The Boatmaker (38 page)

“Fine,” he says. “That's a fair price.”

The brothers exchange looks of puzzled disappointment. They would have come down to a slightly more realistic price—still theft, but a little more reasonable—even if the boatmaker had not threatened to walk away. They wanted him to be shocked by the price but afraid to negotiate aggressively. They wanted to play with him the way a kitten plays with a baby bird in the angle of a stone wall. When he is not afraid and shows little interest in the price, they feel cheated.

The brothers lead the boatmaker out of the cave's main chamber and into a smaller side chamber. Wooden cases are stacked along the walls, stamped with the names of companies from all over the Mainland and Europe. In front of one of the stacks is his boat, lying on the sand, mast and sail beside it. The hull, fittings and trim, along with everything in the cockpit, have been covered with several coats of white housepaint. The compass is not with the boat. The boatmaker turns his back to the brothers, reaches into his sealskin pouch and takes out the amount the brothers have named. He hands it to the taller one.

“Why did you paint it white?”

“We were
taking care of it
. We thought you might come back. We wanted it to be in good shape.”

“Where's the compass?”

“Oh, we have that, too.” The slightly shorter brother goes through an opening at the rear of the chamber and returns with the compass. They have torn it out even more roughly than the boatmaker did before he pawned it. But it is intact.

“Help me get the boat down to the beach,” the boatmaker says, unable to bear being in this cave with these men for another minute.

On the beach he strips to his longjohns, keeping his gear in view. The brothers stand on the beach talking quietly in the accent of this part of the coast, where earlier ways of speaking have survived for many decades, even centuries, after they disappeared from the rest of the Mainland.

When he landed here, the boatmaker thought that perhaps all of the Mainland was pickled in the salt brine of its past this way. It was completely unexpected, since he had come from one of the most backward parts of the entire kingdom. Yet he landed among men who spoke a language that seemed old-fashioned even to a Small Islander. It took him only a day or two after leaving the father and
sons to realize that this stretch of the coast is a world unto itself, where old ways—both good and bad—have been preserved by isolation.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the brothers talking in low voices. He knows they still bear a grudge, would like to hurt him. He trusts their father will keep them from harming him while he stays. But he has no interest in spending any more time in this place than is absolutely necessary.

He looks over boat, compass, mast and sail, rudder and centerboard. Everything is there, though covered in layer after layer of creamy housepaint. The touch of these men on his boat disgusts him as much as if they had touched his own body. He asks them for tools, knowing there are many scattered through the chambers of the cave. They bring out a selection of tools, asking for more money, which he gives without arguing.

Among the things he chooses, he makes sure to take a whetstone and a large knife with a fine curved blade of German steel. He will sleep holding this knife and the sealskin bag containing what is left of his money and a note with a few words written by Rachel on their wedding night, when, for a few hours, two people who had rarely been happy were happy together, and each thing was in the place intended for it. Though the handkerchief from his
mother is long gone from his pouch, he remembers every detail she stitched there: the houses on the bluff above the harbor, the curve of the shoreline, the three harbor seals in green, one large and close by, the other two small and farther off, near the shore.

The brothers retreat into the cool of the cave, where they can watch the boatmaker on the beach, working in his long underwear. He begins by taking things apart. The thwarts come out. The decking comes off. The centerboard and rudder lie on the sand, along with the unstepped mast and his compass, which he has covered with his clothes.

Soon he is drenched in sweat. He strips off his longjohns, tears a rag into strips and fashions a loincloth and turban. He puts them on and works in the unblinking sun like a visitor from another continent.

He needs buckets and turpentine. He gets them from the brothers, who stand smoking in the back of the cave. He wonders how long it has been since they used their bonfire to decoy a ship onto the shoal. He wonders whether, if the time between wrecks is too long, they begin to fight each other out of boredom.

The brothers don't bother to hide their smiles when they see the boatmaker come up the beach into the cave dressed in loincloth and turban. But they give him what
he needs without demanding more money. They sense that his hand has closed. They saw the knife he chose from their goods.

The boatmaker dumps the brass fittings into buckets of turpentine and waits for the clear piney-smelling liquid to work. He begins removing white paint, layer by layer, from the hull. Under his hands, the wood of Small Island—maple, oak, spruce and pine—begins to show. He uses his curved knife, two chisels, a file and a plane to remove the paint. The boat is all curves, with few of the regular surfaces of a table or a chair. Each piece must be worked separately.

As he works, he thinks of Lippsted furniture and the craft of building without metal fastenings. He wonders whether a boat could be built entirely without metal. Then he wonders how things are for Rachel and the camp. By now Sven Eriksson has undoubtedly moved them to another part of the royal preserve, to prevent them from being discovered by less charitable observers than the birds of the forest.

The boatmaker has the feeling Jacob Lippsted knows what he is doing and that, even if he overreached in challenging The Royal Champion, he will be able to guide his people back to the capital and restore his relationship with the king. He knows that the hatred of Jews on the
Mainland will not disappear. But it may recede, as the spring floods of the mighty Vashad do, leaving behind splintered houses and wagons, bloated corpses of cows and horses, the earth rich and ready for seeding.

In the endless July days, as he brings the hull of his boat back out from under its coat of paint, the boatmaker's skin turns red, then brown. He makes himself a larger, more elaborate turban and soaks it in water several times a day while the brothers laugh at him from the mouth of the cave. From time to time he changes into his clothes and goes up to the little house on the bluff to sit and eat roast meat. The old man offers to let him sleep on the floor of the cottage, where he slept the first time he was here. The boatmaker declines and offers to pay for his food, an offer that is also declined. He descends rickety stairs to the beach and sleeps next to his boat, pulling his clothes around him for warmth. On this part of the coast, the nights are cool, even in July.

Each morning he wakes, takes off his clothes, dons loincloth and turban and goes to work. When the brass fittings come out of the turpentine, they are mostly clear of white paint. But each piece must still be worked with a knife and a rat-tail file to remove as many as possible of the last small white flecks. Then the fittings go back in the turpentine.

When he has finished with the fittings, he returns to the hull, decking and thwarts. The patches of wood grow until they are almost as large as the areas of paint. Then the balance shifts: The painted areas become islands in a sea of wood. Then those islands shrink to flakes. The work can't be hurried, and the boatmaker doesn't try, although he knows the end-of-summer storms are coming, and he should be on his way.

After many hot days on the beach, all the paint is gone. It has been demanding, intricate work to remove every last white dot, but he has done it. When the wood is clear, he examines his rigging and compass. The mast, gaff and sail are sturdy and unbroken. The compass is working, pointing north to the magnetic pole that lies beyond the most remote of the kingdom's northern islands. He begins varnishing the wood, giving it two and then three coats. He lets the varnish dry before putting the pieces of the boat back together, wood first, followed by the brass fittings. He mounts his compass on the foredeck, repairing the damage done by the brothers.

Then he begins caulking. Between every curved strip of hull, steamed to fit in the shed on Small Island, is a gap that must be made watertight. While the boat sat in the cave, the seams dried out and spread. Now they will be tight again, and the collection of lifeless pieces will
become a boat. When he finishes caulking, he hauls his boat down to the water, eases it in and stands in the sea, cold even in summer, a small brown man in turban and loincloth watching the hull swell and the seams tighten.

When the boat is seaworthy, he steps the mast and checks the rigging. Everything has survived. He looks the boat over one last time before provisioning it for the return journey. He will not put in at Big Island, so he must be prepared for the full sail of almost two weeks. He is late, he knows, too close to the late-summer storms between Big Island and Small Island. But the work could not have been done faster.

As he looks over his work, the image comes to him of the native islander on the bench in the barbershop, under the engraving of The Royal Champion. He goes to the brothers, who have in their cave almost everything that has ever been bought or sold on the Mainland.

In a small chamber he finds the sealskins he is looking for. He goes back to the boat and extends the decking over most of the cockpit, leaving a small square opening at the stern. Out of sealskins from the cave, he cuts and sews a parka like the one the native wore, with a hood fitted to his head and shoulders. He fastens the edges of the sealskin to the gunwales and makes the seams as watertight as he can. Nothing will prevent the fiercest storms
from drowning him, but the hood might help keep his boat from swamping in a storm that isn't too violent.

The brothers watch, nudging each other in amusement. Far from wanting to hurt him, they are now sad to see the boatmaker leave. He has proved more entertaining than they could have imagined before he arrived. When he leaves, he doesn't bother to say goodbye to them. He does mount the stairs to bid farewell to their father, who is surprisingly emotional.

His boat provisioned with bread and water, his head covered by his new sealskin hood, the boatmaker sets a course for Small Island, which is a gray dot over the horizon. His course takes him north of Big Island. He passes it after six days. A place that was once his goal, mysterious, alluring as a dream, is now just a small green smudge off to port.

The winds are from the south, strong and steady. He makes good time, bailing as the seams expand and the hull comes together and rides lightly on the swell. He stays awake, keeping an eye out for the storms he knows are coming.

Twelve days out, past Big Island, on the final leg, unable to keep his eyes open, the boatmaker falls into a deep, exhausted sleep. He dreams he is sailing his boat, which is much the same as in daylight. The voyage is the one he
is on. But in place of the familiar night sky an enormous wooden dome curves above him. The dome has been carved out of beams pressed together so that their square ends look down on the boatmaker. The entire bowl of the sky has been carved out of the endgrain, the hardest part of any wood to work, impossible to plane, saw or even chisel. Speckled through the endgrain like thousands of stars are dark dots marking the channels that nourished the living wood.

The boatmaker looks up, amazed. How could anyone have carved a dome stretching from horizon to horizon out of the endgrain, tough as iron?

Then, high above him he sees a single white gull soaring, its wings spread as it turns in a huge, lazy circle. One wing must have a blade on its leading edge, because the gull trails a shaving, smooth and brown. As the gull circles, the shaving lengthens and dangles over the sea. The boatmaker stares up, stunned. It would be impossible for the world's mightiest craftsman to produce a smooth, unbroken shaving from this much endgrain. Yet the gull does it without any apparent effort, as if it were simply gliding on the wind.

He wakes upside down, cold water in his lungs, not knowing where he is. Holding the little breath he has, he reaches into the boat, floating above him, for something
to cut the sealskin that binds him to the hull. Just as he is sure he will pass out and drown, his hand closes on the knife he bought from the brothers. In one final effort, he cuts the sealskin and swims out from under his boat.

The sky is dark. It is raining, but the storm that capsized him while he dreamed of the wooden dome of the sky has moved off. Rain is falling gently on the upturned hull. He gasps, filling his lungs with air, retching salt water, kicking slowly to hold himself up in his sodden clothes, then draping himself over the hull and holding on to the wood. He is sure he has been dismasted, but he can step the mast with the tools he has. Hanging on to the hull, chin on the wood, still coming out of the dream of the gull, he sees a dot up ahead. Dawn has revealed a tiny flaw in the horizon: Small Island.

It takes him twelve hours in and out of the water to right his boat, step his broken mast and bail enough water to begin making way. When he is done, he is half dead, chilled to the bone. His teeth will not stop chattering. He holds his jaw closed with one hand, tiller and sheet in the other. The sun warms him a little as he sails. Then the sun goes down, and his teeth begin chattering again.