by Ferenc Máté
We ate in the salon. Nello savored every bite of sliced pork with hot peppers and shrimp and noodles smothered in garlic. Only once did he look up to say, “Charlie, you’re a godsend.” Then he saw me push my food around on my plate. “You miss your flapjacks, don’t you?”
Now that the ketch stood still, Hay had regained his confidence and played the perfect host. After some slugs of rum he and Ernie were old friends; after dinner they sat back and had their pipes, and Hay questioned Ernie about logging up here in the wilderness with as much interest as if he had nothing else on his mind.
They had built a skid road up into a valley where there were cedars ten feet across. Took two men two days to saw one of them through, and fourteen oxen to drag it down here. The oxen had stampeded down a slope with one of those logs chained behind them, and he had kept driving them as hard as he could because if they slowed up, the log would have made chopped meat of them all.
Ernie asked Hay about his trip.
“Very fine,” Hay offered. “Exhilarating. But to be sincere, I’m not used to a boat being on its side. Had quite an ill effect. I prefer motor yachts that stay flat on their bottoms. My wife, on the other hand—”
“Even more so,” I cut in.
“Oh, women.” Ernie laughed. “Solid land is what they like.”
“No, no,” Hay insisted. “More than anything she loves sailboats.”
Nello’s cup froze at his lips.
“Especially,” Hay continued, “since Captain Dugger so very patiently taught her how to sail.”
I couldn’t look at Nello.
There was no air in the cabin, just pipe smoke and rum fumes, so I went above. A land-breeze had blown away the mist, and the moonrise was so bright I couldn’t see a star. Saturday night laughter came from the floathouses and through the windows I saw the loggers “climbing wall”—running full speed at it in their cork boots to see who could get highest before falling to the floor.
Nello came up into the darkness and walked past me without a word. He pulled out his cigar stub, lit it, took two long drags, then blew a cloud of smoke into the moonlight.
“So. You gave sailing lessons to the Welsh girl. Right?” he said. “The one that knit my sweater?”
There was a lull in the laughter and I heard Hay’s voice from below. He was talking about Indians and their artifacts, masks especially. Had Ernie heard of a Kwakiutl from way up coast—with a white squaw—passing through here in the last few days, loaded down with masks he might want to sell?
“You were right.” I finally said. “About her paddling the canoe.”
He was too angry to answer.
“Rolf saw them,” I went on. “And you were right about them moving at night. They came out after dusk.”
He sat down on the coaming and sucked on his cigar.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” he said, blowing his smoke toward the open hatch.
“I don’t know.”
He picked up from the deck one of the lines he had whipped that afternoon, squeezed the dew out of it, then hung it on a spoke of the wheel. He stared at me hard. “You met her just once, right?”
When I didn’t answer, he said, “It is her, isn’t it?” He turned and spat a bit of tobacco in the sea. “I knew we were hexed, but I never thought this bad.”
There was a huge thud from the houses, followed by laughter.
“It’s not serious,” I tried to assure him.
“Who are you kidding? I know you. For you even flippin’ a flapjack is serious.”
Lanterns began to go out in the bunkhouses and the night fell silent. Ernie swayed up the companionway ladder feeling no pain. “What a night, gentlemen, what a night. Lovely food, lovely company.” Hay came up behind him. Ernie brimmed with gratitude; he wanted to host us for a Sunday breakfast with a real surprise here at the world’s end, genuine maple syrup. Then he bade goodnight and walked home over the log booms with his unlit lantern creaking as it swung.
“What a beautiful moon,” Hay said softly.
“Mr. Hay, we have some news,” Nello said with as much calm as he could muster. “The lighthouse keeper thinks he saw your wife. Last night. After dusk. They were catching the tide.”
Hay just stared in confusion.
“They were a distance away.” I said. “And it was pretty dark. He might be guessing.”
“Was she all right?”
“Seemed fine. Sitting up.”
No one spoke for a while. Even the wind fell still.
“Thank God,” Hay said at last.
10
NIGHTSAIL
It is lucky for children to be born at new moon. It is unlucky to be born at nighttime. Then they will not live long.
—FRANZ BOAS
Lost in thought, Hay pulled out his pipe, struck a match to light it, but forgot to suck and the match burnt down and he threw it in the sea. He clambered over the lifeline down onto the logs and ambled away into the night.
Nello puffed hard on his cigar—I had never seen him take more than two drags at one lighting. From the bunkhouses came the sound of a fiddle playing a slow tune.
“Mr. Hay, sir,” Nello called out firmly. “Please don’t go too far.”
“I’ll be all right,” Hay replied.
Nello looked at me, and when I didn’t move, he snuffed out his cigar on the chainplate and, as the breeze scattered the sparks, said, “It isn’t that, sir. It’s just that we’ll be setting sail any moment now.”
I stared at him but he went on without looking up. “Because Captain Dugger has calculated that they’re about twenty miles up ahead, and the captain thinks that if we don’t catch them before Devil’s Hole, the first set of big whirlpools, we might not be able to catch them at all before they reach their village. In that case, we might have a nasty problem on our hands. Isn’t that what you said, Captain?”
I nodded in agreement. But he was crazy. To sail here at night! With the eastern strait littered with rocks and islands, and the waters full of deadheads that could hole a hull better than a rock.
“There is moonlight and a light breeze,” Nello went on. “And the current is with us. Isn’t that what you said, Captain?”
“Word for word.”
Hay seemed suddenly clear-headed. “But shouldn’t we have left hours ago?”
I began to say something but Nello’s words came first. “The captain wanted to be sure the wind stayed up,” he said. “And that the mist didn’t return and block the moon. To sail safely, sir, we need good moonlight.”
I sounded like a ventriloquists dummy. “Need moonlight.”
Hay picked his way back toward the boat. Nello went forward and began untying the main.
The fiddle played and a voice sang along, “Midnight on the water, so steady and slow / Pour us another drink, set them up Joe.”
WITH NO LANTERNS lit and only the sails shedding moonlight, the ketch sliced across the sheet of silver sea. We had even gutted the lanterns down below and turned off the chime on the ship’s clock because sound carries a long way over calm water. We spoke only when we had to. They might be just ahead; why alert them? The stern wake sighed below the transom, then shone long and white, bent northward by the current. Hard shadows lay on deck; the world was black and white except for the faint flame of the harbor-entrance lantern far behind.
To the west, Texada Island rose like a wall; to the east, snowcapped mountains shone white on an indigo sky. We were crossing the tide line with its trail of torn kelp and sea grass, and Nello went into the bow to watch for logs and deadheads up ahead. Hay sat in a corner of the cockpit holding his unlit pipe. There was no sea running, so our motion was slight, and he seemed all right, if a bit pale in the cold light. We were doing less than four knots, so we tacked often to stay in the middle of the strait and let the strongest part of current take us north. Once clear of the tide line, Nello came back to announce, “So far, so good.”
My neck was tightening from staring hard ahead, or maybe it was th
e night air, or maybe nerves. Nello was right: I took things seriously. Too damned seriously. Had to learn to enjoy what I had: the wind, the moonlight, the ketch. If only she sailed faster. My mind had drifted and I had gone off course and pointed too high, luffing the sails. They slatted loudly until I fell off again.
“You have good eyes, Captain,” Nello said, looking over the side. “I wouldn’t have seen that deadhead to save my life.” I turned back and saw the round, dark shape bobbing in our wake. But it bobbed too much for a deadhead—it was just a flimsy sawn end of a log and Nello knew that. I took a deep breath.
The breeze stayed steady, bringing warm air from the land.
“Mr. Hay,” Nello began. “After the Kwakiutl left your yacht, you didn’t notice a piece of your clothing missing, did you?”
“No,” Hay replied. “Why?”
“Because when we Kwakiutl want to hex somebody, bewitch ‘em, we take a piece of his clothing, and some strands of hair.”
“Yes,” I said. “Have you counted your hair lately?”
“I’m afraid it’s serious business, Captain.”
“I quite agree,” Hay piped in. “I studied many of Boas’s field papers. Years he spent with the Kwakiutl; and witchcraft was the thing they feared most. If you were found out putting a spell on someone, you could be put to death. Isn’t that so?”
“Sure is,” Nello said. “At least in my village.”
“Which was that?”
“Qa’logwis. Crooked Beach.”
“I heard it’s a beautiful area,” Hay said wistfully. “Tiny islands in a gentle inland sea.”
“Islands everywhere,” Nello said, “Like a maze. Some are just rocks, some with a few twisted spruces, others a tangle of salal bushes so dense you can walk on them. Mist and rain, fall and winter.” He paused. When he started up again it was like someone telling a story to a child.
“That’s when the spirits come. And that’s when your soul wanders off in the mist and you get sick. That’s when a hex works best. If you go down to the water, you can sometimes coax it back inside. If not, a pexala, a shaman, comes and gets it back for you. Sometimes not. Then you die. Then we take you over to the little island across the way and lay you on the salal bushes.”
He fell silent and stared at the waves. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bore you.”
“On the contrary,” Hay burst out so loudly I had to tell him to keep it down. “I am an anthropologist. I collect Indian objects not just to have them but because they tell stories. It’s part of the science. But objects are only second-best story tellers, when there’s no one left alive to tell them; nothing can replace an oral account. The most precious are personal stories. My respect for your people is profound; nothing fascinates me more than their stories.” Then he added almost as an afterthought, “Even under the circumstances.”
“Mine aren’t what you call scientific material. Just stories.”
“They might be that to you, but for me it could be a gold mine of information. Take one of your creation stories. They tell not only the mythology, but hidden in there is so much ethnography, from foods to clothes to habits.”
“Well.” Nello laughed. “I have one of those. Of our na’mima, our big house. Na’mima means ‘one of a kind’—family—wives, kids, brothers, uncles, cousins. There were eight na’mimas in our village; our tribe. Our tribe was called Kwexa, Murderers. We had a bastard of a chief and one of the na’mima chiefs put a knife in his neck. The tribe broke up. Some moved away. We stayed. Some call us Kwe’xamut, Those Who Stayed After the Murder. Charming name.
“Anyway, each big house too has its own name, its own fishing grounds, hunting rights, berry grounds, and—believe it or not—its own creation story. Myth at the end of the world, we call it. I guess we mean the beginning end. Our name was Echo of the Woods and you’d never guess in a million years why.
“They say the Great Inventor had a beautiful stepdaughter—so of course he wanted to make love to her. He told her to prepare for a feast with a nice bath in the river. So off she goes, naked except for the tiny cedar apron between her legs. He ran into the woods and cut some yellow cedar—it sparks like hell—and set it by the fire. Come by the fire and dry yourself, Inventor called to her. She came and squatted and then he threw the yellow cedar in the flames. Well, sparks flew and her apron caught fire and burnt off the hair between her legs. Off she went, moaning, to her sleeping house, moaned all night that she was so hot she couldn’t sleep. Inventor went to her and whispered, ‘My dear, I know who can help you. He’s called Echo of the Woods. You go and call his name and he’ll answer back, “Yaa. Yaa.” Like that. When you are near, be silent, just feel around. You’ll recognize him from his magic member. You lie down on it and it will ease your pain.
“The girl went out into the woods and called, ‘Oh, Great Echo.’ ‘Yaa. Yaa,’ came the reply. When she found his member, she lay right on it and in the morning her mother found her in her bed sleeping like a baby. And from her were born the first people of our na’mima. Now, doesn’t that beat some old guy breathing onto a lump of clay?”
Hay snickered with laughter. “That’s the best creation story I ever heard. But you are half Italian. Catholic. What do you say about God creating man?”
“I say forgive and forget. I, for one, have forgiven Him. We all have our bad days, don’t we, Cappy?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Lately all my days have been bad.”
“Yaa. Yaa,” Nello said, and got up. “Should we tack?”
We came about and the sails slatted and sprinkled us with dew. A light burst right behind me in the night.
“Dammit, Hay!” I hissed. “Put that thing out!!”
Hay froze, his face lit red by the clump of flaring matches he held above his pipe; but he kept the clump of matches flaming until his pipe was lit—then he threw them in the sea.
“I’m very sorry, Captain,” he said. “I thought aiming the light behind us wouldn’t do any harm.”
“We don’t know for sure where they are. No more matches. And no pipe. Please!”
Nello went forward and pretended to check the headsails. When he came back he sat and seemed to be studying Hay’s face.
THE MOON SHONE clear in the middle of the sky. Nello sucked his cold cigar.
“Must have been a wonderful place to be a child. Your village,” Hay said, trying to sound cheerful.
“It was okay,” Nello said distractedly. “No one bothered us. We believe kids are relatives back from the dead. My mother called me ‘Grandpa’ because I could hold my breath underwater just like him and sink to the bottom like a rock.
“So we just played all day, or helped haul hot rocks to steam the sides of the canoes, carried boards, dug clams with the old women—it was all a game. In the summer for the salmon run, the grown-ups let us help build weirs across the rivers out of poles and twigs. Haul stones for the traps—dams, really, all shapes and sizes. The fish would swim into them at high tide, and at low tide they’d be high and dry. When the weather was good my big brother let me steer his canoe, hold it in the current, while he knelt in the bow and speared fish.”
“Shhhh,” I said. “Look at two o’clock!” and pointed at two small islands dark on the silvery sea. “A flame flared there just now. Who the hell is out here after midnight?”
“Fish boat, maybe,” Nello said without conviction. “Anchored for the night.”
“I’ll check the chart,” I said. Down below, I lit a lantern and held my hat over it to shield the light. The chart showed the water around the islands full of rocks; no boat could get in there, unless it was small, with very shoal draft. I blew out the lamp and sat in the darkness. They couldn’t be this close. And why would they be so careless as to light a fire? Maybe they thought it safe so late at night. Or maybe they had to. Had to why? And why the hell would they have made less than ten miles since last night, unless something happened to them? Or to her? It was hard to breathe down there; I went above.
&nb
sp; “It’s all rocks in there,” I said. “You can’t get near those islands, unless….” I didn’t have to say more, Hay stared at me so hard I had to look away. “There’s a reef this side of them. We’ll drop the headsails and ghost. No anchor—the chain makes too much noise. You two handle the ketch. I’ll row the skiff in.”
“I’d like to come along, if you don’t mind,” Hay said, but he wasn’t asking.
“I don’t think—”
“She’s my wife.”
“Fine. But not a sound.”
“Sailors say,” Nello cut in, “that flames on the sea are an evil omen. A spell. They draw boats into waterspouts, onto reefs.”
“St. Elmo’s fire,” Hay said. “Or ignis fatuus, fool’s fire.”
Nello went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Some sailors say those ships came to a bad end all because the captain or helmsman who saw the flame was deranged to start with. Went and followed it and sailed the ship to its death.”
“Barroom gossip,” I grumbled, heading down the companionway. I unwrapped the Winchester from the oil-cloth and loaded three bullets. I didn’t need more. I’d probably only get one shot.
When I went back up, Nello was on the foredeck silently lowering the jib. Hay held the wheel. He froze when he saw the gun. “What’s that for?”
“I don’t speak Kwakiutl,” I said, and took the wheel from him because he had almost brought us into irons. I fell off and headed for the islands. When Nello came back and he saw the gun leaning in a corner, he looked silently at me. His eyes said nothing. With only the main up, we had slowed—we were less than a quarter mile from the rocks.
“Another thing us kids used to do,” Nello said in a hard whisper, “was to try and help people who had been hexed. My brother had a woman almost kill him. Didn’t mean to, just wanted him so bad. We would be out fishing, then he’d suddenly get the shakes and say “I gotta go,” And he went. She lived at Gilford Island, a good ten miles, and he’d paddle his canoe as if the devil had him by the balls, then he’d run across the island through the salal, sweating and bleeding, and he’d grab her and off they rushed to do the work. He’d stay a few days, then come back and fish. Then, wham, off again. He was down to skin and bones. Our aunt lived in the woman’s village and spied on her. One day when she went swimming, the aunt went through her clothes and found it. Tiny, wrapped up tight in the belt of her skirt. Our aunt ran home and put it in water to take it apart, otherwise the spell might have killed him. It was all wrapped in hair—his and hers—and there were two clay figures inside: a man and a woman. She had her tongue in his mouth and he had his pecker inside her. With great care, the aunt took them apart and threw her in the fire and sank him in the sea. My brother never thought of her again.”