The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (12 page)

the broken group

O
n the fourth day of their time together—their vacation within a vacation, his father called it—Robert let the anchor chain slip through his hands before he’d been able to secure it and it plunged back into the bay. The chain at his feet uncoiled up and over the bow with startling violence as he stood, frozen to the moment, and watched. The sound of the chain paying out was like playing cards on spokes, but deafening. Within five seconds the anchor was back on the sea floor and the chain paid out. “Dumb,” he said to himself. In three weeks, he would be twelve years old. “Idiot,” he said.

His father came forward from the cockpit and stood beside him. “What happened?” he said. The engine was idling.

“It slipped,” Robert said. “I couldn’t stop it.”

His father kneeled down and ran his hand over the toe-rail. The chain had jumped its track and gouged the wood on its descent. “Jesus,” he said, picking at splinters. He looked at his son. “You all right?”

The boy nodded.

“This could’ve been wrapped around your legs.”

“I know,” he said. “It wasn’t, though.”

His father ran his hand one more time over the rail, then stood and grabbed the line. “We’ll do it together,” he said. The bay was empty. They hauled the anchor and his father went back to the cockpit and put the engine in forward. When Robert was done washing the deck with the pole brush, he sat down next to his father. “I don’t want you to worry about that,” his father said.

“What’s Craig going to say?”

“Craig’s just going to be happy to get the boat back.”

The boat—
Pamier
—was a Valiant 32 they had borrowed from one of his father’s friends; it was a sailboat built for cruising, a solid and friendly vessel. But, as his father had said at the beginning of the trip, this was the ocean, anything could happen. Inattention had consequences at sea, so it was important to be careful. He’d said it in a funny voice, a captain conjured from a long-lost comic book, but he’d also made it known he was serious. When his mother and sister had been with them, they wore life jackets at all times unless safely below deck. They were to keep one hand on the boat when walking bow to stern, no matter how calm the water looked. Still, with all this preparation: the boom had skimmed the top of Robert’s head on a violent jibe, drawing blood, and sent everyone into a silent funk. The propane stove whommed upon ignition. His sister, before she and Robert’s mother had left, had been terrified of the propeller.

They glided out of their anchorage into the strait, which was calm, and powered for a time in silence. The sun was out and hot and the wind blew divots in the water. They were heading south, back to Seattle. To the east of them was the mainland, tree-thick hills balded at their tops from clear-cutting. To the west, a view of the unbroken ocean. Robert knew his father wanted to sail, but his father remained silent at the helm as the breeze moved across the cockpit.

“Where are we going?” he finally asked.

“You tell me. We’ve got three islands to choose from.” His father spread the chart on the divan and set his binoculars on it for weight. Robert found his notebook and opened it up. He’d been taking notes on their navigation for the last week. He began a new entry with the date: August 14, 1989. They were in the Broken Group, a cluster of islands sprinkled across Barkley Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. His father circled a spot on the chart with his calipers. “Those three.”

Robert studied the chart. One of the islands was shaped like a jagged crescent moon. The other had a cove. “Wower,” he said.

“Are you looking at this day?” his father said. “Look at this day!”

T
hey made it to Wower by midday. His father looked at the chart and lowered his speed as they entered the cove. He kept his eyes on the digitized depth reader, whose numbers jumped wildly as they passed over rocks and shoals. Robert stood at the bow, watching the water for rocks and kelp-clumps that could muck up the propeller. “Okay,” his father called from the stern, and he dropped the anchor, and his father backed it down.

Theirs was the only boat in the cove, which was unsurprising, given the recent weather. There had been a storm, and it had caught them, unprepared, seven days earlier. Since it had passed, they had seen only a few other vessels trolling in the distance, and they’d grown accustomed to the isolation, reveling in it even. No more crowded anchorages. No more strange voices carrying over the water, puncturing their sleep. No one watching them except for seabirds and the occasional seal. They were far from home. They rose with the light, and the days, to Robert, felt stretched out and long.

When his father cut the engine, Robert felt relief in the silence. The two of them got into the dinghy, and while his father rowed toward shore Robert paid line over the stern. “Life jacket?” his father said.

“I forgot it.”

His father looked at him. “This water’s fifty degrees,” he said.

Robert nodded.

Ashore, they secured the first line to a birch tree and then hopped over the rocks and looped a second stern-tie around a large piece of driftwood his father said must’ve rolled from a log boom offshore. Maybe on its way from Alaska. It looked like it’d been there for years, sunk deep, near its base, in the sand. Three points of contact, now. Robert could see his father relax. They would not drag anchor. They were secure.

On the way back to the dinghy, Robert caught the toe of his heavy shore boot on the lip of a rock and fell on his hands. Barnacles dug into his palm, but he kept from crying. His father put a hand on his back and led him down to the shore, and the boy put his hands in the salt water until the sting was gone. “Cold, huh?” his father said. Back aboard
Pamier
his father rummaged through a drawer by the stove and came topsides with some Band-Aids.

The stern-ties were perhaps an unnecessary precaution. For the last four days the weather had been beautiful and calm—the barometer had climbed and plateaued, and the voice on the ship-to-shore radio mounted over the instrument panel droned on and on about pleasant conditions. There was no mention of the storm, nothing of the shipwrecks Robert, before going to sleep, imagined. No distress signals. No calls for help.

“How’s the hand?” his father said.

“It’s okay,” he said.

Later that afternoon Robert went by himself in the dinghy to set the crab-trap, and then rowed over to a kelp-bed and leaned over the side with what his father called the look-box: a cylindrical plastic bucket with a Plexiglas bottom. It worked like a reverse periscope, and below the surface of the water Robert could see starfish, orange and deep purple, some with too many legs to count. He watched an anemone contract its bluish suckers and then release them to wave gently in the current. He’d remembered his life jacket, and it made hunching over the dinghy’s side uncomfortable, but that was the deal if he wanted to go rowing by himself: life jacket at all times, and stay within sight of
Pamier
.

Ashore, his father showed him how to fillet the salmon they’d caught the day before, which made him squeamish but also, as he put one gloved hand on the body of the fish and with his other made his first cut, exhilarated. As he felt for the spine with the knife, he remembered how his father had brought the club down on the fish’s head, three whacks, until it stopped flipping around and lay in the cockpit, stunned at its own suffocation, its gills clapping open and shut. Robert had never seen his father hit anything, and watching this he’d felt his own weight to be less than the fish’s. He had caught it. He had hooked and reeled it in. His father had been at his shoulder, excitedly shouting instructions about line tension and angle, finally grabbing the fish with one hand while the other reached for the club. The wet blows sounded like a cabinet shutting. “That’s
your
fish!” his father had said, holding it up for appraisal before dropping it on the deck. Robert had smiled, but then had felt ashamed. He wanted to throw it back, or at least part of him did, but the blood was dark, and its scales, like small mirrors in the sun, had flecked off onto his shoe. It could not be undone.

After they’d collected enough wood for a fire, Robert walked on the beach below the tide line, picking up sand dollars and skipping them back into the water so they wouldn’t dry in the sun. He flipped rocks and watched tiny crabs scuttle over one another in the sand. He delicately carried a crab in the basin of his shirt to a tide pool, crouched down, and dropped the crab into a sea anemone, which closed itself around the crab. It looked to him like a hug; a greeting. He didn’t know whether or not anemones ate crabs, but eventually the crab stopped moving, and the anemone opened itself again.

They cooked and ate the salmon ashore, and after dinner they sat facing the water as the sun went down. As the light flattened, they saw an eagle, and watched it dive and swoop just beyond
Pamier
. Soon it was dark. When Robert began to get sleepy, he and his father stood and peed on the fire side by side and then his father kicked sand over the remaining embers. On board, they slept in the main cabin, together. It had been this way since his mother and sister had left, the two of them bunking up, and it was a comfort to Robert. He would not have admitted it, would not have said it aloud, but he was unable to sleep in the unfamiliar boat, with its stays and halyards constantly adjusting in the wind, knocking into the mast, without knowing his father was two feet away from him, in a matching and old-smelling sleeping bag.

T
he storm had come up suddenly, and had been more severe than the man on the weather channel had predicted. When the wind picked up, his father jokingly announced it was time to batten the hatches and get out the board games. “I don’t think this is funny, Joshua,” his mother had said. His father looked at her and shrugged. He went topsides to check the anchor and returned below to say there was nothing to worry about. Robert’s sister was two years younger and scared of the wind. When they were in their sleeping bags in the bow cabin that first night, the cabin the two of them had decided to call “the cave,” he’d let her sleep on his bunk between him and the hull.

The next morning a front rolled in, bringing with it a gale-force warning. His parents discussed trying to make it to Ucluelet, but by the time they’d decided to leave, the wind had already arrived, and his father said it was too late. It would be safer to stern-tie to shore and hunker down than to attempt an open-water crossing.

“There are no other boats here,” his mother said.

“We’ll be fine,” his father said.

“You think, or you
know
?”

His father didn’t answer but turned to Robert and told him to put on his foul weather gear.

“You must be joking,” his mother said. Robert had never seen her so angry. “He’s not going out there with you.” Outside, through the hatch, it was dark.

“I need someone to help with the stern-tie.”

“Well, not him.”

Robert already had his slicker, but his mother told him to put it away. “How could you do this to us?” she said to his father, almost under her breath.

“What do you want me to say? I’m sorry.”

“You knew it was late in the season to be out here. You told me.” She opened the closet near the galley and pulled out a pair of rain pants and slammed the door shut. “You might have grown up sailing, but no one else here did. You understand? This might not be scary to you. But I’m telling you. This isn’t fun for the rest of us.”

His father watched her stomp rain boots on. When she stood, he was still watching her.

She turned to Robert and his sister and told them not to worry, and then she climbed topsides after her husband.

The two of them watched the storm and their parents’ progress through the oval-shaped cabin windows. The trees onshore whipped and swayed. The rain was coming down sideways and in sheets, and looked at times to be billowing in the wind. He could hear his parents shouting, but it sounded like a combination of directional advice and nonsense.

“What if they don’t come back?” his sister said. She was nine and shorter than he was by a foot, with her mother’s brown hair.

“That’s stupid.”

“What if?”

After a while they heard their parents scrambling back aboard and Robert turned to his sister, who was crying, and said, “See?”

That night his sister whimpered until their mother brought her sleeping bag into the forward cabin and slept with the two of them. In the morning the storm seemed to have passed over them at least partially, but the voice on the radio said that in the north, hurricane winds were being reported and an all-craft advisory was issued. They spent the day in the cabin playing cards and board games. When the wind kicked up again, Robert’s father went topsides to check the anchor and returned wet and angry. “We’re dragging,” he said.

“What can we do?” his mother said. It was the first time they’d spoken to each other all day.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Robert’s sister began crying again. “That helps,” his father said. “The crying helps.”

At some point, Robert fell asleep, and when he woke up he was surprised at how quiet it was in the main cabin. The storm had stopped. Morning light was streaming in through the hatches, which were now open. His father sat at the chart table with the radio on low volume.

“We’re taking your mother and sister to Ucluelet,” he said. “They’ll catch a bus and then a ferry home.”

“What about me?”

“I need you,” he said. “The boat has to come down. I can’t do it by myself. The storm’s over. It’ll be fun.” He stood and stretched. “We can poke around the islands for a few days before heading down. Me and you. It’ll be fun. I promise.”

It took six hours under power to get to Ucluelet. As they pulled past the breakwater, his sister pointed to the shore abutting the marina, where a number of the boats that had been free anchored were stacked almost on top of each other, as if they’d been swept into a corner by a large broom.

Robert hugged his mother and said good-bye to his sister at the bus station. His sister was crying for no reason. She gave him a drawing of a tree, and he thanked her for it. They waited for the bus to pull out, and then he and his father returned to
Pamier
.