by John Hersey
But in the dark in the dinghy on the way out to the boat—the wind had almost died—he said, “Audrey? You got that paper of mine—did’n’ you put it in your bag? Gimme back. I’m gonna cancel. Stuffy ungrateful bastard.”
“Tear it up. Tear it up,” Tom said.
Audrey wouldn’t give Flick the doily. Flick said, “I know you, Audrey Medlar. You want your cut. Right? Fiffy per cent. Right?”
“Isn’t that a drop of rain?” Dottie asked. “Didn’t I feel a drop of rain?”
It was in fact beginning to rain.
“That’s good, then, isn’t it, Tom? If the rain comes without any wind, doesn’t that mean the storm isn’t going to be too bad?”
She must have taken everything in—the broadcast below decks, the exchange on the pier about the mooring. Poor, silent Dottie! She had it backwards. He did not tell her that but, rather, to encourage her, he said without lying, “The wind certainly has dropped out.” But to himself, slowly, rowing to the scanning of the lines, he recited the adage:
Wind before rain, soon to your ale;
Rain before wind, ’ware a fierce gale.
Tom stood on the foredeck in a furious wind which drove raindrops hard against his waterproofs, making a sound of dried peas in a gourd. It was seabottom dark. He did not know what time it was; a halyard rapping against a spreader had wakened him. The tiny battery-powered anchor light hanging from the forestay, swaying in the wind, cast a dim glow about it, making a shimmering globe of luminescence out of the raindrops flying past. Water ran in sheets down across his bare feet. His waterproof hood was drawn tight around his cheeks and chin; wet pellets struck his face. As wind-puffs rose in intensity they set up haunted-house whistlings at the tops of the tubular wooden chafing guards on the shrouds. The halyard was still slapping at the spreader with an importunate doggedness, like someone steadily knocking at an unanswered door, desperate to come in from the discomfort and fear of the vast, windy darkness. He listened to the whistling and beating and thought of the various things he should do. He had been roused from his berth and impelled to go above by a habit of thinking: Details matter. They really do matter. Put them together and they do matter.
He had been stupid not to bring any light above. He went aft and stood for some moments at the companionway hatch, wondering how he could get below to switch on the spreader lights without dripping all over everything; he knew he could not, it was hopeless, he would just have to grope and drip. He pushed back the hatch and went below as quickly as he could, and he fumbled over his bunk for a flashlight, found it, blipped it at the clock—three forty-seven—went aft to the power panel box behind the companionway ladder, poured brilliance into the box, found the switches he wanted, and flipped them: spreader lights and binnacle light. He tossed the flashlight on his berth and climbed above.
Now the whole boat was bathed by the floodlights that shone down from the spreaders: big raindrops driving slantwise the length of the boat, everything white and everything varnished and everything brass glistening with varied tonalities; and, all around, the black water pocked with a hissing gooseflesh. Tom lifted the binnacle hood and looked at the compass, its whited points and degrees pinkly glowing under the tiny infra-red bulb. The wind had indeed backed. It was north of east now. To be exact: East northeast a quarter east, seventy degrees. He supposed it would settle in at northeast for a few hours, perhaps many. He wished now he had listened with a less muddled ear to the afternoon forecast, and that he had picked up a late evening one. Details accumulate; they count. He would have to remember to check and log the barometer reading and time when he went below later.
He started swiftly to work. He set up canvas chafing gear on the anchor line at the bow chock. He took up hard with a winch crank on the halyards and reset the halyard stops to hold them away from the spars; the rapping ceased…
He paused then, as if trying to decipher the real message of this wind. A ferocious puff came running, and hard bits of water pelted his cheeks, and be became convinced—almost said out loud to the wind, “I believe you. I do.” And he set about two heavy and fateful chores to manifest his conviction that Esmé, deceitful and unpredictable, had simply outrun all her beautiful data that Flicker loved so much.
First he undressed the yawl—for he had heard of vessels ripped from their anchorages in gales by flapping sails that had come unfurled from their booms; he mistrusted the shock-cord he had installed to hold the sails in place. He took the mizzen off and stowed it for the time being in the cockpit. Then—far more trying task—he opened the gate-latch of the track on the mainmast and pulled down the slides of the luff of the mainsail, and wormed its foot forward along the boom track and got the whole heavy sail off at last. He damped the bulk of it down temporarily atop the cabin trunk by crisscrossing over it the free end of the working jib sheet.
He went below to the forward cabin and turned a light on there. Dottie and Flick both stirred, both turned their faces to the opposite outer skins of the yawl, and both lay oblivious. Dottie wore pajamas; Tom could spare a corner of his mind to notice that.
He burrowed for the two empty sail bags and put them out in the main cabin. Then, with grunts and thumps and clankings, none of which seemed to penetrate to the awareness of either Hamden, he lifted the heavy fluke anchor out of its seating in the forepeak, and he lay it on the deck directly under the hatch. Next he opened the hatch part way on its forward hinge, so that not much rain could drive in, and he fed out the inboard end of his heavy anchor line—beautiful creamy new Nylon stuff.
Within a difficult hour he readied his ship. First he crammed the sails into their bags, dropped the mizzen into the main cabin, and lashed the mainsail, inside its bag, into the dinghy cradle on top of the cabin trunk, using two strong spinnaker guys and webbing them tightly back and forth many times. Then he lifted the fluke anchor and its chain and Nylon line up on deck through the forward hatch; and he weighted the line, sixty feet from the chain, with a heavy spare flywheel that had been stored for this very purpose in a cockpit seat locker. He started the engine and swung out to the right on the light-anchor line and got the fluke anchor down and the flywheel overboard; then swung left with the motor’s help and managed to raise the Danforth anchor—for he did not believe in having two anchors down in winds that were sure to shift.
He was committed at last to the storm, whatever it might bring, with his vessel stripped and his heavy fluke anchor down on a weighted line.
He was burning inside his waterproofs, but a push of elation worked at his throat. He had known what the significant details were, had known their relative importance; and now he wanted to let loose into the baby-teeth of the storm a shout of invitation and defiance. But he stifled the cry before it had built to actual sound, because he saw a ghost beside him.
It was Audrey. Her hair and nightgown were sopping. How long had she been there watching him? Her face turned toward him as he looked at her; it glistened in the rain as though smeared with cold cream; her hair was plastered on her forehead; her lips were pulled back—a smile?—a chill?—and her teeth flashed in light reflected from the deck. Did she want to speak? Did she want to say, “Can I help you, darling?”
Could she help? Could she make amends? Could she do anything now?
What could he answer? Go below. Leave me alone. You’re getting soaked!
Not getting. Already. Everything was already as it was. He stood on the foredeck beside his unfaithful wife in the wind and rain, looking out, as she looked, too, into the darkness upwind.
3
The Cone of Uncertainty
Tom started up from a short sharp sleep into a universe of wind. A howl combed through the rigging of Harmony; every spar and cable, every hard edge set up a note of its own. Rain clattered on the skylight and washed with a deeper tone on the decks. From time to time the whole boat gave a rapid series of shudders, as if chilled by thoughts rather than by
the wind. The yawl seemed to be sailing widely back and forth on its anchor line, as the gale caught first one cheek of the bows and then the other, and on each tack of this veering the wind canted the mast and the boat heeled over as if reaching under full sail on a day of moderate airs. A constant rattling and slamming of lines and blocks underscored the whine of the whole instrument of the yawl. The hull rocked and slapped on a smart chop that had worked itself up in the confines of the Great Salt Pond.
All this Tom took in from his bunk, with his eyes closed and his mind resistant. He had not slept enough. He did not want to enter the new day yet, if at all. He was against the blow; he took it personally.
He opened his eyes and looked across at Audrey. She was hard asleep. He wondered if a bad conscience could have a narcotic effect; then he realized that the sort of obsession she was inhabiting carried no sense of guilt with it. Her sleep was fresh and innocent, her body pure, for what was happening to Flick and to her (she must have imagined) had never happened to mortals before. But her hair was haggard; it seemed to have been blown straight out into strings by this wind. Even her cheeks appeared to be drawn down sadly by the ferocity of the gale, which seemed to Tom’s mind to be raking through the cabin, though his senses told him that the air within was weirdly still. Here in the inner box of the boat the wind was a force of nerves.
But in the very midst of bracing himself he began to think of details, the bane and boon of his life, and at once he was standing, peering out through the oval porthole above his berth. He saw chaos filtered through chaos, a lowering, soaked day looming beyond a glass streaked with drops and lines and sometimes sheets of rain; yet he made out soon that Harmony had held and was holding. He had marked bearings abeam at the anchorage in the evening light the night before; he lined up again the end of a wooden pier with a gable of a house up the moor far beyond. He was glad he had set the fluke anchor. Harmony was holding fast.
Knowing that, he could look for signs of the day through the bleary glass: greenish scudding water, power boats straining and careening, the immovable land mass crosshatched by slanting curtains of rain, the nap of the foliage cowering as close to earth as could be, as if with a vegetable patience waiting it out and saying, This will pass, this will pass.
He had waxed the porthole glass, in and out, and the downpour danced across it in agile globules. Sometimes, when a sudden spillage of solid water curtained the opening, the wind, getting at everything, made tiny waves across the vertical surface which looked like the ripples of sand in a tidal pool, and through that brief filter Tom saw a horrifying corrugated white power boat beyond.
As the yawl sheered out on a starboard tack and the glass was drained of all but a few scurrying drops, Tom saw the marina dock: a mess of trouble. The glimpse was not long enough to make out more than that things were distinctly not right along the pier.
He looked at the clock: nine minutes past six in the morning.
Once more he checked the bearings ashore, the pier and the gable. This time Harmony must have been on a different phase of her constant oscillation; the pilings of the old dock stood forward out of line. Had Harmony after all dragged a bit? Tom began at once to think, sorting out his mind under the gruesome symphony of Harmony’s standing up to the cruel wind, what he would do if she dragged. Step one, step two…Ending, no matter what course of steps he took, in the unthinkable. But then he realized, with a surge of relief, that the wind must have shifted during the night, probably going round now slowly clockwise in the cyclonic pattern; and that would account for the pier’s being out of line on one side of her swinging. Thank God, she was well rooted in the mud.
Here came Flicker Hamden bustling out of the forward cabin, slamming the door back against the bulkhead with his elbow, his unshaven chin belligerently jutting forward, his eyes yellowy and rheumy. No struggle to rouse him this morning!
“Christ, man,” he said, his jocular tone thinly covering a real resentment, “you told me cruising was the most relaxing pastime this side of—what did you say?—the Turkish baths?”
Tom, shocked by Flick’s inconsiderateness, put a forefinger to his lips and then pointed it across at Audrey.
Flick ducked and made a face, as if to dodge a blow of surprise, and he disappeared into the head, banging the door shut and knocking the close bulkheads with knees and elbows and overriding the storm with athletic pumpings and noises of splashing and of blowing through water. This was a morning to show his vigor.
Tom looked out the porthole again, with its fugitive drops running almost horizontally, and reasoned out the wind direction: a point or two south of east. Good in one way, for part of the bulk of the island, rather than a mere sandspit, stood between Harmony and the pile-driving air; but bad in another way, for by the mariners’ rule that put the eye of a storm like this two points abaft the beam of a vessel nosing the wind, Block Island—and Harmony—must be more or less northeast of the center and therefore almost dead in its path, where the longest and worst would come.
The barometer? Tom tapped its face with a forefinger. Twenty-nine point seven, and falling. But that told little; the speed of the fall was what mattered. It was six-fourteen. Logging the figures in his memory, he aligned the needles as on any morning.
He turned on the radio; it was almost time for Sunny McCloud. But Boston could not be heard in this noise, not if he kept the radio low so as not to waken Audrey; nor could Providence. New London was selling bread. He held New London, and a song came on: “Liar, Liar.” And then another, the Righteous Brothers with “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’.” Then praise of a caked bleach. New London was not interested in this storm. “Nobody knows,” the Chiffons lamented, “what’s going on in my mind but me.” Six-thirty passed. Tom turned the radio off.
Flick came slamming out of the head, and Audrey, all too fittingly aroused by Hamden’s racket rather than by the storm’s or the radio’s, turned her head and sleepily said, “What are we going to do?”
Flick stood in the door to the forward cabin, seedy in his rumpled pajamas and slovenly bristles, waiting for Tom’s answer.
“Sit tight. Right here.”
Flick asked, “This a good place to be?”
“Can’t say it’s an ideal anchorage, but we’re stuck with what we have. We’re holding, anyway. So far.”
“Shouldn’t we go ashore?” Audrey’s voice, in her state of slowly emerging awareness, seemed defenseless and trusting, and it wrenched at Tom and made him angry.
“In what? Scuba suits?” At once he repented this foolish sarcasm, realizing that Audrey had not had a chance to get her bearings. “Couldn’t very well make it in the dinghy now.” It was the big oaf, the snorter and splasher, standing in the doorway, who made him angry.
Who made him angrier now, by saying (and especially by using a pronoun which, in seeming to distribute the blame, aimed it, to the contrary, through a reverberating irony of tone, all the more tellingly), “We should have followed the forecasts closer. We got kind of sloppy yesterday.” It was the nursemaid’s “we.” Such insolence! Why hadn’t he glued himself to the radio, if he intended to treat himself to this big “we”?
“Look, chum. There’s a difference between tracking and predicting. This one out-foxed the boys. Nobody knows enough about storms yet. It still takes human guesswork—”
Flick whirled away and went forward and slammed the cabin door. Harmony timed badly her next shudder, which came at this moment and seemed to express an old boat’s disgust at her owner’s way of handling things.
Tom lit the stove and set some water to boil. He would shave in the midst of peril and demonstrate to—to Audrey—that—that—
She was standing by her berth in the narrow space by the folded-down table, dressing. She always turned her back to him in modesty when she let down the top of her nightgown and put on her bra; he saw now her soft back…A fierce gust spoke in the stays and spars abo
ve with the voice of a crying child. Audrey, her sympathies aroused, leaned to the porthole on her side and looked out; there she would see the wide and, on that side, almost boatless expanse of the Pond, greenish and foam-flecked all the way to Indian Head Neck. She held her face so close to the glass that two plumes of fogging fanned out from her nostrils; then she swung around to Tom with a look of total recognition of what they were up against.
“We’d better have eggs,” Tom said in an everyday voice, so controlled that not even his control could be heard in it. “This will be a big old working day, just sitting here. Good fat breakfast, O.K.?”
In seeing the surprise and fear ease from Audrey’s face, Tom felt he might presume to ask her a dreadful question, ask for an explanation, an accounting. How come? What was the story? What had gone wrong? She was still his wife; she still trusted him; she looked through the streaming glass, saw wet hell, turned to him, heard his calmness, responded, felt safe—a lot safer than he felt. This sequence gave him rights; he had a right to whisper a question. What went wrong, darling? Those two wouldn’t have to hear.
Whoosh. Another gust. How Harmony heeled under bare poles!
The moment for the question, if it had ever been there, was gone. Audrey bent to make up her berth; Tom turned to do the same on his side. They were working together, and it was too early in the morning to talk.
The water came to a boil. Tom took a steaming panful into the head and shaved. Interstitched with the wailing of the storm and the creaking of Harmony’s timbers, which in the tiny toilet seemed very loud and urgent, he heard through the thin bulkhead to which the mirror was fastened sounds of a quarrel. Tom felt, under his generalized anxiety and pain, a blurt of smugness. Audrey would notice his clean chin; perhaps she, too, could hear now the mean squabbling up forward.
