Of Song and Water (15 page)

He looks again but there's no one there.

Never once did he question his father's course. Never once did he get in the way. He punches the accelerator and the engine unwinds. But how do you stop a thing like that? He was too young. He barely made a sound in his father's world. Even so, he blames himself for being a willing accomplice, for working closely with his father, cleaning and repairing the ketch, making it Bristol, and then standing by in silence while his father, without hesitation, turned the ketch over to a collector of fine antiques, a trophy hunter, a man with no interest in sailing.

 

“YOU MUST be crazy,” says Otis, “driving up here in the dark like a bat out of hell.”

“I would've waited till tomorrow,” he says, “but I saw the light on – ”

“It's nearly midnight,” says Otis. “Suppose you'd rung at the wrong moment? What then?”

He checks Otis's collar for lipstick. “You'd ignore it, I guess.”

“Is that what you guess?” Otis chuckles. “All right, Jason, get your sorry ass in here. I just brewed a fresh pot. I guess I can spare a cup.”

He steps through the door and picks up the scent of coffee and old leather. “A couple of weeks,” he says, “and I'll be finished with school.” He follows Otis into the kitchen.

“What's your plan?” says Otis.

“Boston College,” he says. “They gave me a scholarship.”

“Then you're not really done with school.”

“I meant high school. I'm gonna buy a used car and drive to the coast.”

“Guitar going with you?”

“Naturally.”

“You want cream and sugar?”

“Black,” he says.

After handing off the first cup, Otis pours one for himself and stirs in two teaspoons of sugar and a lot of cream. “You swing by the old store?”

He shakes his head. “I came straight here.”

“It's still boarded up,” says Otis. “No businessman wants it. It's a sorry sight. I wish your old man was still there.”

“You teaching?”

“Off and on,” says Otis. “Every so often I get a boy who reminds me of you, but it doesn't pan out. Port Austin is a small town. Folks just pick up and leave.” He takes a slow sip of his coffee. “How's Detroit?”

“It's big,” he says. “I didn't know how big till I started driving.”

“You get downtown much?”

“Sure,” he says. “All the time.”

“But now you're heading for Boston.”

“As soon as I can.”

“That's how it goes,” says Otis.

He looks at Otis looking at his coffee. “How what goes?”

“You just got off Gross Ile and into Detroit and already you're planning to leave.”

“Wayne State is too close to home,” he says.

“That's true,” says Otis. “But there's more to it than that. Like me and everybody else – you get tired of the people you're with. You like to imagine
yourself in a neighborhood that's different from the one you're in. The whole thing makes me irritable.”

“But they're offering me a free ride.”

“That's not what I mean. I'm talking about staying with a place. When people pick up and leave, it breaks things up. It changes the landscape.”

“You left Detroit and New York.”

Otis nods. “I did.” He walks over to the sink and rinses his cup. “In any case, you're too young to settle down. You're right. You go to school. If Boston turns out to be your place, then stay there. You want more coffee?”

“No thanks,” he says. “I gotta use the can.”

“You got a room somewhere?” says Otis.

“No. I brought a sleeping bag. I'll go down to the lake.”

“Looks like rain,” says Otis.

“You think so?”

“The sofa's free. You better sleep here. It'll rain for sure if you don't.”

 

COLEMAN carries a five-gallon bucket. In it are rags, paper towels, oil, regular and waterproof grease, wrenches, screwdrivers, hose clamps, a wire brush, and a flashlight. He shifts the bucket from one hand to the other when he feels a cramp.

Sitting on blocks near the fence is a giant cruiser, a Chris-Craft, with a rotting hull. He's never seen anyone go near it. The local philosopher, a gaunt alcoholic, calls it a ghost ship – the yard's monument to damage and disrepair. Next to the cruiser is another wooden boat that looks brand-new. The river sparkles beyond the docks.

He keeps walking and takes a deep breath and tries to keep himself steady. Lately, when he leaves work, his clothes, even his hands, smell like beer. There's plenty of daylight left, he thinks. Humbug is better in the daylight. Loads of fresh air – and enough dreams and defeats to go around.

He stops at the
Pequod
, the smooth fiberglass hull curving away from him toward the bow. He bends and sets his bucket on the ground next to the ladder. I'll open the cabin, he thinks. I'll let out everything that's stale.

He pulls a slip of yellow paper out of his shirt pocket. He checks the list of jobs that need to be done. He knows the work is critical for both safety and comfort, but most of the repairs are more than he can do. Spring commissioning, or so H.M. liked to say, involves know-how, keen observation, and planning. “But it takes more than that,” he mumbles, realizing that in the yard, with the boat cradled and dry, it's easy to drift off, sink into currents of sanguine reverie, evade or somehow deny the fact that there's no real hope at Humbug, no chance, without talent, money, and time.

He looks around. No one else is out this early, he thinks. A jump on the season should count for something.

Even with the snow almost gone and the sun shining, Humbug offers little more than gray, silver, and white. He tells himself that Jen would plant flowers here. He remembers in the darkest months how she often came home with bouquets for the kitchen and bedroom, with French soap, honeysuckle or lavender, for the dish on the pedestal sink.

In Tobermory, the houses on the harbor are red, yellow, and blue
– a line from a letter long ago, and now he repeats it like the chorus of a song. “In Tobermory,” he says out loud, “the houses on the harbor are red, yellow, and blue.”

 

HE THINKS of the call from Cape Hurd and the journey to salvage his father's boat, the trip unfolding in the last spring of the millennium, the scent of warm earth rising around him like fog. The long drive made him feel cramped and stiff, a bit older than forty-five, as he sped across the Ambassador Bridge and passed through Windsor in a flash, traveling north through Ontario and up the Bruce Peninsula to arrive unannounced at Jennifer's door.

She didn't seem flustered, not even surprised. She brewed tea, Darjeeling,
and talked as if there were no time or distance between them, as if the long years of his marriage had somehow been forgotten.

They sat at the kitchen table. “Welcome to Tobermory,” she said.

The word flowed from her like music, a sound quite different from the one he'd known as a boy, the sailors on Lake Huron dividing the word into stiff Midwestern syllables. He basked in the comfort of her voice. Did it flow like water the first time? Or was it later, when she whispered Tobermory in a dream?

As far back as Boston, the stories began, with Jen going on about her grandmother's house and the summers she spent there as a girl, about Big Tub Harbour and its century-old shipwrecks. He listened, taking in as much as he could, building a picture of Tobermory in his mind, making it the town they'd run to if need be, a refuge he thought of as perfect, knowing then that to go there and actually see it would destroy the possibility.

“When Granny died,” said Jen, “she left me the house. I was settled in Boulder, thought I'd stay there forever, so it wasn't simple coming back.” She poured a second cup of tea and described how the journey had filled her with misgivings, but then, magically, arriving by water, she'd felt the tension in her shoulders give way, glad that Bay Street, the seawall, and the fishing boats, all washed by the late afternoon light, looked exactly the same. A hush fell over her mind, a serenity she'd known only in her grandmother's house, the storybook house that might've been built in Edinburgh or Amsterdam, the house that she finally claimed and where, like her grandmother, she now lived alone.

He raised his cup and remembered their days together in college, sleeping late under thick blankets, holding her close when she woke startled from a dream. “All that I wanted then is forgotten now, but you,” he began to say, but his voice sounded strange, almost absurd, so he stopped after the third word and helped himself to another biscuit.

She'd never been far from his mind. Her face was there, he sat thinking, and
the days we lived without worry or plans, walking endless streets, going home to sleep in rented rooms, then lost each other somewhere, now unclear, except for the orchard and the October light.

She'd said, “Come back or not. You won't find me.” But from the day he married Maureen to the day they split their property, even on the day Heather was born, he'd always known where Jennifer was. He might've gone to her hoping to win her love back. Instead, he waited until tragedy forced his hand, until news of his father came from Cape Hurd. Then he drove straightaway to Tobermory.

He made no expression of regret or hope. He chose only to drink tea, play the part of an old and tired friend, a man who'd come to visit for no other reason than the fact of business nearby.

Jen took his nonchalance in stride. “When they found your father's boat,” she said, “I wanted to call you. I always thought Dorian was a little like me.” She looked into her empty cup. “But then I made up my mind that you'd come. And here you are.”

“I have to haul it back,” he said.

“When will you do that?”

“I have to hire someone – a trailer and truck.”

“Will you sell it?”

“Store it,” he said. “At least for now. Probably Humbug.”

“What's Humbug?” she said.

“A marina. He kept it at the Ford Yacht Club. But Humbug's closer.”

She took the cold teapot to the sink and rinsed it. “And you're sure?”

“About what?” he said.

“That it was no accident,” said Jen.

“No. No accident. He knew how to read the sky. The storm was huge. Every inch of canvas was up when they found the boat.” He wanted to tell her
how lovely she was, that it was good to see her again. He complimented the house. “It's exactly as you described it,” he said.

“It's my home,” she said, sitting down, brushing crumbs from the table.

He nodded. “I don't see that you're like him at all.”

She took a minute before she answered. “Maybe it wasn't the right thing to say. It just seems to me now, thinking of him again, that he was always on the water, always slipping out. After Halyard & Mast went to pieces – ”

“He killed it, you know. He brought the place down like – ”

“I know,” she broke in, “that's what you always said. But he seemed chained to it even after it was gone. He was never free of it. He wanted to be, but he never figured out a way.”

He sat back in his chair. “And what about you?” he said. “What are you chained to?”

“Nothing,” she said. “So maybe you're right. We're not the least bit the same.”

 

THE MUSIC of her voice is always with him, the round vowels and soft consonants, even now, having come here in the April thaw to make the boat ready, to wax the faded gel coat, check it for crazing, a sign of uneven stress, and look for deeper cracks, making sure the laminate underneath is still sound.

He sets the wax and mildew remover on the ground next to the bucket. Since the close of Halyard & Mast, every marine supply he's been in seems small, a sorry excuse for a store, a bad imitation. It chills him to think of Halyard & Mast's surrender, the fits and starts of its sudden death.

He remembers the first sign of its passing: his father's nameplate, DORIAN MOORE, black letters on gold, half buried in a mountain of coffee grounds in the Dumpster behind the Port Austin store.

My old man made a killing, he thinks, standing next to his father's boat. In
his quiet and steady way, he liquidated H&M's stock. He reordered nothing. He let the shelves and the display stands fall into disarray. He stopped answering the phone, fired the bookkeeper, and gave the cashiers and the manager time off to look for other work. He took offers from wholesalers and scavengers buying inventory on the cheap. He did all this after the suicide, after cleaning, repairing, and putting the ketch up for auction.

He checks the ladder for stability, rests his left foot on the bottom rung. He remembers, on his sixteenth birthday, his father boarding up the stores in Bay City and Port Austin, dismantling in three years what took more than thirty years to build. He can hear his father saying, “Your grandfather was Halyard & Mast. Not me. He's dead now. So's the business.”

Back then, the disposal of H&M felt like a killing. He still thinks of it this way and wonders why it stays with him. It's true that he'd always loved the water and the boats, the quiet movement, but he lacked his father's talent. He cared more for a landlocked dream. So why should it bother him now? Suppose he'd been the favored son in full possession of the family gift. Would it have made any difference? His father, after all, threw in the towel, chose to give it up. He wonders what it means to kill something inanimate, a dream or an idea. But then he returns to the matter at hand. He knows it's the nature of things to be seen only once. Everything must die for a while before it can be remembered with affection.