Spartina (36 page)

He said out loud, “ ‘O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!’ ” He couldn’t remember any other part of the poem. Except the title—“The Lamplighter.” The line played itself again in his ear, “O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!” And again. He felt the little poem tug at some other thought, as though it was the current in a salt creek tugging at a stick half on the mud bank, half bobbing in the water.

He’d read all those damn little poems to the boys. He wouldn’t have guessed they’d have stuck. It came loose: “Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea, And my Papa’s a banker …”

The boys had said, “Miss Perry says ‘pa
pa.
’ ‘And my pa
pa’s
a banker.’ It goes ‘pa
pa.
’ And Miss Perry says ‘Mar-
eye
-ah.’ Not ‘Mar-ee-ah.’ ”

It came again, trickling into his ear. “—and Maria go to sea, and my
papa’s
a banker and as rich as he can be, But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,” he shouted out loud, “ ‘
O LEERIE, I
’
LL GO ROUND AT NIGHT AND LIGHT THE LAMPS WITH YOU
!’ ”

He found the line turning to Charlie. When Charlie was six and seven, he’d admired everything Dick did. Every dumb ordinary thing. If he split wood, dug clams, or opened a beer, Charlie would be there with his face swiveled on him like a searchlight.

Tom hadn’t been like that. Of course Tom’d had the problem of keeping up with Charlie, that’d kept him more closed in, he’d had
to pretend to be indifferent to anything he couldn’t do or understand—until he got it and could spring it on Charlie whole. But Charlie had followed Dick around like a duckling—Charlie’s wide-open face had looked at Dick like Dick invented everything they found in water or mud—lobster, fish, clams. That knives could cut, that boats could float. O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you.

Dick now thought it amazing that Charlie hadn’t turned sour when Dick did. Charlie hadn’t followed him into bitterness, he just wandered off his own sweet way. Maybe he’d found another Leerie to go round with.

What faint light there was began to darken. Dick could still see the dark of the sea against the lighter blur of sky, but now he lost his short glimpses across the trough to the defined planes of the wave face, facets of chipped flint. He still had a sense of the enormous distance between waves. Each trough a small valley. And he had an even more puzzled sense of whether it was
Spartina
who moved toward the wave or the wave which came toward her, until she lifted up and went blind in the blown spray across her windshield.

It was full dark when he sensed that the seas were growing confused. From the direction of the spattering across the windshield he figured the wind had pulled around to the southwest. Maybe west. The main roll of the sea was still from the south, but he could feel
Spartina
responding to bulges and shoves of wind on her starboard bow.

This was good news and bad news. The good news was that the wind shift meant
Spartina
was getting to the bottom of the hurricane. The bad news was that she might take some funny bounces. He couldn’t see how high the seas were running, but the time
Spartina
spent climbing seemed shorter. It took him a while to figure out what else was different—it was the pitch of the wind.
The higher register was intermittent and more variable, rising and falling, instead of solid noise. And he could hear
Spartina
now. He couldn’t hear the engine, but at less than half-power that wouldn’t be very loud. What he could hear was her timbers working, groaning and creaking.

As she rolled to port in a little cross sea, he felt his right foot nudged by the Coke can.

He scooped it up, popped the top, and sucked it in. He hadn’t realized how dry he was. Almost immediately he began to sweat. He felt it popping out on his forehead and running down his sides. He reached for the thermos of coffee but put both hands on the wheel as
Spartina
slid sideways and rolled sharply to starboard. He turned his head at the first noise. It sounded as though he was grinding his teeth but it was the port section of window. In the glow of instrument lights, he saw the black window turn crackling white. He ducked away, his left hand still on the wheel, his right hand skidding on the floor. His left hand came loose. He was flattened against something, he couldn’t tell what. He was being pulled sideways. His left hand found an edge. It came to him slowly that what was pulling him was water.

He felt it pull past his waist, past his knees. He was lying against the door of a locker. It occurred to him with careful instructional slowness that the reason he was lying on what was normally an upright door was that
Spartina
was over on her starboard beam.

He was too dazed to move his body, though he felt his hand move under his face, brush his cheek. After an instant he felt his feet touch the floor. His senses cleared enough for him to feel
Spartina
coming back. He turned and grabbed the edge of the instrument shelf and then the wheel.

Spartina
was more or less on her feet. There were no lights on the instruments. Only the binnacle light was still on.

He wasn’t sure, but he thought he remembered seeing bluish
light when he was lying down. The wiring shorting out from the water? Where had all the water gone? He began to shake now. The weight of the wheelhouse full of water could have pushed her over—with all that weight so high she could have turned turtle.

He leaned over and opened the locker door with his right hand and groped for the flashlight. He shone it first on the broken window. There were a few pieces of glass in the frame. He knocked them out with the flashlight so they wouldn’t blow loose. He shone the flashlight around the wheelhouse. There was an inch or two of water left sloshing around. The instruments were still in their mountings. The loose charts were gone. There was a soggy piece of one plastered to the jamb of the doorway.

He put both hands on the wheel, breathed through his nose. The open door was a piece of good luck. The water had poured out the door before its weight rolled
Spartina.
Once out on deck, it’d just slid away.

Of course the other piece of luck was that he hadn’t gone out the door too. And surfed on over the rail.

He could feel his hands shaking, even though they were tight on the spokes of the wheel.

In the lull of the next long valley he tried to turn his mind to sealing the broken window.

It was on the lee side now, so the wind wasn’t blowing the spray in, but another freak wave and he’d be up to his knees again. And if
Spartina
buried her bow again …

He could feel the edge of adrenaline ebb away. He looked for something to seal the hole. He thought of the mattress on the bunk. The wheelhouse door. The locker door.

The problem kept him in an alert state of indecision. He could hear the noise of the wind humming across the open hole. He lost track of time.

What brought him to was that he had to take a leak. He shook
his head. He realized he’d been close to nodding off on his feet. He unsnapped his bib, shoved it down, and pissed into the inch of water still sliding around his feet.

He examined the window with the flashlight. Maybe not as bad as he thought. Only three feet by two feet. He took the thermos out of its bracket and put the flashlight in its place. It shone bleakly on the dead instruments, on the film of water at his feet. He drank the coffee and tossed the thermos into the locker.

Spartina
took a wave over her bow that danced around the wheelhouse. By the flashlight Dick saw a bucketful of wave spill in the window. It was the locker door banging loose that nudged him. He filled his jacket pocket with nails. He took a cat’s paw from his tool box and tore the locker-door hinges loose.

In the next long trough he held the door up to the window. It didn’t fit, but better too big than too small. In the relative lull of each trough he banged in a couple of nails, through the plywood door, into the frame.

Back at the wheel he looked sideways at it. It looked like hell. One good smack of another cross-wave and it’d come flying in and he’d be lying on it like a damn Indian yogi on a bed of nails. He got his screw gun out of his tool chest. He couldn’t remember if the batteries had got wet. No. The locker door had been closed then. He was clumsy with the screw gun, he wasn’t used to using it left-handed. He zapped the first screw in askew, but the next six spun in straight. He was sweating again. The piece of plywood still seemed ominous. He got a short piece of wire and used his left hand to take some turns around the knob of the locker door. He made the other end fast to a bracket on the wall. At least this way, if the whole thing got knocked in, it would pull up short before it took his head off.

His jumping around and banging had revved him up some. Or maybe the coffee was kicking in. He checked his watch and turned
out the flashlight. Getting on to midnight. Unless
Spartina
had drifted back a whole lot, she should be coming out.

He could feel the seas diminishing. The crests were steeper—he could hear them sizzle over the bow—but the size of everything was settling down. The time in each trough was shorter, and the time climbing the next wave. He felt a small upward pressure of hope through his chest and shoulders. And a pain in his rib cage, a twinge in his right side when he breathed. He couldn’t remember hurting himself.

He began checking his watch too often. He’d wait and wait and then sneak a look, only to find that what he’d hoped would be an elapsed hour had only been fifteen minutes.

At three in the morning he began to talk to himself. “No more looking. Forget the goddamn watch. The watch is nothing to do with it.” He pushed the watch up under his sleeve so it wouldn’t be so easy to get a look at it.

He wasn’t surprised to hear a brass band playing. It came from somewhere off the port bow, somewhere beyond the boarded-up window. It was playing a march. At first he couldn’t hear it well enough to tell what march it was. Then it came closer and he heard piccolos tweeting above the melody, and he recognized “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” He began to march in place, picking his knees up until they hit the wheel. He heard the trombones and sousaphones take it, and then the whole band crashed into the big wide-open part. He sang along. “Be-ee kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody’s mother.…”

The band stopped. Those weren’t the real words, but what the hell … he’d got the goddamn poem right.

He took a deep breath and let it out through his teeth. Jesus. He was going nuts. Completely nuts. Into the wide blue yonder.

No, not completely nuts. He wasn’t
doing
anything crazy. He just better watch himself. It didn’t matter what he heard or what
he thought so long as he kept
Spartina
headed up. She’d do fine, if he could just watch himself.

Then he began to suspect that something had gone wrong. That the waves that had whomped down on her had spread her, had pulled her deck planking apart. That each time a wave spilled on her, she was taking on water through the gaps.

Or something was up with the engine. Something was working loose. One little spot of metal fatigue was working. If anything was wrong below, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do.

He looked at the compass. He was a little surprised to find that, although he was still taking the seas more or less bow on,
Spartina
was headed southwest. There was less spray, and what there was was rolling rather than driving across the windshield. He couldn’t tell for sure which way the wind was blowing. It would still be pretty stiff even if he was past the southern edge of the storm.

He said out loud, “One thing at a time. Wait’ll it gets light. Once it gets light, you’ll see what’s going on. Once it gets light, you’ll wake up some.”

But when it began to turn light, he felt more and more exhausted. Each shade of lighter gray in the sky seemed to sap him. He began to blink off and on, sleeping for a few seconds like a porpoise. It wasn’t doing him much good.

By six the gray light was brighter than anything he’d seen since he hit the storm. It wasn’t clear, but it was clearing. The seas weren’t huge, but were steep and sharp-crested now that the wind wasn’t tearing off the tops. But it wasn’t the condition of the sea that was his problem. It was his own condition. He hadn’t done anything dumb yet, but he was getting to a state where he wasn’t sure he could watch himself.

He held on for another hour. He tried jigging and jogging in place to get his blood moving. It pepped him up some but at the same time made him feel more lightheaded. He began to fear he
was just going to give way. The fear sent a ripple of energy through him, but it wasn’t enough.

At last he recognized that he was done, that he’d have to put all his trust in her. He slipped the loops of inner tube over the spokes, cut back on the throttle to idle, and broke out the sea anchor from the one intact starboard locker. He put her in neutral. He tucked the bulky canvas and the stiff hemp bridle and line under one arm and went out the door. Just aft of the wheelhouse he clipped onto the lifeline and made his way onto the foredeck. When he glanced at the wheelhouse he saw that the paint looked like it had been sandblasted. In places it was down to bare wood.

He got the sea anchor over the side, made the end of the line fast, and paid off the coil.

When he turned the corner to go back into the wheelhouse he was pulled up short by the line to his waist.

He said, “Wake up, dumbo.” His voice surprised him. It sounded like somebody else.

He got back to the wheel and watched the line to the sea anchor. As the bow rose he saw a length of the taut line slice up out of the water and shake off droplets. Setting out a sea anchor had always struck Dick as something like flying a kite, except, once you got the big canvas cone out there, it was supposed to fly you.

He didn’t know exactly where
Spartina
was. He knew roughly—east of the gap between Monomoy and Nantucket. With the wind out of the northwest and the seas southwest, he wasn’t going to drift onto anything but plenty of water. All he needed was to rest his legs for a half-hour. He pulled a life vest out of the locker. It was thick enough so he wasn’t sitting in the puddle of water that was sliding around. He set his back against the one remaining locker door. He felt his shoulders and neck sag with relief. He tightened up again as he thought to clip his line to the locker handle. He sagged back again. The pale sun was near the top of the open door.
He stretched his legs out straight and felt them ease. He thought, Okay, just a few minutes of this. Just till the sun gets a little higher. As his eyes closed he thought, This may be the dumb thing I’ve been trying not to do.