by Doug Burgess
Sylvanus did. The next day he sailed Marylee’s Revenge out into the bay and began moving round the buoys that guided ships down the coast. Captains bound for New York from London usually took their soundings off Narragansett and looked for the light on Block Island to keep to starboard. But Sylvanus funneled them right into the bay, and had his men light a bonfire on Fogland Point to make the Bombay skipper think it was Block Island. He laid the markers to lead to Scilly Island, which wasn’t no more than a cluster of rocks shaped like a crescent moon. Funny thing, though, it had a hidden entrance, like Ali Baba’s cave. Think of a croissant with overlapping ends. From a distance it just looked like solid rock; get close, and a channel appeared. Like a big fat fly waiting in a spider’s web, Sylvanus hid in the harbor till he heard the crash of timbers, then sailed out bold as brass and offered to rescue the crews. Those poor fellows thought he was their savior. But once he ferried them to shore, he and his men came back and picked the convoy clean. It was a good racket, and he kept it going. Sylvanus married Peleg Sanford’s daughter and, by the time he drowned during a winter gale off Cape Newland, he was a wealthy man, well respected in the town.
That’s how we got the name “wreckers”: not for salvaging ships, but wrecking them in the first place. It made good business sense. Like a fella that owns a body shop cutting down all the stop signs in town. I don’t think you need to be so judgmental. Those were rough times, and men did what they had to do to get by. The crews weren’t harmed, and many of them were richer for the experience. Found Jesus, you might say. The ships were insured. The men that owned them, the bigwigs in Boston and Newport, lots of them were slave-traders. It’s true. Or smugglers. So I guess you could say what Sylvanus was doing was kind of like scamming the Mafia. Dangerous? I’ll say it was! But profitable. It was he that built the family fortune and passed the trade on to his sons. And they passed it on to theirs, and so on, right until your Great-Great Granddad William decided to become a banker. He was the first Hazard to graduate from college. His father was devastated. The same day William got his degree from Brown, old Elias got roaring drunk, went down to Dowsy’s Pier and set his boat on fire. Burned it right to the keel. “There’s none of the Hazards will ever go to sea again,” he said.
But he was wrong. William worked for the Greater Providence Savings and Loan, but his son Ezekiel was a captain for the old Fall River Line. And his son, your Grandpa Michael, was something else altogether. Mike was a hard man. I loved him like hell, but he was a hard man. It was him and your Aunt Constance that started New England Wrecking and Salvage. He never said it had anything to do with family tradition. He didn’t need to. Hazards were wreckers, always had been. And Mike knew boats better than anyone. That was back in the early fifties, when the big barges started coming in and out of Fox Point up in Providence. Now I won’t say Mike moved buoys around, and I won’t say he didn’t. But he was lucky. Luckier still in ’54, when Hurricane Carol came. You never saw anything like that in your life. Boats thrown clear on top of houses, piled up at their piers like cordwood, wreckage strewn all the way from here to Pawtucket.
It was a bonanza. We filled the whole scrapyard in two weeks, lived off it for years. Those were good times. You might say there’s a bit of Sylvanus in all the Hazards. Good and evil, rage and comfort, wrecking and salvage. We became wreckers to have the power of gods on Earth: choose what to save— and what to destroy.
Chapter Eight
The fleet has come back, dejected. I get a full report from Aunt Irene that evening. Two groundings, one man overboard, and a blown Evinrude, but no sign of Marcus Rhinegold or the Calliope. “Not like we were expecting any,” she adds, though I detect a note of wistfulness.
“Are they satisfied?”
She collapses into a chair. “God, I hope so. Most of them, anyway. Wally’s wife is still shooting her mouth off that the boat’s out there somewhere. If you ask me that woman is unbalanced.”
“She’s just bored. Nothing to do here, so why not hunt for buried treasure?”
“Well, either way, she made poor Wal go out again after the rest of the fleet came back. I drove by the piers at sundown and he still wasn’t back.”
“Hope he’s okay.”
“Do you?” She gives me a conspiratorial glance. “He probably relishes the chance to escape her for a few hours. And don’t worry about what he said at the bar. He’s just an asshole.”
“It’s okay, Irene. I left Little Compton and came back a man. I figured there’d be a fair amount of comment.”
She chuckles. “If you ask me, most people feel proud to have you here. Between you and the Karibandis, we’re almost cosmopolitan.”
The floorboards above our head creak; Grandma is rolling in her sleep. From the kitchen comes the sound of a ladle banging gently against a stockpot. The Hired Help has not produced any more sandwiches, but several times I’ve left dishes in the sink and come back to find them dry and spotless in the cupboards. I’d like to pay it a wage, if only I knew how.
“Did you have a nice day?” Irene wants to know.
“Grandma’s been telling me about Sylvanus again.”
“That old chestnut! Hope you recorded it this time.”
“Yup. Got right to the part with Grandpa and the Hurricane of ’54. She always fades out after that.”
Irene nods understandingly. “We were all young, and happy. Your Grandma, especially. She was so much in love with Mike. Then.”
That last syllable holds a lot. I remember Grandpa Mike: a thin, gray, taciturn man who chainsmoked Marlboros and put them out in the cup of his hand. He didn’t have much time for children, still less for girls. He came home from the scrapyard, ate his dinner in silence, watched Letterman, smoked again, went to bed. He didn’t say thirty words to me in fifteen years. My impression of him was of a volcano—ancient, seismic, dormant but not extinct. Lung cancer made him thinner, grayer, quieter. Then one day he was gone.
“I know you don’t have lots of good memories,” Irene continues, as if she’s read my mind. “Hazards are a hard bunch. Mike needed someone like your Grandma to soften him a little, and your dad really needed Sharon. That was a love match, those two. He brought her back to Little Compton when you were about a year old. But then Sharon died in that horrible accident. Once she was gone, that part of your father just dried up. I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it. And you looked so much like her, David, when you were a little girl. Her eyes, the shape of her face. Sometimes it was uncanny. At first I think it hurt him to look at you, see Sharon there. But later, when you were a teenager, it was different. He couldn’t wait to get shore leave, just to see you. To see that part of your mom that still survived.
“Now you understand. When you became a boy, it was as if she died again.”
That night I dream of boiling seas and breakers like black jagged teeth. The schooner is on the rocks, and the animals in their pens have gotten loose. Wolves chase chickens across the deck, and then the ship heels over, and chickens chase the wolves. Marcus is at my side on the quarterdeck. He laughs. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen tonight.”
Hands like white spiders on the taffrail. Men are climbing up the side of the ship.
“Were you expecting guests?” I ask him.
No, he shakes his head. “This is a private party. You go tell them to get off.”
I take a belaying pin with me to beat them back.
“We are here to rescue you,” my father says. But he is holding a bloody knife in his hands. “You’re my precious little girl.”
I wake to the bedroom blue and soft. It’s not yet dawn and the house is totally still. Even the Hired Help must be resting. I pad softly downstairs, the oak floors cold under my feet, wrap myself in an afghan and take a mug of tea out onto the back porch. The ribbon of sea stretches like a broad smile, but off to one side the Sakonnet light flashes its endless warning: Danger…danger…danger.
Mast beacons from the lobstermen answer back. The scene is quiet and sad and beautiful, and always changing. A gray mist settles slowly on the dark water and frames it against the sky. There is a moment when the two shades become one, and the sea becomes vapor, a hanging cloud between Little Compton and Aquidneck and Jamestown and Misquamicutt. We might all be islands now, adrift and floating in this endless firmament. But then the first light comes, pink as any newborn, and the sea retreats into its dark hollows. And just like that, the day begins.
We keep an old Cape Dory down at Dowsy’s Pier. Her name is Pretty Jane. She technically belongs to my father, but he hasn’t sailed in fifteen years and probably never will again. The last time was when he tried to teach me how to tack and I ended up slicing my own forehead with the boom. Eight stitches. Dad stopped trying afterwards.
Grandpa said he was a fool to attempt it in the first place. “She needs a man’s touch, Andy,” he growled, speaking of the Pretty Jane with more affection than he ever showed his wife, or me.
A week later Dad was back on his ship, the USS Tuscaloosa, and from then on our conversations grew increasingly rare and awkward. Once I asked Grandpa if he’d take me out, but got such a look in reply that I never asked again. He kept that boat spotless, though. Or rather, I did. Grandpa smoked his cigarettes while I sanded all Pretty Jane’s brightwork and varnished it, beat the dust out of her cushions, pumped her toilet and scrubbed down her decks.
“It’s your dad’s boat,” Grandma explained, since Grandpa never explained anything. “And it’s a daughter’s job to look after the things her father loves.” I don’t know who’s been caring for the Pretty Jane now, but the fiberglass hull is still clean and tackle neatly stored.
It’s a matter of only a few moments to free the stern lines and cast off, loosen the sail, and turn her bows towards the bay. I feel like a pirate taking his first prize. The early morning breeze catches the canvas and pulls it taut, and Pretty Jane plunges joyously into her first wave. The tiller bucks beneath my hand, but I grip it firmly and bring us round to the wind. We were enemies once, but we’re allies now. The boat leans over to starboard and shows her fat white bottom to the shore. “Hey, Grandpa!” I call aloud. “Fuck you!”
It is full dawn by the time Pretty Jane hauls up past the Little Cormorant. South is Schuyler Ledge, where cod once ran thick as walls; east is Dolphin Rock and the wreck of the old SS Portland, a passenger ferry bound for Boston that went down in a famous gale in 1898, with all hands. The coastline retreats into the horizon, nothing more than a blue-green smudge. The compass on the deckhouse tells me I’m heading east by northeast, a course that might take me to Martha’s Vineyard or even Nova Scotia, if I felt like it. Poets have dribbled a lot of ink about the freedom of a sail and a star to steer by, and I won’t add any more. But I will say that the wonder of it is less about absolute control, which would only excite a megalomaniac, and more about the limitless expanse ahead. I could put into Aquinnah on Nantucket Island by lunchtime, or pass it by and keep on course for Chatham. There’s no fuel to run dry, no engine to overheat. If the compass gets wet I might end up in Greenland, but why worry?
There is that annoying sound, though. Clinking, like coins in a jam jar. Every time Pretty Jane rolls, I hear it, and it’s beginning to get on my nerves. Why the hell would Grandpa keep a jar full of pennies on a boat? I put it out of my mind, stare out to the horizon, take a deep breath. Ah, the open sea. How many years has it been? Can’t count that cruise to Hawaii. But here we are: the fresh breeze, the green waves, the rolling deck. And Marley’s chains, clanking away nearby. After a while I can’t take it anymore. The hatch is still open, the cabin empty and mocking. Two blue plastic cushions and a pump toilet that makes eager sucking noises if you get too close. Gray carpet. And that damn clinking.
I put a rope round the tiller to fix her course, and duck into the cabin. The chop is heavier, the sound louder. It’s coming from under the seat cushions. I pull them back to reveal…
Bottles. A case of Bacardi to starboard. Another of Dewars Single Malt, to port. And a third, tucked up into the bow, of empties. Hello there, Grandpa. Between Emma’s cake and Grandpa’s hooch, this week has been a regular feast of the dead, but the sun is high, it’s past noon and like any good pirate, I’m thirsty. Time to splice the mainbrace!
Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum later I’m rolling more than the Pretty Jane. Course is northwest by…something. It’s okay, though, because the shoreline is off to port and Dad is here to guide me home. “Keep an eye on the headsail, Rosie. When it starts to luff, the boat wants to turn. Then pull the line taught, and she’s yours!” Stand by to come about. Come about, ay!
Grandpa was definitely onto something here. Drinking yourself into a stupor at a bar is humiliating, and doing it at home is just sad, but on a boat in the middle of the sound, you are the master of your wobbly universe. I feel like Captain Kidd as I reach for the Dewars.
“Oh quarter, oh quarter, those pirates then did cry,
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we!
But the quarter that we gave them—we sunk them in the sea,
Coming down the coast of High Bar-ba-reeee!”
I don’t know where the song is coming from. Maybe I heard it on a movie, maybe Dad sang it when I was a little kid, maybe the mad ghost of Sylvanus whispers it into my ear. I can feel them now, the Hazards. Lost ships prowl the depths beneath Pretty Jane’s keel. The Cape Dory swings almost on her beam ends, and Grandpa’s stash scatters about the cabin. The sea is kicking up a bit. Not a storm, not even a squall. Just a fresh breeze. A few whitecaps. Good weather for catching Puritans. Another bottle and I’m on my feet, reeling, crying, screaming out to the hollowed shell of the world:
“Sylvanus Hazard, you crazy shit, I wanna join your crew!”
My only answer is the gulls, mocking as they wheel overhead. Sky and sea are flat, featureless, empty. No, not empty. In the distance, a sail. No bigger than a pocket handkerchief. The handkerchief becomes a table napkin, a bedsheet. It’s coming this way. Gliding fast across the water, Marylee’s Revenge, summoned up from below. I can see her black bows, the Indian maiden pointing her sword toward me. And Sylvanus standing white-faced and furious, with Marcus as helmsman. Yes! Yes, come on! Come get me, you bastards!
The sail flattens out against the sky as she turns, coming broadside. Then she turns again, tacking clumsily. My vision clears a little; euphoria becomes an ache behind my eyes. It’s not the Marylee, of course. A dun-green hull with a stubby little cabin tucked into the bow. It’s the My-T-Fine, and Wally is drunk at the helm. “Hey, Wal!” I call out, wincing at the sound of my own voice, “Your missus is gonna be all kinds of pissed when you get home!”
He must have heard, because the My-T-Fine veers a point to starboard. Her bows are turned toward me now, and closing fast. Dangerously fast. He’s not changing course. Suddenly we are jousting knights, the Tea Party versus the Green Party. “Watch that thing! What the hell—?”
The son of a bitch is actually trying to ram me. I push the tiller away and bring her round, just in time for My-T-Fine to sheer across my starboard flank. There’s an ugly squeal of fiberglass, a heavy thud. His hunched form is at the tiller, bundled up in a camo hunting jacket, cap pulled low over his eyes. He doesn’t even turn to look at me. “You’re an asshole, Wally, you know that?”
No answer. The My-T-Fine goes on a few more paces and then the wind catches her, and she’s all aback. Wally lets the lines go. Two boats pitching up and down like corks in a bathtub.
“What the fuck, man?”
There’s a dent in my teak rail and two of the bumpers were sliced right off. Pretty Jane wallows a bit and I’m thinking, How long after the Titanic hit the berg did they actually notice she was going down? No sense risking it. I pull back the deck hatch and peer into the darkened hull. Green water sloshing around, and a gaping, hissing noise. The fiberglass is cracked. Damn.
My-T-Fine is still there, bobbing placidly a few yards away. Wally is looking determinedly at the horizon. “Ok, Wally, you sank my battleship. Now I need a tow.”
Something wrong. Maybe he knocked his head against the boom. Hope he did. I bring the Pretty Jane alongside as gently as I can, her bow nudging My-T-Fine like a horse looking for sugar. Wally pays no attention as I bind us fast and come aboard. The face under the cap is gray and pinched, eyes squeezed shut. It looks as though he’s spilled a thermos full of coffee down his front. His right hand is on the tiller, his left hangs slack at his side, palm up. Beer cans on the deck, a half-eaten sandwich sodden in bilge. Smell of urine, and something worse. He’s not just drunk, but dead drunk and passed out. Dumb bastard. A man could get hurt like that. I clutch the mast to steady myself and wait for the world to settle back on its axis. It does, slowly.
Only then do I see them. Three little holes, a perfect vector: one in the back of Wally’s jacket, one in the splintered teak deck, and one—a gaping, gushing keyhole—right under his chin. I called for one dead man and the sea sent me another.
Above our heads the gulls laugh, and laugh.
Chapter Nine
It’s a pretty procession we make, the corpse and me sharing My-T-Fine’s tiller, with Pretty Jane wallowing along behind. By all the evil luck in the world, the day has turned warm and half the town is down at Dowsy’s Pier, watching as we limp to shore.
“Well!” calls out a cheery voice. It is Renee Rosen, one half of the singular couple I met the other night at the Boy and Lobster. She is standing on the dock with arms akimbo. “That’s a fine picture, I must say! Looks like old Wally’s picked up a supercargo.” She peers down into the boat and her face darkens. “What’s wrong with his—”