by Jim Lynch
“They’re beauts,” Grumps said. “Gotta admit that. We’ll see whether they live up to the hype and the price, but they sure look fantastic.”
“Oh, they’ll sail better than they look, Mr. Johannssen,” she said. “But as you’re well aware, people still have to know what they’re doing. I’ve made similar sails for some racers who come back complaining they’re still in the back of the pack. So I go out with ’em and stand on the bow and want to shout, How can you blame these sails? They’re the best thing you’ve got going for you!”
An unexpected puff temporarily filled ours. The fabric tugged and the boat moved—scooted, actually—like a much-lighter vessel. The Bobos smiled but remained oddly quiet, almost sheepish, not wanting to jinx anything by yapping about it. Then another gentle gust, and the sailmaker’s eyes widened as the boat accelerated, one pupil veering toward the center as if she were slightly cross- or lazy-eyed, and giving me a second look. What was she? Hispanic or Asian or Native American or East Indian or biracial or maybe just bronzed from looking up at so many sails?
“Isn’t this right here the very best moment?” she said. “You know, when the boat first starts to go. When you go from a dead calm and suddenly get a little wind and you realize this is gonna happen. And that sound when the boat starts hissing through the water, like a whale exhaling or the sigh of some benevolent god.” She laughed. “I’m sorry, sailing makes me ramble at the mouth. But I don’t care if I’m racing or it’s a slow or fast boat, when it first grabs and goes, that, for me, beats everything.”
I avoided looking at the Bobos, who I knew were giving me Bambi eyes, and instead glanced at her ringless fingers, my pulse racing at the absence of diamonds. I pretended to be distracted by some submerged marine life only I could see so as to conceal how appealing she seemed to me.
When she went forward to study the sails from the bow, I finally noticed the dozen Stars tacking out toward the racecourse. I’d been so preoccupied with getting the Joho into the water, I’d forgotten it was race day.
“Quite the sight,” she said, returning to the cockpit.
“What?” I asked.
“All those old race boats,” she said. “I’m a little weird, I guess, but to me…” She spun to look at me at the exact instant I’d swung forward for better footing, and our heads nearly collided. There was nothing boyish about her this close up, with dark eyes shaped like pumpkin seeds and a slight curl to her upper lip, as if bracing for impact. “To me,” she repeated, without backing up, “that right there—with all of them clumped together—that is what I call beauty.”
I pulled back and looked away, not wanting to foul the moment with my own voice or expression.
My grandfather picked that instant to pull a small flask from his vest pocket.
“Oh Jesus,” Father said.
Grumps poured a capful and shouted, “Poseidon, my favorite almighty, please bless this vessel—we have rechristened Freya Three—and make her so fast the dolphins are jealous.” He tossed the shot overboard, then patted his pockets, frisking himself until he found a cigar and beamed at her. “We’ve got the whole family racing this year at Swiftsure, except for Josh’s brother, who’s still at sea.”
Father winked at me as Grumps poured another shot and offered the cap around. Both of us turned him down, but the sailmaker took it in a single swallow and started laughing, an uninhibited and voluminous sound for such a small contained woman, a miracle of proportions, really, like hearing all the music that can come out of a tiny sparrow. Grumps looked at me now, wiggling his hedgehog eyebrows as her laughter traveled across the water.
“What did you say your name was again?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” she said, “but it’s Sue.”
He chewed on that, lit his cigar, and blew some smoke. “But what’s your full name? I bet it’s got more rhythm to it than just Sue.”
She chuckled. “Well, it’s actually Sunita Banerjee.”
“I knew it!” he cried. “Sunita!”
She looked at me, as if it were my turn to speak. Waiting for my heart to stop skidding, I silently handed her the wheel and started counting the beats until Grumps would tell her that a sailboat is alive.
“Oh, yes!” she responded triumphantly. “It definitely is!”
Then Grumps stared at me again, and after a slow, deep swallow of rum, said, “Can you believe Ruby actually called me?” He beamed like a gambler on a life-changing roll. “Our little gal called me right out of the big blue sky and started this ball rolling! How ’bout them apples?” he asked, his voice climbing. “The Rubester wants to go sailing!”
ENORMOUS PUMPKINS
One of the very few calls I ever received from my sister came in the fall of 2009. “Come on up, Josh,” she’d urged me. “I want to show you something. But you gotta come in the next couple weeks or it’ll be too late.”
Originally, I figured this would be a spontaneous and long overdue family adventure into the wilds of British Columbia to see the elusive Ruby, but then learned Canadian border guards wouldn’t admit Americans with DUIs. This ruled out both Bobos, since Grumps had got his first the year before, driving home from the boathouse with a Rainier between his knees. And Mother bailed at the last minute for some critical project she couldn’t suspend or explain—at least not well enough for me to understand.
Since her one grand fund-raising trip home, Ruby had come back just once, in 2006, a visit as awkward as it was wonderful, with none of her stories normal or verifiable, such as one about a wealthy Nigerian gangster, in a leopard-skin hat, who’d asked the Red Cross exactly whom he should talk to about purchasing her.
So driving solo to what sounded like her latest make-believe venue in early September left me fearing my deficiencies would be all the more obvious without other Johannssens to divert her attention.
She’d given me the name of her farm, but her directions were useless, largely because she still didn’t drive and had no sense of direction, leaving me to bang around Pemberton for more than an hour until I found a narrow road skirting the Ryan River and curling up onto a lush plateau with a series of farms called Twinbrook or Mockingbird and then, finally, Do-Right Organics.
Gravel soon faded to soft dirt split by bunchgrass and flanked by overgrown bushes and vines still reaching for one last jolt of seasonal heat as a succession of handwritten signs popped up like flash cards ten yards apart. DO RIGHT!…EAT SMART!…LIVE BETTER!…LOVE LONGER!
Eventually, the driveway broadened into a lumpy field where five weary buildings were cluttered with rusty equipment and dented trucks and raggedly dressed young men and women milling around a fruit-and-vegetable stand under a patchwork of fluttering tarps. I heard clucking and then saw white fluffballs of baby chickens before a shack door swung shut. The backdrop for all this was orderly rows of what looked like raspberry vines and a vegetable garden the size of an Olympic swimming pool with pumpkins so large and orange they could probably be seen from space. Two men were packing zucchini, tomatoes and onions into crates behind the vegetable stand where a creatively pierced woman with a neck tattoo—EPIPHANY—was counting colorful money.
“We’re closed, but what ya need, hon?” she asked, eyes down, her lips moving as she flipped through the bills.
“One of everything.”
She glanced up. “Everything?”
“Actually, I’m just looking for one Ruby Johannssen.”
She studied me, then went back to her bookkeeping. “Get in line,” she said.
“She here?”
“She doesn’t do drop-ins.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gotta get on her schedule, hon.”
“Ruby’s my sister,” I said.
“Mine too,” she replied, counting fives now.
“That’s strange. You’d think I’d remember you around the house.”
She studied me again, then laughed until the hobos stopped packing fruit to gawk at me.
“Claims he’s Ruby’
s brother,” she announced.
One of the men thrust a filthy palm at me. “Glad to know you.”
Others surrounded me.
“Ruby,” I said. “She around?”
“She’s everywhere,” said a pigtailed woman with eyes so far apart she’d be hard to surprise. She stepped forward and hugged me as Epiphany hollered, “Ruby!”
Everybody went so strangely quiet that I said, “It’s been a long day, but are those pumpkins abnormally gigantic?”
This struck them as hilarious. “Your sister,” Wide-Eyes told me, “grows the world’s biggest pumpkins.”
“The biggest everything,” the hobo added.
I nodded skeptically. “Those are hers?”
“The biggest ones are.”
“Got her own special fertilizer,” someone volunteered.
“Yeah,” Epiphany said. “It’s called Mozart.”
“Mozart?”
“On a loop. Just loud enough for the pumpkins to hear.”
“Third and Fifth Symphonies,” Wide-Eyes added.
Hearing a familiar mock scream, I turned and saw my sister sprinting down a raspberry row, sun-reddened arms wheeling overhead, swimming through air. She never had learned how not to run like a five-year-old. My memory goes hazy here, but I know she tackled me and then whisked me away by the hand, her complexion, the squeeze of her grip and her muscled shoulders all exuding strength and health as if, like her pumpkins, she was thriving well beyond the norm, though I also noticed the splinted finger and swollen knuckles and the long scar on the inside of her left forearm.
She immediately bombarded me with effusive and unreliable stories about the glorious people who worked there.
“Where do they all live?”
“Right here for the most part.”
“They pay rent?”
“They help out.”
“Of course,” I said. “You give the lodging away.”
“This isn’t a country club, if that’s what you’re asking. Some of these people are ex-cons or former addicts, but all of them love growing healthy food.”
“Where’s Phillipe?”
She squinted. “No idea. Left two or three years ago with some gal from one of the Carolinas. Actually, I’m not sure which gal or which Carolina.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He wasn’t who I’d hoped he was, but he got me here. And I’ve got new boyfriends and girlfriends.” She laughed. “I love it when you don’t know what to believe. To be honest, they’re probably all pretenders, too. I attract ’em, right? This sweet cowboy sold me a tractor last month, then stole it back. Can’t prove it, but that’s what happened.”
“I’m told you grow the biggest pumpkins in the solar system,” I said.
“Just the province. We won first place for gourds last year. Gonna be bigger this year, but I won’t let ’em enter again. Last thing we need is more attention.”
I shook my head. “Good luck with that. But how do you explain it—even to yourself? Why are you—only you—always doing things that attract attention?”
She shook her head and sighed. “What I love about this place is it isn’t about me at all. It’d be so much easier if I believed the same things others do. Then maybe we could have a conversation about mythology or reincarnation or whatever. Guess I just believe in intuition and luck more than most people. But nobody wants to hear that. They want it to be something more.”
“Intuition and luck can’t explain you,” I said.
“No?” She smiled. “Sailing’s training, intuition and luck, right? And it’s not hard to tell which seeds will grow best or how to locate someone’s inflammation and to poke around till you figure out how to unlock it. You’ve got a lopsided walk, by the way. Favoring your left side.”
An hour later, she laid me out on her dining room table, touched the middle of my back with two fingers of her uninjured hand and made a slow circular motion, then did the same behind my knees. And that’s the last thing I remembered before she woke me.
“C’mon, snoozy, I’ve got something to show you.”
She had me drive a rusty Ford to a treed corner of the vast property that sloped toward the river with vegetation so rampant and outsized it was intoxicating just to drive through.
Wanting answers to the same old questions, I began with “Why don’t you ever visit or write or at least call?”
She looked confused. “I don’t think in terms of when I last saw you or talked to you. You know I’m no good with phones or time. Days feel like hours to me. Somebody wants to see me? Come visit! Do we really need to watch reruns together to be a family?”
“But you don’t even ask about everybody.”
“We haven’t got there yet.”
Then I hit her with updates: how Mother was still consumed with inscrutable math, how the Bobos were facing another product-liability lawsuit, how Grumps had two recent fainting episodes that involved tiny strokes, how nobody had heard from Bernard in almost three years, and how I kept dreaming that he was dead.
“We’d know if he was,” she mumbled. “That’s so sad about Grumps.”
“Call him! He adores you.”
“It’s mutual, but when I call or go home I’m that little kid again who knows where the wind’s coming from. I don’t want to live all that over and over. I feel best when I forget I’m even here. That’s what I like about hospice work.”
Reeling, I asked, “What is that, exactly?”
She smiled. “You help people deal with dying, Josh.”
“I know what it is. I mean, what do you do?”
“I read and sing to some. I help others rethink and revise their lives. They’ve helped me realize that I’ve never been all that comfortable with mine.”
Smells of grass and rotting fish greeted us as we stepped outside the truck, my door rubbing steel on steel both opening and closing. The air was so still and clear I could see freshly hatched bugs flying over my head like stunt pilots. Then I noticed a shallow pond no bigger than a pool table and twitching with activity. When we got closer, I recognized the color and reek of spawning salmon. She put a finger to her lips, grabbed my arm and pulled me away to where the bluff overlooked a ditch, narrow enough to step across, and a sluggish river below. I spotted some motion in the creek, then the occasional wiggle and leap of a red-and-silver fish the size of my thigh that was lunging against the current and up the hillside.
Maybe it was the mini-massage and the nap, but I couldn’t find words that fit what I was seeing.
“This is the only river access we have,” she told me, “so I decided to try to create our own little salmon run. Why not, huh? The creek’s been pesticide-free for over twenty years, and there’s already a natural pond in the middle here. We dropped in a few hundred babies—they call ’em fry, right?—during my first fall here three years ago. I didn’t know then that it ran almost dry in August, and figured it was another crazy long shot anyway. But then starting a couple weeks ago they started returning, and we’re using the carcasses for fertilizer. But we’re not showing all this to anybody. It’s our little secret. Otherwise, it’ll be a circus, and we’ll get regulated and sanctioned and God knows what. But we’re definitely gonna need a bigger pond.” She looked around, straddled the ditch with one foot on either side and then laughed at my astonishment. “I knew you’d get it, Josh! I knew you’d love this!”
I looked down the slope as this sparkling ten-pound salmon muscled up through grassy, ankle-deep water, all determination and instinct, culminating its journey into the Pacific and back up this tiny, trickling creek with GPS-like precision and a few final thrusts toward its origin.
A LESSON IN BOATBUILDING
When Grumps came shuffling up A Dock cradling a six-pack of Rainier tallboys two Saturdays before Swiftsure, he didn’t generate any more double takes than any other codger until he stopped at Grady’s semi-dismantled yacht and unleashed his showy falsetto. “Goddamnit, Joshua, you’re a sucker for hopeless p
rojects.”
Pretty quickly, the liveaboards figured out who he was. “Grandpa Johannssen!” Rem bellowed from his yawl on B Dock. “We’ve heard so much about you!”
“Well, it’s high time somebody has. I so rarely get the fanfare I deserve.” He smiled at everybody beneath his push-broom mustache. “Looks like we’ve got an old-fashioned planking party on our hands.”
When I’d wondered aloud if his steam box was still around, I hadn’t expected him to crawl into his rusty truck and drive it on down. Yet here he was, and seeing him now made me question all the fretting over his mortality. With his Gilligan hat and the dirty fleece vest he’d worn daily for the past decade, he looked more like a man entering his seventies than one spiraling into his late eighties.
“Well, what the hell are we waiting for?” he asked. “Let’s unload the truck.”
Mick and I grabbed the narrow twelve-foot-long pine box that’d been dangling over the tailgate the whole jaunt down the freeway. Noah carried the old kerosene tank, while Lorraine packed a cart with the stove, propane tank, hose and car jack. Rem followed us back and forth, hauling sawhorses and openly speculating on how much he’d get paid for this. “Least a beer, you’d think, wouldn’t you?”
As we set up, the liveaboards kept firing questions. This normally incurious ensemble suddenly wanted to know all about planking, as if there might be something critical to be learned. So Grumps explained:
“We’re softening wood so we can bend it to the shape we want. And, Poseidon willing, it will stay that way. All we need is what we’ve got right here, a simple propane camping stove and a tank full of water to boil so we can generate steam. And, see, we’ve connected a hose from that tank to this steam box, which I outfitted with these three-quarter-inch dowels to keep the planks suspended. We’ve also got a thermometer drilled into the box here so we know when it hits two-ten and it’s ready to go.”