The Year of Broken Glass (27 page)

But on the
Belle
, the fuel tanks full of water and crud from the contaminated dregs of the holding tanks they filled from in Nawiliwili, she is drifting on the northward current further into the windless zone. The shortwave is overwhelmed with news and calls for help as a result of the massive simultaneous earthquakes in India and southwest of Indonesia occurring just days before, and of the ensuing tsunami damage to shoreline countries throughout the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, and Francis's calls for help go unanswered while Miriam, green-faced and weakening by the hour, drifts in and out of agonized delirium.

Without surgery there is nothing to be done for her. Francis finds an old prescription of T3s in Horace's head closet and tries to get her to drink them down, but they come back up in a pool of blood. She writhes through the days, drying and parched, the sun beating hot and unrelenting down upon them. Nights he lies beside her, in her rancid bed, and tries to sleep though she twists and wrenches, whimpering in the otherwise eerily silent darkness.

In the daylight he busies himself trying to get the main up and running. He drains the fuel lines and then refires the engine, rigging a clamp-and-cast-iron-frying-pan contraption to the ignition button so the starter will turn over while he bleeds the air from each injector. A couple of times he gets the engine to start, only to die within minutes as it again fills with water-contaminated fuel. The fourth afternoon, grease-smeared and defeated, he stands beside the engine, sweat dripping from his forehead, listening to the silence following the engine's once-again failing. He knows he won't be given another chance, the batteries too weak now to power another round of cranking the flywheel over.

Miriam groans from her bed below the bow. Beyond her closed door he hears her coming to, in unfathomable pain, and he's stripped to conceding that his attempts at restarting the engine have been admittedly futile; that they've been nothing more than his way of doing something, anything, in the absence of knowing anything else to be done, not wanting to give over to the inevitable death being brought on beyond her door. He lifts himself out of the engine room and replaces the floorboard. Climbing to the cockpit he scans the horizons. Identically unbroken, unaltered blue in all directions.

The first two nights of her sickness he'd fired flares up into the night sky, hoping to be seen from any boat over the horizon. But nothing. They're alone out here with whatever evil or ill energy has descended upon them. He thinks perhaps a jinx fixed by the float they failed to deliver soundly, by whatever consciousness it has which sets the ground to shaking—as it most likely has now in India—and sets the seas to swallowing the land.

He strips off his clothes, climbs onto the taffrail and dives, swimming as far out underwater as his lungs will allow. Then he resurfaces and continues swimming away from the boat, the water cool and enlivening around him, until he finally stops and spins onto his back, filling his lungs so he can float and stare up at the sun. He considers which will take more courage, to exhale and sink, or swim back to the boat, imagining the long, cold descent into the depths juxtaposed with Miriam's dying in her foul bed. As he turns his back to the sun and starts swimming for the boat, having made his choice, he feels like nothing but a coward for having done so.

•

Francis realizes that, though he can't fix her, can't save her, he can come out of his shock, his panic and lack of presence, and in so doing there are things to be done to alleviate for her the worst of her suffering. He makes a bed of the salon and cockpit cushions above deck, at the bow of the boat, and carries her carefully—her bones turned brittle beneath her skin—from her stateroom to the open air. He lays her down, her body aflame with fever, and places sea-soaked towels over her naked skin, her gaunt, flaccid limbs so swiftly deteriorated from those toned and smooth that he'd groped and held less than a week before. In the sun he can see her body greying before him, her eyes darkening and receding in their sockets, and he knows it won't be long until she's gone.

For the past few days nothing but faint, indecipherable whimperings and whistlings, like light wind through cracks in a thin wall, have passed from her lips. He lies down beside her finally to listen. Inside the pain she is cutting the threads that connect her consciousness to her body. She imagines herself like a seamstress working to reset an elaborate garment,
snip snip
, go her little scissors. With each strand cut she recedes from the pain, further into a plane of light that flares with each beat of her struggling heart. From that place she felt him carry her from the dimness and into open sunlight, so she is surrounded both inwardly and outwardly by it, the heat unbearable but for the cool cloaks of water he sets across her.
Snip snip
, she cuts herself away as he lies down beside her.
Snip snip
, inside the red, sun-stained dark behind her eyelids.

He washes her, limb by limb, and holds wet cloths to her lips. He places his hand on her distended abdomen, but she winces, so he instead holds another wet cloth to her forehead, stroking the feverish sweat from her hair. When dusk comes he brings the sheet from his bed and lies beneath it beside her, speaking of their past month together, of his childhood, his own children, anything to keep the sound of his voice calmly flowing into her ear. He imagines it helps her, his being there, though for her his lilting voice is like a faint and distant seabird's calling carrying from the shore out to the boat she is on, the
Misty Girl
, with her two girls on the back deck and Yule at the helm, steaming away from the rising sun, out to the fishing grounds for another day of hauling and setting.

•

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'twas sad as sad could be; and we did speak only to break the silence of the sea.
These verses—Coleridge's, though she thinks of them always as Yule's, the words he'd whisper in the morning to break the days of silence that would always follow whenever they'd have a roaring fight—these verses sing for days at the tip of her tongue, until on deck there in the early morning light she lets them pass by her lips, the iron taste of blood in her mouth, into the waking, windless air. Francis rouses from his sleep to the sound of her recital, comprehending
to break the silence of the sea
, as he comes to, a rush of hope lifting him to sitting as he does. He looks down at her eyes still sunken and dark, her skin lined and sallow, aged thirty years through these days of agony. Her searching eyes find him, as does her hand. He cradles it in both of his, cold and empty as it already seems, as the life lifts or falls from her eyes, he's not sure which, only that it's gone, she's gone, instantaneously so. There's no sense of her still in the body beside him, no lingering warmth of spirit to attend. Just this inexplicably wrecked body, the gas passing from it, vulgar and sickly. Death, in the guise and withered form of the woman he'd given himself over to, in fever and fear, and found in return a clarity of mind and heart he'd long thought lost; a clarity coming now into infinitesimal focus, coming terrifyingly clear in the absolute aloneness he's caught within.

The Horse Latitudes

HE
ROLLS
THE limp body into the sea. It flops like a rag doll over the deck-edge, arms dragging and slapping against the rail stanchions and the hull before landing with a splash supine upon the water. Upon, because the body floats, buoyant beside the boat, its wide eyes staring up at Francis as though with recrimination. As though to say,
How could you abandon me?
Though Francis knows he's only anthropomorphizing what is now no longer human. Death, in the guise and withered form.

Lowering the dinghy off the
Belle
's stern into the water, Francis climbs in and paddles to the bow where the body nudges the hull. He ties a line from the stern to the body's arms, then he paddles out, away, all the while cursing the name of Horace for being so old-fashioned as to have a rowboat, not a powered skiff, for a dinghy. Had it been otherwise he may have devised a way to attach the small outboard to the
Belle
to use as a makeshift kicker, and in so doing he may have been able to drive them southward back into the wind. Then Miriam's fortunes may have been different; maybe a ship with medicines and medical personnel would have noticed his flares or responded to his calls for help. Maybe she'd be recovering and he wouldn't be towing this bloating, ruined vestige of her upon this desert of ocean.

A few hundred yards from the boat he stops and unties the line from the stern. The water is flat as glass, no swell, so the body lies still, unmoving. Francis waits beside it for a few moments. Forgetting himself, he sends a small prayer out for her in his mind, to wherever, whatever might be listening, though it's more from some sense of protocol that he does so. There's nothing out there. Francis can feel it, the vast emptiness of the air around him. If there are gods, or a God, they're not with him now. He has half a mind to keep rowing, and rowing. He thinks of that wife and husband from Vancouver Island who crossed the Atlantic by rowboat and lived to tell and write of it, to speak on the radio and tour their story across the country. To gain fame, and some fortune, by the fruits of their endurance. As he rows back to the boat he thinks of the story he'll have to tell of these weeks at sea, and with this thought the implication of Miriam's death seeps into his mind like a fear-borne contagion and he begins to consider the possibility he too may not survive. And then he thinks further, for the first time in weeks, beyond his immediate predicament, and wonders if he does survive who in his life—his children, his women—might still be alive to hear it?

•

Francis has left the dinghy tied off to the taffrail, floating in the relentlessly slack water, and occasionally he rows away from the sailboat, filled sometimes with a flush of false hope, sometimes with fear, sometimes with the emotion, less extreme, of out-and-out boredom. He's moving slowly northward on the current through the world of no-wind he's stranded within, but without any points of dead reckoning to reference he has no way of knowing this.

So the day after her passing, after an afternoon and evening spent in utter inertia, sleeping and staring into the emptiness of the air around him, he starts taking stock. He empties the galley cupboards of all their contents and determines he has food for another fifty days, sixty if well rationed. Beneath Miriam's bunk he finds two bottles of champagne, a corkscrew stashed between them. A night's worth, a celebration. He wants to drink them down fast, consecutively, but he places them instead back beneath the bunk, good keeping for when and if needed, and turns instead to the realization of his first major oversight: water.

There's no agreement amongst mariners or historians as to the etymology of the term,
horse latitudes
. The most accepted and agreed-upon theory of its origin comes from the time when there was a great amount of trade between continental Europe and the West Indies via the seas. It's said that quite often, stranded in the crossing of the subtropical high, Spanish sailors would be forced to corral their trade-horses overboard so as to conserve the water they required. Another, less popular theory contends that the horses were driven mad by the hot, stagnant skies, and were thrown to the sea so the sailors could be rid of their beastly insanity. Less popular still, some accounts insist the horses were in fact kept on board and slaughtered so the sailors could eat of them and drink of their blood.

With the batteries drained low from his many attempts to fire the main, the little one-hundred-watt solar panel won't provide the high amperage required for deep recharge. So although he's getting enough juice from the sun to keep the radio and lights on and the inline water pump delivering water to the galley tap, the desalinator won't make it past start-up surge, which leaves him only what's left in the storage tanks to drink from, plus any unlikely rain that might fall. Without tearing the boat apart so that he can get a good look at the size of the tank, he has no way of guessing how much water remains. He needs help. It's all he can think as he contemplates himself parched, dehydrating to death in the inescapable heat. In hindsight he sees that all the while he was trying to restart the main he should have been conserving battery power and focusing on somehow attracting rescue. Which leads him to his second oversight, which he will never see clearly, but will lead him to his third, which he immediately will.

In the first few days of Miriam's dying, consumed as he was in the panic and shock of the inexplicable thing that was happening suddenly inside her and the Murphy's Law scenario of simultaneously losing propulsion power, he'd obsessed over starting the main engine, stopping his wrenching only to tend to her and occasionally send out a distress call on the shortwave. Several nights he had spent hours radioing out into the ether without result. Why hadn't anyone answered? Sporadic chatter came through as always, but when he called out, no one called back.

He looks over the shortwave but all he sees is a simple radio with a volume, channel and squelch dial. He checks the handpiece connection at the back as he has many times before and as always it's secure. If he were to unscrew the radio from its mount and turn it upside down, he would find on its underside a little recessed toggle switch labelled
CALL STOP
. It's one of the many silly customized retrofits Horace decided upon, a means to prevent any future grandchildren from sending out a false SOS call while inevitably playing, against his “captain's rules,” at the nav station.

What Francis hasn't known, and what Miriam in her agony had unsuccessfully tried to tell him several times, moaning almost incomprehensibly the two words, “stop calling,” whenever she would regain cognition within the pain long enough to try—what he eventually misunderstood as her request for him to stop calling for help and instead tend to her, to be with her while she faced her final hours—was that she switched it on when they first left Hilo Bay, afraid that outgoing communication might alert any possible pursuer to their position. A superfluous precaution taken in the midst of the fright-induced, unreasonable paranoia they shared and reinforced for each other those first few days following the ambushed meeting with Sunimoto. So Miriam had lay dying while he hollered frantic pleadings for help that were never transmitted. It wasn't, as he had thought in the absence of any other explicable reason, that there was no one listening within his transmission range, or that all emergency monitoring had been narrowed only to the areas affected by the Indian quakes.