Sons From Afar

by Cynthia Voigt

  Robin sat up in the bow, in the little triangular seat with orange life jackets jammed under it, on top of the anchor. He had his feet neatly side by side. After a few minutes in the open, he put on the sweater Sammy had made him borrow. Sammy didn’t say a word. The boat cut through the tops of the little waves.

  Sammy headed south. He had baited three traps that morning, and the metal cages were lined across the floor at his feet, with their plastic-bottle floats inside. He thought they’d just set three traps, just to give Robin the idea. He didn’t plan to keep anything they might catch. Gram was making fried chicken for dinner, with her special gravy to go over the rice, the green beans they’d canned last year mixed in with tomatoes they’d put up, and chocolate cake for dessert. It was the meal Sammy had asked her to cook. It was Sammy’s favorite meal.

  For a while, Sammy just drove the boat along. It didn’t matter where they set the traps—he didn’t expect to catch any crabs, not this early in the season. Then he waved Robin back to the stern and put the tiller into the boy’s hands. He sat in the center seat, to be handy in case Robin got into trouble. Robin kept them going straight for a while. Then he tried to make turns. It took him a few tries to get used to the backward way the steering worked. While he was making mistakes, the boat swooped sideways under Sammy, pushing him this way and that on the seat as Robin saw that he was going in the opposite direction to that which he’d intended, and overcorrected. They moved gradually toward the shore, and the details of the shoreline came into focus.

  Sammy watched Robin making the usual mistakes, and watched the rim of growth that went right up to the low shelf of land, scrubs, and trees. He saw the way the water ate away under the trees at the very edge. It was a process that took only a few years once it got started. First the water would find a place to eat away at the bank, then it would gradually uncover the root system of the tree, as if the water were some kind of archaeologist, gently uncovering treasure buried within the earth. After a while, when the water had undermined enough, a little overhanging ledge of dirt was formed, which crumbled downward, and the process of erosion began again. The sides of the bay were filled with trees that had been felled in this gentle fashion. Snags, they were called.

  All along the shoreline, snags lay half in, half out of the water. Some of them had lost all their branches and were beginning the final steps of decomposition. All had that bleached gray-brown color of dead wood soaked in salty water. They could be dangerous to boats, so when Robin came too close to the shore Sammy just pointed toward open water. He was pulled sideways by Robin’s sudden response. When he’d regained his balance, he indicated with a gesture of his hand that Robin should speed up, and he was pushed forward onto the crab traps by the sudden burst of speed. He was laughing as he regained his seat, but Robin’s face was serious, concentrating.

  Sammy leaned forward. He had to yell to be heard over the motor. “Slow down, really a lot. I’ll show you how to drop a trap.”

  Robin obeyed, handling the accelerator much too delicately now, overcorrecting again. Sammy took one of the traps, pulled out the float, and freed the feet of lightweight line that connected the float to the trap. When the boat was finally moving slowly enough, he caught Robin’s eye and showed him how to stand up against the side of the boat, with the float in your right hand and the trap hanging closed from your left. As Robin watched, he dropped the trap into the water and immediately hurled the float out over the little gray waves. The line drifted out behind the float, to be pulled down by the descending trap.

  The motor choked, sputtered, and died. The silence that fell over them was filled with water sounds, waves and wind. “I’m sorry,” Robin said. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing. You just cut the speed too low. It happens. It’s not serious. We’ll just start the engine again. It works like a lawn-mower.”

  “What if it won’t start?”

  “Then we’ll row.” The oars lay under the seats, out of the way but accessible.

  “I don’t know how to row.”

  “It’s not hard.” It sounded like Robin was trying to avoid being at the tiller. “How about if you drop the next two traps?”

  They shifted seats. Robin’s hands were clumsy, as Sammy had thought they would be, this first time handling the equipment. He didn’t start the motor until Robin had unsnarled the line and stood in the right position.

  “You have to be careful to toss the float out, to keep the line away from the propeller blades,” Sammy warned Robin.

  Robin nodded. “Because it could cut them,” he explained.

  “Not so much that as because the line could get tangled up in the blades and then the motor wouldn’t work. It takes a while to free the prop when it’s snarled.”

  “What about the boat, how would you keep it from drifting out to sea or something?”

  The kid didn’t know anything about the bay if he thought it would be easy to get swept away to sea from Crisfield. It was possible, but it wouldn’t happen easily. Robin was more anxious about this than Sammy had realized.

  “We’d drop anchor,” he explained. “The anchor’s under the life preservers,” he said, answering Robin’s next question before the boy even thought to ask.

  When Sammy looked up to check Robin’s position, he saw the brown eyes looking at him with something he had to name admiration. He turned a wide circle to head back to where the float bobbled on waves that flowed by, up and down, under it. Sammy didn’t mind being admired.

  “Now,” he called. The trap dropped, sinking rapidly into invisibility. Robin tossed the float well out and away. He bent down without being told, to get the third trap ready, and Sammy thought to himself that it might take a day or two to show him how to do things, but Robin was going to work out all right.

  With all three traps set, Sammy cut the motor and let the boat drift along parallel to the distant shore. Robin watched the floats, which seemed to grow gradually smaller and smaller. “Don’t you lose them?” he asked.

  “Nope.” Sammy looked at the gray water, then let his eyes go up to the gray sky. On the earth side, white wisps blew loose from the massed gray clouds. If you could cut through those clouds, the sun would be shining, on the sky side.

  Sammy thought the wind was rising, just a little. But they only had time for a couple of runs along the line of traps anyway; he just wanted to give Robin the feel of pulling up the traps and hanging around in the boat, a feeling for the way the work went. Sammy leaned back against the bulwarks, letting his feet rest against the opposite side of the boat. The boat floated under him. The muggy air blanketed him. At the moment, he couldn’t think of anything he’d change about the whole world.

  “My mom says,” Robin remarked, “that even considering your family you’re still unusually self-reliant. She really likes you.”

  Sammy smiled: He’d thought so; he hoped so. He lay back, lazy. His body was tuned to the movements of the boat; his eyes automatically watched the sky he knew almost exactly how far they were from shore and where he’d head in case of a squall or any trouble—he guessed you could say he was self-sufficient.

  “Dad says you’ve got a crush on her,” Robin talked on.

  Sammy made his face a mask. He didn’t want his face giving anything away, even though he wasn’t sure what there was for his face to keep secret. He kept his eyes on the water’s surface.

  “He says,” Robin laughed, “he doesn’t blame you, he has a crush on her himself.”

  Sammy wasn’t interested in any of that. He sat up, bringing his feet down with a thud. “Mothers, parents—sometimes it looks like they like their kids’ friends when the friends are the way they want their kids to be. The way they wish their kids were.”

  Hearing himself, he didn’t think he’d made much sense, but Robin followed his thought. “Did yours?” Robin asked.

  “What?”

  “Is that what your mother did too?”

  “No,” Sammy said. He’d never thought about comp
aring his mother to other mothers. He wondered if that was because he knew how bad she’d look, compared to other mothers. “She didn’t do the usual things. She wasn’t like most people.”

  “What was she like?”

  Sammy never talked about Momma; he almost never really thought about her; he just remembered. But floating along in the boat, he wanted to say something. “She played with me, she was fun. Her hair was long and soft—it kind of shone.” He remembered that. Remembering that hurt, but it was a good kind of pain. “I was pretty little when she died, but I think now,” he thought aloud, “she was the kind of person who might be too gentle. You know?” The kind of person who needed taking care of—he couldn’t stop himself from thinking—and his father was the kind of man who didn’t take care of things. And Sammy—he’d made Momma take care of him. Which couldn’t have helped her out any. “She played with me,” he insisted. “We had fun. She liked me.”

  “We play Scrabble a lot and she always beats me,” Robin said. “But I don’t mind, and I’m getting better, too.”

  “She liked me exactly the way I am,” Sammy said. “Or was.” He guessed, thinking back, Momma had done that, liked people just the way they were instead of wishing they were someone else. Including his father. “But she really wasn’t like other people.”

  “Because she was sick?” Robin guessed.

  Sammy didn’t correct him, and maybe that was why, anyway.

  “They say that mothers have a special feeling for their sons. Do you think that’s true?”

  Sammy didn’t remember that. But how would he know? Momma hadn’t been normal anyway. It wasn’t normal to just abandon your kids, even though you loved them, and then go die in a hospital for crazy people. It didn’t make any difference to how Sammy felt whether it was normal or not, but it wasn’t normal.

  “Because my mom might have another baby if they can afford it,” Robin continued. “And it might be a girl.”

  “Yes, it might,” Sammy agreed. He started to laugh at the obviousness of that. Robin joined in. They were thinking along the same lines, he and Robin. Sammy could feel that, and he liked it. Maybe Robin was going to be a friend. “My father never married her,” he said. And wished right away he’d kept his mouth shut.

  But Robin surprised him. “Sometimes I wished my father hadn’t. They just got divorced anyway, which is about the same as never being married. Only it’s worse, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” Sammy agreed, thinking about this new angle. “You can’t lose what you never had. Anyway, you got another one.”

  “He made her cry,” Robin said. He was looking out over the water now; it made him ashamed that his father made his mother cry. “She used to cry a lot and he’d never—care.”

  Sammy didn’t much like the sound of Robin’s father, who didn’t try to visit his own son, anyway, and he knew about his son, he knew where his son was. “Anyway, she doesn’t cry now, does she?”

  “If she did, Dad would care,” Robin told him. “Did yours ever?”

  “I don’t remember, so maybe she didn’t. She used to sing some awfully sad songs, I remember that.” It was time to start the motor, but Sammy was reluctant to stop the talking. He knew he had to, they’d have lots of time for talking, all summer. And besides, all this remembering hurt him; it hurt him to love Momma and to wonder: if his father had been different, if she didn’t need to go crazy and die, if there had been someone there taking care of her, instead of someone there needing to be taken care of. Sammy had never thought before how complicated it might have been.

  He tried to explain to Robin about pulling up the traps, how you had to almost jerk up at first, to close the doors and trap the crab that might be inside. On the floor of the bay, he explained, the four doors lay flat open, and a long quick pull on the line from above closed them before the crab could escape. “We probably won’t get any, this time of year. This summer we’ll be crabbing with a trotline, but I didn’t want to bait one just for an hour. This is a kind of practice.”

  “I’ll need practice, because I’ve never done anything like it,” Robin said. “Dad said so. He said I should plan to watch carefully and take directions.”

  Sammy, smiling away inside of his head at Robin’s little-kid seriousness, gave him directions as he brought the boat back to the first float and approached it at the lowest possible speed. Robin leaned out to grab the line just under the water. “Got it,” Robin said, straightening up and pulling his arm way back, then hauling the line in as fast as he could while Sammy turned the boat in a slow circle to keep the line clear of the propeller.

  “Empty,” Robin said. He held the dripping trap out over the water. “But it felt heavy.”

  “Just drop it in again,” Sammy directed, speaking loudly to be heard over the motor. “And—” He was about to say toss the float wide, but he saw that Robin remembered. He kept his mouth shut.

  The other two traps were empty too. Sammy didn’t mind. Robin didn’t mind.

  The clouds that were moving in a mass over them had turned darker. The lower layer now blew thick, white, like whitecaps upside down. Instead of letting the boat drift, Sammy set the anchor. He showed Robin how to do it, how to pull back on the anchor line to be sure the two broad steel teeth were lodged in the bay floor. The anchor caught, hard and fast, and he checked to be sure the line was well wrapped around the cleat at the bow. He explained to Robin that the waves were getting choppier and the sky didn’t look too good.

  “It’s okay for us to be out still, isn’t it?” Robin asked, trying not to sound frightened.

  “Sure,” Sammy reassured him. “I’ve been out in lots worse.” He had, too.

  The boat rocked now, its floor slapping down onto the sides of waves that passed beneath them. The wind was chilly. Sammy didn’t wait too long. It wasn’t the time of year for squalls, he thought, but it wouldn’t be too smart to get themselves soaked with rain. He started the motor after only a few minutes, then told Robin to sit at it, ready to shift into gear when he had the anchor loose.

  The trouble was, the anchor wouldn’t come up. It was stuck on something and Sammy couldn’t pull it free. If it had been Jeff or James in the boat, he could have tried approaching the anchor from a different angle; but Robin wouldn’t know how to work the tethered boat around, wouldn’t know how to hold it against the wind and waves, wouldn’t know how to try running the boat up over the line to pull the anchor loose, wouldn’t know to cut the motor immediately so that the line wouldn’t wrap around the propeller. If they changed places, Sammy thought, that wouldn’t be any better because Robin wouldn’t know how to play on the anchor line, feeling the right direction to pull in, if they could find it.

  The waves weren’t really getting that much higher, he told himself. The wind really wasn’t rising so fast. He knew that. But he felt as if wind and waves were building, every second.

  He jerked on the line, pulling with all his weight.

  Nothing happened.

  He jerked again. He leaned out over the water and tried pulling straight up.

  He couldn’t budge it. They were caught there, trapped.

  Robin was watching him. He didn’t know what to do and the kid was watching him, like Sammy had the answers to everything. He wondered how long it would be, anyway, until somebody figured out that something had happened, and found a boat to come looking for them. In this weather—which wasn’t bad yet, not at all, but might get worse.

  Sammy wasn’t thinking clearly, he knew that. Ideas fell around in his mind, like a castle you’d built out of wooden blocks, then kicked down. Ideas fell with a thump all over his mind and he couldn’t do any more than listen to them hitting the ground.

  He reached down and uncleated the anchor line, tossing it overboard. He’d hear about that, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do to free their boat. The anchor line sank under the waves.

  As soon as he nodded to Robin, who shifted into forward with the motor racing at a speed that almost tumbled Samm
y out of the boat, the wind seemed to slow down. The waves seemed to subside.

  Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. But it had seemed bad, dangerous. He thought now that things were okay. But he honestly hadn’t thought that before. It was an honest mistake. But what would he say to Gram and James about the anchor?

  Sammy moved back to the motor, and Robin hauled up the traps, one empty, two empty. When he had the traps on board, while Sammy drove the boat in a wide circle, Robin wound the line around the float and jammed it back into the traps, just the way they had been on the way out. Robin was having a good time anyway.

  The final trap had a crab in it. Robin turned around to face Sammy, his face almost split in half by his smile. “Look. Look at this, Sammy. I caught one.”

  Inside the metal grid of the trap the crab looked huge. It was probably six-and-a-half or seven inches from point to point.

  “You almost never get one that big this early,” Sammy congratulated him.

  The crab’s shell was browned with living through the winter. It glared out from the metal box, which swung at the end of the line Robin held. Its high round eyes looked like they personally hated Robin and Sammy.

  “I caught it!” Robin yelled. “I caught a crab! My first time!”

  Sammy could remember how that felt. He could remember why Robin was so excited. The crab tried to move its big front claws, to raise them out and threaten its captors, but the cage was too small. Its eyes glared and spittle appeared at its mouth. The claws pushed against the sides of the trap, as if the crab was trying to bend them.

  Sammy felt for that crab, which was pretty funny considering the number of crabs he had plopped down into bushel baskets, or plopped down into steaming water, or plopped down into his mouth for that matter.