And the Sea Will Tell (13 page)

Jennifer didn’t have to think twice about her birthday wish. It was often on her mind.
Please let everything work out all right for Buck and me
.

She didn’t tell anyone, of course, because she desperately wanted her wish to come true.

M
UFF DID NOT WANT
to upset her elderly mother by mentioning her own problems and worries when she wrote home on July 13, 1974, three days before the Leonards departed. But in spite of her good intentions, her gnawing concern about life on Palmyra broke through in every paragraph.

Mac was exploring the interior of the island during the hottest part of the day, cutting his way through dense undergrowth with his machete, when he badly misjudged a powerful swipe at one branch. The blade easily severed the branch and flew into Mac’s left leg, slicing through to the bone just below the knee. Blood poured down into his sock and sneaker.

Mac swiftly tied his bandanna, wet from sweat, around the cut. He was grimly calm, but realized he had to get back to the
Sea Wind
. Fast.

He considered the trail he’d just blazed, but it meandered too much. A straight line through the jungle would be quicker. He began chopping in that direction, handling the machete with renewed respect.

A few minutes later he had to stop to tighten the tourniquet. The bleeding had not even slowed. Just how much blood could he lose before he felt faint? Already, a weariness from all the exertion in the hot sun had settled in his limbs, and he felt himself moving at a dreamlike, slow speed, as exhausted as a runner at the end of a marathon. But he didn’t dare stop to rest because he was losing more blood all the time. It would do no good to yell for help, anyway, because no one was close enough to hear him.

He soon faced a growth of thick wild grass nearly his height. Hacking through it in the stifling heat and humidity would require energy he didn’t have.

He turned away, searching for an easier way. Within minutes, he was back at the barricade of tall grass. He cursed himself for not carrying a compass. The sun was no help because high clouds had sailed in with the afternoon breeze and veiled the sky. He tried to reorient himself, unable to believe he was so confused. “
You can’t get lost on a tiny island
,” he had told Muff. Now
he
was lost. As his strength and self-confidence ebbed dangerously, he finally chanced upon the runway, where the assembled birds greeted him with a squawking cacophony that sounded like beautiful music to his ears.

It wasn’t far now.

Pulling the dinghy alongside the
Sea Wind
, he yelled for Muff. She popped up from below, took one look at his bloody leg, and let out an anguished cry.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he assured her, climbing aboard. “I cut myself with the damn machete. We need to clean it.”

Muff, who had taken advanced first aid, focused on the task at hand. She cleaned the deep wound with cold fresh water, then dripped searing peroxide into the cut. Mac barely flinched. “It’s got to have stitches,” she pronounced briskly. “I’ll get the sutures.”

“Better bring some antibiotics.”

The sutures had not been unpacked since Mac put them in the first-aid kit before their honeymoon cruise—thirteen years ago. Packed separately in foil, each length of thread was still usable, but the needle had become too dull. Instead of stitching, Muff sprinkled a powdered sulfa drug on the wound, and closed it as completely as possible with butterfly bandages.

“It’s a long way to a doctor or hospital,” Muff said. “Please be more careful, honey.”

Grunting noncommittally, he swallowed an antibiotic pill and went right to bed, obviously worn out from the ordeal. That night, Muff set the alarm clock, and woke him at two o’clock for a second dose.

Unable to go back to sleep, she went topside. On the familiar deck, she nearly stumbled in the darkness. There was no moon and the stars must have been hidden by overcast.

She awkwardly groped her way to the stern and sat down to think. Looking out toward what she knew was the jungle, she could see nothing. The darkness was literally blackness. It was as if she had stepped into a closet and shut the door behind her. She couldn’t remember ever being in such a dark place.

There wasn’t any kind of sustained pastel dusk at Palmyra. Nighttime fell as if someone had dropped a curtain. Mac said the sudden darkness was explained by their proximity to the equator. Muff found it eerie.

Mac spent most of the next day in bed, alternately sleeping and reading. This was the first time since they had arrived at Palmyra that Muff had seen him taking it easy during the day. It took an injury, and perhaps some wounded pride, to keep him down.

In the evening, Muff prepared a special dinner. She thawed out two steaks, put them on the hibachi, and baked potatoes topped with some of Jennifer’s coconut butter. She chilled a special bottle of champagne she’d been saving since San Diego, and they feasted.

The next day, Mac felt much better, though he would have to continue the antibiotics regimen for a week longer.

After this brief respite, Muff worried again, for she knew he would soon be back exploring the rugged island he saw as his domain.

When will he tire of this godforsaken place?
She desperately wanted to help her man live out his dream, but she didn’t know how much longer she could stand it here.

I
GNORING THE GENTLE RAINFALL
, Jennifer scraped more soil into the shovel and tossed it into a makeshift wheelbarrow.

Rain here was nothing like the gray, ugly torrents she’d experienced in New York, or California’s winter downpours. On Palmyra, showers were not at all depressing. They were warm and refreshing, something to look forward to as pure pleasure. They also meant renewed supplies of life-saving fresh water. Usually, as now, the sun still beamed during the showers.

Digging for scarce dirt had become a regular chore. Jennifer never would have guessed the difficulty of gathering garden soil on a coral atoll. It could only be found beneath trees and shrubs, but even there it was never more than a few inches deep. The natural flora thrived despite the lack of soil, undoubtedly because of the rich nutrients from the island’s abundant bird guano and decayed vegetation.

She wheeled her cargo toward the cement structure they were now calling the Refrigerator House. These days, the dilapidated refrigerator was powered by their own portable generator. In the time it took her to traverse those fifty yards or so, the rain stopped.

Buck, wearing only shorts and sunglasses, was on the roof of the building, spreading out the previous load of dirt. His sinewy muscles were slick from the warm rain, and Jennifer appraised him with a long look. She adored him.

Strange as it might seem, growing a roof garden made sense, as they had learned the hard way when they first moved a batch of vegetable and marijuana seedlings ashore. They’d left the tender little plants in paper cups filled with dirt on a broken-down picnic table. During the night, many of the shoots had been eaten, presumably by crabs and rats. After taking the remaining plants back to the boat, they searched for a spot that would be out of reach of the marauders. Eventually, they decided to plant atop the roof of the Refrigerator House.

Buck had built a rickety ladder and rigged a five-gallon bucket on a length of rope for hauling the soil they collected.

“We’ve got enough here now to plant a few rows,” he said.

Jennifer came back to reality. She knew what he had in mind. “The vegetables come first. We can’t eat dope.”

He chuckled good-naturedly. “Speak for yourself.”

Jennifer hoped that growing their own tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, carrots, and lettuce would eventually ease the long-term food situation. But it would not solve their immediate problem. The plants wouldn’t start producing for months, and as of now, they scarcely had one month’s worth of food left on the
Iola
.

“How much more dirt you figure we need?” she asked.

“Eighty, maybe ninety wheelbarrow loads.”

She groaned. Her back was already killing her, and she knew how hard dirt was to come by on this coral reef. “That’ll take at least a week if we work five or six hours a day.” She had no hope whatsoever that Buck would be so energetic.

She and Buck had already discussed what they would do if Dickie and Carlos didn’t show up with provisions next month, as scheduled. Before Jack Wheeler left the island, she had asked him if food was available at the nearest island shown on the chart, Washington Island, some 120 miles to the southeast. Wheeler said yes, that there were some Gilbertese natives living there, but that Washington was a “reef island,” meaning there was no channel, and in order to get ashore, a boat had to fight both the breaking surf and the dangerous coral reefs surrounding the island. The nearest island that could be reached where food could be purchased was Fanning, 175 miles to the southeast. Fanning, he explained, had a few hundred permanent residents, a general store, and, like Palmyra, a protected lagoon. But Wheeler had warned her that Fanning would be too difficult a voyage for a sailboat without a motor because they would be going against the wind. Instead, he suggested American Samoa, a much easier sail, he said, because of favorable winds and currents the whole way. “
Samoa
,” Jennifer had said incredulously. “That’s way south, isn’t it?” Wheeler confirmed it was more than a thousand miles south of Palmyra, but he nevertheless recommended it over Fanning. Jennifer couldn’t imagine a two-thousand-mile round trip to go grocery shopping.

They would try for Fanning, even though they wouldn’t be able to buy much with their very limited funds. But Mac had expressed an interest in buying their portable generator, the same model he’d meant to get before leaving home. She knew he would give them a fair price. Also, Jennifer hoped she and Buck could find some kind of temporary work on Fanning and earn money to buy additional supplies. She planned to stock up on the staples—flour, sugar, rice, beans. Also, they wanted to buy an outboard motor they could use on both the
Iola
and their dinghy, so they could troll for fish in the lagoon. Those supplies would keep them going until the following spring, when the vegetable garden would be producing. That was her master plan, anyway, while Buck was more concerned about getting the marijuana crop going. He was planning for their smuggling operation with the Taylor brothers to make them rich by springtime.

While Buck was thinking big, Jennifer’s attention was focused on basic day-to-day survival, for her the most unappealing aspect of life on Palmyra. She spent the majority of her time gathering and preparing food, like a woman in a third-world village. Making a batch of coconut butter took hours, beginning with collecting ripe coconuts—most of those on the ground had rotted—then grinding, blending, and cooking them. She and Buck had found a single banana tree on an islet across the lagoon, and they would row all the way over for just two or three bananas. Washing clothes and drying them in the humid air took half a day. Feeding the dogs—Jennifer prepared mullet and coconuts for them to supplement the shrinking supply of dog food—cleaning the boat, working on the garden…the chores seemed never-ending. “Paradise sure is exhausting,” she groaned to Buck. “We’re practically alone on a tropical island in the middle of nowhere, and I’m busier than a streetwalker when the fleet’s in.”

“Let’s pretend I’m a horny sailor, huh?”

Everyone on the island was invited to a potluck dinner at Buck’s camp on the evening of July 25.

Jennifer had cooked most of the afternoon, preparing garlic bread, an apricot nut loaf, and a coconut pudding pie, using flour and sugar donated by the
Shearwater
. Mac and Muff brought steamed potatoes and carrots, the last of the produce they’d bought in Hawaii.

Mac was impressed with how neatly the camp had been fixed up and outfitted since their visit on Jennifer’s birthday.

Muff observed that Roy had finally made an effort to trim his undisciplined beard and long hair. “He looked powerful,” she would later write to Bernard and Evelyn Leonard. “How I think Jack London might have looked.” His improved appearance was not sufficient, however, to dispel her growing contempt for the big man with ugly tattoos. “I don’t appreciate his bumming,” Muff wrote in the same letter. “Roy wanted more cigarette papers and tobacco so he came over the other night to get some from Mac. They need so much of everything. Well, I guess the only way to look at it—when we run out of things to give them, we’ll just have to leave Palmyra. That’s fine with me.”

Muff observed some young sprouts in paper cups and asked what they were growing. Without hesitation, Buck replied, “Marijuana.” She thought he enjoyed waiting for her reaction.

“And vegetables, too,” Jennifer quickly added.

Bill Larson from the
Shearwater
came to the party alone, bringing a bottle of rum and a canned ham. His shipmate, Don Stevens, had stayed in bed with a painful ear infection. A concerned Mac asked if they had any penicillin aboard and, when Larson answered no, went back to the
Sea Wind
and got some of the wonder drug for Stevens.

Buck had set up a record player in his tent, so while they ate outside next to a campfire, they listened to an album of love songs by assorted 1960s pop artists. Larson left early, taking a plate of food and Mac’s gift of pills for his sick friend. Mac and Buck adjourned to the tent for a game of chess.

Jennifer played chess too, and was quite good. In fact, Mac, looking for chess action that morning, had come over to the
Iola
and taken Jennifer back to the
Sea Wind
. She beat him in the first game, apparently surprising both of the Grahams. Mac asked for a rematch and, to his relief, convincingly beat her the next two games. He was, Jennifer realized, a tournament-caliber player. But tonight, instead of watching the men play, as she would have liked, she stayed at the campfire to chat with Muff, who seemed downcast.

From the first day they met, Jennifer had considered Muff inhibited. The conversation as they sat around the fire caught her by surprise.

“I never wanted to come here,” Muff said in a low, almost conspiratorial tone that wouldn’t carry to the tent. “I don’t see why Mac had to just pick up and leave.”

Muff stared blankly at the fire, which still radiated warmth from the flameless embers. “We had a wonderful life in San Diego. Lots of friends, really good people. Everything was so nice.”

Jennifer nodded, but said nothing. She couldn’t believe Muff was opening up like this and confiding in her.

“My mother and two sisters live in San Diego. It was important for me to spend time with my mother.”

Jennifer put a thick branch on the fire.

Muff wondered if she sounded pathetic or silly. Why was she trusting this aimless hippie with her innermost feelings? She didn’t particularly respect Jennifer. Not her judgment, not her life-style, not her choice of men. But…she was the only other woman on Palmyra.

“I keep trying to get him to leave,” Muff said, deciding to continue on. “He tells me to relax and enjoy myself. But I can’t. He says he’s here to discover something, but he doesn’t know what. Neither do I.” There was no bitterness in her voice, just unhappiness and bewilderment.

“Mac’s an adventurer,” Jennifer offered. She felt she had to comfort Muff somehow.

“Yes, he is. He loves living like this. He wanted to get out of the big city so badly. It got so he hated to read the paper in the morning. All the stories about rising crime convinced him it wasn’t safe to walk down the street in broad daylight. And he was sick of all the congestion and cars and wanted to get away. But believe it or not”—she laughed—“I wish I was back home in the rat race.”

“Well, I’m kinda glad to be out of the rat race,” Jennifer said, “but this place does have its drawbacks.”

Drawbacks
, Muff thought derisively. “Sometimes I find myself wondering what will become of us,” she sighed.

That struck a chord in Jennifer, but she was in no position to confide in Muff. She couldn’t talk about Buck’s fugitive status or share her many good reasons for worrying about the future. She and Muff were on this unyielding atoll for the same reason. Each was here because of her love for her man. But Jennifer’s need for secrecy meant that this fleeting opportunity for them to understand each other was lost.

“I know what you mean,” Jennifer said lamely. “I really do, Muff.”

S
INCE THE
Shearwater
was going to depart soon, letters home were written on July 30. Larson and Stevens would mail them from Hawaii.

Mac wrote his sister in Seattle.