A Million Tears (The Tears Series)

by Paul Henke

  ‘How many times will we have to do it, do you think?’

  Estella asked.

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ I replied. ‘At a foot a time . . .probably forty to fifty. If we work during both tides we can have her on the beach in three or four weeks after the first lift.’ I did not add the fear that worried me. Was the lift sufficient? I thought it was, but until we tried I could not be sure.

  Slowly the raft fitted together. Each log was lashed down separately, care being taken to use as little rope as possible, since our supply was not inexhaustible. With no water barrels, rudder, nor housing to make we would be ready to launch the raft as much as a month earlier than expected. What we would have though, would be big, heavy and unwieldy. The problem of the launch had occurred to us, and we hoped we had the solution. We were building on the sloping beach. If we dug away the sand down to the water, a mere six feet away, we hoped to be able to get the raft into the lagoon.

  Jake and I dived to the Lucky Lady using our homemade bell. We positioned it near one of the starboard portholes so we could reach out and remove the glass. We used it to fashion a second diving mask. We then spent the best part of a day examining the Lucky Lady and discussing where and how we would pass the lifting ropes. The fact that she was sitting upright on a pile of coral had helped when stripping her and now was going to prove a Godsend when it came to the lift. She was angled slightly to port, lying with her side against a large piece of coral that stretched over three quarters the length of the hull. On her starboard side there were a number of broken segments of coral, some as much as eight feet high, though none were touching the hull.

  Now I was doing something definite to get away I no longer suffered the depressions I had previously. Every day we were working by sunrise and did not finish until sunset, stopping only for a light lunch and frequent drinks of water or coconut milk. Even through the heat of the early afternoon we continued, wearing large, floppy sun hats which Estella had made out of palm leaves.

  We finished the construction in the third week of May.The days had flown by unnoticed, except for the fact that Estella was fast approaching her time. She accepted it far more stoically than we men. She mentioned the fact, hitherto ignored by us, that one of us would have to deliver the child. We all blanched but Dominic and I agreed entirely on one thing. Jake was responsible for putting it there, he could deliver it. He went into a paroxysm of panic at the thought and kept insisting Dominic or I were much better at that sort of thing than he was. What sort of thing he meant he did not expand on. At first it was funny, but as the day got nearer the problem took on gigantic proportions.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘this has been going on for years. Millions of men have helped deliver babies. It must be as easy as falling off a log.’ Estella cast a reproachful glance at me. ‘Well, you know what I mean. Surely you know what must be done.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she replied tartly. ‘Unfortunately, apart from lying on my back with my legs open there is little I can do to help you. I’ve told you all a dozen times what you must do, I can’t do more than that. And I want to add, you three are a great help to a girl, I must say. You instil me with such confidence, I wish I had never become pregnant,’ and she promptly burst into tears.

  We looked helplessly at each other and then Dominic and I sneaked quietly away leaving Jake to comfort her. When it came to some matters I was amongst the fifty percent of the cowardly population in the world, all of us male.

  The day came to launch the raft. We scraped away the sand from around it, and dug down in front until the sea was lapping at the logs. Behind the raft we built a sturdy tripod, which acted as the fulcrum for a lever made of a fifteen feet long, ten inch diameter tree trunk. With the lever at the centre of the raft, and with two thirds of it behind the fulcrum, we attached a triple sheaved block and rope. When the three of us pulled on the rope the lever came slowly down, the raft tilted and slipped all of six inches over the sand. We repeated this again and again . . . and again . . . until finally the front third was floating, then a half, then two thirds, and then we were standing behind pushing it slowly into the water. That night we men celebrated by getting drunk.

  Which was a great shame really, because around midmorning next day, just as we were surfacing, Jake yelled for help. Dominic and I rushed to their hut to find Estella lying on their bed, her hands over her waist, pain on her face.

  ‘He’s early,’ she whispered. ‘It is time. Don’t forget what I told you. Plenty of hot water and use the whitesheets I’ve got ready from that top drawer,’ she pointed to the rough chest of drawers Jake had made.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ one of us said.

  Dominic and I collided in the doorway as we rushed to light a fire and put water on to boil. Our haste to get out of there before anything happened was unseemly. We hung around outside, listening to Jake and Estella talking in quiet voices; he seemed to be reassuring her. The morning dragged. We had a half hearted lunch of cold meat and mangoes and sat in the shade waiting for the big event. It was late in the afternoon when Jake yelled to us:

  ‘Come here quick. Bring the water. Heck, it’s coming.’

  Dominic and I leapt to our feet like frightened rabbits at the first yell from Jake. We bumped into each other going for the water, now simmering on the stones by the side of the fire. We scrambled up the steps and into the hut as the miracle began. Jake was incredible in the calm, proficient way he delivered the boy. It came out head first, covered in blood and a slimy substance. He handed it to me, and without thinking I took him.

  ‘What do I do?’ I asked plaintively.

  ‘Hold him by his feet and smack his bottom,’ Dominic said, ‘like Estella told us.’

  The baby was crying gustily, his eyes screwed tight, his tiny fists clenched. Jake had cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors and Dominic was putting some sheets into my hands, to cover the baby with. Luckily the placenta had come out with the cord and Jake took the mess and threw it on the fire.

  ‘But he’s breathing all right,’ I said in awe. ‘And Estella said . . .’

  ‘So she did,’ said Jake. ‘So just hold him you big ape, until Estella can take him.’ He was busy cleaning Estella and covering her with a sheet.

  ‘I shall take him now,’ she said sweetly. ‘Let me see my baby.’

  Tentatively I held him out to her. She took the bundle, still crying, from me, opened her night-dress and began to feed him. The noise stopped like a tap being turned off. As she fed him, she reached into the sheet and counted his fingers, toes and looked him over. Finally she was satisfied and lay back with a beaming smile. ‘We shall call him David Dominic Rodriquez Mendoza Kirkpatrick.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a mouthful for such a little fellow, isn’t it?’ asked Jake. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of Jake Junior.’ ‘Never,’ Estella said with finality.

  I was honoured. Dominic thought Dominic David had a better ring to it than David Dominic and Rodriquez had been chosen as it had been their father’s name.

  We did no work for the next couple of days. Jake wanted to stay close to Estella and the three of us would be needed for the next part of the operation. Estella was soon on her feet, preparing meals for us or fussing over the baby.

  Estella assured us he was beautiful, but I confess all I saw was a red, wrinkle faced, sleeping, or crying bundle about eighteen inches long. I could not see any trace of the beauty she talked about. But then I was not alone; neither his father nor uncle could either.

  Four days after the birth we were ready to pull the raft into position. We used the rope from the top of the mizzen mast of the Lucky Lady to pull ourselves slowly and sedately along. The raft was a heavy structure and tended to tilt if we walked from one side to the other. But she floated with the whole of the second layer out of the water. We pulled the bell down over the cockpit and Jake and I dived down. We had two strops to pass round the hull, one near the bows and the other near the stern. We held the strops in place by hammering nai
ls into the hull and bending them around the rope. It was a simple task but having to hold your breath, swim out and back to the bell, and every ten minutes take the bell to the surface to freshen the air, made it a long and tedious process. Each time we took the bell up to the surface wasted about forty minutes, provided all went smoothly and the ropes and tackle did not become tangled, or the blocks tumble.

  On each side of the raft we made two sets of reels, each with long handles. We had the tackle roved to advantage, able to haul from the running block fixed to the eyes of the strops around the keel of the Lucky Lady. On the raft we had the standing block tied on a pendant around the reel. We turned up the reels until the ropes were bar taut. Jake and I dived down to see how the boat was laying, and agreed it was as good as we could have hoped for.

  While we had been working Estella had been keeping a note of the times of high and low tides and this allowed us to know accurately when they would next occur. A high tide followed a low tide every six hours and twenty minutes, as near as we could tell. Also at one part of the month, the range – the difference between high and low water – was only five or six inches, while two weeks later it was as much as fifteen to eighteen inches.

  Low water on that first day was at eight o’clock in the evening. With the last of the rope, we ran a block and tackle from the front of the raft to a tree near the huts.

  Nervously we ate a cold meal, sitting on the raft on the lagoon, watching the last of the sun’s rays disappearing from sight, and waiting for low water, which would be in another hour and thirty minutes. We kept the lifting tackle tight by means of a ratchet wheel and peg Dominic had made on the reel. When the peg was pushed into place, after the wheel was turned, there was no chance of it unwinding. It was a calm night, with only the gentlest of breezes, little cloud, the sky full of stars, the moon not yet risen. We could see Estella sitting by the fire outside the huts, peering anxiously our way, her face an undistinguished white blob in the poor light.

  ‘I’m sure we moved slightly then,’ I whispered, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s possible. What the hell are we whispering for?’ Jake suddenly said in a normal tone. ‘We ought to start lifting soon after low water, not before.’

  We heaved until the ropes were taut and the sea was lapping over the edge of the raft. Would it lift?

  ‘Shall we haul on the rope and see if we move?’ asked Dominic.

  ‘I think we’d better wait,’ replied Jake. ‘There’s a few rocks in the way which we don’t want to scrape across. This tide should give us a twelve inch lift at the end of the six hours so we may as well wait another hour at least.’ It was then half-past eleven.

  I checked the towing tackle and felt the slack in the once taut rope. ‘We’re floating. Yahoooo,’ I screamed at the top of my voice, sending the birds in the jungle into a screeching panic and making the baby cry. ‘Sorry, Estella,’ I called.

  We pulled without having to put in too much effort, and had the satisfaction of seeing the water wash past the edge of the raft. We were careful and hauled on the rope inch by inch. I would have given my eye teeth to see what was happening to the Lucky Lady down below. I don’t think we travelled more than a couple of yards when we came to a halt.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘we should only move at high tides, to reduce the number of times we knock against the sea bed or on the coral.’

  From them on one of us stayed on the raft all the time to keep the lifting tackle tight, while whenever high tide approached, all three of us went out. As we neared the beach the mast moved up, a permanent and accurate reminder of our progress. When the Lucky Lady struck a piece of coral, or bumped onto the sand, the raft would swing slowly on one side, as though on the end of a pendulum, but always closer to the beach. We used the masks to watch her progress and dived regularly to check the way she sat her cradle of strops. Each day diving to the bottom became easier as the depth was now little more than twenty feet and our distance to the shore halved. It was going so well it was inevitable something would go wrong. The after strop around the hull parted.

  The forward strop held, however, and the boat remained upright, helped by the mizzen mast protruding through the raft. It took us a day to rerig the broken strop and, as an added precaution, to replace the forward one too. And so it went on, tide after tide. We erected a canvas cover on the raft to protect us during the day from the sun and the occasional rain shower. Twenty-three days after the first lift we tightened the ropes and the deck and forward superstructure of the Lucky Lady jammed tight against the bottom of the raft.

  We knew we had buoyancy to spare, so we removed more of the central logs to allow the boat to come further through the raft until it was as high as the deck. With one more lift we dragged the Lucky Lady as close to shore as we could. With the next low tide she would be sitting on her keel, balanced by the raft, with a foot of hull showing. Would it be enough to keep her afloat when the tide turned, or would the water fill up quicker than we could keep her empty?

  Estella brought the baby’s cot near to us and while he slept she helped us bail. Slowly the water level in the cockpit went down. Then Jake and Estella were able to man the pumps in the cockpit while Dominic and I used buckets. We went into the saloon, filled the bucket and returned to the cockpit to throw it over the side. We were midway through the tide when I dived to find the Lucky Lady floating an inch above the sandy bottom.

  I took the raft apart while the others continued bailing and pumping. The water was going down at a steady rate and made us wonder why the Lucky Lady had sunk in the first place. Where was the leak? It took us some time to find it. We found that three boards had sprung just below her plimsoll line. In the normal way, using the pumps, we could have contained the leak easily, but because we had not been on board on that fateful day she had sunk. A few minutes work with the hammer and some heated pitch cured the problem and she was as sound as ever.

  With all the hatches open, the stoves lit and a pleasant breeze directed into the boat by our cannily erected canvas screens she dried out rapidly. While that was happening, we replaced her rotting rigging, greased everything that needed greasing and slowly checked the whole of the hull for further damage. As our thoughts turned to escaping, Dominic made the discovery that shattered us for days.

  He had been out in the dinghy, now once more in its more usual role. When he returned after some hours, he was almost in tears. ‘There’s no way out, you stupid bastards,’ he screamed at us, when Jake asked him what was wrong.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘That . . . that coral,’ he almost choked on the word. ‘It . . . it doesn’t end. There’s no gap, nothing. I . . . I thought I’d find the channel which we came in by, but there is none . . . God . . . So what good is the stupid boat to us now?’ he yelled, on the verge of becoming hysterical.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Jake shouted at the top of his voice, and Dominic seemed to calm down a little.

  ‘But what are we to do?’ he pleaded, needing an answer.

  ‘Get the masks,’ I snapped at him. ‘We’ll take it in turns to be towed behind the dinghy and find the way out. There must be one because we came in.’

  That we hadn’t noticed a channel, but always assumed there was one, was not as ridiculous as it may seem. After all, the coral was a hundred and fifty yards away from the beach and stretched for nearly a mile. It showed above the sea in some places, but was mostly covered with spray continually flying over most if its length. Dominic had clearly missed seeing the channel, that was all.

  We started at the spit, only needing a small gap a mere four or five feet wide and some eight feet deep. They rowed while I was dragged behind, lifting my head every minute to gulp air.

  We took fifteen minute turns to be towed and moved only slowly, determined not to miss anything. By the time I was in the water a second time we were a little under half way and I found where I thought we had entered the lagoon. As the afternoon faded, so did our hopes. Domin
ic was proved right, there was no channel.

  We were sick at heart, dumbfounded. Seeing Estella standing on the shore watching us return, the baby cradled in her arms, was enough to move me to tears of frustration.

  ‘There has to be a way,’ I said fiercely. ‘There has to be,’ I paused. ‘I know how we got here,’ I added, and the others looked with interest and hope. ‘In the rough seas, about there,’ I pointed, ‘we hit the reef with the bottom of the keel and were pushed over. I guess the side of the Lucky Lady hit a corner of the reef and the boards sprung. With the wind and the waves behind us we slid over easily enough. Remember the scraping we heard at the time, and I thought we were on the bottom?’ I asked Jake.

  He nodded glumly. ‘God, what fools we’ve been. If we’d noticed earlier we could have built the raft on the other side of the spit and been ready to leave here by now.’

  ‘The baby is still too young,’ Estella said quietly. ‘True,’ Jake put his arm around her, ‘but all I’m saying is . . .’ he sighed, ‘in a couple of months we could have been away.’

  ‘Jake, I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘You saw how difficult it was to handle that monstrosity in the lagoon. What would it have been like out there? I don’t think we’d have survived. We need to get the Lucky Lady out of here, and that’s what we ought to be thinking about. I don’t give a damn now if I spend the next year digging a channel through the spit, but I’m going to do something. That’s for sure.’

  I stalked away, only half believing what I had said. The thing was I did care if I spent a year. I regretted spending one day too long on that blasted, gilded prison of an island.

  A channel, was it feasible? Feasible yes, but a hell of a lot of work. I walked over to the spit. At its narrowest part there were fifteen yards between the open sea and the lagoon. If we dug out the centre part first, then worked outwards, when the water finally came in it might wash the walls down. That was a possibility. The gap would need to be four to five feet across and seven to eight feet deep. The sand was about three or four feet deep and then came the coral. We would have to chip away chunks of it with our axes and anything else we could use. Then once we got to the edges and the sea swept in? We’d have to dig the edges out from under the dinghy, if it was necessary. Despair hit me like a thunderbolt.