by Ron Irwin
A newspaper clipping had been stuck on the wallpaper beside the desk. It was faded and greasy the way newspaper gets when it’s been around a long time. There was a cluster of pinholes right above the clipping and reddish marks where he’d taped it in different places over the years. It took me a few seconds to recognize that the darkened picture on that curled paper was of two rowing shells crossing a finish line. The photo was of the Harvard boat crossing the line first against Yale at Gales Ferry. It was snapped just before the winners would have pumped their arms in the air in victory. The coxswains were both hunched in the back of the boats, and both teams were wearing white tank tops. You could see the backs of people watching the race in the foreground. The caption read, Harvard takes Yale by one half length at Gales Ferry, and beneath it were the names of the rowers in each boat. I could barely read them, but finally saw, C.Channing. He’d rowed six-seat. I could not see his face. I looked around the room again for more pictures, but there was no further evidence that this was a rower’s study, a rowing coach’s study. No other news clippings, no oar over the full bookcase, no framed photographs, no cups, medals, or trophies. Nothing.
Somewhere he must have the Yale shirt he’d taken off the other six man, the one the losers traditionally hand over in defeat. I took another look at the clipping on the wall; just a random race result between some college kids in New London, Connecticut. But it was the biggest race in college rowing. I pushed the clipping flat with my fingers. It felt like a skin shed years ago and salvaged.
“What are you doing in here, Carrey?”
He was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. I was busted. Hadn’t even heard him.
“Nothing. Just looking for you, Coach. You asked me to drop by?”
“How long were you in here, Carrey?”
“Five minutes. Max. I didn’t take anything—I didn’t even move anything.”
He made a big show of looking around the room carefully. The dark furniture and walls and desk seemed to suck the sunlight from the air. “I certainly hope you weren’t pilfering books. I have a valuable collection.”
“I didn’t touch anything, Mr. Channing, I swear.”
I waited to see what he would do, but he just stood there.
“Coach, can I please ask one thing?”
“Ask it.”
“Where are all the trophies? All your rowing things?”
“Many of my belongings have been lost, sold, stolen, or litigated away from me over the years.”
“You don’t keep any of the stuff you win for Fenton?”
He paused, then said, “The trappings of victory are not mine to keep. They are at the school. In my office at the boathouse. On the walls in the banquet room. You know this, Carrey.”
“But your own stuff, I mean. Your own medals.”
“Carrey, have you ever noticed that the minute you put a trophy in a case, it becomes impossibly old? I do not know why. The luster of victory wears off quickly, I suppose.” He looked at me, suddenly old and frail himself. “The thought for the day is not about trophies. It is about this: ubi concodia, ibi victoria.”
“Where there is unity, there is victory.”
“Carrey, I am surprised. By God, you remembered a line of Latin. And who said this?”
“No idea.”
“Publilius Syrus. A writer who started out as a slave and found a kind of freedom. Where there is unity, there is victory. Every rower knows this because without total unity in the boat, you will only find defeat.”
“I’d like to be a unified force of one.”
“Carrey, if you agree to think of Publilius Syrus every day from now on, I will agree to have you on the God Four.”
“Fine.” I said it quickly. There was always the chance he wasn’t just joking.
“Then you are on the team. Barring some misfortune that kills you.”
“I’m really on the God Four? Just like that?”
“You will be in the boat, but the world is yours to lose.”
I didn’t know what to say. I stood in his living room, speechless. Grinning like an idiot. Finally, something did occur to me. “Ubi maior, minor ceasat.”
“And what on earth does that mean, Carrey?”
“The weak die before the strong.”
“The last word is ‘cessat.’ Fool. Its real meaning is that what is important brushes away what is not important. Like, for instance, the importance of your learning how to row with the others. Getting along with them. This is more important than whatever you have achieved in your scull.”
“I’m improving.”
“You are getting stronger. Whether you are improving as a rower remains to be seen.”
“Do the others know?”
“You will find out. But I want to remind you that nothing is permanent in rowing. I can remove you at any time. I can do it even if you only irritate me. Do you have any more questions, Carrey?”
“Just one, Coach.”
“Then ask it and leave. I have things to do.”
“Did you go to law school? At Harvard?”
“An idiotic question. Why would you think that?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Carrey, let me tell you something I teach all my English students. Are you ready for it?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t believe everything you read. Don’t believe half of it. And none of what you hear.”
* * *
I had lost enough weight so when I looked in the bathroom mirror I could follow the network of veins down my shoulders and arms. If I made a fist, the muscles in my shoulder cuff pumped up and expanded like a fan beneath my skin. I was in the best physical condition of my life. Wadsworth looked much the same as me—lean and mean—and Perry, who had dropped at least twenty pounds of fat but none of his muscle, looked downright menacing.
By the time we were six weeks off the spring racing season, I might not have recognized Connor. His clothes hung from his body and his newly cut short hair only emphasized the fact that you could clearly see the outline of his skull. I had come to believe he was running at night after all the communal training was over. Ruth was not only skeletal, but also undernourished. We could virtually eat what we liked—our training was so intense that we were burning up thousands of calories every day. But she was thin to begin with and had to deprive herself of a lot of food to drop even more weight off her small frame. How she managed to keep up with us on our training runs on the meager rations she allotted herself I do not know. In fact I had no idea just how dangerously underweight she was. The year after we graduated, the school would set a minimum weight for coxswains.
I was eating food supplements, painkillers and vitamins throughout every day—we all were. Three white tablets after morning practice, washed down before the powdery taste coated my tongue. Then a Tylenol, followed by an anti-inflammatory bumblebee-shaped horse pill for my knees. Then two vitamin Cs to ward off winter sickness and flu. A supplement for stress. Two more complex vitamins. Lecithin. A marblelike tablet full of bitter gelatin. A jar of translucent pills stood by my window, golden tears of soft amber. Then two amino acid pills. These were meant to help my body build red, aerobic muscle but instead made my sweat smell like rotting flowers. My dessert was a tiny anti-asthma pill that kept my throat and nasal passages from closing in the cold air. It dried my sinuses and gave me a hollow feeling for the duration of the early morning.
It was now the end of February. Five days of weak sun had melted the snow on the road and the hold-out ice floes on the river drifted by the school like wreckage. The crew started running together outside, long runs down the roads behind Fenton, through the sheep mud of this unexpected spring. We trod on piles of dark leaves covered with old, dirty snow, kicked them aside. River Road was slick and streaked with muddy tire tracks and we ran through the wet and occasional cold gusts with anticipation thinking that winter was over.
One afternoon I joined Connor, Ruth, Perry, and Wadsworth who were al
l on the main school bridge looking down at the black water running hard in-between the broken floes. Connor leaned over and spat far into the depths below. He turned and folded his arms theatrically. “Your captain declares it time for the God Four to have its first on-the-water practice,” and a collective whoop went up. It was the first time I felt truly one of them.
Connor opened the boathouse doors to reveal the slumbering boats. We pulled out the Fenton first boat, flipped it into its cradle and brought out the riggers. Working quickly, we assembled it wordlessly, cranking on the riggers and sliding the seats into place. When that was finished, Ruth stood at the bow formally and made us wait before making the classic coxswain’s call, “Reach down … and up … and over the heads.”
We flipped the boat over our heads and maneuvered it out into the cold. Ruth had us walk it forward and then drop it to our shoulders without looking back. I smelled the plastic and grease smell of the rowing shell and then the river and then the wind off the river and excitement surged through me. Ruth led us down to the long wooden dock—still covered in a thin, wind-dappled layer of ice—where we cranked the boat over our heads and flipped it down into the water. She held it firmly while we ran up for the oars, the boat straining against her, looking like it wanted to pull away and take to the water itself.
I picked my oar out of the snow and glanced at Perry. Connor stood next to me for a second, his breath puffs of vapor before us. “What are you thinking?” he asked me, his voice sharp. “You have that look on your face.”
“I’m thinking that right before everything good that’s ever happened to me, something went wrong.”
“Nothing’s going wrong. You have to learn to enjoy this sport, Carrey. Remember when you used to enjoy rowing? You’ll enjoy it today.”
“I know it.”
“You have to love the arrogance of it. We’re about to illegally take out twenty thousand dollars worth of school property. How does that make you feel?”
“Like I’m taking a joyride in someone else’s Porsche.”
“This will be better. Take my word on it.”
We pushed off the dock and the boat seemed to find itself and graft to the current. Hunched over our oars we let the boat take us down the river while Ruth settled into the stern. She leaned out over the water and sighted the curves, then breathed into her microphone and commanded us to keep our heads in the boat. Our first few strokes fought the speed of the water until we were rowing hard enough for the boat to be steered in the current, and with the current we flew down the river, past the school. Were you to look out the window that day, glance up while packing your books, cleaning up your desk, getting ready for that late winter dusk, you’d see four bodies laying back and that boat catching speed; a thing woken from hibernation and bounding away in exhilaration.
“Oh, man,” Wadsworth purred.
“All right!” Perry yelled.
“Quiet in the boat,” Ruth admonished, failing to disguise the smile in her voice.
I rowed behind Connor and after the first three strokes I didn’t feel the cold; after the first power twenty I didn’t even feel the speed. I’m pretty sure I closed my eyes the entire way. Ruth didn’t put us through our paces. She just let us bring the boat down to the dam where we dragged it to a stop and sat, hunched over our oars, breathing heavily, light-headed and euphoric. Hunks of ice and logs and other flotsam that had crowded along the boom surrounded us and nudged the boat. My oar was tinseled with tiny icicles.
Ruth finally spoke into the headset and her voice cracked up around us, an electric, confiding tone. “Carrey’s one of us, guys. Channing says we have to be nice to him now.”
Connor turned, flashed me a grin, and Perry pounded me on the back hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Wadsworth murmured, “Way to go, Rob.” I hate to admit how good it felt.
Then Ruth’s stern coxswain voice restored order, “Let’s touch it and start half slide in two, people. We need to get back.” Ruth hated to break rules. Deep down, she just didn’t have the criminal spirit.
Connor’s shoulders heaved as he sighed in irritation. “What’s the big rush, cox?”
Ruth leaned out of the boat, glanced at Connor, then her voice rose up. “Quiet in the boat. Bow pair, touch it and start half strokes; stern pair, join in on three, that’s one … and two…”
We turned and rowed back in the half darkness, Ruth sighting our way and standing in the stern every so often to look for the deadheads and logs and trash. Even fighting the current the boat had a warrior spirit. When we reached the dock, Connor once again turned to me with a look and I knew what I’d known all along; we were fast and had power and there was nothing except God Himself that would stop us. And even then He’d have to pull something pretty serious.
Which, naturally, He did.
24.
The FSBC crew went in for ultra-colorful rowing garb; hazard yellow climbing jackets and warm-up pants in violent reds, loud blues, deep purples, and various shades of black. We liked to wear tractor caps, too, pulled down low with the bills kneaded until they curled just right and you looked out on the world with tunnel vision. On practice days I wore my Carrey’s Joinery cap and I fit right in with those kids advertising CAT and John Deere on theirs, though none of them had ever used a mini-dozer, power shovel, or tractor in their lives. Certainly none had had to face the wrath of a contractor when a worker arrived on site still shitfaced and broke a five-thousand-dollar piece of equipment by driving it over building rubble or smashing into a wall.
We practiced at Fenton through the spring vacation. Day after day of it; and every morning the God Four was the first to hit the water. Two weeks of rowing through that wet cold and we felt invincible. We rowed set pieces between landmarks beside the river and the times we clocked were almost perfect. We could not be sure of what other teams were doing, of course, or how the water and wind would affect us in a real race, but we could dependably make the boat run fast enough so that we began to believe we were unstoppable; that we could be walking into an undefeated season. Channing was patient with our confidence, fully aware it was premature but allowing it because of the team spirit we were building. By the time the rest of the school returned from their ski trips in Vail and holidays in Florida and Europe, we were itching for competition.
But then things went wrong.
Rowing is like any sport that melds a human to a machine—like cycling, like kayaking, like race car driving—the key to peak performance lies in the tiny details. And Channing was a tinkerer. He spent every day of spring vacation looking for flaws in the machine, not trusting, from years of experience, that he had such a perfect four. He finally found one; not that he wanted to, it gave him no happiness for his suspicions to be validated. Especially this close to race day.
The practice that signaled the end of our honeymoon period began right after class on an afternoon when the weather was finally warming up. Ruth was waiting for us in the boathouse as we filed in and took our places in front of the long, blue Vespoli four and pulled it from its rack.
“Hands on this boat, gentlemen.”
We hoisted the boat to our shoulders at her instruction and balanced it for a quiet moment in the gloom while Channing headed down to the launch dock. In the silence you could hear the rattle in Perry’s throat. We stood there, adjusting to the weight, waiting for Ruth’s next command. When she gave it, in her distracted, soft voice, we inched out of the boathouse, an awkward caterpillar. Ruth backed away from us to check the riggers as we moved through the doors and finally the boat was birthed from the boathouse and we were following her to the river.
Channing was already waiting in the swirls beneath the bridge, sitting in the stern of the coach’s launch and watching our progress. We brought the boat down to the edge of the dock where Ruth gave us the commands to lay it down easy against the surface of the water and run up for the oars, which had been fanned against the side of the hill. We kicked off our shoes while we lowered the oars into t
he riggers and screwed them down. The damp chill of the dock seeped into my feet. I stood lined up against the boat while Ruth counted us down and then ordered in the starboard side and then the port. To get in the boat I balanced between the tracks and lowered myself like an acrobat into the sliding seat. The weight of the oars stretched across the dock held the boat in place. All the while, Channing watched us from the water, already critiquing as we hunched over to tie in, adjusted the foot stretchers and ran our bodies up the slides before pushing off in one motion.
There was a momentary pause. Ruth leaned out of the boat, dark glasses on, headset strapped over her face; a diminutive pilot. Her voice cracked through the speakers below us. “Three, take half a stroke. Jumbo, touch it,” and then the inertia of the boat and its weight and size gave way to the current and the river had us. The boat’s bow pushed downstream and I felt myself limbering up, the flat of the oar blade skipping over the water while the bow pair pulled us away from shore and Ruth half stood in the boat looking for the debris of winter being flushed down the Housatonic to greater seas.
Channing’s launch chugged into speed behind us and he followed at a respectful distance, always beginning fifty yards down the river from the boat, trying to see us as one small unit he could pick up and hold in his hands. You could look over Connor’s shoulder and see him enveloped in a haze of diesel fumes. The boat passed under the town bridge and the splashes and drips echoed and sounded hollow and subterranean.
Ruth leaned out of the boat again and exhaled into the microphone, a long scratchy growl that rose out of the bottom of the boat. “Touch it, and let the bow pair join in. Wads I want you to take it easy on these strokes. Jumbo, you’ll be rowing with arms only. On two, and that’s one … and two…”