Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “Just a small one,” the caption reads. “I have to operate.”

  He also left bits and pieces from most of our boats. I went through mountains of nautical detritus in the freezing-cold garden shed behind his house, high-stepping over rusting garden tools and reaching around scary bottles of thirty-year-old pesticide to get at the treasures. Rotting cardboard boxes rained hundreds of dollars’ worth of bronze nuts and bolts on my shoes. I unearthed a priceless collection of teak scraps left over from the costly rebuilding of a doomed deck; cans of questionable kerosene and long-solidified spar varnish; the rope and wood boarding ladder he’d made during his fear-of-falling-overboard phase (this coincided with his fear-of-head-injury phase, when he wore a red motorcycle helmet while driving his convertible).

  One boat in particular was responsible for much head-scratching and even the need for a German-English dictionary. From Stortebeker III, a classic beauty he’d bought from another doctor who’d finally given up on maintaining a seasoned wooden cruiser already well past middle age, I discovered old admiralty charts of Raoul Island, where HMS Bounty’s Captain Bligh and his men first made land after being cast adrift by the doomed Fletcher Christian; ceramic jars with cork-lined lids marked “Kaffee” and “Kakao” and even, stuffed into a black plastic bag that showered me with rat droppings when I tugged it out of a high-up cranny, a threadbare Nazi flag. Stortebeker III had been built in 1937 in Bremen; there was no lead in her keel.

  But the boat stuff was not so difficult to deal with. A lot of it, like the screws and the teak, went directly into my own boat stores, with silent thanks that I would never have to buy it. The coffee and cocoa containers were washed out and refilled. The rest of the household goods found their way to new homes or to family shelves where they could bide their time for as long as it took for their new owners to die. I donated the doctors’ portraits to the Victoria Medical Society.

  That left the papers.

  My father’s papers (and there were a lot of them) were sealed in already-labelled cardboard boxes. I left those for last, finally working through them with a growing sense of dread. Most of them were no problem: letters, newspaper clippings about his early triumphs as a violinist, pristine instruction manuals for his many cameras, his own short stories and essays, and even a few tentative poems. But there was one box I didn’t want to find. For a while, I thought it might not be there at all, that he might, in the final months before he was exiled to the nursing home and lost control over his own possessions, have managed to get down on his knees and enter the vile crawlspace beneath the kitchen, where I knew it was stored. I imagined him navigating shakily past the trap with the liquefying rat and the jumble of mouldy boat cushions, making it finally to the leaning pile of cardboard boxes to locate and destroy the one I feared.

  I found it, of course. He could never have disposed of it even if he’d wanted to; it was too heavy. I shoved the box to one side, ignoring it until that’s all there was on the workbench. It was labelled like all the rest (he was a labeller) but more carefully than the others. The word LEGAL was written on one of those white adhesive rectangles with a red border, then licked and smoothed hard onto the cardboard so there would be no mistake about what was inside. The pain its contents represented had been impossible to contain, but at least the evidence was secure. Until now.

  The tape yielded after a short struggle and took some of the cardboard with it; he had sealed the box well. Inside were files, packed tightly, a solid cube of paper. I pulled them out in slippery handfuls, stacked them on the workbench, stomped the torn cardboard box flat — it was as frail, it turned out, as he was at the end. Then I began to go through the piles.

  Work quickly, I told myself. Be ruthless. You owe it to him to see what’s in here, but you don’t have to read anything. If he would never explain it all to you before, why dig it up now?

  The papers smelled of mould and neglect and, because I knew something of their story, of defeat. I began to go through them, quickly scanning each before they went into the recycling box. Files of patients long dead, each in its own named folder. Photocopies of scientific papers from medical journals, none of them more recent than the mid-1980s. Long and ominous-looking transcripts in vinyl 3-ring binders warped with age and a thick bundle of yellowed newspaper clippings that I tossed without even looking. Printouts of some kind of manuscript, the lettering faded, on side-punched computer paper. I glanced and tossed, as though washing my hands of a corpse. It looked like the whole story was here.

  And then, after about twelve inches, I gave up and began to go in reverse. The discard pile got smaller again. I couldn’t recycle or even shred this stuff. It was too sensitive. There were names. It must have taken him years to compile this dossier, with trips to the medical library, the archives, the stationery store for the recipe cards where every reference was recorded on its own little rectangle. “Hydrocephalus in Children.” “Complications of Ventriculo-Atrial Shunts.” “The Practice of Law and the Search for Truth.” Most of the reprints were heavily annotated in orange highlighter or in his own neat hand; some of the notes were askew on the page. I imagined him, an unwilling student in his late seventies, cramming a heavy textbook over the photocopy machine, leaning on the cover, turning the page, and doing it all again. I couldn’t throw this stuff away.

  Pretty soon it was all back together again, a toxic little archive reconstructed. I grabbed a flattened U-Haul box, erected it, and shoe-horned the lot back in. Then I sealed it with packing tape, rather a lot of it, because I never intended to open the box again, and all it lacked was an unambiguous name. I took a felt pen and wrote the one he had already chosen for his own manuscript on the top and on each side for good measure so there’d be no mistaking it: THE TRIAL. Then I pushed it out of sight.

  With that, the storm blew itself out. Successive waves had brought the flotsam of my parents’ lives ashore, and I’d salvaged what I could. Now the final rogue wave, the one that had thrown up The Trial, had receded. As far as I was concerned, the box could sit in its dark corner forever. Trying to connect the dots between the handsome violin-playing medical resident and the querulous old man with the haunted eyes and the flyaway hair didn’t enter my mind.

  ***

  But I wasn’t finished with The Trial, and it was all the fault of our new boat. Buying a boat had many unforeseen consequences; one was the change in character of the basement. Before the boat, it was a place for tools, workbenches, old furniture, warping LP collections. With the death of my parents, some of my own junk made way for their art collections, their drawings and photographs, their sheet music. Then, when Vera arrived, criteria for residence in the basement changed again. The ratio of boat junk to all other kinds began to shift in favour of utility — no matter how theoretical — on the water. Former tenants were replaced by extra life jackets, old mooring lines, miles of wiring ripped from Vera’s innards. Every week, something new needed a home, so something from a previous life had to be evicted.

  One evening, I tugged a cardboard box out of a suitable-sized space, jammed a busted boat barbecue in the hole, and had a look at what I had extracted. Of course, it was The Trial. Maybe this was a sign. Should I refile this thing? Cart it around forever? Or deal with it? I knew I couldn’t do any of these things until I had a real look at it.

  I slit it open with a box cutter and pulled out a ring-bound sheaf of documents an inch thick. Supreme Court of British Columbia, it said across the top. Proceedings of Trial. I found another one, dated the following day, but that was all. So that was how long the trial had lasted: two days, and then the humiliating settlement, the lawyers paid off, and Dr. Harvey’s accuser triumphant on the front page of the newspaper. The proceedings were date-stamped 1987; he had another twenty years to think about the trial before death called a halt to his brooding.

  And all that thinking had just made things worse. Why had my father never recovered from whatever was described in the co
ntents of this box? All doctors made mistakes. He had often entertained us with his blunders as a sleep-deprived intern: trying desperately to start an IV in an enormously overweight woman whose arms were “much bigger than most people’s legs” or waking up in a cold sweat and realizing he had mismatched the blood that was to be used for an operation the next day (he got lucky on that one when the patient perked up and the operation was cancelled). Had more serious mistakes been made in the case contained in this box? If so, by whom?

  So many perplexing aspects of those last two decades of his life related to this collection of documents that would still be on the shelf if I hadn’t bought a boat and decided I needed the storage space. His horror of lawsuits was often extended to the actions of his children. “Don’t do that. You’ll be sued,” he was always telling us. His determination to get his experiences onto paper, which resulted, near the end of his life, in a handsome memoir and a second, much thicker, manuscript about the trial, which he could never bring himself to complete. The Game, he called it.

  I knew what his trial was about, more or less. There had been an infant, a neurosurgical emergency, an out-of-the-blue malpractice suit. I remembered the shock of the sheriff’s knock on the door so many years after the events, and the stoic anguish in my parents’ house when I came to visit. But “emergency” was a word I had heard so many times growing up, and my parents believed in suffering in silence. When the stories came out in the press, I read them, disbelieved them, and destroyed them.

  But he hadn’t. The press clippings were here, in this box, in their own neatly labelled folder next to all the other files that had survived my attempt at culling a year earlier. The headlines were familiar even after twenty years yellowing in the dark, and they still hurt and amazed.

  “Doctor Offered Mother New Son to Replace Brain-Damaged Baby” was one. Like hell, I thought, exactly the same reaction I’d had twenty years ago. The other clipping was “$1.5 Million Offer Ends Lawsuit Over Brain Damage to Baby Boy.” I didn’t read either of them because I already knew the bones of the story, and the flesh that had been put on them for publication had been rancid even then. A hydrocephalic infant had received a shunt. The shunt had gotten infected, was taken out and replaced. Shunts were not something I knew much about; I thought they might be some kind of drain. Between the first and the second shunts, fluid pressure on the infant’s brain had shot up, with effects that might be permanent. The plaintiff (the infant’s mother) thought they were and that the defendants (my father, two other doctors, and the hospital where it all happened) were to blame. Tucked in behind the lurid newspaper reports was a photocopy of a cartoon in which a draped patient looks up at the surgeon. “Leave a clamp or something in me, Doc,” he says. “I need the money.” At least my father’s morbid sense of humour seemed intact.

  Then something else slid out from between the photocopies, as though it had chosen this moment to make up my mind for me. It was a black and white photograph — he had always worked in black and white — of an infant with its head almost concealed in bandages. This was no newspaper photo. A nurse in a rocking chair held the child on her knee, looking down on puffy, wrinkled-up eyes. It was a beautiful photograph; the light from some hidden window — a ward hallway? — fell softly on the two faces. The nurse looked serene, the way one wants nurses to look when they are holding your child. The child, as far as I could tell under all those bandages, just looked tired. There was a handwritten note stuck on the back, and I recognized the name written there: my father’s lawyer, assigned by the Medical Protective Association to defend him in the suit.

  That photograph, and the note on the back, said everything about my father. That he had taken the picture; that it was a good one; that he was so naïve, even in his seventies, to think its existence might somehow make a difference to the lawyer, to the case. That the trial had been about him, and that the more his lawyer knew about him as a person, the more it would be clear that he had done all anyone could have. In my parents’ world, virtue was supposed to be its own reward. Hard work and excellence were your friends. Here was that belief, in this picture. Maybe the fact that the picture was filed with the sordid clippings meant he’d recognized how naïve it was. Maybe he’d never even sent it. But I had it now, and it triggered something.

  How often can you hold in your hand something that represents a parent’s life? This picture, which he had taken, developed, printed in the downstairs darkroom, was who my father was, or at least who he wanted to be seen as: the doctor-artist. Everything else in the box, including his own writings, represented the struggle between the way he saw himself and the way others saw and ultimately judged him. Now, stumbling on the offending box again, I found myself intensely curious about that struggle, because surely the image we have of ourselves, deep down, determines how we respond to others. What did he really think of himself? Here, with these official transcripts cheek by jowl with his innermost thoughts, was my chance to find out.

  I wasn’t interested in judgment — of him or his accusers — and I decided right then that if I looked any further into this story, it wouldn’t be with any romantic idea of exoneration. There had been no findings in the hydrocephalus case, no assessment of fault, only accusations, discovery, a few days of trial, and the huge settlement. It was over a long time ago. Nobody cared about it anymore. But there was a detective story in this box, even if the only person interested in the outcome was me. Who was this man who came to the breakfast table with blood spatters on his glasses, who never took holidays, who lugged his camera into operating rooms, who exhorted his children in their projects, “Do a job!” (And, I have to add, who took his sons in a nineteen-foot sailboat to certain death in Haro Strait?) After death comes to me, will my own children unearth a summary of my life like this one? Not a chance. Most people, when their parents die, have to do their reconstructive work using letters, snapshots, mementoes. How many people get the chance to really understand what a parent actually did when they left the house each morning? How many people get the answers to family mysteries neatly packaged in a single cardboard box? Even if, as it turned out for me, it’s not the answers they’re expecting?

  It wasn’t that big a box. If I weeded out redundant files (I already knew there were multiple versions of his own writings, many fits and false starts), the whole lot would fit somewhere on Vera. Sailing around Vancouver Island would soak up two months of summer and demand plenty of reading material. Detective fiction was always a good choice for long evenings at anchor; now I would have detective fact, which was even better. Having my father along for the ride wouldn’t be so bad; at least he wouldn’t be able to talk. And anyway, he’d always liked cruising, or tried to.

  ***

  What happens to people when they get stuck? When they can’t go forward but they can’t go back either? Of the thousands of photographs my father took, my favourite is of my mother poised at the end of a diving board. It’s at a lake in Ontario; the board is long and high and sticks out from a wooden tower. She’s facing the camera and the shore, toes on the board and heels on nothing, arms spread against a cloudless sky. Beneath the rubber cap, a look of serenity. It’s more than a snapshot — my father rarely took those — and I imagine him kneeling on the dock, fiddling with the latest in photographic technology for 1946.

  It takes courage to walk to the end of the board, grip the sandpapery plank with your toes, cancel out the shouts and splashes from below, and launch yourself backward into three seconds of nothing. Whenever I look at that picture, I think of the photographer forty years later, how he collected his courage and forced himself to walk further and further from the safety of a pleasant retirement, all the way to the courtroom in Vancouver where his accusers were waiting.

  The horrible difference was that my mother dove, but my father never got to. For her, the shutter snapped and off she went, revolving briefly in the Ontario sun and then — I like to think — knifing neatly into the lake without so m
uch as a droplet to hit the camera. And she kept on diving, metaphorically at least, all her life. When cancer finally took her, she was the one who decided when.

  For my father, alone at the end of his own diving board, the voices stopped him at the last moment. “Come back,” they told him. “It’s over. Climb down the ladder, go home.” But he couldn’t, and that’s where he froze, until the end of his life, unable to go forward or back. It nagged at me, seeing him out there, deaf to all entreaties. And when the end finally came, he didn’t dive or climb back down — he just tumbled off. The best I could do now would be to understand why he decided to take that long walk to the edge, and why he was unable to return. Pride was something he had plenty of. But, unlike my mother, he wasn’t fearless.

  The accusations levelled at him consumed him until he died. He never closed the book.

  He died lonely and unhappy, but he left me a lot of things. Some of them, like my love of boats and the sea, were intangibles that reflected his own interests. Others were very tangible indeed — like the “book” of the trial that he never really closed. If there was a story to be told about our circumnavigation, I realized, it would include both.

  Stowaway

  If you’re heading north out of Victoria, up Haro Strait, there’s not much mystery about where to spend the first night. The easiest place to stop is Sidney Spit, a marine park at the northern exit of the strait. But I don’t like the anchorage there. It’s shallow, and the sandy bottom shifts from year to year, building up here, eroding there so that even the latest chart is a work in progress. And I have a long memory: Sidney Spit was where the family sailboat blundered ashore all those years ago, where the famous gudgeons ripped off, the place I thought would be the last dry land I’d ever set foot on.