The Boatmaker

by John Benditt

  “Here’s the money you wanted!” he shouts.

  “Hush. You’ll wake everyone.”

  He crosses the room in two steps and rips the sheet from her. She lies back, giving in to his anger. He takes the scalloped neck of her nightgown in his right hand and pulls. A strip of fabric comes away from neck to hem, uncovering her. He drops the fabric and slaps her hard across the face with his right hand. She says nothing, but looks at him, flushed and out of breath like a boxer.

  For four days they stay in her room, eating nothing, drinking only from the bottles the innkeeper leaves outside the door. It is as if they are demons living on nothing but each other’s flesh. When they were together before, their lovemaking was often rough, but not all the time. Sometimes he felt tender, even admired her as a woman who knows things no woman on Small Island knows. Whose relationship with the keeper of the inn is different from any relationship between man and woman on Small Island. Whose beauty has awed him from the moment he saw her.

  Now all that has been left behind, and they are demons in a death struggle, caged, tearing each other to pieces, each piece with its own pulse, the way the pulse remains in every fragment of a heart that has been cut in pieces. Even when he is inside her, it is a death match. He is much harsher than before. And she is just as harsh, digging her nails into him as soon as he stops holding her wrists together, biting whatever is within reach until his blood flows.

  They don’t stop, day or night. In this room, the clock has only one hour. It is always the same time, whether they are on the floor or on the bed or he is bending her over the desk. Money mixes with clothes, bodies, blood, seed, streamers of nightgown, sheets. They stop briefly, then begin again as if they had never stopped. She sleeps from time to time, while he leans over, watching. He does not allow himself sleep. He is sure that if he falls asleep, she will kill him.

  The whole time they are together he is in a rage, convinced that she is laughing at him, peasant of Small Island. And she is fighting to keep him away from her heart. To keep the coating of ice intact, deep and thick as in the deadest time of winter.

  On the fourth day, when he stands naked and looks down at the tangle of clothes on the floor, her body at the center like a bird in its nest, she knows she has lost. She knows what he will say before he opens his mouth, then feels it rip her open just as he ripped her nightgown from neckline to hem.

  “I’m going,” he says, looking straight at her, his face and arms red-brown, the rest of him white, framing a bush of brown, red and gold. “The money’s gone. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Money. It’s yours. All of it.” He gestures to the tangle on the floor.

  She wants to open her mouth and tell him it’s not about money. It never was about the money. He can stay as long as he wants. She won’t ask him to leave. She will take care of her customers elsewhere and then come to him in this little room, and they will be together in their disorder, where they have everything they need. She wants to tell him this. But her mouth will not open.

  She sees the welts on his sides from her nails. She has written on his body. She didn’t know she had it in her to write anything, but she has written a story on him, a story that will fade slowly from view. She wonders whether another woman will read it before it fades away completely. She sees purple marks from her teeth on his neck, shoulders and arms. His body rivets her. The words he has just spoken have made him even more vivid, powerful. There is a light around him: the aura of farewell. She knows this time he won’t be back. And now, having lost, she wants him, deeply.

  He bends over and paws the layers. He moves carefully, not touching her, as he finds the pieces he needs to reassemble a version of himself.

  When everything is on, he stands dressed, his clothes askew. The drooping mustache. The dark eyes. The stubble. She isn’t sure whether she is laughing or crying but her eyes are doing something, something is flowing from her into the world.

  He doesn’t seem to notice. He walks across the wreckage as if walking on waves, his Small Island boots lifted over flying foam. Then he is out of the room and gone, not bothering to close the door behind him. She hears the sound of his boots, fading on the stairs.

  She throws things this way and that until she finds a robe, wraps it around her and hurries down the stairs, pulling the belt and taking a pin from her mouth to keep tawny hair from her face. She reaches the bottom of the stairs in time to see him from the back, receding in the dust: a slight figure in a corduroy jacket, with a round bald spot. He walks stiffly, like a man getting out of bed and walking for the first time after a bad accident. She feels the ice pack around her heart give a huge crack and give way. In its place is a rush of warmth. She is surprised to find her eyes are not wet.

  Behind her, the door to the office opens, and the innkeeper stands in the doorway, watching his wife at the foot of the stairs. Beyond her, the figure of the boatmaker is growing smaller. The innkeeper knows the boatmaker’s money is gone. Counting the days on his fingers, he can guess very accurately how much the boatmaker had when he came in the front door and walked up the stairs trying not to be heard. Within a few hours every bill and coin will be in the box under his bed, next to the well-oiled shotgun whose twin triggers have a very light action.

  The boatmaker walks away feeling the soreness right through his body. On Big Island he has been to places he did not know existed when he put his boat in the water. He doesn’t know whether he has found what he came here for. He does know he will need to get himself some work and a place to sleep. He thinks he will return to the Hostel. This stay will be different. For the first time since he saw the woman of the town in front of the Mandrake, sending her barely visible plumes of smoke into the summer air, the need for drink is gone.

  A few weeks later he is sitting in the big room of the Hostel, where food is served on rough wooden tables. The hall is filled with the crews of the two ships that are in port, a whaler and a trader. Both are big sailing vessels, the whaler with three masts, the trader with four. All around the boatmaker comes the buzz of three languages: the language of the Mainland and the islands, including Small Island, English and the whistling, clicking speech of the natives.

  It is said that no white man has ever mastered the native language, never been able to use its clicks and pops properly to tell a story, which is all the natives seem to do in their own culture: sit and tell stories. Stories of the origin of the world, the wrestling of the mighty twins whose struggle created the world, stories of the spirits of the ancestors, of whale, seal, walrus, bear and salmon, stories of the endless expanse of winter ice, the way the world was before the white men arrived with their mechanical movements, their stilted language, their gunpowder and alcohol. Drink has changed many of the natives. The Mainland mostly holds them in contempt, though the king has established missions to bring them the Good News about Jesus Christ. They often sail on the big ships and are good sailors: strong and willing, unafraid in storms, though very drunk in port.

  The crews of the two ships have been in port a few days and the worst of the drunkenness is over. In his sobriety the boatmaker is quiet, almost invisible. He wonders how many of these sailors, whose voices, rough as saws, fill the dining hall, have been up to the Mandrake to visit the woman of the town. Many, no doubt. She isn’t hard to find. It’s still more than warm enough to sit outside the Mandrake with her box of matches, a drink in hand, advertising more vividly than the faded sign with its mandrake root ever could.

  As always, it has been easy for the boatmaker to find work. As soon as one person hires him, the word spreads that he has a gift for wood. And there are always things that need building or repairing: houses, furniture, barns. People are used to work being done half-right, a quarter-right—or even mostly wrong. They are pleased to find the boatmaker does his work so that everything fits and everything lasts. He does this with the tools at hand and the wood that is available. He never haggles: He does the work and accepts the offered pay. Sometimes his employers think he is s
low, since only children and half-wits are indifferent to money. Yet he is rarely cheated.

  Because he is working and not drinking, money silts up in his sealskin bag. He sleeps at the Hostel, in the big room upstairs, for almost nothing. The mattresses are rolled down and filled with sailors who stink and dream in their three languages. Although it was not easy, he has learned to sleep through the commotion. It is the first time he has lived, eaten and slept among many men. He has learned to manage the smells, the dreams, the arguments, the talk, the songs, the scrimshaw, the cribbage. He slides through it all and remains alone. By the time the Warden settles heavily into the chair across from him, his scratches have healed. His color is better and his breath is good. His mustache is bushy. His animal spirit has returned.

  The boatmaker has no trouble picking up the heavy white mug in one hand and lifting it to his mouth. The Warden signals for a mug, and a waitress brings one. She leans and whispers into the Warden’s large red ear, looking at the boatmaker as she speaks. Actually, she may not be whispering. She may simply be speaking in an ordinary Big Island voice. But the wash of sound makes it impossible for the boatmaker to hear.

  “She says you look better,” booms the Warden. They drink. There is no moon in the boatmaker’s cup. Nothing but coffee, dark and oily. “She’s right. You do look better. You’ve been working. I hear you’re good with wood. Better this way, isn’t it?”

  The boatmaker drinks his coffee, waiting for the Warden to come to the point or leave.

  “Still not saying much, eh? Well, believe me, it is better this way. We’re happy to have you here while you’re like this—working and not fighting.”

  The waitress comes back and fills both mugs. She goes away, looking at the boatmaker out of the corner of her eye.

  They sit there for a while in silence while the room empties and quiets down. Now the Warden doesn’t need to bellow. “Haven’t been up to see Elise either, have you?”

  The boatmaker begins to think about getting up and leaving. He doesn’t know anywhere else on Big Island to stay. But the price of staying at the Hostel may be getting to be more than he can afford. He reaches into his clothes and pulls out a banknote. It’s yellow: five crowns.

  He holds the bill in front of him, his hands resting on the table as he stares at the king of the Mainland and all its farflung islands. He looks into the engraved image, feeling that it is about to speak. He has no idea how long he remains sitting there holding the edges of the bill. When he returns to himself, the room is empty and the Warden is gone.

  After his conversation with the Warden, the boatmaker knows he will keep working a while, then move on. There is nothing more for him here. When he woke up from dreaming about the blue wolf, all he knew was that he was going to build a boat and sail it to Big Island, something no one he knew had ever done. At that time Big Island seemed like a different world, enormous and complicated. Now he knows it isn’t all that much bigger than the place he comes from. He has found everything there is for him here; he must move on. He will work, retrieve his compass from the pawnbroker, make his boat seaworthy again and put to sea.

  As he makes his preparations to leave Big Island, the boatmaker finds he is beginning to be interested in money in a way he never was before. He has already learned some important things. From the woman of Small Island he learned that money can be used to repay certain debts but not others. From the woman of the town he has learned that money can be used to deceive and hurt. But these experiences feel as if they are only the first steps toward a deeper understanding of what money is. There must be more to learn, in places where history stretches back farther. On the northern islands, the history of settlement is shallow. The people of the Mainland have lived permanently on these islands for only a few hundred years. Before that, they were the province of the natives in their skin boats.

  His plan is no clearer than the notion he had while he was building his boat of what he would do after landing on Big Island. All he knows is that he must move on, go deeper. And in the world the boatmaker comes from, the realm of green islands scattered on a cold northern sea, going deeper means only one thing: the Mainland.

  CHAPTER 9

  Two months after leaving Big Island the boatmaker has sailed to the Mainland and made his way inland all the way to the capital. Mostly he has walked, sometimes hitching a ride in a farm wagon. As he travels, he learns about the country, mostly by listening. He doesn’t ask many questions, but he finds that people are happy to talk about what they know and offer their opinions of what is happening in the kingdom. While he listens, he notices what people wear, what they eat, how the houses are built. It is a different world from Big Island—much larger and stranger.

  One of the things he hears people talking about is the modernization program undertaken by the king. Running in the blood of the reigning king is the urge for victory inherited from his pagan sea-warrior ancestors, along with the visionary ecstasy of Vashad. The spirit of the peasant boy who converted the king hovers over the country. The main cathedral and the river flowing through the capital are named for Vashad. In the cathedral are displayed six huge carved wooden panels depicting his life. The workmanship of the panels is famous. But the current king is a man of reason, and his passion is neither for conquest nor for the Resurrection. Instead, he dreams of bringing his small, backward kingdom into the century of progress.

  As he moves inland, the boatmaker sees signs of the huge modernization program all around. New telegraph lines are rising on stout poles carved from the forests of the Mainland. Half-finished roads and bridges are everywhere. In even the smallest villages there are new schoolhouses, waiting for teachers trained in the latest pedagogical methods, whom the king hopes to lure from the wealthy and advanced nations of Europe, to the south.

  It is still warm enough to sleep on the ground. The boatmaker has no need to find lodgings, and he spends little of the money he brought from Big Island. But by the time he reaches the capital, his money has begun to run out.

  The boatmaker has never had difficulty finding work. But when he arrives in the capital, it is particularly easy due to the construction boom that has accompanied the modernization program. The city is expanding rapidly, bringing blue-and-yellow tramcars out from the old center to places that had been farms only a year or two before, running along newly paved streets that had been country roads. The fields are full of buildings going up. When work on one site is finished, it is easy to get a job on the next. The boatmaker works from first light until dark and often beyond. Work is almost as good as drink was on Big Island before he stopped drinking.

  As the boatmaker moves from one building site to the next, he makes the first friends he has had as an adult. On Small Island there is only family, then everyone else. His own family is tiny and broken. But as he works in the midst of the construction boom that surrounds the capital he becomes friends with an oddly matched pair called Crow and White. And these two men become something new for him: neither family nor everyone else.

  White is huge, with tangled white-blond hair and stubble the same color on a broad chin. His surname, which no one ever uses, is Weiss. White is helpless with tools, which splinter in his paws, but he can lift and carry timbers that two ordinary men couldn’t budge, as well as sacks of gravel that would usually be hauled in a wagon. He is entranced by what the boatmaker can do with a hammer or a chisel and must be prodded by the crew boss to move on when he is caught staring like a child as the boatmaker fits two pieces of wood into a complicated joint.

  Crow is a small man with dark hair slicked back from the widow’s peak that curves down his forehead like the beak of the bird he is nicknamed for; his surname is Kravenik. His eyes are dark and his features sharp. Although Crow’s hands look clever, they are soft and pale, and the boatmaker never sees him do anything that could be interpreted, even charitably, as work. Everyone who knows the two of them refers to them together as if they were a business, perhaps a dry-goods store: Crow-and-White.
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br />   In the morning, Crow arrives with White at the construction site where they are working. The two of them come out from the city on the tram or in a wagon. Sometimes Crow stays all day, drinking coffee or pulling from the curved flask he keeps inside his jacket. On other days he stays only briefly, returning at the end of the day to pick up White.

  The crew boss and the men who own the building sites, who don’t usually welcome anyone who isn’t working for them, seem perfectly comfortable with the small dark man. They take him away from the workmen and talk quietly, sometimes sharing a drink from his silver flask. Sometimes the boatmaker hears them laughing and pointing at one or another of the men. Once he even thinks he sees them pointing at him. But he dismisses the idea. What reason could they have to talk about him? He is a stranger here, with no family, just another worker. He shrugs it off, as he does Crow’s habit of writing in the small black notebook he keeps in his inside pocket with the curved flask.

  As the boatmaker and his friends move from site to site, the tie among the three of them deepens. The boatmaker tries to teach White the things that can be done with tools, beginning with some of the simplest. The huge man is slow and tentative from having been laughed at all his life. But he is not stupid. Just clumsy, untutored and so immensely strong that other men have naturally turned him into a beast of burden.

  The boatmaker has never taught anyone to use tools, as he himself was never taught. He learned by watching his father and taught himself, the tools fitting easily into his hands, moving the way they were intended to move. Tools don’t move that way in White’s paws, and helping him learn is a long struggle. The boatmaker doesn’t mind. When he is teaching White, he finds in himself a patience that is rare with people—though common enough when he is working with wood.