Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

by Paul Watkins

  ‘What about his arm!’ Howard croaked up into the work lights. His eyes were bloodshot smudges.

  ‘Get it. Put it in the ice room. Right now.’

  ‘Make Pfeif do it. I can hardly move.’

  ‘I don’t care who does it, but get it done now.’

  I had begun to shake in my knees and elbows. Shivers walked up my back so violently they were painful.

  Gil let out the cable until Kelley’s arm came loose from the drum. It fell on the deck.

  I picked it up by the hand and carried it down to the ice room.

  Howard opened the hatch and stood in front of the hole, hidden in steam rising from the ice below.

  I swung the arm down on to a pile of new ice. Then Howard and I shut the hatch again.

  Gil hauled in the cables.

  A minute later, the dredges appeared and clanked against the sides.

  We brought them on deck and I followed the movements of hooks and chains until both dredges lay flat on the iron plates. Then I rummaged through the pile with my basket until the scallops were gathered and ready for cutting.

  And since there was nothing else to do, I cut out the scallops and bagged them and left them in the washer pen. I didn’t want to go down in the hold.

  Howard and I cleaned away the crabs and skates and sand. Anything that looked out of place I threw overboard or dropped into the lazarette.

  Franklin had wrapped Kelley in blankets and given him a life jacket for a pillow. There were no painkillers on the boat. Not even aspirin.

  I walked into the galley expecting to be thrown out again, but no one bothered me.

  I touched Kelley’s dirty boots as I moved past, seeing the heels worn out and the treads rubbed off his soles.

  Franklin sat at the galley table with Kelley’s head in his hands. He wiped Kelley’s face with a damp cloth and talked to him in a quiet voice, sometimes drawing the cloth across Kelley’s forehead. It sounded as if Franklin was telling him a story.

  I bowed my head forward to listen, watching Kelley’s face to see if he’d open his eyes or move his lips. Then I felt Franklin’s hand on my shoulder.

  He waved me away. The skin was chapped and white on his knuckles.

  Before I left, I smoothed Kelley’s hair back on his head.

  It took five hours to reach Block Island.

  When land showed on radar, I went down to the bunk room and sat in the dark by myself. I took off my diesel-smelling clothes for the first time since leaving land. I took clean trousers and a shirt from the bottom of my pack.

  I was asleep when we came into port.

  Franklin turned on the bunk room light and I swung out of bed thinking it must be time to go on watch. I reached for my trousers hanging on a brass hook, then saw Kelley, ugly white, and his blood dried black on the galley table.

  All around us in the dark were moored boats and land and the flashing light of an ambulance waiting at the dock, since Gil had finally raised someone on the radio.

  I stood on our bow with the heavy mooring rope, a staleness in my body I had never felt before.

  One of the ambulance men caught the rope and slipped it over a dock piling.

  The medics carried Kelley out like a plank and laid him on a stretcher. They banged his head on the door frame but he didn’t make a sound. Gil was made to go with them. Before he left, he told me to go down to the ice room and bring up Kelley’s arm.

  Holding my breath, I reached across the bloody ice and took hold of the arm. It was almost frozen. I handed it up to the same man who had caught the mooring line. His round glasses had steamed up in foggy air rising from the ice room. I couldn’t see his eyes. His mouth twitched as he closed his fingers around the stump.

  In the time before dawn, when the Block Island streets were still empty, I stole a child’s bicycle which I found leaning against a telephone pole.

  Grey light filtered through the clouds.

  I cycled out of town, across the island to Mohegan Bluffs. Hundreds of years ago a tribe of Mohegan Indians had canoed across from the mainland to attack the local natives, but they were tired from canoeing and the locals drove them back over the edge of this cliff.

  Yellow nylon rope had been stretched across the last hundred feet of ground. Cracks showed in the earth. Erosion was pulling the cliff wall into the sea.

  I ducked under the rope and walked over the cracked earth to the place where I knew my grandfather was buried. The plaque lay twenty feet from the edge. I saw boulders and dirt in long slides down to the water.

  When my mother and grandmother used to bring me here, I never came close to the grave, since I didn’t know exactly where his body rested. I didn’t want to tread on him.

  First my mother said he was buried with his head under the plaque and his feet pointing out to sea. After that, she said it was the other way around. Then she thought his body might be on the land side of the plaque. Finally she admitted that she couldn’t remember.

  My grandmother had also forgotten, the way she forgot everything else in the months before she died.

  I was afraid that the coffin underneath would collapse if I trod on it, and the grass would fold up over me. In the end, my mother persuaded me to come close enough to read the plaque. She swore that they had buried him standing up so he could look out to sea.

  I used to dream that my grandfather lifted the plaque after dark and rested with his elbows propped on the ground, watching trawlers run past into Newport and Galilee.

  If the cliff eroded much more, he and his bones and his plaque would all go down to the sea for good. With the toe of my boot, I pushed back grass from the rim of the plaque. The bronze was crusted turquoise with decay.

  I broke the bike’s chain as I pedalled into town. I put the dirty links in a purple plastic basket hooked between the handlebars and coasted the rest of the way. Then I set the bike back against the telephone pole.

  Gil sat on the rusty dredge. He was showered and shaved and alone on the deck. I heard the sound of Franklin scrubbing out the galley. Breaths of bleach and soap reached me where I stood on the wood planks of the dock. Gil said Pittsley and Howard had wandered off down the beach. Nelson was lying in his bunk.

  ‘How’s Kelley?’ I eased myself down on the planks.

  ‘He’s dead.’ Gil sucked at his teeth. ‘I think maybe he was dead when they took him off the boat. I didn’t ask.’

  I already knew. I had seen Kelley’s face when they carried him out.

  Gil made a cat’s cradle with a rubber band stretched between his hands. ‘The police were pretty good about it. They aren’t impounding my boat or the scallops. The Coast Guard’ll send someone around in a couple of days to inspect.’ He pulled the rubber band out and back around his fingers. ‘I have to find out where his parents live. I have to call them and let them know.’

  ‘Are we sailing back to Newport today?’ The staleness still ached in my body. I wanted to be home in my room, where I could think straight.

  ‘Not for a while. I have accident reports to fill out.’

  ‘Is it all right if I take the ferry home? There’s one that runs to Galilee.’ Beads of dew on the dock planks soaked through my trousers.

  He squinted up at me. ‘Are you quitting?’

  ‘I just want to get some rest. I don’t think I could sleep on the boat right now.’

  ‘Sure. Then go. Just be at Sabatini’s by seven tomorrow morning, for when we unload the scallops.’

  ‘What are you going to tell Kelley’s folks?’

  Gil slid his lower jaw back and forth. ‘If you’re going home, go home.’

  The only other people on the ferry were a group my age. Three boys and five girls. They wore clean khaki trousers, penny loafers and aviator sunglasses.

  I sat on a bench sipping coffee from a paper cup, leaning forward to hear what they said. They spoke of the hotel they’d been working at since June. They talked about going back to school, about the courses they would sign up for and the money th
ey had made. Their faces were smooth and tanned.

  Pale, late summer sky rose up above the flimsy huts of Galilee as we came into the harbour.

  I wondered if my parents would even bother to ask me about returning to college. I hoped they would leave it alone. With pictures of Kelley still burning like sunspots on my eyes, I didn’t know how much talking it would take to make me change my mind. I didn’t want to change my mind. I wanted it to be too late.

  I walked home from the ferry. Warm mist clogged the hedges. A strong smell of honeysuckle blew in from the fields. Little frogs swam in the ditch water.

  Nobody was home and the house was locked, so I fell asleep spread-eagled on my face in the front yard. A while later, I woke and found the neighbour’s dog sniffing at me. He licked my ear, then lay down and used my leg for a pillow. I put my face back in the grass and slept again.

  Kelley’s parents drove down from Kennebunk.

  They buried him in a cemetery just outside Newport.

  I didn’t see the funeral. Gil told us the parents wanted to have only family members present. He said we should all be at Mary’s on Monday morning, the service having taken place on Saturday. He told us to wear jacket and tie.

  My mother and father fought when I told them about the death. He explained to her how that accident wouldn’t happen in the work I intended to do. She said she didn’t care. She said she had stopped caring, Then she took it back and asked to know each detail of Kelley’s death, stopping me every couple of seconds to ask if I knew never to do such a thing.

  I had no trouble remembering what happened. The details seemed clear and separate and passed through my head without leaving me sick or sad or afraid. What bothered me was that I didn’t feel as sad as I thought I should. Several times a day, I caught myself planning the business with Kelley and not realising that he was dead. And each time I remembered, the neat screen where my plans played out went blank.

  On Monday, I dressed in jacket and tie and took the bus to Newport.

  At Mary’s, I met Pittsley and Howard and Nelson, who had just come back from a clothes shop.

  Howard explained how Pittsley refused to listen to the shop lady and bought a jacket with the sleeves too short. He also bought a ready-made tie with plastic clips for attaching to the collar.

  Gil walked into the bar wearing a suit from the fifties with wide lapels and a western design stitched on to the pockets. I thought to myself that he must always have been this fat.

  He drove us to the cemetery in his truck. We sat in the back with the wind whipping at our neatly combed hair. By the time we arrived, it looked as if we’d been at sea a week.

  We stood around Kelley’s grave with our hands double-fisted on our chests while Gil read prayers from a book he borrowed from the seamen’s mission. Then, by himself and with no music, he sang a hymn about the darkness that deepens, which had as a chorus the words ‘Abide with me’.

  Even as Gil sang, I looked around the stone-crowded churchyard, expecting to see Kelley’s head poking up from behind one of the grave markers, thumbless hand held over his smiling face and the sound of his snorting giggles waking us all from our mourning.

  Bunches of flowers lay stacked beside a white wooden cross. Gil said the cross would be replaced by a headstone when the carving had been done for it. Earth was piled high on the grave. Gil told us this was for when the coffin caved in. He made us all promise to drop by now and then to pay respects.

  On the way back to Mary’s, I sat in the front next to Gil.

  He didn’t speak for a while. He drummed on the steering wheel with his chubby fingers, then played with the rear-view mirror. ‘Look at them.’

  ‘Who?’ I raised my head. I’d been studying my fingernails.

  Gil pointed at the reflection of Nelson and Pittsley and Howard in the back of the truck. ‘What a mangy bunch, eh?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Mangy bunch,’ he said again, and slumped back in his seat. ‘I guess they’re all going to quit on me now.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Gil.’

  ‘What about you? Are you going to quit?’

  ‘No, Gil.’

  He nodded and chewed at his lower lip. ‘I won’t hire a new man if I don’t have to. At least not for a while. You and Howard can handle your watch. I’ll keep Franklin out on deck with Nelson. We’ll all help with the cooking. Truth is, I’m not sure I could find a crewman right now. Not once the word gets out about what happened. People are superstitious.’

  ‘What did the Coast Guard say to you?’

  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, as if it was none of my business. ‘They made me replace the Givens Buoys. Made me go into a pharmacy and buy just about one of everything. My boat’s more like a floating hospital than a trawler. Of course, it should have been that way before. I just have to live with that.’

  I heard Howard and Pittsley and Nelson talking in the back. ‘How old was Kelley?’

  ‘I don’t know, Pfeif. I guess maybe thirty-five. Thirty-eight. I don’t know.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Let me ask you something, Pfeif. Do you know where Kelley kept his money?’

  ‘All I know is that he stored it in a Tupperware box and not in a bank.’

  ‘Did he keep it on the boat?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve had Franklin search the whole ship and he’s found nothing. You’d do yourself a favour to remember where it is, Pfeif.’

  ‘I swear I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s thousands of dollars in that little box, and no one’s ever going to find it. Not if I know Kelley. You two were going in on a boat together. Is that right?’

  ‘He told you.’

  ‘He told me when he was drunk and then he forgot he told me. He figured he owed you for jumping in after him when he got knocked overboard.’

  ‘I told him he didn’t owe me a thing except the hundred dollars for bailing him out of jail.’

  ‘Are you still going to try and get a boat?’

  ‘I was always going to get myself a small boat. I took Kelley’s offer so I could learn the work.’

  ‘Do you have Kelley’s boat?’

  ‘I doubt that. Not now.’

  ‘So you want to fish inshore? Don’t like it out there, do you?’

  ‘I think I’d just prefer to run my business and live close to the land.’

  ‘You work for me until you have the money. I’ll keep your pay cheques coming. You and Howard will handle that watch by yourselves. I don’t need to hire a new man.’ Quiet. A bug splattered on the windshield. Gil squirted wiper fluid on the glass and set the wipers going. ‘Ever had a friend die on you before?’

  ‘No. Grandparents but not friends.’

  ‘It messes you up for a while.’

  After a few days, the clear and painless memory of how Kelley died fell apart into an ugliness that sent echoes through me of his scream and the exact feeling of how it was to stand on the bridge looking down at the crew grouped over his body, all of them treading in his blood. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, the pictures returned so violently that I forgot what I was saying and had to be reminded. I shook the way I had shaken when I carried his arm down to the ice room. I felt as if I’d never get away from it, that I’d be shaking the rest of my life.

  I met Bucket in the dusty parking lot of his dockyard, as he shuffled toward the bus stop.

  We walked back to his boat and sat in the cabin. He opened his lunch box, which had a picture of Donny Osmond printed on the front, and took out a sandwich.

  I told him Kelley was dead and he said he already knew. I had nothing else to tell him. All I wanted to do was leave. I sat on the hard wooden seat and said nothing, hearing the squelch of Bucket gumming his sandwich.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be keeping up the payments on your own.’ He spoke with his mouth full.

  I convinced myself earlier that Bucket would hold on to Kelley’s money and sell the boat to someone else. I hadn’t even consider
ed that he’d let me finish off the debt and keep the business. Without speaking, I pulled out my wallet and gave him everything in it as the next down payment.

  He folded the money away in his palm like a magician. Then he wrote out a contract twice on the wax paper wrapping of his sandwich. At the bottom he wrote, ‘Legal’.

  I looked at the figures. I still owed him over five thousand dollars.

  We signed both copies and each kept one.

  ‘How long do you think it will take you to pay off the boat?’ He clipped his lunch box shut.

  ‘I’ll keep working for Gil and give you everything I take home. In the meantime, you can show me how to work this business.’

  ‘I get tired. I can’t work late in the day because of my getting tired. I’ll teach you as long as I got the energy.’ He locked the cabin door and we walked across the parking lot. I paced slowly to keep level with him. His hands were crooked with arthritis.

  At the bus stop, I asked him to lend me some money for the bus, since I’d given him all I had. He asked the price of my fare home. ‘Seventy-five cents, Mr Bucket.’ He pulled three quarters from the deep pocket of his overalls and let them fall one by one into my hand.

  That evening, I heard my father pacing downstairs. The insurance adjusters were haggling over his claim. He was restless on the land and couldn’t understand why insurance men kept going back to the Glory B and peering at the wreck. By now, the only part that showed above the water was its mast. A big orange buoy had been attached to the hull to warn other fishermen where it lay. Earlier in the evening, he and my mother had sat in white metal chairs at the bottom of the garden. She brought out drinks and talked while he picked his nails and nodded at what she said.

  I stayed out of sight in my room, hidden behind the mosquito screen. I strained to hear what they said, but the wind took their voices away.

  I woke in the middle of the night.