The Great Wide Sea (9 page)

It was a good sleep. Like drifting off lying on the couch on a spring afternoon when birds are in the trees and someone is mowing his lawn. But the lawn mower stopped. I opened my eyes. I wasn't on the sofa. I heard shouting and bumping. The water outside the window glittered and then I heard Dylan calling me.

“Ben!” he was shouting. “Come up here! Hurry!”

I looked up stupidly. Gerry appeared at my feet. “Hurry, Ben,” he said, and raced away. “He's coming,” he yelled as I crawled out and stumbled on deck.

Dylan was crouched at the rail, holding on to the lifelines with one hand and to something far over the boat's side with his other hand. The thing was Dad. Dad was gripping Dylan's arm with his left hand and holding his right hand pressed in a fist against his chest. Blood streamed from his hand down his chest and pooled in the water.

“Bad cut,” he said through white lips. “I can't pull myself onto the boat.”

I reached over and grabbed Dad's arm with Dylan. We pulled together, but it was no use. We couldn't lift Dad's weight.

“Hold up your other arm,” I said. Dad lifted his right arm and blood pumped out of his hand and down his arm. I grabbed his arm. It was slick. Dylan and I pulled again, but Dad was still too much for us.

“The dinghy,” Dad said.

“And life ring,” I said to Gerry. He threw it overboard and Dad grabbed it as Dylan and I untied the dinghy from where it was stowed over the forward hatch. As we flipped it right side up, the emergency pack fell out. I shoved it toward Gerry, who held on to it while Dylan and I slid the dinghy into the water. Dylan held the towline while I lowered myself into the dinghy and turned its side toward Dad.

Dad grabbed it with his left hand and then lifted his right arm over the gunwale so the blood was falling into the dinghy. I grabbed under his right shoulder, and he pulled with his left arm. He kicked a few times, the dinghy rocked, and then he scraped on his belly over the side and into the floor of the dinghy.

Lying on his back, he held up his hand. “Pressure,” he said. I grabbed his hand and saw that the cuts sliced evenly across the inside of the second knuckle of all four fingers and through the middle of his palm. It was impossible to tell how deep they were. I pressed my hand against his and blood oozed between my fingers.

Dylan and Gerry stood on
Chrysalis
, looking into the water. I followed their gaze. Sharks. Not very big, but sharks. Three of them.

I turned and looked at Dad. Tears were sliding from under his closed eyes.

“Your hand hurts,” I said.

He shook his head. Then he spread his left hand across his chest and turned his face away. His lips barely moved. “I'm sorry,” he whispered.

I held his hand and squeezed.

 

That night Dylan and I sat out under the stars. I kept replaying in my mind Dad's bleeding fist clutched against his chest and the warm, slick feel of the blood when I grabbed his arm to pull him on board.

After we had gotten him on board, he had slowly opened his hand and begun to give us instructions—pressure, cloths, boiling water, antiseptic. We all worked, even Gerry, for an hour to clean and bandage his hand, to get everyone into blood-free clothes, and to clean the boats.

He told us what had happened. He had untied the knife from the line and kicked his way under the boat. He was holding a prop blade with his left hand and cutting at a tightly wound piece of sargassum with the knife in his right hand. Suddenly the seaweed split away and he dropped the knife. It balanced momentarily on the prop shaft. He grabbed it just as it slipped free. When his hand closed, it closed around the blade.

At lunchtime Dad had insisted that we eat. He sat in the cockpit fumbling with a sandwich, trying to hold it together with his left hand. Finally he let me cut it into four pieces for him. Then he let me pop the top of his soda.

“People manage with one hand all the time,” he complained, and then pushed the sandwich away. “I'm not hungry,” he said.

“Why don't you lie down?” I asked.

“I'm not tired,” he snapped.

“When I cut my foot,” Gerry said quietly, “Mom made me go to bed. She said getting hurt makes people tired.”

Dad drew in a deep breath. He paused, then sat back and exhaled.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll rest. Ben, if anything—
anything
—happens, wake me.”

I nodded.

Dad slept all afternoon. When he got up, we changed his bandage because it was bloody. He wasn't very hungry for dinner but sat quietly in the cockpit while we ate. Before long, Gerry went to bed, and then Dad, Dylan, and I were sitting in the dark.

“Don't you think we ought to take you to a doctor?” I said.

“No,” he answered.

“You're hurt bad. You need a doctor.”

“I'll be fine.”

“Maybe you need stitches.”

“They're not that deep.”

“What if they get infected?”

“I am not going to a doctor.” He stood, holding his hand against his chest, and carefully negotiated the companionway ladder.

Dylan and I were still as we listened to him climb into his bunk. Then we moved to the foredeck and lay down side by side. I expected Dylan to start a star lecture, but he was silent. Eventually I heard him breathing deeply. “You asleep?” I whispered.

“No,” he said quickly.

I propped myself up on one elbow and looked down at him. In the starlight I could see his cheeks were wet. “You're crying,” I said.

He didn't answer. I lay back down. His breathing slowly grew quieter.

“Is that the Pleiades?” I asked. “Just rising over there?”

“Yes,” he answered, but said no more.

“I never saw so much blood,” I offered after a while.

“Me neither.”

“Those sharks. They came from nowhere. They seem so stupid and then—”

“They're not stupid about blood.”

We lay in silence again.

“Right after Dad got in the dinghy,” I said, “tears were coming out of his eyes. I asked him if his hand hurt. He shook his head. Then he said he was sorry.”

“For what?”

“He didn't say.”

After a moment I went on. “I haven't seen him cry since we got on the boat.”

“Except once,” Dylan said.

“When?”

“The other day when you stayed on the island.”

I held my hands in tight fists. “You just think he cried,” I said.

“No,” Dylan said. “I watched him. He sat at the chart table after you left. At first he just stared. Then he covered his face with his hands and shook.”

“Then he stopped.”

“No. Then Gerry patted him on the shoulder and he took Gerry in his lap and then he stopped.”

I took a deep breath, flexed my fingers, and slowly exhaled. “What did you do?”

“I got out the Bahamas book and started reading about the Great Bahama Bank.”

I turned to look at him. “You weren't upset with me?”

“I knew you'd come back,” he said.

“How could you know that?”

“You're our brother,” he said. “You'd never leave us.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

DYLAN MADE THE best doctor. He was good at changing Dad's bandage. Gerry was good at handing Dylan the things he needed. I was good at getting out of the way.

They sat in the cockpit, and Dylan slowly unwound the bandage from Dad's hand. Then Dad held his hand out over the edge of the boat while Dylan washed it and poured antiseptic over it. Dad jumped and hissed every time the medicine hit his hand. Then Dylan rewrapped the hand in clean bandages and took the old ones to wash and boil.

Dad said we would stay until he felt stronger. For the first few days, he spent most of the time lying in the cockpit and wouldn't let us leave the boat. Gerry wanted to know if the sharks were still there. Dad said no, but he wouldn't let us swim anyway. Then he completely changed his mind and decided I had to learn to use the speargun. Fresh fish would be good for us, and our supplies would last longer. He made Gerry watch a fishing line off the stern and sent Dylan and me in the dinghy with the speargun. It took me several times, but I finally brought back a grouper. Dad stood over me while I cleaned it to make sure I did it right. He told me how to cook it, and we had a fish feast that night.

By the second week, Dad was much better and Dylan and I started taking the dinghy out just to explore, sometimes with Gerry. On the far side of Joulters Cay was a huge flat that lay bare at low tide. We walked out and felt we were walking into the middle of the ocean. We found conch hiding in patches of turtle grass and brought them back to the boat. Dylan wanted to eat them the way the Bahamians do, but we couldn't figure out how to get the meat out of the shell. In the end, we just put them back in the water.

When we got back to
Chrysalis
, Dad always had something he wanted me to do that he couldn't manage with one hand. Once he had all the spare lines out and was trying to coil them again. It took me an hour to get them straightened out. Another time he was trying to inspect the emergency pack while we were all gone and dropped it overboard. He had pinned it up against the side of the boat with the boat hook, but he couldn't lean over far enough to grab it. I don't know how long he had stood like that waiting for us to get back, but I know he was angry when we returned. I always did what he asked and didn't say anything. We would have just ended up fighting.

By the third week, he was ready to swim, so we all took the dinghy to the beach. Dylan, Gerry, and I started a hole in the sand while Dad swam back and forth, looking as strong as he had ever been. After a while he called to me, “Ben. I'll try the gun.”

I waded out and handed it to him. He held it in his left hand and carefully fitted his right hand around the handle. He winced as his forefinger reached for the trigger.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

I took it back and turned toward the beach.

“It's time to leave,” he said. “Don't you think?”

I stopped and looked back at him. “Leave?”

“Head south. To Andros.”

“Andros?”

“I'm rested now. We're running low on water and food. We've been here three weeks. It's time to go, don't you think?”

“Okay,” I said.

“That's decided then,” he said, and lay back in the water to float.

At Andros, we tied up at Morgan's Bluff just long enough to fill our cupboards with groceries and our tanks with gas and water. Then we anchored and went to look at the reef. The eastern side of Andros is edged with a shallow plateau that is only a few hundred yards wide on the northern end of the island but is a few miles wide farther south. The entire edge of the plateau is crusted with a continuous reef covered by only six feet of water. Just past the reef, the bottom plunges down a cliff to a depth of over eight thousand feet. The different kinds of coral on the cliff are so thick, they fight one another for space. Every shape, every color, every texture is laid out there in the water below you—and it's all alive.

Every day for a week, we dinghied out to the reef and swam. Though Dad's hand was getting better and better, he still couldn't handle the speargun, so I kept my job as chief hunter. Dylan positively identified a blacktip shark and started making a list of all the coral we had seen. And Gerry finally got tired of spending all his time alone in the dinghy. He didn't actually learn to swim, but he started getting in the water in a life jacket. At first he just held on to the dinghy gunwale to learn what the life jacket felt like. Then he held on to a short line and kicked a little bit. It wasn't really swimming, but it was as close as Gerry had ever gotten.

After a week, we hauled up the anchor and sailed down the eastern side of Andros, ducking into each of the little harbors along the way to stay for a few days before heading south again. We had to learn to sail inside the reef. Gerry handled the depth finder, shouting out the numbers every time they changed. Dylan was an expert with the charts, matching up what he saw in real life with the numbers and lines on the paper. I stood on the bow and watched the sea. Before long, I could tell the depth by color before Gerry even read off the numbers.

By the time we pulled up at Pigeon Cay before making the final run into Fresh Creek, we had developed a whole new afternoon routine. After anchoring, Dad and Gerry did boat chores while Dylan and I went fishing. Dad and Gerry were a good team. Gerry's hands were small but agile, and Dad was patient with him. Dad got done the things he wanted to do, and Gerry was learning—how to tie off a line, tighten a screw, handle the pliers—all the things Dad still had trouble doing. Dylan and I made a good fishing team. Dylan didn't want to use the gun, but he was good at spotting the best places to fish. I didn't have his eye for fish hideouts, but I had good aim and timing underwater. If we were lucky, we had fish for dinner. If not, we opened a can.

At Pigeon Cay, we were not lucky. Dylan and I took the dinghy out as usual, but soon clouds started piling up in the west, so we turned around and motored back to
Chrysalis.
When we got back, Dad and Gerry were not tinkering on the boat. They were reading in the cockpit, Gerry snuggled up next to Dad and leaning on his arm. Gerry was just finishing
Mike Mulligan
as the dinghy bow touched the stern.

I snagged the towline on the cleat. “I didn't know you could read.”

“I'm learning,” Gerry said. “In boat school.”

I nodded, then checked the motor and tilted it forward. At home, everybody was settled into classes. The leaves were turning and the nights were getting sharp with cold. But we weren't at home. We were here. Instead of sitting in geometry class, we were plotting courses on a chart. Instead of memorizing biology vocabulary, we were learning about coral, conch, and fish. It was a strange sort of school, but there were parts of it I liked.