by Ferenc Máté
“Cut the fucker!” Jordan bellowed. I glanced up. He was smiling. A wave broke over the dock and soaked me to the waist. I came to, sliced the line, and, with one desperate lunge, launched the skiff and jumped in.
“The line!” Jordan howled. “Throw me the bloody line!”
He cleated it and gunned the tug. The skiff skipped from side to side on the towline like a colt trying to get free. It began to rain. Hard.
When we swept past Bird Rock the skiff started shipping water, but Jordan kept the throttle down and the skiff went skimming, now burying her bow, now rolling from gunwale to gunwale, but surging ahead. I listened with all my concentration for the sounds I dreaded, the sounds of the ketch grinding, breaking up against the bluff. Then the tug and skiff rose from a trough onto a crest, and just ahead of us through the sheets of rain I caught sight of the ketch, her bow held high.
Jordan opened the throttle wide and we bore down on her. A breaker caught us and threw us sideways. We were in the shoals now and the ketch drifted on. Something was wrong. Why the hell hadn’t she slowed? Why hadn’t her anchors caught? Then, just before the tug’s steel teeth gored the ketch’s side, Jordan spun the tug away. He shut the throttle down, ran on to the aft deck with the hatchet, and cut me free. The skiff flew loose and rammed into the ketch. I was thrown onto the floorboards. A sea broke over us, half filled the skiff, and pulled her sluggishly away, until the next sea lifted us and tossed us back. I grabbed the gunwale of the ketch with both hands and hung on.
I had her.
The tug bobbed near. Jordan cupped his hands over his mouth and roared, “All yours, you poor son of a bitch!” And kept on yelling but the rest was drowned in the storm. All mine—all I had to do was let out anchor line. The ketch rolled hard and the rail went down and the sea closed over me, but I hung on. She rolled back. On the next rising wave, I scrambled aboard clutching my painter, cleated it, then slid and lurched on the mossslimed deck forward to the samson post to ease the anchors out. We were less than ten boat-lengths from the bluff.
I knelt down thinking, By God. I do have her!, clutched the post, and reached for the anchor lines. But there were no lines. There was nothing near the post. Dangling there were short cut ends of the ropes. I stared at them stupidly.
Jordan was gone. He had guided the tug out of the shoals to the safety of deep water. There was only one escape. If by miracle I could raise the sails in time, and if by miracle she didn’t run aground, I’d sail her out. And if I couldn’t, if she was hurled against the bluff, masts snapping, decks buckling, the sea rushing in, pulling her under, at least she would have died with sails aloft, having tried to sail out to the open sea.
But the dirt-hardened knots of the mainsail lanyards wouldn’t give—I gored them with my marlinespike. The drumming on the cliff was now louder than the waves. The knots opened; the sail was free.
Five boat-lengths.
I had memorized the halyards in the cove over the year and now yanked one in the dim light, watching for a movement in the sail, but nothing budged. Bloody lines. Found the right one at last, and the soaked mainsail began to rise toward the moon, pouring filthy water from its folds, rose to the masthead. I cleated it and was scrambling aft to sheet it tight when a wave broke over us and sent me sliding, banging along the deck, but I tightened the mainsheet and the sail filled and the ketch heeled—lurched ahead—and I turned the wheel but the bow barely swung.
Three boat-lengths.
We needed more sail. With the tail of the mainsheet I lashed down the wheel, then back to the mast to raise the jib, but there seemed to be ten times as many lines as before, whipping and arcing in the wind. I found the right halyard, and the sail flew up, with the bronze hanks screaming on the wire.
Two boat-lengths.
With bleeding fingers I cleated it, jammed the jib sheet through the block, and, with the cliff right there beside me, winched it tight.
One boat-length.
The sails were full and pulling, and the ketch moved ahead and I was sure now that we’d made it, saw the cliff drift slowly by—then we hit. With that deep, dull thud that breaks a sailor’s heart, the ketch came down and shuddered on a rock.
No boat-length.
The keel ground. She shuddered but stood still. A statue with full sails; waiting for that last wave to lower her to her grave. I stumbled forward on deck—it was like walking on firm ground. I groped for the last halyard, clawed it loose, and hoisted the staysail. It was small; and flew fast. Then back to the cockpit. The ketch rose and thudded. I flattened all sails, and she heeled hard but stood still. I kept winching and the sheets vibrated and the blocks creaked from strain but I had nothing else left, so I winched some more. Then the wind gusted and a big wave slammed her and the bow fell, the stern rose—ready to go under—when suddenly her keel scraped and she began to slide.
Sideways.
She slid free. Free to drift leeward to be shattered against the cliff.
The next wave hit her broadside and threw her at the cliff, and the skiff, trapped between, exploded into splinters. I was watching the water vanish beside the hull when, almost imperceptibly, she heeled for the last time, and moved with a feeble desperation, along the cliff—sailing—away into the waves, toward the wide-open, glittering silver sea.
One boat-length.
I clutched the wheel.
We sailed.
2
THE REPAIR
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
—J. BOSWELL (1759)
I held the wheel as tenderly as I ever held a woman. The drumming on the cliff faded behind us, and the waves now rolled more gently under us, then broke with a complacent hiss along the shore. I kept the rudder still so as not to disturb the flow of water over it, lest we lose what little speed we had and be left again to the mercy of the waves. When we gained more speed, I nudged the wheel and eased us away from the rocks, then let out on the sheets and the sails swelled, and we surged through the open sea. The storm eased; we were in its eye. With a suddenness that always surprises, the wind fell and the seas sagged, and spreading like a smile across the bottom of the heavens came the dawn. It came with a deceptive pink light and shepherded the storm-worn moon out of the sky.
SOME PEOPLE CHANGE little when they die; their unused faces, their expressionless eyes stay intact. Block was such a dead man. He lay plump on the rocky shore, the torn kelp around him like a wreath, the painter of his dinghy fouled around his ankle, and his eyes so much the same that I almost said hello. He had floated dead around the cove all night.
The old Swede had been kept awake by the storm, wandering through his dark house on his dark island, staring out at the besieging sea, then through a rear window at the cove to check his skiffs, and to look around the bay like some admiral at his fleet—the fish boats, the floathouses, the big ketch bobbing there, and he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw someone moving on its deck. When the moon peeked through, he recognized Block’s plumpness—there was no mistaking him for a gaunt fisherman of the cove—and although he deemed it strange, he thought Block pretty decent to have come to check the anchors that could drag in the storm. He watched for a while as Block fumbled on the foredeck, stumbling, grabbing to regain his balance in the swells. Then the old Swede went smiling to bed, his faith in humanity a tiny bit restored.
A hollow drumming woke him. He sat bolt upright—it was nothing like the sounds he was used to in a storm. He went out to look. The moonlight shone on the tormented sea, the wind still bowed the trees, and he almost lost his footing on his porch when he saw the ketch ghosting, slowly but well guided, toward the entrance of the cove. Block hunched at the wheel. A dinghy was tied tight alongside and, with each surging wave, slammed with that ungodly thud against the hull. When the waves of the entrance were too much for Block’s nerves, he untied the dinghy and clambered in and, almost falling overboar
d, shoved himself away. He struggled setting the oars, then with clumsy jerks rowed back into the cove and, when the clouds swallowed the moon, vanished in the darkness. The ketch too disappeared. The Swede rubbed his eyes, then, chilled to the bone, went back inside. He took a long slug of rum and, when he looked out again, saw nothing but the dark. He crawled back under his still-warm covers and didn’t even bother to get up when he heard the roar of the log boat and our voices in the storm.
He rose, little rested, after dawn and saw the dinghy circling in an eddy in the cove. Block bobbed up behind it like jetsam, not all of him, just one foot poking, toes first, at the sky. There was a kitchen knife on the floorboards, and with the sliced anchor ropes on the ketch, it seemed that penniless Block had gone for the insurance. And the old Swede, who most of his life had trusted boats more than people, lost his faith in humanity for good.
THERE WERE NO next of kin to squabble with, but I still spent the next month climbing stairs from one airless office to the next. The people in them, accustomed to more mundane events, perked up when I mentioned salvaging a ketch, perked up with a dreamy look in their eyes. As I left, some of them offered their best wishes, others just stared longingly through the walls. The police had me tell them the story three times. One with dedicated eyes came up to me and said softly, “Son, I’m still convinced you killed that bugger for his boat.”
“Why?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“Because I sure as hell would have.” The room broke into laughter.
They had me sign a pile of affidavits, the Harbormaster’s Office had me do the same, the Office of Registry of Shipping puzzled over the reports and told me to come back in a week, and Navigational Waters made me wait all morning for a hearing where three people sat and listened to my story while another snoozed. I signed more forms. Next week the ketch would be mine.
I WENT TO talk to Jordan. I rowed out to the tug, where he was polishing brass in the pilothouse, whistling. I told him that of course the ketch was half his. He told me, smiling, to go straight to hell.
“I hate sailboats,” he said. “Who in his right mind would strain like a beast when there are engines you can start with a finger?” I said fine, if he didn’t want half the boat I’d pay him for his part. His smile faded. A crease of sadness furled around his eyes. “You barely have a dollar to your name,” he quietly said. “And for a whole damned year I had to watch you pine. Night and day, stare at that bloody thing like some schoolgirl in love. Not an hour went by that you didn’t talk about it, and when you didn’t talk about it I could hear you think about it. The best gift to me will be never to hear words like ‘halyard’ and ‘turnbuckles’ again.” And he splashed some goop on the copper pipes and rubbed with fury, mumbling, “How can a grown man utter ‘baggywrinkle’ with a straight face anyway?”
I was too moved to look up, so I mumbled something and went away.
At a toy shop on Granville Street, I gazed at the window and felt about in my near-empty pockets, then went to Henderson’s to collect the pay he owed me. He didn’t say much, just counted out twenty-two dollars for three weeks, then took back two for the pike pole I had lost. In parting, he wished me luck and—I got to hand it to him—he didn’t say a word about my being on his tug that night. I spent every penny in that toy shop. Three dolls and a carriage to push them in, and a dollhouse and some tiny furniture. I swear they cost more than the real thing. I hauled it all down to Jordan’s cottage and gave it to his wife. “A Merry early Christmas,” I said, and left before she could reply.
Next day was the big day: the Office of Registry of Shipping. I was there an hour before a man came to open up. He looked over the papers, then furled his brow.
“There is a hitch,” he said. “We can’t register a ship without a name,” and looked at me as if ready to say goodbye. I was dumbstruck. With all the goings-on, I never thought of one.
“She didn’t have a name before,” I protested.
“She wasn’t a registered ship before,” he said.
I stared out the window, where gulls whirled and ships filled the harbor.
“Terrence Jordan,” I said.
He dipped his pen in the inkwell and wrote with pretty letters.
THE NEXT FEW months were the happiest of my life. I took the poor ketch, her rudder post bent, three planks split, the lead of her keel distorted and gouged, back to Hoffar’s big shed where she was built, for repair. Out of the goodness of his heart Hoffar signed me up as a shipwright’s helper, rough-cutting, planing, cleaning up the shipyard ten hours a day, and let me stay on to work and sleep on my boat at night. “My boat”—what a beautiful sound.
I stripped her bare. I pulled the masts, took off the rigging, unbolted her hardware so I could clean and paint below it, sanded the hull, the cabin, the deck, stripped the peeling varnish off the masts and trim down to the wood, then put on nine new coats, recaulked her planks, and painted every inch with two coats of the best. And in the small hours of the morning, when I had finished some small task, so tired that I could barely lift a hand, I would sit and stare at the cabinside I’d painted or the curved and beveled cabin sole piece I’d made, sit and glow with as much pride as if I had just completed the Eighth Wonder of the World. And when I launched her in March with her resewn sails, new running-rigging, her winches gleaming, she looked as good as new. I was in seventh heaven—but up to my eyes in debt. And down below, except for the bulkheads and the cabin sole and a roughed-in berth aft, she was still as empty as a barrel. I kept working at Hoffar’s during the week, and on weekends began hauling goods and people with the ketch. In a month I had contracts running all over the coast. I added the word “Captain” to my name.
3
THE HIRE 1921
Dr. Franz Boas of the American Museum of Natural History has just returned from an expedition along the extreme western coast of British Columbia, where dwell the Kwakiutl, a race of anthropophagi, man-eating savages, who, isolated from the rest of the world, still practice the bloodthirsty customs. They are fond of festivals and devote a large portion of their time to ceremonies, dances, feasts and orgies of the wildest sort, during which terrible tortures are imposed on members of the tribe.
—New York Herald (October 31, 1897)
The masks of the Kwakiutl blend the contemplative serenity of the statues of Chartres and the Egyptian tombs with the gnashing artifices of Hallowe’en. These two traditions of equal grandeur and parallel authenticity reign here in their primitive and undisturbed unity. This dithyrambic gift of synthesis, the faculty to perceive as similar what all other men have considered as different, constitutes the exceptional feature of the art of British Columbia.
—CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, Gazette des Beaux-Arts
It was a cold, dank, foghorn-riddled morning, with just a patch of water visible around the ketch. I was alone on board, tied to a tilting wharf at the bottom of an alley in that helter-skelter, gap-toothed boomtown of slapped-together sawmills, canneries, and shipyards, just gouged out of the wilderness but already falling down. The fog was as wet as rain; it streamed down the masts, dripped out of the rigging, puddled in the furled sails. The tide was out and great clumps of mussels crackled on the pilings.
There I was, shackled by debt—I felt richer when I was penniless salvaging logs—waiting for the fog to lift so I could run up coast to Squamish with some medical goods; it wasn’t life or death but I was anxious to go because the ten-dollar fee would pay off a bit of debt. Just a few more dozen trips like this and about the same for Meschie’s gold mine way up coast, and if in all that time—a year, maybe two—I managed not to run aground and rip the bottom out of her, saved every penny, barely ate or drank, my debts would be paid off, and then—freedom. I’d sail out of this dungeon-of-a-climate and not stop until the Marquesas or Cook Islands—fool’s dreams never die—where the water is so clear you can watch your anchor touch bottom, and the air is warm and the sky blue enough to hurt your eyes, and you can get lost in some archipelago for the
rest of your life. Dreams. When debts are paid—all kinds. No use leaving a port for good until they’re paid, because you’ll just carry them around inside you all your life.
Damned fog. Like a prison.
But mostly I was anxious to get away from her. There was nothing worse than being so near her and not seeing her, not having her look at me with those daring, frightened eyes. I stared into the fog and thought I saw the outlines of their yacht.
I leaned on the wheel, and stared at my empty hands. Bloody fog; closes you in and turns you on yourself. “Self-cannibalization,” Nello, my half-Kwakiutl first mate, called it, “except you can’t see the bites.” But you sure as hell could feel them. I paced the deck some more. A patch of light brightened the fog and for a minute I was certain it was her, the sail of her small dinghy coming toward me, but then the light faded and the fog closed.
Cautious footsteps sounded in the distance. Then stopped. A rope strained as the wharf shifted on the tide. Then a voice called out and drifted, “Terrence Jordan. Ahoy.”
“Over here!” I yelled as cheerfully as I could—it might be a client. An older man with a bowler hat and careful mustache popped out of the mist. He held a cane in one hand and a damp business card in the other and looked at me through his misted glasses.
“Captain Dugger?” he asked politely.
