The Boatmaker (9 page)

“
You're back, I said.
” She speaks loudly, as if to a half-wit.

“Yes.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I came back.”

“I can see that for myself.” She takes whiskey and cigarette, sips and smokes to conceal her smile.

“
I want to be with you.
” He feels as if the words are ripped from him the way seed was ripped from him again and again in the little room up the stairs. It went on that
way until each act was done in a realm far beyond pleasure or pain.

“I hear you met Stig,” she says calmly, giving no sign she has heard what he said.

“Stig?”

“The Warden.”

“The Warden?”

She inhales smoke and drink, looks him up and down with contempt. The innkeeper emerges from the doorway in his nightshirt, carrying a tumbler of whiskey. He sets it down in front of his wife, takes the empty and goes away, paying no attention to the boatmaker standing in the road.

The boatmaker notices how the clip holds her hair, which is the color of the drink in her glass. The hair is too thick to be caught completely. Strands push their way out and fall over her ears. From time to time she notices one and pushes it back, where it stays a moment before escaping again.

“
I came back to be with you.
”

She sips, appraising the boatmaker's unshaven cheeks, the purple around his eye, the dried blood on his cheek. She wants to feel nothing but contempt. But his condition and directness begin to soften her. She thought she had driven him away for good when his money ran out.
But now he is back, standing there bloodied, without pretense. There are no men like this on Big Island. Even the dumbest are smoother than this, better at presenting the face they think she wants to see. This man, who apparently lacks the shrewdness to put on any face at all, is beginning to melt the ice around her heart.

“The Warden takes care of things. Like a sheriff. Or a parson.” She waves her cigarette. She isn't slurring, but her gestures are bigger than usual. He knows that she never seems drunk, even when she's been drinking for days.

The need to hold her, pull her to him, is overwhelming. He feels like a man trapped in a burning house, walls and ceiling flaming down and every door and window blocked.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“A sheriff. Or a parson.”

“Yes, he's the Warden—of this end of the island. There's another on the other end. Stig may seem like a fool, but believe me, he's not. And he's not keen on having you around. I hear there was a lot of fighting. That wasn't smart. Doesn't do
me
a lot of good, now does it? Stig seems to think you should be on your way back to Small Island.”

“No.”

“Stig can be persuasive. And not just with words. He can have you locked up. There are worse things than the Hostel.”

“The Hostel?”

“The place where you slept last night. And the night before.” She snorts to show that he is as low as the dust on her many-buttoned shoes.

The boatmaker feels electricity flow through him, completing the circuit between the desire to protect her and keep her from harm and the need to choke her until her face turns blue, slap her until there's blood at the corner of her mouth. He stands stock-still, clenching and unclenching his fists.

The woman of the town sees his reaction and is pleased. If she is hard enough, this will turn out fine. She must simply ignore the warming she feels around her heart.

“Stig doesn't take kindly to residents of Big Island being beaten bloody. It seems you did that to several of our citizens before you were subdued. Of course, you look a little the worse for wear yourself. But Stig isn't concerned about that. It's
outside his jurisdiction
,” she says, drawling the fancy words as she exhales rivers of gray-brown smoke. She sees his face redden under the brown that comes from sailing on open water.

“
I came back to be with you
,” he says again with as much emphasis as he can manage. On Small Island, when a woman has been with a man, it usually means she
wants him to build her a house. Sometimes she wants to get married, though not always. He knows this woman is married. The woman of Small Island was married, too, and it didn't matter. He's pushed that knowledge aside and returned to claim her, to find out whether she wants him to build her a house.

He is deadly serious; she can feel that.
Don't soften
, she tells herself. One more hard blow should finish him.

“Do you have any more money?” She looks at him from under her thick unplucked eyebrows.

“Money? It's money you want?”

“Is that a surprise?” When he says nothing, she adds: “Well, do you have any?”

She lifts her glass and lets the warming, cooling whiskey run into her. She knows she's done it. The silent little man is crushed. She begins to enjoy herself the way she usually does when she's with a man. This one gave her a scare, but in the end he was no different from the rest—just less talkative.

The boatmaker knows how much he has left from their nights together: almost nothing. When he was in her room, it didn't feel as if he was paying for anything. He just let go and his money flowed out of him in a trickle, a stream and then a mighty river. Now the flood is spent. He turns away and heads toward the harbor, back
the way he came when he landed and climbed the stairs, first wood and then stone.

The woman of the town watches him walk away. The bald spot on the back of his head is round, the hair around it thick and brown. Monks have their hair cut that way. There is a word for it, but she can't remember it. They would know on the Mainland. Everything is different there. She remembers, as she often does, the beautiful restaurant she saw on her single visit to the capital. It was so elegant: the champagne flutes reflecting candlelight, the waiters buttoned into their starched shirtfronts, music pouring out over the snow-covered sidewalk. That is where I belong, the woman of the town thinks. Among violins, beautiful dresses, refined manners, heavy silver and leaded crystal. I will find my way there in the end. No clod of earth from Small Island will hold me back. He is gone—and good riddance. If he has the nerve to return after the way I have just humiliated him, I will handle him with ease. She lights a cigarette with a match taken from the box with the pink swan floating on the green diamond and inhales, feeling powerful and well protected.

CHAPTER 7

The boatmaker retraces the route he took to the Mandrake. On the crest of the bluff above the stone staircase he pauses, looking out over the sea, broad and green in the heat. He is in no hurry. No one is expecting him. On Small Island there are times when no one knows exactly where you are. But they know you are on the island or on the water nearby. Now he is in a place where no one knows him or his family, where no one will know if he walks out into the bay. He could find some heavy stones, put them in his pockets and keep walking, far enough so that the water comes up over his head. After a time the woman of Small Island would realize something had happened. She might think he had simply decided not to return. Or she might decide he had made it to Big Island, stayed there and drunk himself to death.

On this island, he thinks, life is not as it is on Small Island. Things have odd names. The Warden. The Hostel.
And some of those things seem to belong to no one—or to everyone. On Small Island each thing is owned by a particular person. Every house, boat, board, saw, adze, nail, bottle and glass, every table. Things are easily borrowed, often without much need for asking. But each thing belongs to someone. Nothing belongs to everyone. Except the sea.

The boatmaker thinks of the woman of the town, her half-smile as she looked at him standing in the dusty road and asked if he had any money. A tremor runs through his body from top to bottom. It is the rage he felt in her room. But now it is without the tenderness that mixed with it and made it something else. He begins to shake with so much anger he can barely stand. He makes his way slowly and carefully down the stone stairs.

His boat is as he left it, tied fore and aft. The tide is low and the double-ender seems to hang from its bow and stern lines. Two fishing boats, larger than his boat and painted dark blue, are tied farther out along the pier.

He goes down the last wooden steps, crosses the sand and climbs the pier. Two of the boys who were there when he arrived are playing with a crab, standing on either side of the cornered creature with a stick, pushing it back and forth between them. As he crosses the sand, the boys lean together and whisper. He knows he doesn't look right. And
not just because of the purple eye and the crescent of blood on his cheek. Behind their hands, the boys are laughing at him in a way they would be afraid to laugh at their fathers, the fishermen whose boats are moored to this pier.

In a few hours the tide will be higher. His boat will come up closer to the pier, and he will be able to step aboard easily. But the prickling sensation of rage under his skin won't allow him to wait.

Holding the stern line, he reaches until he feels the deck with his boots. He drops down, eases himself into the cockpit and releases the stern line. Everything is in place: tiller and rudder under the gunwales, centerboard stowed, sail lashed around the boom. Standing in his boat, he is aware of his body in a simple healthy way for the first time since he started drinking with the woman of the town.

In the bottom of the boat is a little water: an inch or two of brackish green that moves as he steps aboard. Although the boat has been tied to the pier for only a week, it already needs to be bailed out and hauled up onto the beach. Each of its seams needs to be worked over and caulked. He thinks about taking off his jacket and starting to work; it's a calming thought. He squats in the boat, feeling the healthy part of him return. He sees that while he has been on Big Island he has been
changing into something else—something that was in him but unknown. The woman of the town did that. At the thought of her, anger surges through him again.

He straightens up, moves toward the bow, the boat sliding under him. The compass is behind the mast, wrapped in canvas held down by a rope. He unties the rope and pulls the canvas off. Under its glass dome, the compass is almost as pristine as the day it was made in a factory on the Mainland, before it was mailed to the woman on Small Island, before his fever, before the dream of the blue wolf—before everything. He has polished it and kept a light film of oil on it. He feels the difference between the woman who gave it to him and the woman of the town; rage goes through him again. He reaches underneath the compass and pulls. Nothing. The compass is bolted with all his craft at the four corners of its base. He pulls again. Nothing moves. Red rage surges through him, blinding him. He pulls one last time. The compass comes up, tearing, splintering and leaving jagged holes in the deck. One of the mounting bolts is bent; the base and glass dome are unharmed.

He sets the compass down, takes off his jacket, reaches into the sealskin bag strapped to his chest. Inside is the handkerchief from his mother with the image of Harbortown and the three seals in green. He wraps the compass in the handkerchief and puts on his jacket.

With the compass cradled in his arms, it's not easy to climb up onto the pier. But he manages and goes along the pier and down to the beach. The boys are gone, leaving behind their prey, a translucent crab stepping into and out of a thin line of foam. The crab moves with a delicate, high-stepping motion, as if it wanted to avoid contact with the water.

At the top of the bluff the boatmaker hesitates. He knows he is going to a place he saw while walking the roads of the island. He doesn't remember exactly where it is, but there's a homing instinct in him, like a salmon's knowledge of the place where it was born. The salmon-instinct takes over, and he sets out on the dusty road to the main harbor and the town on the bluff. He has a feeling that the place he's looking for is on the outskirts of the town.

On Big Island people often stop to say hello to a stranger and offer him a ride to town in a farm wagon. But they don't stop to ask the small man carrying a bundle wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief. In fact, as they pass some people make a mental note to ask the Warden who the stranger is and whether he is dangerous. Paying no attention to their looks, the boatmaker keeps walking until the dusty trees at the side of the road are replaced by buildings, first old one-story houses, then larger houses
with stores nestled in between. Ahead is a wider road, the dusty wagons and buggies on it headed for the center of town.

He comes out of his salmon-trance in front of the place he's looking for. He must have passed it while he was deep in drink, at some point after he left the Mandrake and before he woke up at the Hostel.

His destination is a simple storefront with a big window in front that reaches almost to the ground. Behind the window is a space that looks as though it should hold a display of goods. But there's nothing on display—just a field of green, flat across the bottom and covering a wall in back that comes up to the height of the boatmaker's shoulders. On the window three disks are painted in gold, one above and two below. Under the three golden balls is the name
Cohen
.

The boatmaker knows almost nothing about Jews. On Small Island there are no Jews in the flesh. They are present only in the pastor's Good Friday sermons drawn from the Gospel of John. But there have always been whispers on the island about people from certain parts of the Mainland who came and settled, blending in and concealing their origins. Along with everyone else, the boatmaker heard the whispers, but they never concerned him one way or the other. If he knows anything about
Jews it's only because he read about them. Reading is an odd faculty for a house carpenter from Small Island. But his mother always had books in her house: the Bible and a few others, including a picture book with plates showing Vashad surrounded by his cloud of blackbirds.