Stern Men

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Ruth looked out at Webster in the mudflats and did not reply. After a few minutes, Senator Simon said, “You know, there are no lifeboats on lobster boats. It’s not safe for you.”

  “Why should they have lifeboats on lobster boats? Lobster boats aren’t much bigger than lifeboats in the first place.”

  “Not that a lifeboat can really save a person . . .”

  “Of course a lifeboat can save a person. Lifeboats save people all the time,” Ruth asserted.

  “Even in a lifeboat, you’d better hope to get rescued soon. If they find you floating around in your lifeboat in the first hour after a shipwreck, of course, you’ll be fine . . .”

  “Who’s talking about shipwrecks?” Ruth asked, but she knew very well that the Senator was always about three minutes away from talking about shipwrecks. He’d been talking to her about shipwrecks for years.

  The Senator said, “If you are not rescued in your lifeboat in the first hour, your chances of being rescued at all become very slim. Very slim, indeed, Ruthie. Slimmer with every hour. After a whole day lost at sea in a lifeboat, you can assume that you won’t be rescued at all. What would you do then?”

  “I’d row.”

  “You’d row. You would row, if you were stuck on a lifeboat and the sun was going down, with no rescue in sight? You would row. That’s your plan?”

  “I guess I’d have to figure something out.”

  “Figure what out? What is there to figure out? How to row to another continent?”

  “Jesus, Senator. I’m never going to be lost at sea in a lifeboat. I promise you.”

  “Once you’re in a shipwreck,” the Senator said, “you will be rescued only by chance—if you are rescued at all. And remember, Ruthie, most shipwreck survivors are injured. It’s not as if they jumped off the edge of a boat in calm water for a little swim. Most shipwreck survivors have broken legs or ghastly cuts or burns. And what do you think it is that kills you in the end?”

  Ruth knew the answer. “Exposure?” she guessed wrongly, just to keep the conversation going.

  “No.”

  “Sharks?”

  “No. Lack of water. Thirst.”

  “Is that right?” Ruth asked politely.

  But now the subject of sharks had arrived, the Senator paused. Finally he said, “In the tropics, the sharks come right up into the boat. They bring their snouts into the boat, like dogs sniffing around. But barracudas are worse. Let’s say you’ve been wrecked. You’re clinging to a piece of wreckage. A barracuda comes over and sinks his teeth into you. You can rip him off, Ruthie, but his head will stay attached to you. Like a snapping turtle, Ruthie. A barracuda will hold on to you long after he’s dead. That’s right.”

  “I don’t worry about barracudas too much around here, Senator. And I don’t think you should worry about barracudas, either.”

  “Well, how about your bluefish, then? You don’t have to be in the tropics for bluefish, Ruthie. We’ve got packs of bluefish right out there.” Senator Simon Addams waved past the mudflats and Webster, pointing to the open Atlantic. “And bluefish hunt in packs, like wolves. And stingrays! Shipwreck survivors have said that giant rays came right up under their boat and spent the whole day there, hovering. They used to call them blanket fish. You could find rays out there bigger than your little lifeboat. They ripple along under your boat like the shadow of death.”

  “That’s very vivid, Senator. Well done.”

  The Senator asked, “What kind of sandwich is that, Ruthie?”

  “Ham salad. Want half?”

  “No, no. You need it.”

  “You can have a bite.”

  “What’s on there? Mustard?”

  “Why don’t you have a bite, Senator?”

  “No, no. You need it. I’ll tell you another thing. People lose their minds in a lifeboat. They lose their ideas about time. They might be out there in an open boat for twenty days. Then they get rescued, and they’re surprised to find that they can’t walk. Their feet are rotting from waterbite, and they have open sores from sitting in pools of saltwater; they have injuries from the wreck and burns from the sun; and they’re surprised to find, Ruthie, that they can’t walk. They never have any understanding of their situation.”

  “Delirium.”

  “That’s right. Delirium. Exactly. Some men in a lifeboat get a condition called ‘shared delirium.’ Let’s say there are two men in a boat. They both lose their minds the same way. One man says, ‘I’m going over to the tavern for a beer,’ and steps over the side and drowns. The second man says, ‘I’ll join you, Ed,’ and then he steps over the side and drowns, too.”

  “With the sharks lurking.”

  “And the bluefish. And here’s another common shared delusion, Ruthie. Say there are only two men in a lifeboat. When they do get rescued, they’ll both swear that there was a third man with them the whole time. They’ll say, ‘Where’s my friend?’ And the rescuers will tell them, ‘Your friend is in the bed right next to you. He’s safe.’ And the men will say, ‘No! Where’s my other friend? Where’s the other man?’ But there never was any other man. They won’t believe this. For the rest of their lives they’ll wonder: Where’s the other man?”

  Ruth Thomas handed the Senator half of her sandwich, and he ate it quickly.

  “In the Arctic, of course, they die from the cold,” he continued.

  “Of course.”

  “They fall asleep. People who fall asleep in lifeboats never wake up.”

  “Of course they don’t.”

  Other days, they talked about mapmaking. The Senator was a big fan of Ptolemy. He bragged about Ptolemy as if Ptolemy were his gifted son.

  “Nobody altered Ptolemy’s maps until 1511!” he’d say proudly. “Now that’s quite a run, Ruth. Thirteen hundred years, that guy was the expert! Not bad, Ruth. Not bad at all.”

  Another favorite topic of the Senator’s was the shipwreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown. This one came up time after time. It didn’t need a particular trigger. One Saturday afternoon in the middle of June, for instance, Ruth was telling the Senator about how much she’d hated the graduation ceremony at her school, and the Senator said, “Remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, Ruthie!”

  “OK,” Ruth said, agreeably, “if you insist.”

  And Ruth Thomas did remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, because the Senator had been telling her about the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown since she was a toddler. This wreck was even more disturbing for him than the Titanic.

  The Victoria and the Camperdown were the flagships of the mighty British Navy. In 1893, they collided with each other in open daylight on calm seas because a commander issued a foolish order during maneuvers. The wreck agitated the Senator so much because it had occurred on a day when no boat should have sunk, and because the sailors were the finest in the world. Even the boats were the finest in the world, and the officers were the brightest in the British Navy, but the boats went down. The Victoria and the Camperdown collided because the fine officers—fully knowing that the order they had received was a foolish one—followed it out of a sense of duty and died for it. The Victoria and the Camperdown proved that anything can happen on the sea. No matter how calm the weather, no matter how skilled the crew, a person in a boat was never safe.

  In the hours after the collision of the Victoria and the Camperdown, as the Senator had been telling Ruth Thomas for years, the sea was filled with drowning men. The propellers of the sinking ship chewed through the men horribly. They were chopped to pieces, he had always emphasized.

  “They were chopped to pieces, Ruthie,” the Senator said.

  She didn’t see how this related to her story about graduation, but she let it go.

  “I know, Senator,” she said. “I know.”

  The next week, back at Potter Beach, Ruth and the Senator got to talking again about shipwrecks.

  “What about the Margaret B. Rouss?” Ruth asked, after the Senato
r had been quiet for a long time. “That shipwreck ended pretty well for everyone.”

  She offered up this ship’s name carefully. Sometimes the name Margaret B. Rouss would calm the Senator down, but sometimes it would agitate him.

  “Jesus Christ, Ruthie!” he exploded. “Jesus Christ!”

  This time it agitated him.

  “The Margaret B. Rouss was filled with lumber, and it took forever to sink! You know that, Ruthie. Jesus Christ! You know it was an exception. You know it’s not usually that easy to be shipwrecked. And I’ll tell you another thing. It is not pleasant to be torpedoed under any conditions, with any cargo, no matter what happened to the crew of the goddamn Margaret B. Rouss.”

  “And what did happen to the crew, Senator?”

  “You know full well what happened to the crew of the Margaret B. Rouss.”

  “They rowed forty miles—”

  “—forty-five miles.”

  “They rowed forty-five miles to Monte Carlo, where they befriended the Prince of Monaco. And they lived in luxury from that point forward. That’s a happy story about a shipwreck, isn’t it?”

  “An unusually easy shipwreck, Ruthie.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “An exception.”

  “My father says it’s an exception when any boat sinks.”

  “Well, isn’t he a smartie? And aren’t you a smartie, too? You think because of the Margaret B. Rouss it’s safe for you to spend your life working on the water in someone’s lobster boat?”

  “I’m not spending my life on any water, Senator. All I said was maybe I could get a job spending three months on the water. Most of the time I’d be less than two miles from shore. I was just saying I want to work on the water for the summer.”

  “You know it’s exceedingly dangerous to put any boat on the open sea, Ruth. It’s very dangerous out there. And most people aren’t going to be able to row any forty-five miles to any Monte Carlo.”

  “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “In most conditions, you’d be dead from exposure by then. There was a shipwreck in the Arctic Circle. The men were in lifeboats for three days, up to their knees in icy water.”

  “Which shipwreck?”

  “I do not recall the name.”

  “Really?” Ruth had never heard of a shipwreck the Senator did not know by name.

  “The name doesn’t matter. The wrecked sailors landed on an Icelandic island eventually. They all had frostbite. The Eskimos tried to revive their frozen limbs. What did the Eskimos do, Ruthie? They rubbed the men’s feet vigorously with oil. Vigorously! The men were screaming, begging the Eskimos to stop. But the Eskimos kept on vigorously rubbing the men’s feet with oil. I can’t recall the name of the shipwreck. But you should remember that when you get on a boat.”

  “I’m not planning on sailing to Iceland.”

  “Some of those men on the Icelandic island fainted from the pain of the vigorous rubbing, and they died right there.”

  “I’m not saying that shipwrecks are good, Senator.”

  “Every one of those men eventually needed amputations.”

  “Senator?”

  “To the knee, Ruthie.”

  “Senator?” Ruth said again.

  “They died from the pain of the rubbing.”

  “Senator, please.”

  “The survivors had to stay in the Arctic until the next summer, and the only thing they had for food was blubber, Ruth.”

  “Please,” she said.

  Please. Please.

  Because there was Webster, standing before them. He was coated in mud up to his skinny waist. He had tight curls sweated into his hair and dashes of mud across his face. And he was holding an elephant’s tusk flat across his filthy, outstretched hands.

  “Oh, Senator,” Ruth said. “Oh, my God.”

  Webster laid the tusk on the sand before the Senator’s feet, as one would lay a gift before a regent. Well, the Senator had no words for this gift. The three people on the beach—the old man, the young woman, the tiny, muddy young man—regarded the elephant tusk. No one moved until Cookie rose up stiffly and slouched toward the thing with suspicion.

  “No, Cookie,” Senator Simon said, and the dog assumed the posture of a Sphinx, her nose stretched toward the tusk as if to smell it.

  At last, in an apologetic and hesitant way, Webster said, “I guess he was a small elephant.”

  Indeed, the tusk was small. Very small for an elephant that had grown to a mighty size during 138 years of myth. The tusk was slightly longer than one of Webster’s arms. It was a slim tusk, with a modest arc. At one end was a dull point, like a thumb. At the other end was the ragged edge of its break from the skeleton. There were deep black, cracked grooves in the ivory.

  “He was just a small elephant, I guess,” Webster repeated, because the Senator had not yet responded. This time, Webster sounded almost desperate. “I guess we thought it would be bigger, right?”

  The Senator stood up, as slowly and stiffly as if he’d been sitting on the beach for 138 years, waiting for the tusk. He stared at it some more, and then he put his arm around Webster.

  “That’s a good job, son,” he said.

  Webster sank to his knees, and the Senator eased himself down beside him and put his hand on the boy’s lank shoulder.

  “Are you disappointed, Webster?” he asked. “Did you think that I would be disappointed? It’s a beautiful tusk.”

  Webster shrugged, and his face looked stricken. A breeze came up, and Webster gave a thin shiver.

  “I guess it was just a small elephant,” he repeated.

  Ruth said, “Webster, it’s a terrific elephant tusk. You did a good job, Webster. You did a great job.”

  Then Webster gave two hard sobs.

  “Oh, come on, now, boy,” the Senator said, and his voice, too, was choked. Webster was crying. Ruth turned her head. She could still hear him, though, making those sad noises, so she stood up and walked away from the rocks toward the spruce trees lining the shore. She left Webster and the Senator sitting on the beach for a good long time while she wandered among the trees, picking up sticks and breaking them. The mosquitoes were after her, but she didn’t care. She hated to see people crying. Every once in a while she looked toward the beach, but she could see that Webster was still sobbing and the Senator was still comforting him, and she wanted no part of it.

  Ruth sat herself down, with her back to the beach, on a mossy log. She lifted a flat rock in front of her, and a salamander scooted out, giving her a start. Maybe she’d become a veterinarian, she thought absently. She’d recently read a book, given to her by the Senator, about the breeding of bird dogs, and she had found it rather beautiful. The book, written in 1870, had the loveliest language. She’d been moved almost to tears by a description of the best Chesapeake labrador the author had ever seen, one that had retrieved a downed seabird by leaping over crashing ice floes and swimming far out past the point of invisibility. The dog, whose name was Bugle, had returned to shore, nearly frozen to death, but carrying the bird ever so gently in its soft mouth. Not a mark on it.

  Ruth stole a glance over her shoulder back to Webster and the Senator. Webster appeared to have stopped crying. She wandered down to the shoreline, where Webster was sitting, staring ahead grimly. The Senator had taken the tusk to a warm pool of tidewater to rinse it off. Ruth Thomas went over, and he straightened up and handed her the tusk. She dried it on her shirt. It was light as bone and yellow as old teeth, its hollow inside packed with mud. It was warm. She hadn’t even seen Webster find it! All those hours of sitting on the beach watching him search the mud, and she had not seen the moment when he found it!

  “You didn’t see him find it, either,” she said to the Senator. He shook his head. Ruth weighed it in her hands. “Unbelievable,” she said.

  “I didn’t think he would actually find it, Ruth,” the Senator said, in a desperate whisper. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do with him? Look at him, Ruth.”


  Ruth looked. Webster was trembling like an old engine in idle.

  “Is he upset?” she asked.

  “Of course he’s upset! This project kept him going for a year. I don’t know,” the Senator whispered in panic, “what to do with the boy now.”

  Webster Pommeroy got up and came to stand beside Ruth and the Senator. The Senator straightened to his full height and smiled widely.

  “Did you clean it off?” Webster asked. “Does it look n-n-nicer?”

  The Senator spun around and hugged tiny Webster Pommeroy close to him. He said, “Oh, it’s splendid! It’s gorgeous! I’m so proud of you, son! I am so proud of you!”

  Webster sobbed again, and recommenced crying. Ruth, reflexively, shut her eyes.

  “Do you know what I think, Webster?” Ruth heard the Senator ask. “I think it is a magnificent find. I really do. And I think we should bring it to Mr. Ellis.”

  Ruth’s eyes flew open in alarm.

  “And do you know what Mr. Ellis is going to do when he sees us coming with this tusk?” the Senator asked, his huge arm draped over Webster’s shoulder. “Do you know, Webster?”

  Webster did not know. He shrugged pathetically.

  The Senator said, “Mr. Ellis is going to grin. Isn’t that right, Ruthie? Won’t that be something? Don’t you think Mr. Ellis will love this?”

  Ruth did not answer.

  “Don’t you think so, Ruthie? Don’t you?”

  3

  Lobsters, by instinctive force,

  Act selfishly, without design.

  Their feelings commonly are coarse,

  Their honor always superfine.

  —The Doctor and the Poet J. H. Stevenson 1718-1785

  MR. LANFORD ELLIS lived in Ellis House, which dated back to 1883. The house was the finest structure on Fort Niles Island, and it was finer than anything on Courne Haven, too. It was built of black, tomb-grade granite in the manner of a grand bank or train station, in only slightly smaller proportions. There were columns, arches, deep-set windows, and a glinting tile lobby the size of a vast, echoing Roman bath house. Ellis House, on the highest point of Fort Niles, was as far away from the harbor as possible. It stood at the end of Ellis Road. Rather, Ellis House stopped Ellis Road abruptly in its tracks, as if the house were a big cop with a whistle and an outstretched, authoritative arm.