feel if we took him out on the boat and gave him a water burial.”

“Over my dead body,” Stella said. She started to shake. “I will
not
have him out there all alone. If I can't be with him now, then I'll settle for eternity with him in our graves. On the hill. Forever. I know that you're next of kin, but I'm next to nothing without him. You've got to understand that if you know nothing else.” And she started to sob, so I handed her a Kleenex and that was the end of that.

We went with Madeline and Dottie to choose the coffin. “He has to have the best,” Stella said, although Madeline talked her down from a mahogany number that probably cost more than the house. “Florine, what do you think?” Madeline asked me from time to time.

“Well, maybe . . . ,” I'd start, then Stella's cries would drown me out. During the height of one of her squalls, I pointed to a simple, dark coffin, and Madeline nodded. Stella, thank heaven, agreed with us.

The night before the funeral, Dottie, Bud, Glen, and I sat on Grand's porch. Dottie cracked open a bottle of rosé and I held up my red ruby wineglass and studied the richness of the color in the porch light. Glen and Bud sucked down beers and leaned back in the rocking chairs.

“Don't do that,” I said. “The legs will break.” They rocked down.

“How come no one knows what to say when something like this happens?” Dottie asked. “No one ever knows what to say.”

“The way Stella's carrying on, it's hard to say anything,” Glen said.

“She loved him,” I said. “He's all she ever wanted.”

“She keeps saying that,” Dottie said.

“It's true,” I said.

“Maybe she can get a dog,” Glen said.

Bud burst out laughing, followed by Dottie. I even giggled.

“You think a dog's gonna replace Leeman?” Dottie asked.

“Well, maybe then she wouldn't be so lonely,” Glen said. “Dogs are good company.”

I thought of Daddy, who looked so uncomfortable in his blue suit with his big freckled hands folded over a Bible, being stuck for eternity in a box. Two things hit me at once. I would never see him again, and I would know that he was trapped in the earth in an uncomfortable suit forever. It was too much to bear. “No,” I said. I dropped the red ruby wineglass, which miraculously didn't break as it hit the floor. I held my hands over my face, trying to rid myself of the vision of crawly things chewing through poor Daddy.

Pictures of him flashed through my mind. Him waving at Grand and me from the boat, walking up from the wharf, down the hill to the harbor, tossing traps, drinking coffee from his little red cup, watching the whale, holding his hand, holding him close. Us fighting. Me hurting him. Us making up. Us loving each other, no matter what. Us getting on with it during the hardest time in our lives. I started to cry.

“Get her a Kleenex,” Dottie said. “She's finally exploded.”

Bud was ready with a clean white handkerchief in his pocket and I blew my nose loud into it. I balled it up, wiped my tears, and hiccupped.

“I can't stand to think of him in the ground,” I said. “Being eaten by worms. Sucked dry. He'd hate it.”

“Well,” Dottie said. “It's the way things go.”

“I know,” I said. “But he'd rather be out in the water.”

“Sleeping with the fishes,” Glen said.

The day of the funeral was like the day he died. We filed into the church under a warm blue sky. The pews were filled, as they had been for Grand's funeral. Stella hunkered next to me, one arm hooked through mine. She sobbed throughout the teary service, while I sniffled and tried to listen to Pastor Billy, who stopped a couple of times to blow his nose. Glen told me that Billy had wanted to talk about how they'd all lost a good poker player, but that he'd decided against it, thinking that people might misunderstand. He did talk about men going down to the sea in boats, about Daddy's love of the water, his love for his family and friends, and for his beloved Point.

After the service, we shuffled out of the church and walked Daddy to his burial plot. I got the vision of him being underground again and I shivered and the tears slipped down. Stella put her arm around me and said, “I know. What are we going to do without him?” She threw her arms around Madeline. “What am I going to do?” she sobbed.

The sun hit the back of my neck, much as it had only four days before, only this time it dug its nails in, too hot, too sharp. Sweat trickled down my chest and fell into my belly button before it spilled over and wet the front of my slip and underpants. I looked up at the sky and the day faded to white and I woke up on the ground by the grave with the pallbearers bending over me, Bud touching my face.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Oh, poor Florine,” Stella cried from somewhere. Bud and Glen raised me from the ground and I wobbled between them. They helped me back to the car and I never saw them lower Daddy into the ground, which might have killed me.

At the get-together at Stella's house afterward, I sat in a lawn chair in the shade of a maple tree that held the remains of the swing Daddy had built for me when I was about five. The wood seat was rotted out but I ran my hands up and down one of the thick ropes that held it up, feeling little splinters catch in my palms and in the pads of my fingers.

The men all stood outside the house, smoking, drinking, talking and not talking. Sadness set like shiny stones in their eyes. They'd grown up together, fished together, loved women together, raised kids together, and now the first one of them was gone. To a man, they looked smaller, as if they could be struck down at any moment, too.

People kept checking on me, which got to me after a while, and when Dottie came around, I said, “Give me a hand. I'm tired of feeling so damn precious.” She hauled me to my feet, and I mingled until four o'clock or so, when I decided to go to Grand's house to nap. “I'll be back later,” I said to Madeline, who was running the show.

“You sure?” she asked. “You look peaked.”

“I feel okay,” I said. “Tired mostly.”

I went home and crawled upstairs to bed. My body sank into the mattress, but my mind played Daddy's life like a movie. I cried until I got to the end, and then it was dark, and Dottie was shaking me.

“Get up,” she said.

“Why?” I snapped.

“Just come on,” she said. “And be quiet.”

“What time is it?”

“About one o'clock.”

“In the morning? Jesus, Dottie.”

I hauled myself out of bed and pulled on shorts and a sweatshirt lying on the floor beside the bed. I forced my feet into my sneakers.

Dottie pulled me out the door, down the hill, and toward the wharf. We took a right toward the beach, where I saw a dark figure standing by a dinghy. Bud.

“Get in,” he whispered, and he rowed us out toward where the
Florine
sat moored. We passed her, though, and I said, “What are we doing?” Bud didn't answer, just kept rowing toward the
Maddie Dee
, which sat farther out in the harbor. Onboard her I saw the faint outlines of several figures. Lit cigarettes punched orange holes into the night and I realized that Daddy wasn't going to rot in the ground. He was going home to sea and we were taking him there. The men hauled me and Dottie up over the gunwale while Bud tied off the dinghy next to two others and climbed aboard. Sam, Bert, Ray, Bud, Glen, and Pastor Billy paddled the
Maddie Dee
out toward the mouth of the harbor. Dottie and I stood over the remains of my father, now bound in a white sheet that glowed as if a chip of the moon had fallen from the sky and landed on deck.

When we got far enough out, Bert fired up the
Maddie Dee
's engine and we puttered out into the silent bay toward the ocean, past the lobster pots, past the place where we'd seen the minke whale, and where Daddy had died.

Finally, Bert stopped the boat and shut off the engine. The water lopped against the sides, and we formed a circle around Daddy.

“Well,” Sam said, “we come to bring you home, old man.”

“Should we say a prayer or something?” Glen asked.

“Enough prayers got said this morning,” Ray said. “Sorry Pastor.”

“I agree,” Billy said. “We don't need words.”

“Well, let's do it,” Sam said.

“Wait,” Bud said. “Maybe Florine's got something she wants to say?”

I looked at the men standing around Daddy and moved closer to Dottie. “Thank you,” I said. “Daddy will be all right now. Thank you for this.”

“Don't tell Stella,” Glen said, and we laughed.

Then the men hoisted up Daddy like he weighed no more than a chunk of Styrofoam and they put him on a wide board, tilted it up, and Sam said, “God rest you, Lee.” Daddy slid off and smacked the water like a seal going home. Phosphorus sparked off the sheet as he floated down to the fishes and the lobsters, who knew him better than the worms, and would make quicker work of him.

Then everyone stepped away and left me alone to stare down into the empty water. A light breeze lifted my hair and tickled the back of my neck with a soft touch. I smiled through my tears. “This is so you won't be alone,” I said to Daddy. I pulled off the emerald birthstone ring Daddy had given me so long ago, the ring he and Carlie had picked out for my thirteenth birthday. I tossed it into the spot where Daddy had gone down. In my heart, I put the spirit of my mother alongside him and brought her home to him.

“Take care of each other,” I whispered to my parents. “Don't worry about me. I'll be getting on with it.”