“None of you do,” he said.
“I can drive,” said Simon.
“Sit. That’s all I want anyone to do.”
His fury was so calm, so calculated, that I trusted everything would be all right. I wished one of us had had the courage or the knowledge to reach across the cab and touch our father’s face to stop him, but fury is a contagion, and anger intoxicates young men. We drove without speaking or looking at each other. It was a raw gray morning. Gradually the woods thinned until power lines crossed overhead and the town streetlights swung color across the sky. We made the left on Wharf Street, and then another left, going down the marina road, graveled and pitted by too many years of too little money for road maintenance and too much hard weather. We were just beyond The Fish House, where the road went down a slight hill and turned around in a big loop dotted with pickups, traps, and buoys. The fish pier extended two hundred feet out into the water.
My father threw open the door and was gone. The truck had barely come to a stop. He reached back through the window and touched Simon’s shoulder. “Stay here with your brothers,” he said. “Keep the truck going.”
I hadn’t felt the fear until then. Suddenly my body felt weightless. I found I could no longer raise my hands or figure out how to push away what was happening. He was my father. I trusted him. Now he was halfway down the concrete pier. All around, men had stopped what they were doing. No one was stacking traps, coiling rope, checking gear. Everyone was staring.
Oddly enough, Lyman Creel was the last man to turn and look, and when he did, my father was already on him. The cant hook caught Creel across the face, tearing his cheek open. Lyman stumbled back into a stack of lobster cages but kept his balance. Then my father drove the wooden end of the tool into Lyman’s stomach. With the ocean crashing against the pilings, my father lifted Lyman as if he were made of air and dropped him onto the pier. Lyman tried to sweep my father’s legs out, but my father brought his boot down on Lyman’s knee with gruesome force. His howl was almost as loud as the crunch. Then my father was on top of Lyman with his knee pressed against the other man’s throat. He slipped the pliers from his back pocket and tried to peel Lyman’s mouth open. Lyman swung his one good leg around to twist him off until my father reached back and punched Creel in his knee. Pain provided the opening. The pliers slipped into Lyman’s mouth and gripped the man’s thick pink tongue.
Lyman went completely still then, paralyzed with fear, eyes huge. “Your kneecap might be broken.” My father’s voice was eerily calm. “But it’s likely just a dislocation. You have a deep laceration to your cheek. The blood in your eyes is from the laceration. Your vision is completely fine, don’t worry. I’m putting approximately eighty pounds of force on your carotid artery with my left knee right now. The reason you don’t feel tired from oxygen deprivation is adrenaline. Adrenaline is also the only reason you won’t immediately pass out if I tear out your tongue. I told you to leave us alone. I think you understand why I’m here.”
My father started to twist the channel locks, and Lyman tried to scream with his mouth full of fear and metal. Then my father let go. The pliers clattered to the pavement. He retrieved the cant hook and hurled it into the sea in disgust. No one had moved to stop the violence, and no one moved now to help Lyman, who had crawled up from the pavement and was yelling at my father.
“You’ve got kids and a wife.” Lyman tried to stand and let out a piercing howl as his knee buckled and he fell back to the pavement. “You’re crazy.”
My father dusted a spot of sand off his shoulder, shrugged.
“I should kill you.” Creel spat blood.
“You wouldn’t know where to start,” my father said. “Don’t come to my house again.”
My father had been many things in my life, but for the first time I had seen him become a monster, and I needed to kill the image, to push it from my head and forget it had ever happened. At night I woke constantly to the sounds of imagined sirens—I thought surely someone would come for my father. The river gurgled and the distant ocean waves droned on, and some nights thunder bellowed about the woods, but no one ever came, and Lyman never pressed charges.
It was late October. The air was crisp and bright and thin. Red, orange, and gold leaves turned the skies otherworldly. Yet none of us seemed able to stand each other. Our mother said very little. Our father cranked his angriest Mahler records in the shop. Back at the house we could hear each furious note as clearly as if a hammer were being dropped on a nail beside our ears. Two nights passed without our father coming in for dinner—he stayed buried in his work, hunched over his drafting table, planning the winter builds, our mother doing her best to keep from looking out the window. We didn’t know how to talk him back, to say, Hey, Pop, look. Hey, we’re here. It’s okay. Just come back to us.
On the third night, he came into the kitchen well after we’d finished eating. His face was tired, though his eyes seemed unnaturally wide and alert. Engine grease shone on his hands and smeared his coveralls. When he tried to help with the dishes, our mother lifted the plate she had been scrubbing and smashed it on the counter. “Don’t come in here and be helpful now,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from planning your next barbarian lesson.” He looked away, grimacing, and when he couldn’t find the right words, he reached out for her arm. Our mother lifted and smashed a second plate. This time a shard caught his hand, and a small dot of blood bloomed through the grease. She lifted a small clear water glass and cocked her arm. My father turned and left the room. My mother brought the glass down anyway, smashing it against the counter and grinding the shards down with her palm. She seemed then to realize what she’d done. “Oh, I’m a fucking fool,” she said. She held up her hand. Small chunks of glass sat in the skin. There was no blood yet, just light reflecting off the glass, so it seemed almost as though she were holding a tiny sun in her palm. Simon walked out of the kitchen and returned with tweezers and a bowl of warm, soapy water. He took our mother’s hand and, standing there at the counter, removed each shard of glass. He hummed quietly the whole time, a movement from Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” of all things.
“Prideful, reckless, all grand ideas and sulking guilt after.” Our mother jabbed her other hand around the room. “You’ll be like that too,” she said. “You’ll break my heart, but you’ll do it still.”
I wasn’t sure which one of us she meant. After he’d removed all the glass, carefully setting the bloody pieces on a dish towel on the counter, Simon washed our mother’s hand with soapy water and then poured the bowl of crimson water down the sink. Then he walked out the door with a plate of food and started for the shop, where Schubert was playing now—the impromptus, sad and contemplative. Link and I helped our mother finish the dishes. Link dried. I put the plates and cups away. No one said a word about anything.
When we came home the next day, our father had the truck running. “Get in,” he said. “We’re going into town.”
“To the boatyard?” I asked. I thought perhaps he’d finished the winter build schedule out in the shop that morning—it was my father’s habit to build one new custom wooden boat each winter, often a majestic sloop or a small ketch meant for day-sailing, in addition to the routine winter maintenance he did.
“To the hospital. To see Lyman.”
“What?” I said.
“Gonna bust his other knee this time?” Link scoffed.
Simon cuffed Link on the side of the head, and our father roared, “Enough.” Crows startled from the trees, darkening the sky around us. “He’s owed an apology.”
“He’s owed,” Link sneered.
“I owe him. You’re all coming with me.”
“Why?” Link asked.
“Because I want you to be able to remember what the right thing looks like someday, Link.”
Simon put his arm around my brother. “Come on, Link. Just give it up.”
I’ve thought of that drive often over the years. No one spoke. When my father rolle
d his window down, Link put his up. When my father turned the radio on, Link reached over and turned it off. Each countering action was another cut. I never again saw my father scold my brother. I think he knew there was nothing he could say to make Link forgive what he saw as weakness. In time he’d either see it differently, or he wouldn’t. My father had called Grace Creel that morning, and she had told him not to go to the fish pier. She said my father had taken too much away from Lyman already in front of others. She told him he would be at physical therapy at the hospital that afternoon, and that was where we went.
When we came in, Lyman was lying on a padded bench as a man flexed and put pressure on his knee. He swore with every degree the knee flexed, and I thought he might begin to cry.
“You’re hurting him,” I said.
“Don’t do that.” Lyman grimaced. “I don’t want your sympathy.”
The physical therapist didn’t seem to know what to make of the scene: a grown man standing with his head down, his three nearly grown sons around him, in the PT room in the middle of the day. “This is a hospital, come on, guys,” he said. “Keep the circus shit out of here. I’m just trying to do my job and go home.”
My father apologized for the intrusion. He seemed to realize now how inappropriate it was to be here. “Sorry, sorry for all this,” he stammered. “We’ll go.”
He had started to turn to leave when Lyman struggled up off the bench and said, “You came this far. Do the rest of it.”
My father turned to Lyman, and Lyman started to limp forward. The physical therapist moved to help him, but Lyman waved him off. He’d made it three shambling steps, his face all sweat and pain, when his knee buckled and he started to fall. I caught his arm and held him up.
“Jesus, Lyman,” my father said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“How’s your mother’s hand?” my father asked me a few days later. It was nearing dusk. Blue light gathered outside the boat-shop windows down at the marina. Since apologizing to Lyman, my father had been down here for days at a time, sleeping in the office with his work, grinding, calling his clients, trying to ensure that there would still be work as our family increasingly slid into the role of pariahs, trying, I suppose, to make his world normal again. I had stopped in after school to see him and spent an hour going around the woodworking and paint bays, cleaning up tools. Now we were up in the high office.
“She’ll be okay,” I said.
“I should have left her alone that day in the kitchen,” he said. “Thinking you can fix everything is cruel. It ends up with people hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “For everything. So is Link.”
I looked around at the boatyard in the soft late-fall light. The east end of the boat shop extended far out onto the pier, sitting only a few feet from the rock wall that held back the sea. During storms water would lash over the wall and smash against the shop windows and sometimes flood the building. The shop was laid out in a giant L, with boatbuilding bays set into the center, ringed by the woodworking shop and all its tools. The woodworking shop was two stories high, rigged with ladders and a balcony that hugged the L and whatever boat was at its center, allowing one man to work down below on the hull or keel, while another shimmied up the ladders into the lofted sky to work on the decks. Atop it all, as if set off in a garret, was a peaked third-story attic that my father made his office. It was walled and floored in rough-sawn, inch-thick hemlock, and he had cut the entire east-facing gable out and framed it in with windows so he could look out at the comings and goings of the sea while he made calls to clients or the lumberyards.
Walking by the boatyard in the afternoons, I’d creep toward the windows and peer inside. I thought it strange how this was the building, among all the buildings in town, that I was continually drawn to. It was simply a big barn down near the water filled with boats, and there was nothing particularly novel about boats: they surrounded us, supported us, were so common and expected in our lives that they faded into the ether, becoming as invisible and essential as oxygen.
“They speak to each other, you know,” my father said to me one afternoon, years earlier. I’d been looking into the windows near dusk, and I’d missed him when he’d come around the corner. He must have stood there a long time watching me lift up on my toes and peer into the darkened windows, my breath fanning a hot gray mist across the glass. When I wiped the moisture away with my glove, the boats seemed to have shifted a little.
“What?” I said, scrambling down, feeling exposed and caught.
“Boats,” my father said. “When they’re in storage like that for the winter, they speak to each other. They talk back and forth to pass the winter nights. Everyone knows that around here.”
“That’s outlandish, Dad,” I said. Simon and Link had long since grown bored and run up the street to the newspaper office, leaving me alone with the wild churning snow and the frosted glass and the gleaming, hulking ships inside.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s common knowledge, established fact, and why you all and every child who walks past that window has to stop to look inside.”
Over the years I had come to understand that the possibility of a whole community of people being wrong, even about something as irrational as boats being able to speak, was less likely than their being right. I chose to believe. Soon after I found a key sitting on my bedside table, and I instinctively knew it went to the boat barn. I must have spent hours sitting between those stored boats on winter afternoons, reading, thinking, watching the snow drift across the windows, breathing in the scent of cedar and the sea, listening to those vessels whisper and speak.
“How about you, Dad?” I asked now. “How are you?”
My father looked at me for a long time over a table filled with unfurled blueprints. I was about to apologize again when he said, “I’m okay.”
“Maybe it’s okay to not be okay, Dad.”
My father shivered, nodded. He grabbed his coat from the hook by the door, even though the woodstove was red-hot in the office. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.
I hugged my father, and we stood at the window watching the gathering dark for a long time. Thinking about his words, about time, and of course about regret, which was running beneath all he had said, I began thinking about the boats waiting to be built.
“I shouldn’t have done what I did to Lyman Creel,” he said. “That was too much. That wasn’t human. Your mother deserves better. Loving someone is a fight to keep taking them for who they are. Your mother’s as solid as the crust of the earth. She loves me stupid, but that doesn’t mean I get to stop trying to be better.”
“I know, Dad.”
“And the bateau too.” My father’s face was ashen, and his eyes were sliding about. He touched his throat, right above his collarbone. “I think I need to lie down.”
“Lie down?”
My father pushed papers and build plans off the couch onto the floor. I looked around again. Everything in the office was in disarray. My father did not lie down. My father did not do disarray. “Should I call someone?”
“No,” he snapped, pulling away from me at the window. “Stay here. Stay where it’s safe. The door is locked. Simon and Link are with your mother. I just need to lie down a few. Catch my breath. Think.”
Thirteen
I woke to the sound of a plane roaring above our house.
Since the odd contrition of our visit to the hospital, my father had continued his feverish work on the Citabria. Now the distant, metallic whine of the engine grew into a wail. Then red steel flashed above our yard. I was shocked as I watched the little red-and-white plane bank down the river, turn at the sea, and pass overhead again. I could just make out Arnoux in the cockpit and Reggie beside him. Then the craft passed into oblivion, racing back into the forest. Surely the plane was too low, too fast, these woods too narrow—but Reggie and my father had done the math and determined that the clearing by the plane barn was large enough for taking off and landing. That was
where my mother and I found my father, his flight finished, climbing down from the cockpit.
“It’s ready,” he said. His arms were crossed, and his face held a bewildered look, as if he couldn’t believe he’d just been up in the sky.
“For what?” my mother snapped.
“Public consumption,” quipped Reggie.
“I didn’t ask you. And don’t be clever right now.”
“It’s ready to fly, Falon,” said my father.
My mother turned to Reggie. “Of course you thought this was a good idea.”
“I wouldn’t say I thought it was a good idea. But it was an idea.” Reggie shifted his weight and glared over at my father. He said, “I’m sorry, Falon. I thought you knew.”
“But you never bothered to ask. Every day I wake up and remind myself that I expect too much. What a foolish idea, to think I might actually know what the people I care about are doing.”
“We need a different kind of attention,” my father said. “I thought we could print something in the Days for publicity. Not an entire article. Just a notice. The event is publicity enough.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“I’ll be safe. I’ll do everything right, Falon. You know I’m not a careless person.”
“No, but you’re becoming a selfish person. Your safety isn’t the problem. The Lowering Days is my newspaper. And this is my town too. Not everything is yours. Not everyone needs you.”
My mother walked off then, leaving me with my uncle and my father and the plane. Looking around, I realized I was no better than either of them. I had assumed my mother knew about my father’s strange early-morning tinkering with the plane, flesh and steel holed up together in that derelict barn in the deep, cold woods. Would I have told her, had I known of the deception?
I found my mother on the bluff, at the ghost apples. She was sitting with her back against the tree, picking blades of grass and whistling through them like a child. I came into the clearing and sat down in front of her. She looked like she was part of the tree. She looked like she had been there forever. We all went in pilgrimage to the ghost apples, but my mother was the only one who ever touched the tree. Our hands always stopped short of the bark, the branches, the fruit, as though we didn’t have permission to enter that world.
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