The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  “That is the grossest thing I ever saw,” I said.

  “I’d like to try it,” Dylan said.

  “Is it dead when he pulls it out?” Gerry asked. “Or do you kill it afterward?”

  “You guys are weird,” I said, and we moved on.

  When we got back, we noticed the oil slick on the marina water. Our own boat felt sticky and dirty. We were ready to leave and we hadn’t been there six hours.

  But like everything else, we started to get used to Nassau too. Dad was busy with boat repairs. He didn’t like a noise the rudder was making, and he was worried our water tanks might be leaking. The radio was doing something funny again, and he had decided to replace the mainsail. The marina needed hands to scrape and paint boat bottoms, so Dad and I helped out. It paid our slip fee and grocery bills. Dylan and Gerry spent more time on schoolwork and wrote long letters to Aunt Sue and their friends at home. Dad said I should write too, maybe even to Andrew, but when I sat down with the paper, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Everything would have been like speaking a foreign language.

  In our downtime, Dad shopped for spare parts and canned goods, and we wandered the streets on our own. Right around the harbor, people weren’t very friendly, but on the back streets, it was better. Ladies were always rubbing Gerry’s hair because it was so white, but nobody noticed Dylan or me. We blended in pretty well. Our skin was as tanned as it could get and our hair was long. I had started wearing a bandanna to keep mine out of my face. Gerry said I looked like a pirate. Dylan said I looked like a rock star. Mainly we looked like boat bums, so nobody in Nassau noticed us.

  Christmas came and Nassau had its own celebration the day after. They called it Junkanoo. We wanted to go, but Dad said no, the crowds would be too much. Then he changed his mind for the second Junkanoo parade on New Year’s Day. When we arrived in the early morning, it was going strong. Costumes and dancing and music. Drums. Cowbells. Blowing on conch shells. A man did handstands down the street. A little boy sold conch fritters. Dad kept yelling at us to stay together.

  I was beating my hand against my leg to the goombay rhythm and watching the girls running down the street, screaming and laughing and slapping each other, when a woman in a bikini top and a long skirt came dancing over to Dad and rubbed up against him. Dad gently pushed her away. She laughed and came dancing back. “Smile, man,” she said. “It’s a party.” Dad turned away and she laughed again. “Are you afraid of me?” she asked. She put her arms around his waist and danced against him. “It’s okay, man,” she said. “Your wife’s not here.” Dad went rigid, then twisted out of her arms, and scooped up Gerry. He grabbed Dylan’s arm and shouted at me to follow. We pushed our way back through the crowds and noise to the marina.

  The quiet felt hollow. Dad eased himself down on the cockpit seat. Gerry stretched out beside him and picked at the threads coming out of the cushion covers. Dylan and I stood holding on to the backstay and watching Dad. He rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs. “That woman,” he finally said. “I don’t like crowds. I think it’s time for us to go.”

  “Did you get the new sail yet?” Dylan asked.

  “We don’t really need it. It’s too expensive anyway.”

  “The radio’s fixed?” I asked.

  “The guy came yesterday,” he said.

  We nodded. We all agreed.

  So in the late morning of the first day of the new year, Dylan, Gerry, and I watched from the foredeck as the city slipped away. Gerry sat with Blankie clutched at his stomach. I coiled the dock lines. Dylan dropped the fenders into the forward hatch.

  “Where are we going?” Gerry rubbed Blankie’s silky corner against his cheek.

  “North,” I said. “To the Berry Islands.”

  He carefully wound Blankie around his hands. “Ben,” he asked quietly, “how long has it been?”

  I paused and looked at him. “Since what, buddy?”

  He looked up at me, his face tightening against tears, and slid Blankie over his head.

  Dylan and I looked at each other, then back at him.

  “I want to go home,” Gerry said, his voice quiet under Blankie.

  “We’re halfway there, buddy,” I said. “We’re halfway home.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  HUNDREDS OF ISLANDS make up the Bahamas, and in six months we had seen only a handful. In Nassau, Dad had laid the chart out on the table. To the east were Eleuthera and Cat Island. To the south, Long Island and the Exumas. Even farther south were the last scattered specks of Bahamian territory: Crooked and Acklins islands, Mayaguana, and Great and Little Inagua. Still farther south was the little nation of Turks and Caicos. Among these last scraps of land were islands where only a few people lived, as well as those occasional cays with no people at all and no names, either. There was no natural freshwater and no way to grow food. A boater couldn’t stop and provision or fill up with water or fuel because there wasn’t any. We had six months left. Dad didn’t want to waste time in that desert area. He decided to skip the southern Bahamas.

  Instead, we sailed north to the Berrys. There’s not much there. Just one island after another strung out in a slow curve for twenty-five miles from Chub Cay in the south to Great Stirrup Cay in the north. Almost nobody lives there. Just birds and lizards and conch and lobster. The Berrys are lonely and beautiful.

  It was there that we had the golden day. In my memory, this day is the brightest. A day with sunshine sparkling around our eyes. With glitter in the sand and with water dancing blue and clear all around the edges. The perfect day.

  The day before, we had taken our longest sail since crossing the Bank. The last two hours were in rolling seas. We wedged ourselves in the cockpit to keep in one place, but Gerry was too short. Finally I just held him in my lap. We stared over the rails and waited for it to be over.

  At last we were abreast of the turn and could clearly see the rock we were supposed to beware of. Dylan was shouting degrees through the companionway and Dad was barking back, “Double-check that course, Dylan. That can’t be right.” Then Dad turned on the engine to be sure it was ready when we got set to anchor, but it didn’t start. So he started yelling at me and I started yelling at him. Dylan was quiet and Gerry was rolling around in the cockpit. It was really fun.

  Then we turned Chrysalis’s bow into Little Harbour.

  In an instant, the rolling stopped. All those waves were blocked now by a long, low island beside us. And in the middle was a calm green pool of ocean, the edges licking gently against a circle of little islands surrounding us.

  We were quiet. We glided in under jib alone. Dad didn’t yell. I scrambled to the bow and laid out the anchor chain. Dylan stood on alert beside the jib halyard. Quietly Dad said, “Dylan,” and Dylan released the halyard. The jib tumbled in billows onto the deck. He gathered it neatly inside the lifelines. We were quiet again for a minute.

  “Ben,” Dad said, and I let the anchor go. The chain rattled out of the anchor locker and I counted the markers going by—ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet—

  Dad said nothing.

  I saw the anchor sink into the sandy bottom. I snagged it tight. Chrysalis swung gently on her chain and slowly turned her bow into the wind. The quiet rolled over us like liquid. We sat there just looking out at the little circle of islands and feeling the gentle leftovers of breeze. It was peaceful; it was perfect; it was ours alone.

  The next day we slept late—even Dad—and woke up only when we heard a voice calling, “Hello! Hello! Ahoy Chrysalis.” I heard Dad knocking against the hull as he woke up. He was at the companionway before I had pushed off my covers. By the time I sat up, he and Dylan were already on deck. I heard voices.

  “De worse dat could happen,” a Bahamian man said, and I was on deck too.

  He stood in his dinghy, rowed by a single paddle astern, and held on to Chrysalis’s gunwale. Beside us now, in our perfect anchorage, was a Bahamian fishing boat. On the deck several fishermen lounged and watched their mate.r />
  “De worse dat could happen, mon,” he said again. “We have forgotten to bring de sugar for de tea.”

  And Dad laughed. He threw back his head and laughed. “Sugar!” he said. “I thought someone was dying. Ben, go get these guys some sugar. Lots of sugar.”

  Dylan and I looked at each other. He had said “dying.” He had laughed.

  I came back up with an unopened three-pound bag of sugar. Behind me came Gerry, wiping his eyes with Blankie.

  “Tanks, mon,” said the Bahamian. He looked at us. “Dese all yours, mon?”

  “Every one,” Dad said.

  “You lucky,” the fisherman said. “We catch some lobster, we’ll bring you some.”

  “Sure,” Dad said. “Sure.”

  The fisherman rowed away, standing in his boat, pushing the stern paddle from right to left and cradling the sugar in the crook of his arm.

  Dad turned to us smiling. “Coffee?” he said, and the perfect day began.

  What was so perfect about it? Just that it was. Dylan and I spent the morning in the dinghy, puttering around the end of one of our sheltering islands. Dylan was watching the bottom, looking for conch. After lunch, we took Gerry with us, and he leaned over to look too.

  We rounded the end of one of the islands in the circle. Out there was the great wide sea, green and glittering and calm. To our right was a sudden crescent of sand no more than ten feet long. We beached the dinghy and sat there, the three of us, alone, looking out to sea.

  In that moment, I imagined we were the only ones on earth. From where we sat on our miniature temporary beach, it was an easy thing to imagine. Except for the dinghy and the tiny whiff of exhaust and gas, there was no sign of human life. Before us lay the ocean, behind and around us the little scrub island. No Dad. No Chrysalis. No nothing. Just us and the waves and the fiddler crabs and the conch. I lay down and looked at the sky, and something in me felt light enough to rise right on up with the clouds and go spinning off in some kind of crazy, wild dance.

  I jumped up. “Let’s swim. Come on, Gerry. We’ll teach you.”

  “Just a little, Ben,” he said cautiously.

  I felt so soft inside. “Okay, buddy. Bare butts, everyone.”

  So we stripped, laughing and poking. My brothers’ skinny white butts looked like little rabbit behinds as they hopped into the water.

  Gerry reached out for Dylan’s hand and Dylan took it. They didn’t look at each other. It was just electricity, I guess. I remembered Mom doing that. She could be looking 180 degrees away, and Gerry’s hand would go out and hers would be right there—like she had some kind of radar or something. When I saw her in my mind like that, it wasn’t sadness I felt. It was joy. This sudden bolt of joy.

  So I ran into the water and tackled Dylan and splashed Gerry. I yelled and they started screaming and splashing. Gerry’s head got wet before he thought about it and he was pushing himself on the bottom with his hands and kicking his feet.

  “You’re swimming,” we yelled like wild hyenas, and launched ourselves backwards into the water. I picked up Dylan like a baby and pitched him thrashing and howling back into the water. He came up laughing and wanting more.

  Gerry carefully tried coming deeper.

  “You want me to throw you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  So I didn’t—just like that. Because he said no. “Okay, I’ll hold you up to practice swimming.” But I could see he didn’t trust me.

  So Dylan held him. I watched and played cheerleader. “Do your arms like this. Now kick. Try floating on your back. It’s just like sleeping. Hold your arms out. Stick up your chin.”

  Before too long, Gerry was ready for Dylan to let go.

  But he sank. I snatched him up and he came up with his eyes big and round and scared, wiping water off his face with his palms. Blowing and puffing, but not crying.

  “I think he beat Mom’s record for the fastest sinking ever,” Dylan said, and we laughed.

  “Want to try again?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  And I almost remembered something. Like when you catch a whiff of something and your brain starts clicking like a motor trying to start. But it can’t. You click and click and then it’s lost. This time it felt like a cool breeze in the summer heat or a touch of shade in the summer sun. Something in it felt like closing my eyes and just drifting in cool calm. But I lost it, and as it floated away, I thought something in it was about Mom.

  I waded back out of the water and sat on the beach, propping my arms on my knees, watching Dylan and Gerry play until I found myself staring at the sand between my knees and felt Dylan’s fingers on my head.

  They sat on either side of me. The quiet grew. A seagull squawked. The tiny waves kissed the beach. The lizards slithered behind us.

  “Come on,” Dylan said. “Tide’s coming in.”

  I looked up and saw that the ocean was crowding out our little beach. The sand crescent was almost gone. Quietly we launched the dinghy. Quietly we puttered to the boat. Quietly we watched the sun set.

  When night came, we sat in the cockpit with Dad and ate the lobster the fishermen had brought while we were playing in the water. Everyone had his own lobster tail. It was way too much. We were dripping butter down our chins and Dad was laughing at us. He kept telling Gerry to wipe his face and then wiping it for him.

  It was fun. Sitting in the dark, dripping butter, and listening to Dad and Gerry laugh.

  Dad asked us about our exploring mission, and Dylan told him about seeing the conch and finding the beach and going swimming.

  “Ben made us take off our clothes!” Gerry said suddenly.

  “You swam naked!” Dad said, pretending to be shocked.

  Gerry nodded. “It was weird.”

  “But you like to swim naked,” Dad said.

  “I remember,” Dylan said. “The beach at the lake.”

  Dad nodded. “Remember that green swimsuit with motor-boats all over it?”

  Boy! Did I remember! Gerry wouldn’t wear anything else when he was two and it was way too big.

  Dad was wiping the butter off his fingers. Then he turned and took Gerry’s hands and started gently wiping the fingers one by one.

  “Once upon a time,” Dad said, “there was a boy named Gerry who always wore a green motorboat suit when he played in the water. Now Gerry had a teeny, tiny, baby bottom, and every time he stood up in the water the suit slipped right over his behind and down to his knees. An old man, who was Gerry’s dad, fussed at a beautiful woman, who was Gerry’s mom.”

  Did Dad really stop to catch his breath or did I imagine it?

  “‘The boy needs his string tied!’ the old man said. Poor Gerry came to him, crying and dragging his suit around his ankles. The old man hoisted the suit, adjusted it around that teeny waist, and pulled on the strings. Nothing happened. The strings were just decoration!

  “ ‘Just go without,’ growled the old man. But little Gerry refused. He cried and tried to play in the water while desperately holding up his suit. The beautiful lady laughed. The old man laughed. And little Gerry cried and cried.”

  Then Dad really did stop talking. He turned and looked straight at me.

  “And suddenly,” Dad said, “out of nowhere came Gerry’s biggest brother. Within a second, the brother’s suit was off and he had tossed it in a ball to the beautiful lady. He scooped up little Gerry. The middle brother caught Gerry’s suit as it fell to the water and then stripped off his own suit and brought them both to his mom.

  “And the three boys marched into the water butt naked. And the mom and dad weren’t laughing. They were smiling and being very careful not to look at each other because their eyes were all glittery. Then the lovely lady’s fingers touched the old man’s hand and without turning her head, she said very quietly, ‘I’m sure glad there’s no one else at the beach today!’

  “And then they laughed and laughed and the boys played and played. And that’s the story of how Gerry learned to swi
m naked. The end.”

  “Is that true?” Gerry asked.

  “Every word,” Dad said, and leaned back to gaze at the sky. “Orion,” he said. “Dylan, look. There’s Orion.”

  Dylan looked. We all looked. Orion was bright, especially his belt.

  I closed my eyes.

  And that was the golden day. Afterward I remembered Orion and the dripping butter. I remembered the naked butts skipping into the water. I remembered the splashing, backwards free falls. I remembered that I had almost remembered, and I wondered what it was I had lost.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BUT THE GOLDEN day ended. We bounced through the Berrys. Then we went farther north to the Abacos, the top of the Bahamas. We headed north along the cays on the eastern side of Great Abaco—Little Harbour, Man-O-War Cay, Green Turtle Cay.

  Dad’s hand was still bothering him. The scar site was tender, and the injured muscles refused to tighten enough to allow him to take a strong grip on a line. Fortunately, I was getting stronger. I didn’t need his help anymore to get the main up the last few inches, and sometimes it was easier to tighten the genoa just by pulling on the line without using a winch handle. Dylan had gotten strong enough to manage the anchor, and Gerry had turned out to be good with a fishing pole. We got better and better at our new jobs as we cruised through the last few islands before we headed home.

  At one island, we gathered lobster just like the Bahamians did. At another, we watched sharks cruising after a fishing boat. At another, we found a coconut and ate it. At one island, Gerry turned six and we remembered to say happy birthday. Each island was small and perfect. Each one was our anchorage for days and days.