The Boatmaker (6 page)

He flicks his cigarette through the doorway into the dark, orange sparks pinwheeling as they fall. He follows the pinwheel out into the darkness, crushes the end of the cigarette under his boot, buttons his jacket and sets off for his mother's house. As he walks, he begins to envision how he will get the boat down the bluff and into the water. He will make a set of rollers, made of pine logs stripped of their bark. He will tie the boat to trees at each stage to prevent it from overpowering him and shooting down the slope. As he lets the boat slide down the bluff,
he'll take each roller out from under the stern and move it to the bow. Done alone, it will be a long, hard piece of work.

The door of his mother's house hangs open. Around the house is the smell of wet earth. He walks up the path to the front door and climbs three wooden steps.

Inside, a kerosene lamp hangs from a beam. His mother sits in a circle of yellow light under the lamp, round embroidery frame in one hand, needle in the other. The smell of whiskey greets him like an old friend. She looks up, her face and nose broad, gray hair pulled back. Her round metal spectacles are tilted on her nose; one of the earpieces is missing. In spite of the fact that he hasn't been here for more than a year, she doesn't look surprised to see him. On the floor, outside the circle of yellow light, he can make out flat empty bottles lying on their sides.

“You're still sewing.”

“
Of course I'm still sewing.
How do you think I live? You think I get money from your father? Or from you?”

She lists to her left, spits and pushes the needle into the fabric. Holding the hoop carefully in her right hand, she reaches down with her left, brings a bottle up into the light and takes a pull without offering a drink to her son. He has been staying away from alcohol while he builds his boat, and it's hard for him to smell it without wanting
some. He isn't usually a man who can have one drink and easily stop. If he takes one, he's likely to be drunk for weeks, never finishing his boat and missing the summer winds favorable for Big Island.

“Where is he?”

“Who?” She sets the bottle down in the same place on the floor so she can reach it without looking, pulls the needle out and resumes her work.

“You know who I mean.”

“Where do you think?
Up to Gallagher's Point with his whore.
” She spits again on the same spot. The needle, poised above the embroidery, dives down and in. For all the anger, her hands are sure.

He stands foolish and awkward, feeling shamed by her brutal lack of interest in him. Her face is fleshy, cracked and reddened. After all that has happened, after every blow she has delivered, psychic or physical, he needs her love exactly as he did when he was a boy. When his brother died, he wanted to save her. He knew he could never take his brother's place, but he thought he could save her from darkness and drink. He couldn't. When he reached out to hold and comfort her, she pushed him away, more roughly each time. His boat will make her see him differently. He is sure that in her eyes he will never be as good as his brother, but perhaps he can be better
than his father—better than he feels at this moment, shamed in yellow light. His mother works methodically, her jaw clenching and unclenching as the needle passes through and out of cream-colored fabric.

“Why don't you ever talk about how he died?”

“
Who?
” She looks up, her face flushing a deeper red. His guts turn to water, and he wants to run, but he makes himself hold his ground.

“My brother.” His breath is tight. He can't believe his audacity in mentioning his brother. He is sure she will explode. But she doesn't. Her tone is low and even. It feels worse than an explosion, if that is possible.

“You know what happened. Everyone on this nasty spittle of an island knows it. You can hear them whispering in the dark.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

For a moment, she just looks at him, then says, in a deep, raspy voice: “Your father killed him.
You know that.
”

“I don't know it. You never talk about it. All I know is what people say.”

Her face darkens until the red seems black. “There's no mystery.
Your father took him into the sea and drowned him.
He knew how much I loved that boy. He did it because he hates me. And because he's a weakling.” She leans over for her bottle, brings it up and drinks.

He is getting what he came for, and that is important. But it is harder to bear than if she had exploded and beaten him.

She looks straight ahead, away from him, in her own thoughts. “
He was the one,
” she says quietly, as if to herself. “He was so beautiful. What a man he would have been. He could have been anything he wanted. He could have left this spitfleck of an island and gone anywhere. Big Island. The Mainland. Europe, even. He could have been anything. Not like his father—that half-man. Or the other one—another weakling. Crying and wanting what I don't have.”

Tears run down her face. She wipes her nose on her sleeve, takes another pull on the bottle. As she swallows, she looks up at him as if she is surprised to see someone standing in her house. He knows that when he leaves this house, he will want a drink—badly.

“I'm leaving.”

“You left before.”

“I'm leaving Small Island.”

“And how would the likes of you leave Small Island? You have money for passage on the steamer?
I doubt it.
” She spits.

“I'm building a boat.”

“A boat? How do you know how to build one? On this island, only the boatbuilder families do that.”

“I know.”

“When are you doing this?”

“Soon.”

She looks at him long and hard, sets the bottle down and gets up, leaving her embroidery on the chair. The floorboards creak under her bare feet, which look as large and tough as tree roots. She leans over, opens the top drawer of her sideboard and takes something out. She closes the drawer, turns and comes toward him holding what she removed from the drawer. When she is close to him, her head is level with his shoulder. He wants to touch her, but he's sure that if he does, she will slap his hand away.

She takes his hand, lifts it up and puts something made of linen into it. “Take this. It's all I have.
Now leave me.
”

He turns and walks down the wooden steps, leaving the door open. The boards are loose. He should come back and fix them. He doesn't want her to fall. His boots find their way along the path, which is invisible in the dark. The grass catches at his feet and tries to trip him, but he pushes through into the woods. When he gets home, he falls to the floor next to his boat and sleeps.

He wakes up in his clothes, cold and sore. It comes back to him slowly: going to his mother's house, her not seeming to know he was there some of the time, telling
her about the boat, being given the handkerchief. He rolls out from under the hull, stands up, goes to the pitcher in the corner, drinks some of the water and pours the rest over his head. Takes off his corduroy jacket, hangs it on a peg near the door. Reaches into the jacket pocket and pulls out the handkerchief. It's creamy yellow-white linen, decorated with his mother's needlework in green. He would know her work anywhere.

The embroidery shows the harbor of Small Island. On the bluffs above are a few tiny houses; below is the curving shoreline. In the foreground are three harbor seals, their heads sleek and pointed, nosing above the surface. One is nearby, on the right, the other two farther away, toward the land, facing each other. He folds the handkerchief carefully and replaces it in his jacket pocket. No matter how far from Small Island he goes, he must never lose the thing his mother has given him.

He turns to look at his work. The boat is almost finished. He has filled in maple decking between the gunwales and completed the centerboard well. In the town, he has purchased the few pieces of hardware he needs, avoiding the woman while he was there.

Now that the boat is almost done, he can indulge himself. He goes outside and sits, smoking and thinking, enjoying the warmth. Sitting with his back against
the shed, he sees her come up the path carrying a parcel. She stops in front of him, the toes of her boots almost touching his.

She sits down beside him without saying anything. The silence excites him. He feels the excitement rising in his chest, arms, legs. He waits until his cigarette burns to a glowing nub, then crushes it into the earth. He takes hold of her, rough and tender at the same time, feeling the thing that always joins them, regardless of how long it has been.

He gets up, leans over, puts one arm around her back, the other under her legs. He lifts and carries her into the shed, then lays her down in the shadow of the boat. He pulls at her clothes, then at his, and enters her, quick and sharp. Her legs are raised, his overalls falling around him, his buttocks white in the darkness of the shed. She feels herself flow around and into him. As always, she loses her sense of where she is.

When he is done, the first thing she's aware of is the coolness of the air on her body. She straightens her clothing, gets up, brushes herself off and walks out the door. He watches her without moving from the floor.

The package is where she left it. She picks it up, brushes off a few pine needles and some crumbs of dirt. She goes back into the shed, holding the parcel out, her
hands trembling. He stands and gets a folding knife, cuts the twine, which falls twirling to the dirt. He slices the paper, removes it and sees a light blue box with dark blue lettering raised from its surface. The name of the famous maker of nautical equipment means nothing to him.

He squats next to her on the dirt floor. What's inside the box is heavy, wrapped in tissue paper. He unwraps the tissue and lets it fall. What's left is a marine compass, designed for big ships but scaled down to the proportions of a small boat. It has a solidity and precision beyond anything he is familiar with. The black dial is lettered in red and gold. The needle moves slightly, as if eager to show him his course away from Small Island. He knows this compass must have cost every one of the bills he left her with the table—and perhaps more. He sets the compass back in the box, puts the box on the dirt floor and lies down, curling into her.

Two weeks later he and his boat are on the rocky beach below the town. Everything he needs is in the hull, packed in nets fastened under the deck. He's rigged a canvas cover over part of the cockpit to keep the spray out. The steamer makes the trip in two days. He might need four or five, depending on the wind.

One of the last things he did was to sew himself a sealskin bag with two straps to go around his shoulders.
In the bag he put the handkerchief from his mother, along with what is left of the money he earned from carpentry jobs. The bag is strapped to his chest under his clothes; the compass is mounted on the foredeck just behind the mast. He'll have to leave the tiller and step forward to read it, but when the wind is fair, the boat should sail itself.

Before leaving, he swept the shed, leaving the door open for the next man who wants to use it. He took the important tools with him, in case he needs to find work on Big Island. Any honest man of Small Island is welcome to the rest.

His final job was to step the mast, which he did when he got his boat down the steep slope to the beach. Now he pushes the boat out into the water, leaving the stern on a rock. He waits a moment, going over a few last things. Then he takes off his boots, ties them together and throws them into the cockpit. They land, one on each side of the centerboard well, dangling from their laces.

He steps into the water in his bare feet and frees the stern from its rock. The boat floats in the green water, waiting. He steps in, feels the boat take his weight and settle. He sits on the stern thwart, lifts the rudder and sets it in place on its two brass pins. He raises the gaff-rigged sail he sewed in his shed from heavy canvas. The
breeze picks up—a summer breeze, no more than a puff, but enough to move his boat. He trims his sail, and the boat springs forward, leaving a hissing wake. He reaches forward and slides the centerboard down. When the centerboard is up, the boat will draw only a few inches. A little water comes through the seams onto his feet. This doesn't matter. As he sails, the hull will swell, seal itself and become watertight. Sitting on the thwart, he holds himself still, looking straight ahead, not turning around to see Small Island shrink out of sight behind him.

CHAPTER 5

When the boatmaker reaches Big Island, it is hot and dusty: high summer. The boat sailed beautifully for four days and three nights, letting him know he had done the right thing in building it and sailing out onto the open sea. He steered by the sun and the compass the woman ordered all the way from the Mainland, his wake bubbling behind him. The summer winds were fair and steady, and he ran downwind almost from the moment he put his boat in the water. It took a few minutes to work out of the wind shadow of Small Island and catch the prevailing winds. From there it was like sailing in a dream.

The best times were at night. The moon gained fullness on his journey until it lay whole and round on the water, his boat gliding over the wide white disk. The sea was calm, a big lake, the waves little more than ripples as he ran downwind, the gaff-rigged sail far out over the
gunwale, held by a pole he had cut and stowed before setting out.