The Pacific and Other Stories (47 page)

O
N THE SEA
the only law was God’s law, the physics of wind and blue water and the rolling of the waves that with continual urgency push boats across oceans that ring the world. War of any type is different on the sea, in that it is almost all maneuver. When ships are firing at other ships or planes, or planes are leveling to lock-in a torpedo drop, or a line of cruisers or destroyers is dueling, the immense force overwhelms mere men and contrasts with the delicacy of their existence. But even in the greatest tests of fire there is a sense of separation, a separate dignity, a separate identity. Sailors are delivered to war, riding, and even in the bloodiest engagements the sea cleans up quickly, quieting any chaos man can make and sealing the scene of battles with the inflow of innocent waves that whisper and relax.

In ocean racing you leave no track that lasts for more than minutes. Though each moment is fresh and dangerous, the rules never change: the only variations are in the way you play them. In racing, one moves not much faster than a man can run, tense and intent upon seconds, watching for maximum swell in the spinnaker, sensing the changing angle of the wind so that its collision with the mainsail leaves as little as possible of slip and escape. In this patient and continual sensing of that which cannot be seen, a sailor deepens in thought. Going around the world courting the invisible at every moment teaches not only that mystery has force, but that it can deliver.

That which cannot be seen, in this case something as simple and explicable as the wind, had propelled him around the world and called forth his unceasing attention lest an ungraceful move dismast or capsize his craft. That which cannot be seen had warned him of the storm far in advance of its coming. For ten days, subsumed by the rhythms of nature and necessity, he had been preparing for his final engagement, which now was rolling at him from across the Atlantic.

Though he was afraid, he was not afraid, and though his heart was broken he was happy. All the practical things had been taken care of. The money had long before flowed into trusts. Paintings and memorabilia were with Anna. The letters had been written, the plans laid out. In the last week, he had sold or sent the last of his valuable possessions. A few cartons of books were on their way through the mail. All he had left were his glasses, a watch, and clothing. In the bathroom, a toiletry kit. In the kitchen, a plate, bowl, wineglass, two pots, knife, fork, and spoon, can opener, and cutting board were the only hard items remaining.

In the days before the storm he had slept deeply and well, on the floor, with two blankets—one folded for a mat, the other, of the lightest weave, for the late hours when the wind made a cover necessary even on the Gulf Coast in September. Shorn of most things, feeling more and more agile as the storm approached, he found less and less desire to replay the scenes of his life. Now it was as if, in facing what was to come, he was able to pull from the past everything of value and make his peace with it so he could leave it behind. In truth, in leaving it behind as he had never been able to previously, a seal was set upon it. And when finally it left his hands and escaped his possession it took on a life of its own.

A
T THE MARINA
on the mainland most of the boats had been taken out of the water, a useless act, for the ocean would rise to lift them from their cradles and throw them inland to end their days smashed, demasted, and on their sides. The rain was already driving, though not yet in sheets and whirlwinds, and with everything battened down and wet, and the sky dark gray, it looked not like Florida but like Maine in a gale.

He was on the last barge, with the police, who had made their sweep. He guessed that within the hour not a single one of the fifty or sixty people on the barge or moving anxiously about on shore would remain. And there was not much more than an hour or two before one would not be able to navigate the passage out, even under power—and his boat had no engine. But it was an ocean racer, a Halifax 40, as stiff and strong as a lance, empty and light, with a keel that would enable it to hew to the windward side of the
channel, closer than usual because the depth of the water had increased with the rise in the sea. The barge had slid right over the dock that it had spent years butting with its prow, the swimming pool at the marina was inches and minutes away from the jailbreak of its waters, and the last-minute evacuees were rushing along flooded paths that were up to their knees.

He went to the shed where the luggage was stored when on holidays a crush of people went over to the island and the things they carried choked up behind them. Now it was empty, warm, and dark except for thin stalks of light pressing in through cracks in the siding. It was as good a place as any to listen to the sound of one’s own heart and breathing, to know that even this close to the end, with answers not yet apparent, they seemed, nonetheless, beautifully close.

In the shed the water rose, flowing wavelessly through seams that had conquered its resonance. In the darkness, with his eyes closed, he was battered by the images of those who were gone and those he would never see again; of his father walking with him on an Atlantic beach in sunshine and wind; of his mother, tranquil and beautiful, in a white wicker chair in the second summer of the First World War, listening to a little boy who could hardly talk, but as rapt with attention as if he had been Ralph Waldo Emerson; of his angelic daughter, sleeping, secure in his arms; and of his wife, when she was young, in the bow of the
Inverness II
as it dipped and rose in the sea off Lahaina, when, for a moment, the world was perfect. These insistent memories, of his wife as she threw back her head to clear the hair from her face, of his infant daughter, her eyes squinting into the newly discovered cold wind, her little hands held up before her face to protect it, these insistent memories, soon lost but to God, he would take with him into the sea.

H
E HAD THOUGHT
that time would pass very slowly in the confines of the shed, but it had raced, and when he looked at the tritium-laced hands of his watch he saw that he had overstayed. He unlatched the door, which the wind then threw open. Though they were yet to be stripped of their branches, the palm trees were getting ragged. He did not even have to look, but could sense that everyone else was gone. It was not quite like being alone
on the sea, but he felt a sense of freedom. No man would be watching him, no one to confine, judge, or proscribe except nature itself. You could not be lonely when you were completely alone, but only when you were close enough to others to fail them or to have been failed by them.

As if eager to run into the heart of the storm, his boat was bobbing urgently near the top of the pilings to which it was moored. It had not been constructed to sit at a dock or cruise idly in middling seas. It had been made for the lower fifties and the highest sea state, and when he stepped aboard from the dock covered by two feet of water, he imagined that the boat knew it.

In a quick and final release, he cut away from the moorings. Never again would he tie up. Never again would he maneuver into a slip. There would be no alteration of action and rest, but only action building without cease until it became eternal stillness.

The boat moved from its slip into the channel, cutting to windward, picking up speed. With just a yard of mainsail he was making fifteen knots and leaving foam. This running of the slot was complicated, for if he had blown to the lee of the channel he could never get back, and would die in the muddy bureaucracy of the mangrove roots.

But all was going well and fast. The keel, a great underwater sail and balance for the power of the wind, held him on course like a straightedge. The difficult part was yet to come, the race to the sea. It was a short stretch, but if the wind blew straight down this untackable slot he would never get out to open water. He had counted on the fact that the storm had a north by northeast bias and the channel veered slightly northwest. He would know at the turn, where the wind came freely off the ocean, undisturbed by the now rapidly disappearing island.

He wished that at the turn, eighty-five degrees to port in two hundred feet, he could lift the keel and skate into position, but the keels of ocean racers are not centerboards and do not lift in shallow water, and the boats they steady were never intended to skid.

When the time came he spun the wheel and tightened the mainsheet. The stern swung around in a graceful movement and the boat reoriented even before it reached center channel. All it had to do was break through the waves sweeping down the slot.

At the turn, these waves had been five feet from trough to crest, and at the end of what once had been the jetty, fifteen. Even before he left the last qualified embrace of land he was in the storm and the boat was flying across the crests and thudding against the troughs. Before he sailed beyond what had been the beach, waves washed over the deck and tried to take him with them, but his safety lines held.

Then he cleared the land and sailed into the violence of the storm, his boat battered near to death not even two miles from his house. This would not do: his desire was to reach the heart of the storm, where he would match its rage with equanimity. At the heart of the storm, he believed, he would find love. Why he thought this he did not exactly know, but he thought that if in difficulty the heart rose, then what could be more promising than the heart of a storm? He swung the prow west-northwest and ran close in, lifting the mainsail another few feet. In wind that screamed in the halyards he could have made good headway just sailing with the mast, but he wanted strain, and he flew forward at more than thirty knots. No one alive would have been strong enough to hold a tiller in these moments, and for him, because he was old, holding the wheel was almost unbearable, but he held it, locking it when he could, and unlocking it to trim when he had to, hoping that it would not be pulled from his hands and spun so that the spokes blurred and he would have to run with the wind until the boat detonated against a beach made invisible by colossal surf.

Although he had never seen a sea like this, he had been schooled in long-lasting storms that had not been so different, and he managed to hold and persevere. As he moved forward and the hours passed in cold and exciting agony, he found regions of waves so high that sliding down them was like falling from a cliff. As it got darker, the tritium hands glowed more brightly, he breathed hard, and the noise of wind and water was so great that it hurt.

And when he had been out for so long that it was night and great hills of foam appeared in a malevolent glow and almost broke over him without warning, he felt very tired and ready to sleep, and that, at last, he was closing upon the heart of the storm, a terrible darkness tinged with light.

D
OWN BY
S
T
. E
LIZABETH
’s, up from the river and toward the museum, just beyond where the Utrechtseweg parts from the Onderlangs, he died with the vision of his daughter Charlotte in his eyes. He had been lying in the street after staying impossibly long on his knees, unreachable by his men except those who, having come to get him against his orders, lay dead nearby. Descending silently toward the fields west of Arnhem in perfectly balanced September light, he had known it might end this way. He had known well enough at least so that before the glider came to rest upon the golden stubble of recently cut hay, he felt an upwelling of affectionate memory, of love, and of deep gratitude for all he had been allowed.

And that had been much, even if only for a short time. Charlotte had just turned eighteen and was now posted to an antiaircraft gun in Chelsea. To be stationed in Chelsea in any capacity was a prize, but it was hardly comforting to think of his daughter—the vision of whom as a child in her red dress he could not banish from his mind—in the semidarkness of London lit by its own burning, firing her gun against resurgent fleets of German bombers, air-breathing ramjets, and rockets. There was no comfort. That was the trick at the end, to understand finally that every comfort was in vain, and then to understand that comfort was unneeded, and thus somehow to rise into death reassured.

The glider pilot had been masterful when, cut away from the tow, he had come into his own. Aircraft crowded the sky like swallows, and after the gliders landed they sat upon the fields like the tank traps that look like children’s jacks, obstructions in the paths of those that followed. But the pilot of his glider, in a burst of brilliance and concentration, banked, circled, and swooped as all inside went silent and breathless, and found the one clear alley in a field littered with broken fuselages and shattered wings.

From the moment they landed they were raked with the fire of German heavy machine guns embedded efficiently in the woods, chattering as if to one another as they picked out the abundant targets. This ignited the fields and the gliders that lay pierced and broken upon them. A wounded man with smoke coming from phosphorus burning in his chest begged to be shot. They would not, or could not, and when the line of flame neared him, he shot himself.

The idea that Charlotte would be left alone was intolerable, but in the minutes remaining of his life he had accepted it. He had parted from her in a restaurant at Victoria Station. A beautiful blonde girl, she was miraculously awkward and nearsighted. “You don’t
aim
the gun, do you, Charlotte?” he had asked, and she had replied, “Oh, no, I’m the loader.”

He had come up from Aldershot for lunch, the last time he would see her except in indelible memory. Both knew that it would take other people at least a split second, and perhaps more, to realize that the major, of full maturity, was not inappropriately associating with a young private. Because of that, they were slightly reticent, as they had learned to be when Charlotte had grown tall and they went together in public, Charlotte’s mother having died when she was seven.

They looked very much alike, and to anyone with half a mind it was clear from facial structure and coloring, and the particular way that both were burnished by August sun, that they were father and daughter. “How are you coming along?” he asked, intensely interested in her answer, which, because she did not ever think in terms of how she was coming along, was lacking in specifics.