The Lost Skiff

by Donald Wetzel

  “Now, Jack,” Ellen said, “you know as well as I do that it’s nothing but inexperience.” They argued this a little between them but I didn’t care enough to take sides. As far as I was concerned they both were right.

  To begin with, all of them, Mr. and Mrs. Haywood, too, did not believe that the skiff had been stolen at all. I had told them the whole thing, exactly as it happened. What they believed was that the tide had come in and floated it free and it had drifted off. Maybe then, they figured—they were mostly being nice about it, I think—someone might have seen it drifting along and taken it in tow. What made them pretty certain about their tide theory about how the skiff got lost was what they all had noticed about the tides themselves during the day and which I could not deny. I hadn’t noticed or known until then that a river like Little Star Creek even had tides.

  I said so to Jack and Ellen as soon as they finished their argument about my inexperience and ignorance. “I’ll take your word for it,” Jack said, “even though that seems to me a hard thing not to notice. But if you had got down from Little Star Creek onto Big Star Creek and kept going you would have ended up in Mobile Bay and from there if you wanted to you could have went on to the ocean. Which is where the tides come from.”

  “All the rivers around here are tidal rivers,” Ellen said, “and they rise and fall right along with the regular tides.”

  “All the way up to their source,” Jack said, “where the water can be sweet enough to drink, with not even a hint of salt. Still they rise and fall. They have got no way to avoid it. Further down, near their mouths, they become brackish and should not be drunk, of course, although you would probably figure that out for yourself with a try or two.” Jack was being a regular schoolteacher about it, but for once I figured he knew pretty much what he was talking about. More than I did, anyhow. “You don’t know how lucky you was,” he said, shaking his head in wonder, “swimming back with an incoming tide behind you, even though it was about to turn, and not even knowing the help you was getting. Because when a tide is going out, depending on a lot of other things of course, it can sometimes really go out with a rush.”

  “That was what happened,” Ellen said, “on the last part of your swim from the island to The Landing. The tide had turned and started out.”

  “It was pure luck you made it back alive,” Jack said.

  “I guess I should feel lucky all right,” I said, “but for some reason or other I don’t. I doubt anyhow that later I will be apt to look back at this as one of my most lucky days.”

  Jack started to argue with me about this a little, but Ellen broke in and mentioned to him I was still a mighty strong swimmer in any event, while Jack himself most likely couldn’t have done what I had done even with the best tide going and a good strong wind to help him out. “I would have better sense than to try such a thing,” Jack said, “and I also wouldn’t have went and lost the skiff.” I knew he was right in both cases and we were all quiet for a while and then Jack went back into it. “If it had of been me and I had forgot all I ever knew and had gone off following a game trail into the woods leaving the boat there to be carried off by the tide like it was, and if I had come back to find myself marooned through my foolishness and with no transportation, still the furthest I would have swum would have been to that clearing you mentioned with the PRIVATE, KEEP OFF sign and the fence. Because while a game trail may sometimes lead you to water, it can just as often get you lost, but a fence, any fence that’s kept up at all, if you follow it long enough it just naturally has to lead you to people.” This seemed true enough, though it had not occurred to me, but Jack was not finished with it yet, so I said nothing. “If you had followed that particular fence for less than a mile, where it would have took you, if you took all the turns it takes, was to Stacey’s old unused chicken sheds, and from there you could have seen the new ones and even the house itself. Or if not, by this time the dogs most likely would have found you, and old man Stacey or his boy would have thought nothing of driving you back to The Landing. So you see, the way you done it, you could have got drowned for nothing, while if you had done it my way, the most you could have got was dog bit.”

  I could have pointed out to him that the way it actually worked out I didn’t get drowned or dog bit either one, but I did not have the heart for it and anyhow I knew that he was right, even so. So what I finally said was, “Well, I can see the things I did wrong, but that’s in the past, and what worries me now is the matter of finding your father’s skiff, which I lost.” I had wanted to stay on at The Landing and start looking for it as soon as either of the painted boats had got dry enough to be put in the water, but Mr. Haywood had not appeared to think that was such a hot idea. He said no, anyhow. I guess he figured I’d done enough damage already and did not wish to take the risk of more, although he claimed he wasn’t really worried about the skiff one way or another or whether it was ever found again or not. Along with Mrs. Haywood he seemed mostly relieved that I hadn’t drowned myself.

  Jack seemed to be thinking about what I had said, and finally he said, “Well, I guess I could take some time off and show you where to look, if we can work it out with Pa.” It wouldn’t have been right to say so right then, but Jack’s help in the matter was somehow the last thing I wanted.

  “I would look for it up and down the creek,” I said. “Where else? All I would need is a boat and a pair of oars.”

  “And a strong back,” Jack said, “if you mean to row. You have never been all the way down it yet; that’s a long old creek. My plan would be to use Pa’s motor if he would let us. We could do it in half a day, if the speed didn’t bother you.”

  “I would rather row,” I said, “however long a creek it is. Down one side and back the other, not missing an inch. That would be my plan.”

  “It would take several days and give you some blisters on your hands,” Jack said. “But it might be fun at that. We could live by catching fish.”

  “Then both of you would starve,” Ellen said, and then before Jack could give her an argument, she turned to me. “You must not be too worried about looking for Pa’s skiff right away. If you really mean to take the time to look for it, in the way you say, then you will need more of a plan than just a boat and oars.”

  I hadn’t realized it would be such an undertaking as Jack had suggested, taking several days, but the way I felt about it I would have taken a month at it if I had to. “All right,” I said, “I will take some time and work up a plan and figure out what stuff I have to take. I will do it right, if that is what is worrying anybody, and if the skiff can be found I will find it.”

  I had sounded a little like I was making a speech, so I shut up for a time. I knew that both of them meant well by their advice, but I was not in a mood for it. I had lost their father’s skiff, and the first chance I got I meant to do what I could to try and find it, and for the rest I would have been willing to let the matter drop for a time.

  So Jack changed the subject by going back over all the things I did wrong the summer before, naming them off one by one and somehow managing to find something he had thought was humorous or at least interesting about each of them. It even got the two of them laughing a little now and then, but if they expected me to laugh with them I was not in the mood for that, either. And then we were home and the pickup bounced over the cattle guard and came to a stop and Jack surprised me by giving me a big slap on the back. “Rodney,” he said, “I am sure glad you come back to The Hill again. Maybe you don’t never mean to do it, but you liven things up some every time.”

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say to that, so I helped him unload the truck and then I got my stuff and went on across the road to my uncle’s. I didn’t even have the heart to thank the Haywoods for taking me along; somehow, it wouldn’t have seemed right. I figured they would understand.

  It was late afternoon when we got back, and though it seemed like a strange time to do it, the first thing I did was take a bath and change my clothes and comb
my hair. It didn’t help much. Aunt Vera could see that something was wrong, I guess, because she kept asking me if I had enjoyed myself and so on until finally I told her and Uncle Charles that I had lost Mr. Haywood’s old cypress skiff. My Uncle Charles is a retired banker who fools around now at farming, and he takes all money matters pretty seriously, from his past experience, I guess. Anyhow, right away he wanted to know what the skiff was worth, and when I said you couldn’t put a dollars-and-cents worth on such a skiff, he seemed not to understand. “Well,” he said, “I will talk to Mr. Haywood and I imagine he can put a monetary value on it quick enough, and then of course we will have to pay him what he says it’s worth. Are you sure it was altogether your fault? There is such a thing, you know, as a true accident or, if you will, an act of God for which you could not be held to account.” My uncle talks like that.

  “It was no act of God,” I said. “It was ignorance. But you won’t have to pay Mr. Haywood for it, because I’m going to go back to the creek and find it again for him.”

  “I suppose that is a possibility,” Uncle Charles said. “It may have been found by some honest person at that; there are still some, I am told, among the rural poor who believe it wrong to lie or steal. Perhaps we should wait upon the outcome of your search before mentioning the matter of recompense to Mr. Haywood. I am sure he would rather have his skiff back than the few paltry dollars that is probably its honest worth.” Aunt Vera said that she was sure some nice person would have found it and that I would have no trouble getting it back, and that was the way we left it. Aunt Vera means well every time.

  After supper I decided to stay away from the Haywoods for a while, even though they are the only other people living right on The Hill. Usually I would drop over after supper for a few words with Jack or with Ellen if she happened to be around, or stay and see something on their TV with the whole family, if there was something worth watching. But it was not a thing I always did, so I decided I would stay home this time instead and see what interesting business might be going on around the rest of the world, according to my Star Roamer set and with what the sunspots would allow.

  Sometimes about all I can get on the short-wave band of my set is static of the worst sort, and I have learned that this is largely radio-wave interference caused by the sunspots acting up. I got this information straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, that being our science teacher at school, about whom I am only being polite when I refer to him as a horse’s mouth. He is all facts and no imagination and pretty bitter about it. He’s the sort who likes to keep reminding people that the world will not last forever after all. That’s how I found out about sunspots, when there are flareups or explosions of a sort around the edges of the sun. He pointed out that these may someday get pretty serious and even now they can louse up radio signals all around the world. He gave us a whole lecture on it proving that either these sunspots or other astral variations would someday wipe us clean out of the universe. This seemed to please him, oddly enough. It bugged me enough so that when the class was over and he was gone, I went up and wrote big across the blackboard, If the sunspots don’t get you, the astral variations will, so prepare to die! and signed it Sad Sam Brooks, which was his name, Mr. Samuel Brooks, Jr. I got in some minor trouble over this, but I thought it was worth it.

  What brought this to mind was the way all I could get on my set around the world this time was squawks and squeaks and static, except for a few shrimp boats out in the Gulf having a boring discussion on band three about whether there might be a thunderstorm coming up or not. I finally gave up and went to band two, which is regular AM radio, and got some decent music, which I turned down low and listened to without the phones, stretched out on the bed wishing there was more of a breeze and trying to put all the events of the day altogether out of my mind. Tired as I was from that swim, it was not an easy day to forget; it kept breaking in on my thoughts every time I moved a muscle and felt it hurt and remembered why. So I stretched out as still as I could and tried to pay attention to the music and waited for it to get late enough so that I could go to bed without having it seem odd.

  Finally a little breeze sprang up and I was just getting comfortable from the heat of the day when I heard the squeak of the back gate swinging open. Well, I thought, I suppose Jack has just remembered another country item for my education, and I waited, but instead of the sound of his feet pounding up the back steps to the porch, there was no sound at all. There is a low wooden wall that runs around the porch that I cannot see over without sitting up, but the rest of the porch is only screened, so I can generally hear Jack thumping along from the time he slams open the gate and heads for the porch, and the quiet this time surprised me. Then right outside the porch next to my bed, so close it half startled me, Ellen’s voice called out, as soft and easy as though we had been having a conversation right along. “That is certainly nice music, Rodney. Is it from far off?”

  I got up and went to the screen and there was Ellen, all right, standing there in the dark as natural as could be, as though she always came over like this for a conversation now and then, though she had never done it before in my life. “Only from Mobile,” I said, answering her question. “The sunspots tonight are something awful.” I knew right away that that must sound pretty crazy to her unless she knew about sunspots and static, and I guess it did, because she laughed.

  “Someday I’ll figure that out, I am sure,” she said, “but here around The Hill anyhow there is a nice first quarter of a moon that will be setting pretty soon, if you would like to see it. I just noticed it myself and thought I’d stop by. It’s right at the edge of the pines on the hill, and that always makes such a pretty sight, I think. Unless you are too tired, of course.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I will find my shoes and be right out.”

  “Come barefoot if you want,” Ellen said. “I am.”

  So I stopped looking around for my shoes and went out and found Ellen waiting in the dark, and for some reason I was a little flustered and all I could think of to say was that I was glad she had thought to drop by and something foolish about how nice the wet grass felt on my bare feet, hot as it still was.

  “What I like best,” Ellen said, “is the feel of the powdery dust in the road. It’s dirty of course, but it feels clean even so.” We walked out into the road between our houses, which is really just a kind of lane and mostly grass, and then out to the road that runs along in front, and there I saw what she meant about the dust, and how pretty the moon was, as perfect a crescent as if it had been drawn there, hanging low in the sky right at the tops of the pines on the top of the hill and lighting them up so that you could have counted the tops of each one if you had wanted to, while elsewhere the woods were more like shadows than like trees.

  “Well,” I said, “this sure beats sunspots any time,” and then we walked down along the road a ways while I told her about sunspots and astral variations and static around the world, just to make conversation, although it seemed like a strange thing to be mentioning walking barefoot through the dust, with off to one side the moon already starting down behind the pines, almost close enough to touch, it seemed.

  I was still a little surprised about Ellen stopping by for me, so I kept talking away for a while to cover it up, but finally we came to the bridge over the brook that runs into my uncle’s pasture, where we stopped and leaned on the wooden railing and Ellen said, “Listen to the night things,” and I got quiet. There were all sorts of insects and other small creatures unknown to me, possibly some of them frogs of one sort or another, making all sorts of noises, both soft and loud, and all of it making one general kind of racket that was nice enough and kind of impressive if you stopped and listened to it with some care. Then Ellen said, “Most all of that sound is really a kind of singing. But I expect you know that.”

  “I had never thought about it before,” I said. “From things you can’t even see, anyhow, it’s quite a racket.” I had suspected from the first that Ellen mig
ht have actually come by because I’d acted like such a kid about losing the skiff and was going out of her way to be nice to me, the way it used to be before, the first summer I was at The Hill and had done some similar stupid thing and went around moping about it. So I said nothing about the lost skiff and kept hoping that she wouldn’t, either.

  If she wanted to listen to the night things, that was fine with me. I noticed her watching me for a minute in the dark, and then she looked back out at the little creek and the swamp, which was all mostly one big shadow now, with the moon almost gone and the only light being starlight. “In the spring,” Ellen said, “it can sometimes give me goose flesh. I guess that’s silly, but it’s so. It’s just one big song. You can hardly hear yourself think. Even Ma and Pa come down just to listen sometimes.”

  “They do?” I said.

  I turned and caught Ellen glancing at me again in the dark. Somehow, I could see her better now, as though I was getting used to just starlight. Also, it seemed that she had moved closer to me. In a way she was just a shape in the dark beside me, but in another way, in only starlight, all the realness, the particular beauty of hers, had never seemed more clear to me. Then I noticed that it seemed as though the night sounds were getting clearer, too, although maybe I was only getting more used to listening. “Yes, Rodney, they do,” Ellen said. “To listen to the joy, Ma says.”

  The way Ellen said it, it surprised me, as though I really hadn’t been listening, not to either her or the night things, and for a time I was quiet, not so much thinking as just listening, to the singing and to what Ellen had said, which was still sort of ringing in my ears. And for some reason the lost skiff seemed a small matter, and I thought, well, what if I have made a fool of myself today, here I am with Ellen, even so. And then the singing seemed to lift up again, louder and more mixed up than it had ever been yet, and then with a kind of sudden surprise it came to me clear and beyond any doubt that what I was listening to and hadn’t known it, what the song was the night things were singing, was one big unmistakable love song. And I knew that Ellen had known it all along. And without meaning to I turned and found Ellen waiting in the dark, and with some confusion at first but then in the most natural way in the world, quick and hard and yet easy, I did what I had never dreamed that I could ever do. I held her close and I kissed her.