The Year of Broken Glass (20 page)

It is also thought to be the etymological origin of “St. Elmo's fire”, the name given to a particular phenomenon witnessed often in the midst of thunderstorms. A searing, flame-like blue or violet can be seen at night emanating from the tips of tall, sharp objects, accompanied by a hissing or buzzing or crackling, as of fire. It is this sound that Francis and Miriam have heard projecting from the mast and bowsprit throughout the early evening, and as night falls the darkness makes visible its luminous glow. Miriam has seen this once before while crossing from La Paz to Puerto Vallarta with Yule, so she knows it for what it is: a coronal discharge; the result of what's known as an electron avalanche, an exponential ionization of the air. They are both in the cockpit when the blue becomes visible, each unable to rest in the heaving tumult. The sea has turned sinisterly unpredictable, sending waves at them from every direction, and though the rain has ceased, there is a constant churning of ocean spray in the air.

“St. Elmo's fire!” she hollers to Francis over the racket of the thrashing waves and wind.

 
“I see it,” he calls back, holding the wheel hard to their downwind course. “What the fuck's happening on this boat?”

She laughs at this, leaning into his side. “It's natural. It's an electrical charge thing, like the lightning.”

“It's fucking spooky,” he says to her now, and she can tell that he's kidding, but also means it. “They didn't say anything about this storm on the network last night,” he says, and she sees now what's spooking him. His first offshore storm. A storm in sight of land, within the vicinity of safe harbour, is one thing. But out on the open ocean, at the full mercy of the elements, it's something entirely different. It can make a coward of the most courageous, a whimpering miscreant of a moral man.

Miriam can see that Francis is fighting to hold to the sane side of fright. “The
Belle
is built for it. She can take whatever the sea throws at her,” she says, not wholly believing her own words as she speaks them.

“Natural or not, those things are freaky.”

“They're supposed to be a good omen,” she says. Francis doesn't buy it. His empiricist underpinnings may have been shaken by last week's sightings, especially the looming, but it's still a long way from where he stands to the realm of petty superstitions and religious faiths. She tries a different tack. “If they didn't even mention it last night it can't be more than a little system blowing through.” It seems a reasonable enough line of logic, and she decides to follow it. “I mean, how bad can it get?” she hollers at him as a massive wall of water broadsides them and she's forced to brace herself against the awning struts to keep from falling to the deck. It's a question she regrets asking just as soon as it has passed through her lips, and she realizes that her attempts at reassurance are as much made for her own sake as for his. So she trains her eyes on the little blue flare atop the mast and says a little prayer to their patron saint.

The Beaufort Scale
 

IN 1805, ADMIRAL Sir Francis Beaufort developed what is known as the Beaufort Scale, a twelve-point scale meant to help sailors estimate wind speed by way of visual observation. Beaufort's answer to Miriam's question, “How bad can it get?” is Force 12,
Hurricane: The air is filled with foam and spray. Sea completely white with driving spray; visibility very seriously affected.
Doesn't sound so bad until one considers what kind of weather would constitute a
sea completely white with driving spray
: mammoth waves perpetually cresting and breaking, colossal walls of water curling over troughs as deep and wide as canyons. Pure, uncompromising chaos.

One of Francis's closest childhood friends took a job on a black cod and halibut boat when they were just out of high school. The
Bull Performance
, a ninety-foot steel-hulled trawler converted to a longliner, was a boat built to beat the weather. At the tail-end of the halibut season, late November, after a month of fishing the furious gale-driven seas south of Cape St. James, the southernmost tip of Haida Gwaii, the winds flared from Force 9 to Force 11,
Violent Storm
. The skipper bucked the Bull Performance into the fifty-foot waves and roaring wind for two sleepless days and nights before their luck expired and a massive wave broke over the boat, slamming with its full weight and force against the two-storey steel cabin, blowing out every storm window and shearing the walls from their welds. The crew abandoned ship, and three of the seven, Francis's friend being one of them, never made it out of the black and icy water into the inflatable life raft. The next night the surviving crew was found hypothermic but alive, drifting in the aftermath fifty miles southwest of where they'd signalled for help, just thirty miles downwind from where the
Bull Performance
was found, still afloat, its cabin twisted and set back six feet onto the back deck.

It makes Francis weak to his very core thinking of it now as the wind and waves rise around him. He's always sworn he would never fish the open waters; that he'd never put himself at the mercy of the merciless wind. And yet here he is, at the wheel of a boat he doesn't know the capacity of, one he's never seen more than a six-foot chop in, in the middle of the North Pacific. The sails are near-bursting with wind and the rigging is a clangorous cacophony of straining steel. He leans to port and pukes his guts out. He hasn't the slightest clue how to sail through this storm as it ratchets up moment to moment.

The lightning has ceased, St. Elmo's fire has extinguished, and they're in one dark, howling cavern now, sailing downwind with the main reefed halfway down, which might seem the preferable direction, not having to scale the front face of cresting waves growing steeper and taller with every successive ascent. But Francis knows better. He knows every time the boat catches the crest of a wave and careens down into its trough, gaining speed until it slams into the base of the wave-back before it, is the height of seafaring danger. The boat's centres of gravity and buoyancy go ass over snout every time it surfs down a wave, and it's only a matter of time before the centres slide past each other and the boat does the same, flipping aft over bow. It is the cause of the majority of all capsizing occurrences, and Francis knows they're sailing on the brink.

But there is something that happens inside a person at sea when caught inside a storm. There is a point where fear surges into further territory. Into grandiose fright. The eye of the sailor peers inward and finds a reservoir of defiance not normally called upon and not often known of until that moment. A moment of fierce self-awareness. Francis shifts into this state, with a steeled resolve. To survive. To meet the storm head-on, with strength and will, and not surrender his clarity and dignity to the raging sea. A very sad, very human posturing in the face of a power so much greater than we are the mind balks at the magnitude, then reduces it through such devices.
So that's how it's going to be is it? Alrighty then. Bring it on, baby!
A product of adrenalin, ignorance, fear and delusion. But it works for Francis, gets his equilibrium re-established, gets him in the game when Miriam emerges from the cabin with a harness and a plan. “Put this on and clip into the jack-line,” she yells over the wind. “We've got to reef the rest of the main down and batten down the hatches.”

The wind has reached Force 10,
Storm: Very high waves with long overhanging crests. The resulting foam, in great patches, is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. On the whole the surface of the sea takes on a white appearance. The “tumbling” of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like. Visibility affected.
Stability affected. The ability to steer the boat affected. To work the rigging and sails, to reef them in, affected.

“Wait until I tell you, then spin the wheel to starboard,” Miriam instructs him, calling through the driving rain. “We've got to get the nose to the wind to get the sail slack.” She hands him the boom line. “Haul this in as the boat turns to the wind. Keep the boom steady.” She snaps into the jack-line and jumps out of the cockpit.

Francis doesn't have his contact lenses in, so he squints hard into the pelting rain and the foam-furrowed dark. The boat is keeled so far over, walking the deck is like traversing a mountain slope of rushing water, the hull shuddering underfoot as it slams to the bottom of another steepening trough. Miriam struggles along, half-hanging off her connection to the jack-line on the upside of the slope. When she reaches the mast she raises her arm in the air. And when she spins it above her head in the starboard direction, Francis spins the wheel.

Erasmus of Formiae
 

THE
EXACT
REASON for St. Erasmus's designation as the patron saint of sailors is in fact a matter of contention and speculation. The story of his initial torture and persecution is but one supposed origin. As another tale goes, he was giving a sermon on a ship at sea when the sky suddenly darkened and a tempest descended. Undeterred by the storm, Erasmus is said to have continued preaching as the sky filled with wind and rain and lightning, one of the bolts striking him clear in his praising, uplifted hand and surging in a crackling flash through his entire body, igniting the floorboards at his feet. And still he spoke the word of God.

Here's another speculation. The origin of his other saintly designation, that of intestinal ailments, of colic in children and the cramps and pains of women in labour, is undisputed. Legend has it that after having his limbs and neck stretched on the rack, Erasmus somehow escaped his Roman captors. He fled to Mount Lebanon, and for a time survived in the wilderness on the scavenged scraps the local ravens fed him. Eventually recaptured, he was brought before Diocletian's co-emperor, Maximian, who once again had him flogged with whips and beaten, then stuffed into a barrel full of protruding spikes and rolled down a long hill. Following his barrel-roll, he was coated with pitch, set aflame and thrown into a dark, solitary dungeon to starve. Again he escaped and roamed the Roman provinces emboldened, preaching the story and message of Christ, converting pagans to Christianity, until he was again recaptured in Salona, the capital of the province of Illyricum, in what is now Croatia. This time he was sent directly to Rome, back to Emperor Diocletian, who ensured this would be the last time Erasmus would be dealt with. He had his men spike him to a table and carve his stomach open. Then he had them cut his intestines away from his abdomen and wind them around a windlass. A windlass, the same device used to haul a ship's anchor from the ocean bottom.

Intestinal pain? Stomach ailments? Francis's retching attests to the seafaring relevance as he again heaves his guts out onto the deck at his feet. He can't stop, and is near useless, despite his recent resolve not to cower in the midst of the storm's anger, its obstinate aggression. He drops the line Miriam gave him and the boom swings free on its hinged clamp, port to starboard, with each pitch and roll of the hull. He lunges forward, groping on the cabin roof for the boom line, but is blinded by the pelting rain and the tears welling in his eyes from his stomach's spasmodic convulsions, so he doesn't see the line or the boom as it swings toward him and slams him in the head, knocking him down, instantly unconscious, folding like a torn sail untethered to the deck.

St. Vitus's Dance

HE
WAKES
INTO a bright beam of light. Hears Anna calling from somewhere far beyond its source.
Wake up
, she is saying.
My God, I can't do this without you. Wake up.
He feels her hands on his skin not because of their coldness (his flesh is as frigid), nor their rhythmic kneading on his naked chest (he's gone numb), but because they are hers, and he would know them anywhere.

•

A pool of darkness. It sways and rumbles and pounds. Like inside a hollowed heart. The thrum of omphalos blood. Anna, six months pregnant. He comes inside her, then dissolves between her legs, his head on her belly, ear to her womb.
Hey little one
, he whispers. And the little one responds, a gentle nudge to his skull from beneath her skin. Afloat in that warm saline dark.

•

He's convulsing and she's holding him, trying to steady him, trying to soothe. It moves through one limb, then another, St. Vitus's Dance, an inaudible measure moving in his mind.

 
•

Willow has the blunt edge of a maul rap-rap-rapping on my skull. Anna's watching from the window with a smile.
Open your eyes,
she's saying.
Open your eyes.

•

Weeping. Wrapped in a warm body weeping warm breath in his ear.
Anna? Miriam: the boat: the storm.
Fear, a convulsion cascading from the coccyx to the crown chakra, a pulsating stream. The fontanelle gushing out and sucking in the dream. The way an infant comes to this world with the other still clutched in its eyes, dark portals, diminishing in this world's wanting light.

•

When he resurfaces from beneath the waves of shock and concussion, it's to the wind-chime ringing of the stays and halyards lightly clanging. The hull gently rocking on the settling seas. The smell of metal and sweat and salt, and Miriam, her smell of grasslands and apple cider, enwrapped in her legs and arms and chest. He puts his hand to her face, the air passing lightly from between her lips. He puts his lips to hers and pulls her warm air in, little ventilator, resuscitator, spirit bellows.

•

It is said trauma and orgasm are two of the temporal paths to timelessness, to God. To be concussed is to be set adrift on an ocean of ethereal unknowing. To fuck is to dive in, shallow or deep, as many depths as swimmers and crystals of salt. To orgasm is to dive down to the stars—a wormhole loop—and for an instant and an eternity at once, brightly burn.