by Ferenc Máté
Next Monday a horse cart pulled up to the head of the alley with a load of the best damned boat lumber I’d ever seen—mahogany and teak boards, some a good foot wide—and asked where to unload it because it was all mine, no charge. And next morning down came a couple of pigtailed Charlies with boxes of the weirdest saws and chisels. One of them spoke some English and said they came to build my boat. I told him to turn back around because I couldn’t pay them. He smiled his worn-toothed smile and shook his head. “No pay,” he said. “Honorable family.”
That’s how I knew I could count on Mr. Chow.
8
CHARLIE
There is such an abundance of animal life in the sea that the Indians live almost solely upon seals, sea lions, various species of salmon, the halibut, cod and herring.
The oil of the eulachon, a herring-like fish containing iodine and many vitamins, is most prized. Caught in the spring—a lone fisherman can bring in 10 canoe loads—they are left to “ripen” in pits covered with logs. In a great bent-wood box or canoe, water is made to boil by putting in fire-heated stones, then the rotted fish is added and stirred until the rendered oil rises, then is skimmed off and stored in long tube-kelp. It is used year-round, poured over dried salmon or clams, or dried berries pressed into cakes.
—FRANZ BOAS
So I went and asked Mr. Chow for a sea cook, then left a note for Hopkins telling him I was sailing the next day. At Palotai’s I bought a string of hard-dried smoked sausages that lasted a month at sea if you wrapped them in brown paper; then I stopped at the purveyor for a small keg of rum.
When I got back to the ketch and stepped into the cockpit I almost squashed him. I was about to give him the back of my hand for sneaking aboard my boat when he cried out, “No hit, no hit! No hit cookie!”
Jesus. He couldn’t have been a day over fifteen. Small-boned, with those mischievous eyes only kids have before they grow old and dull. “You good cookie?” I asked.
“Charlie best cookie whole world,” he said, and beamed so brightly that I would have kept him just as long as he could flip a flapjack. I was making a list for provisioning the galley when someone knocked on the hull. It was Hopkins, all smiles, wishing me a safe trip and handing me another stuffed envelope. Then he was gone. Charlie was polishing the brass binnacle so hard I thought he’d start a fire.
I asked him if he knew Sam Ling at Sunshine Market. “Yessir, Captain,” he said. “Sam Ling uncle.” I should have guessed. I told him to provision for a month and he wrote while I rattled off the list: tinned biscuits, eggs, slab of bacon, tea, syrup, jam, lemons, apples, sugar, flower, rice, onions, cabbage, carrots, prunes, tinned beef, lentils, beans, lard, and he repeated everything so clearly I almost understood him. Then I told him to tell Uncle Ling no horse meat, no cats, and no puppies, and I asked to see the list in case I missed something. He went beet-red and handed me the paper, beautifully written—in Chinese. “Perfect,” I said. “Tell him I need it by tonight.”
He ran up the floats, his pigtail flopping. I began to fill my water tanks, checked the little one-cylinder engine that had only enough power to get us in and out of harbors in a calm, went over the rigging, and got ready to work all night. I barely sleep the night before a long voyage. Especially this one, with her at the end.
KATE
My Keepers
The more I watch the old one, the more I’m sure he can see in the dark. Long before dawn he stops paddling and we drift and he stares at the pitch-black shoreline, silent as a ghost. He paddles a bit, then stares. And he always finds us a perfect place to hide: a creek mouth, the cleft of a rock, a hollow, brambles, something. It’s different every day and it can’t be just dumb luck.
The young one is just eerie. He’s very good at hiding us during the day, flipping the canoe in just the right spot on shore, in the shade, then he covers it with moss and branches until, even close up, it almost vanishes. Then he tells me where to hide so I can sleep. Well, he doesn’t actually tell me—he hasn’t said a single word to me, although he seems to be talking a lot to the sea, the rocks, even the canoe. Sometimes at night he stops paddling and he talks, to the stars, I guess. Sometimes I think it’s a prayer, at others just demented sounds: moans, clacking, warbling.
He is so calm it makes me nervous, and he moves differently from anyone I have ever seen. On foot he almost floats. And he rarely eats, has four bites of dry fish at dawn and four drinks of water and that’s all for the day. Never does he utter a distinct word, just drones, song-like but faint and distant. He aims the sounds at every blessed thing around. He even muttered to a slimy green fish he caught yesterday. He talks to everything. Except me.
And today I thought I heard the wind answer him, and the sea.
9
HAY
When a hunter sees that another hunter goes to hunt on his hunting ground, they fight. The mountain-goat hunters do the same. And when one of them is beaten, he is pushed down the mountain.
—FRANZ BOAS
It was a windless, misty dawn, awash with that pink light that could restore hope even in the dead.
I got to know Hay’s footsteps before I met him. I was checking the rigging with Nello when they thudded on the rickety wharves, so full of assurance and vehemence that I thought he’d walk right off into the sea. He wasn’t as big as he had seemed sitting with his back to me that first night on the yacht; looked intelligent, with a most amenable expression and only the slightest hint of that uncertainty one has in a new place. He seemed propelled by some irrepressible energy that kept in movement not only his limbs but more than anything his eyes, which had an elegant ferocity—not openly voracious like a feeding shark, but their irritating alertness left no doubt that he was, in some indefinable way, gobbling up everything around him. And it was contagious; it made you reach for something, anything, to do, so while we exchanged pleasantries, I nervously uncoiled and recoiled what had already been a perfect coil of rope.
He stood courteously on the wharf waiting to be invited aboard, showering compliments on the ketch: her construction, her Bristol condition. “What a self-contained world,” he said, and for an instant, and it was to be the last until Devil’s Hole, I saw a twinge of jealousy in his eyes. He carried a big leather bag and a rifle in a leather case—both with just the right amount of wear—and he was dressed so ideally for a sea voyage that he seemed like an actor in a play.
While I set him up in his cabin—only a berth with some drawers below but he was grateful for the privacy—I gave him a short version of what Nello had told me: that we should assume the Kwakiutl were well ahead and we’d head north as fast as we could, stopping only to make inquiries. He agreed.
We were late catching the tide. Nello cast off while Charlie finished putting away stores, then he came on deck anxious to help but without the least notion of what to do. We slipped past Prospect Point, shooting the center of First Narrows to catch the full power of the ebb. The wind came out of the northwest, and we beat under main, the staysail, and the jib, heading west into the open but mist-choked sea. Blowing against the tide, the wind whipped up steep waves and, with the short trough between them, the ketch buried her bow and green water shot down the deck and fountained out the scuppers. The ropes strained. Then, shaking off the seas, the ketch sprang ahead.
The canvas bulged, the sheets quivered, and a halyard slatted keeping time against the mast, and I braced my foot in the cockpit corner, clutched the spokes of the wheel, and for a moment forgot about Hay below and Katherine up ahead, forgot my debts and even the South Seas—I was sailing.
Past the narrows the steep seas eased and Hay slid back the hatch and stuck out his head. The fire had left his eyes. He looked gray and sick. He clambered out awkwardly in an oilskin buttoned for a hurricane with a pair of fancy binoculars dangling from his neck, crept along the sloping deck clutching now the grabrail, now the gunwale at his feet, until he reached the cedar skiff lashed amidships on the house, where he made himself into an inconspicu
ous bundle by the mast. Once in a while he’d raise the binoculars and peer into the mist; other than that he was as inanimate as dunnage.
The wind picked up but the mist wouldn’t rise. It made no sense—the nor’wester always brought cold air and clear skies, but not today. I could see no shoreline either north or south and steered using only the point behind me. We short-tacked four times to keep off the southern sandbanks, tacked with quick shouts and scurrying, and Hay had to defend his head against the flogging lines, then we settled into a long beat, into the blinding haze ahead.
Nello trimmed and retrimmed the sails, tidied up the sheets, then sat in a corner of the cockpit with his legs gathered under him like some holy man. He began whipping the frayed ends of lines with a palm and needle and waxed line. He never once looked up, absorbed in the precision of his toil, his big square fingers making delicate whippings, lacings, knotting off.
I stayed alone at the helm, checking our speed by watching the foam wash by, dead reckoning through the unyielding mist, steering with as much conviction as if I actually knew where I was going. North, was all I knew; to look for her. We were to search hundreds of miles of coastline wilderness for a piece of hollow log, a hollow log that didn’t want to be found in that immensity that mocked the arrogant and killed the fool.
I banished from my mind the thought that they might be off to the west among the reefs of the great island, or east in the archipelago hauled into some creek mouth. “North,” I repeated, like some magic word.
Besides, as Nello said, they had to be heading home; they knew it was too dangerous to try to hide on the southern coast. If they had managed to escape from jail, find Hay, grab the masks, grab her, they weren’t stupid.
At noon I plotted us to be in the middle of the gulf. The nor’wester picked up, whitecaps sprouted, spray flew, but the blinding mist stayed. Nello, came aft. “We’re hexed,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“You ever seen mist this thick in a nor’wester? No. Besides which I dreamt last night that we sailed through sand. No water. Hexed.”
Hay’s lifting of the binoculars began to irritate me. If he did it one more time, I’d head straight into a wave and soak the son of a bitch.
“How many hours can your relatives paddle a day?”
He knotted a whip and slapped it hard into his palm. “That depends on how scared they are. One time, a war canoe full of them was chased by the Bella Coola. They paddled nonstop all the way home from Rivers Inlet; eighty miles in fifteen hours.
“Jesus. They’ll be home in three days.”
“No one can paddle nonstop for three days.”
“If they take turns; there are two of them.”
“Three if she helps.”
“Why would she help?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know her.”
“The young guy looks tough enough to paddle home by himself,” I said.
“Oh, he’s tough, all right. We’re all taught to be from the day we’re born. No pants or shoes summer or winter, and from October till spring it rains or snows every day. And we play tough games. We hook middle fingers and see who let go first with a bunch behind each pulling. Some guys had their joints torn loose before they gave in. Or we stick a short stick in the ground near a fire and pick it up with our teeth, move it closer and closer—no fair shielding your face—the one who got closest won; scorched hair, bubbled lips, and all. Older boys play war games with dry nettles; no shirts. Or with spruce branches; you ever grab a blue spruce? Tears your skin to shreds.”
“And I bet those two are the toughest of the lot. You think they sent mamma’s boys to get back the masks?”
“Lemme finish. We had to be tough for falling in icy water or getting a fishhook in the thigh, but we were taught one main objective: not to die. Those two know someone’s gunning for them; and the southern tribes hate them, so they only move at night. That slows them by half. Then there’s the tide. They’re not stupid enough to waste strength going against the current; so there goes another three hours. Leaves nine hours a day.”
“Even then….”
“The third thing are the passes; three of them, one running at thirteen knots, Cappy—that’s three times faster than your average river. But they don’t run—they break, like cataracts, except they’re full of whirlpools. Big ones: a hundred feet across; that suck down giant scows, never mind a shit-bit canoe. You go through right at slack tide—got maybe half an hour—or you don’t go through at all. The fourth thing is Johnstone Strait; when it blows twenty knots in here, it’s a gale out there. When it’s a gale here—forget it. One last thing: they don’t know these southern islands, so they might get lost for a while.”
“If they get lost, we sure as hell won’t find them.”
“What do you care? You get paid by the day.”
“Take the helm, will you? I’ll go check the chart.”
I tried to plot our position by dead reckoning, but instead kept thinking of her out there somewhere in the mist. Wouldn’t they be better off dumping her in some back bay and going on alone? Sure they’d lose a hostage, but they sure as hell would look less suspicious and be more mobile without her weight. Dump her on some miserable island; the wilderness would kill in three days.
I plotted us over Halibut Shoals, then slammed the parallel rules down hard because our course put us right over the White Islets: flat rocks white from bird shit that blends in perfectly with the haze. We could keep going farther out in the gulf but the currents are fluky there and who knows where we’d end up. And past Merry Island the sea is so full of rocks that in this mist you’d be wrecked before you know it. To be safe we had to short-tack; waste time.
Back topsides, I thought I heard waves crashing on rocks. “You hear something?” I asked Nello.
“Only you worrying.”
The bloody mist was getting on my nerves.
“We have to short-tack past White Islets,” I said, and took the helm. “The current might be taking us for a ride.”
“I’ll get the anchor ready,” and he headed forward.
“In case I get to close to shore?”
“In case we’re hexed.”
WITH THE MIST still thick, the lighthouse keeper blared his foghorn on Merry Island where the strait is split in two by the great mass of Texada Island just beyond. His light could blast into the night for fifteen miles, and the foghorn was enough to keep you off the rocks that littered the sea. The fishermen called him Rolf the Precise, and many thought him a saint for keeping his cogs and gears in perfect order, keeping that light aglow even on gale-torn nights, even though breaking waves swirled around his house and his island shuddered as if in an endless earthquake.
Between his island and the mainland, the pass was so narrow that the light would turn the darkness into day—he could see a duck pass, never mind a canoe—and he stayed awake all night, not just to keep the light, but because he loved company, was on the lookout for someone to save or hail over for a hot rum; even Indians. He had little use for them: couldn’t tolerate their approximate lives, not when he checked, adjusted, regulated with absolute precision the angle of cogwheels, the balance of counter-weights, kept spotless the hundred sides of his giant prism, while they drifted about more or less by the moon, the tides, and the seasons. And their villages—rotting fish, garbage, excrement cleaned away only by the currents—deeply offended him. But he plucked them from stormy seas, often at night; the sick and injured he nursed for weeks, and watched sadly as they left.
We dropped our sails in the lee of his island and drifted downwind until the anchor dug in. Rolf was already on his dock hollering invitations. I rowed ashore alone. He was as glad to see me as if I’d just returned from the grave. In his spotless kitchen—zittzen, zittzen—he chatted on about a recent shipwreck—two dead, three saved—and a logging camp that burnt—one dead and the rest in their underwear in the rain—and only when he finally came up for breath did he ask where I was headed this time.
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br /> I told him the story briefly and Rolf leapt to his feet. “Paah!” he grunted like a wounded beast. “Women go to hell!” and with a flick of a hand dismissed half the human race. And told me again how he was married once to “one of those Eastern races” that for him included everyone from Berlin to Japan, so in love that even now his big hands closed with a tender longing, until he got to talking about their wedding day. The day after the wedding she was gone, with his Canadian citizen name, his gold watch, and the shoes he’d bought for the wedding. “Why take my goddamn shoes?” He calmed down and poured me some more rum. “This man sure his wife no running off with Indian?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. He got up and watched a burst of light blast into the dusk, then, satisfied, came back. “If she not run off,” he said quietly, “why she row like one sonovabitch?”
“You saw them?”
“Sure I saw them. Last night; after dusk Indian try to fool me. Made her paddle when the light hit them. The woman’s face was blackened—but I have binoculars of German army so I see her in moonlight—wrapped in blanket look like squaw. But white woman never move like squaw.”
A CLOUD OF garlic and frying pork drifted up from the galley. We left the lighthouse far behind, passed between an island and a point, then turned east along a rocky coast and entered the long cove in the gloom of dusk. The wind had eased and we ghosted in under the main, past a kerosene lantern hanging from a pike pole to mark the shoals, edged up to a log boom, and tied her bow and stern.
The floathouses huddled in a row and the clanging of pots and pans echoed from the bluff behind them. A bulky shadow herded a group of white oxen toward an enclosure on a flat point. Across the floating logs, with a lantern swinging in his hand and stepping with the ease of a gentleman out for an evening stroll, came Ernie the foreman in his slippers, to greet us. He didn’t have to be coaxed to stay for dinner.
