After three days away, on a hot morning that promises brisk business, he arrives at Halyard & Mast and finds the store open and H.M. sitting in his office.
He knocks on the open door. “I thought you were heading out today.”
“I was. But there’s a raft of work right here.” His father scribbles on a notepad. “Don’t stand there like a statue,” he says. “Come in. I have something to show you.”
Despite the brightness of the day, the office looks shadowy, something close to twilight, the dark blinds like bars on the window. He watches as his father moves the chairs and pulls up the rug and raises the trapdoor. For the very first time, he sees the black box in the ground, the letters H.M.M.S. painted in gold above the dial.
“This is how we stayed alive. Everything you ate or wore as a child, the roof over your head, came out of this safe.”
He hears his father reciting the combination and understands the moment as a rite of passage. He knows that learning the numbers will open the door, and he knows that in that instant all other doors will close. He imagines a mason pushing a wheelbarrow down a long corridor. The mason stops at a door, checks to see if it’s locked, and then, without hesitation, walls it over with bricks and mortar.
Havelock also feels the weight, the importance, of this moment. “We’re launching a new store,” he says. “I decided right off that it should be a distance from Bay City – on Lake Huron rather than the bay. What would you say is the best location?”
“Port Austin.”
“It’s the obvious choice,” says Havelock, his face filling with satisfaction. “It’ll be your store. And you’ll have the cottage to live in.”
“When do we open?”
“In the spring.” Havelock adds something to a list. “It’s time, too, that you have your own boat. I’m moving the ketch to Port Austin – the slips are cheaper there – but she’s too much for a young man. Anyway, you’ll want your own.”
“I’ll find one.”
“First,” says Havelock, “mind the store.”
FOR THE rest of the season, showing up every day at Halyard & Mast, Dorian answers the phone, takes orders, and rings up purchases both large and small. He stocks and straightens the shelves, wipes the finger-marked display cases, files the charts by letter and number, and keeps the books and manuals in alphabetical order. He checks the hardware for oxidation and watches the canvas and line for fraying or discoloration. He studies the ledgers, talks to the store’s accountant, and takes a salesman or two out to lunch.
He ranges over the length and breadth of his father’s kingdom.
He stops making mistakes.
MEREDITH visits more often after haul-out.
Over the summer, on days with warm, southerly winds, Havelock had tried twice but failed to get her out on the water. He’d found her resistance puzzling but attractive, listening with amusement to her complicated excuses and assuming that she’d go out only with Dorian. Now he wants to hear the whole story.
“So how is she?” says Havelock.
“Fine,” says Dorian.
“By Christ, I don’t mean how is she today. How is she on deck?”
“She’s good.”
“I guessed it,” says Havelock. “You can see she has the legs for it – the hips, too.”
“She’s strong,” says Dorian.
“Does she take to it like a Moore?”
“Almost.”
“You’ll bring her around,” says Havelock. “You’ve got time.”
“Plenty of time,” says Dorian.
“When did it happen?” says Havelock. “Did you run out when I wasn’t looking?”
“No,” says Dorian. “It was a boat I’m thinking to buy.” He’s glad to have said it. Now they’ll stop talking about Meredith.
“A shakedown?”
“Call it that if you want.”
“Takes gumption – a new woman and a strange boat.” Havelock pulls on his beard. “Listen, don’t make an offer before I see it.”
Dorian waves off the advice. “I’m not buying it,” he says. “She seemed unhappy in the water.”
“Was she cranky or stiff?”
“A little of both.”
“You gotta wait for the right one,” says Havelock.
“I know.”
Dorian remembers how the owner, watching from the dock, seemed wary. He’d tossed off the line and tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I can handle the boat by myself.”
He motored out hoping for a steady wind, but even before he raised the main, the boat felt dull and clumsy, a disappointment after he’d seen the smooth fiberglass hull and believed that it would outdo his father’s sloop. Even the rudder felt sluggish, as if the boat were moving through oatmeal instead of water.
It’s dead, he thought, just like H.M. says. Maybe he’s right. Maybe a boat, when it isn’t built of wood, is a dead thing. I can’t be entirely sure. This one, at least, should be put out of its misery.
AT THE new store, hypnotized by monotony, oblivious to the bare trees and the snow falling, Dorian unpacks boxes and sorts merchandise. He works slowly, methodically, designing the floor plan, building shelves, installing counters and display cases – and then driving to Saginaw or Bloomfield Hills when the small summer cottage, chilly in winter, seems too quiet and too lonely.
In the dead of January, he travels through the dark and arrives at Meredith’s door feeling shaky, the journey having been treacherous, slowed by whiteouts and sudden drifts.
He rings the bell. He sees a neat row of jackets hanging on pegs in the front hall. He keeps ringing the bell and Meredith, wearing only a blue towel, finally answers the door.
She sweeps her wet hair to one side. “Nobody’s home but me.”
He glances over her shoulder and into the dark house. “There’s hardly a soul in Port Austin,” he says. “I think you’d like it.”
Meredith agrees.
In the morning, before rising from bed, she suggests a possible date for the wedding.
He smiles. He pictures her standing at the door wrapped in the blue towel. It occurs to him that he’d meant to propose and that Meredith had accepted. “You choose the day,” he says.
THEY exchange vows in the summer with Meredith showing – but taking no pains to hide it – and with the minister dripping sweat on her white gown.
Havelock drinks too much at the reception.
Behaving like a well-mannered thief, he cuts in on Meredith’s dance with her father. “Stop your stumbling,” says Havelock, nudging the man aside.
He takes hold of Meredith and they turn and counter-turn, the guests looking on, some of them shaking their heads.
Faya grabs Dorian and they waltz onto the floor. “Reclaim your bride,” she says.
Before Dorian can find an opening, Meredith’s father taps Havelock on the shoulder. Havelock ignores him, beaming with pride, moving off with Meredith in the opposite direction.
Undeterred, Meredith’s father waits and taps again.
This time Havelock turns and takes the man’s hand and grabs his waist and the two of them start dancing, whirling across the floor, faster and faster, until Havelock, leading through a broad turn, sends his tuxedoed partner careening toward a table.
A circle of guests fly from their chairs and scatter. In the next instant, Meredith’s father, his coattails flapping, lands on a steaming plate of spaghetti, the wineglasses spilling and shattering on the floor.
The episode clears the hall.
Dorian makes apologies while Meredith rocks back and forth between laughing and crying. They say their good-byes and drive through a gentle rain to Port Austin.
On the following Monday, they unlock the store and put a bright banner in the window. It says GRAND OPENING.
ALL DAY in a good wind, Dorian watches the gulls drift and climb, down-curving at last to the water’s deep mirror. He wonders why one bird searches for a partner while another won’t. Is it accidental or entirely
by design?
Two sloops had followed him out, and the three of them, in their heeling moment, entering the vast body of Lake Huron, shadowed each other for a time. They made a small but impressive symmetry. But then, as time passed, they seemed to think of why they’d come or, as it happened, where they were going, and finally they took up new headings, the first boat falling away to the south.
He aimed his boat higher, to the southeast, dreaming of an up-bound cruise, remembering a trip with his father to the northern reaches of Lake Huron, passing the De Tour Light, a squat white tower, where freighters make the turn toward Drummond, past De Tour Village. They sailed though the turn and spent the night in St. Martin Bay.
Now, with the sun fading, he aims for home, thinking of the Straits of Mackinac, regretting how, in foul weather, they’d made the decision to turn back.
He swears that someday he’ll climb Lake Huron again, that when he does he’ll turn toward Drummond, ascend through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, and then rush into Whitefish Bay, looking ahead, waiting for the blue of Superior to spread out before him like an endless sky.
HAVELOCK and Faya sign over the deed to the summer cottage, a last gift to the newlyweds.
Havelock also sends a crew to Port Austin with plans to build an addition, a nursery, nothing too large or fancy, just a simple room suitable for his grandson. He tells the contractor to paint the walls light blue.
Faya scolds him for being presumptuous. “What if it’s a girl,” she says. “You shouldn’t paint until the baby arrives.”
Havelock listens but goes ahead with his plan, and Meredith, exactly three and a half months to the day of her wedding, gives birth to a boy.
Dorian hangs a mobile of red, yellow, and blue sailboats over the crib.
“I like the boy’s calling card,” says Havelock. “Jason. Jason Moore makes a fine sound. It’s one hell of a name.”
WHEN the cottage feels cramped, Dorian goes to his new boat and keeps busy with maintenance and minor repairs. Meredith stops by only out of necessity. Upon arrival, she waves, puts her left foot on the dock, and then freezes.
They’d started this routine from the very first when she stood on the dock’s threshold and he shouted from the cockpit vouching for the boat’s safety and comfort, trying to convince her that she needn’t be afraid.
“Jason’s too little,” she said. “Maybe when he’s older.” She pulled back her foot. “You can always make a trip with Havelock. I’m sure he’s dying to go.”
“H.M.’s angry,” he said. “I didn’t ask for his advice or approval.”
“Call him,” she said. “He can’t stay away forever.”
Quietly, without invitation or warning, Havelock finally turned up. “Does your wife like it?” he said. “How does she look standing on the bow? She’d certainly be an improvement. A plastic bobber needs something to dress it up.”
“It’s fiberglass, not plastic.”
“I know. The wave of the future. At least Meredith is beautiful.”
“I can’t argue with that,” he said, mindful of the old man’s preoccupations and the secret of his wife’s fear, her trembling at the sight of water.
He thinks now that if she wore a bathing suit and sunned herself on the foredeck, if she came up the companionway carrying drinks, he’d adore her completely. He’d call her the Lady of the Lake. He’d drop anchor in an unknown bay and they’d go below.
But she stays at home or in the store.
He works on the boat and in the summer he eats dinner there.
After dark, he goes home and lies down beside her, the room quiet and cool and her face peaceful, the lines of her body quite visible beneath a thin cotton sheet.
“JASON,” says H.M., “you spoke your first words on the water – you’ll be a natural.”
He smiles at the old man. He’s heard this before. He’s also been told that he learned to walk on the ketch, his feet following the toe rail, his pudgy hands gripping the lifeline.
He’s tried to learn the boat’s language but he always forgets the words, distracted by sounds and rhythms – the sibilance of wind pouring over sails, the water when it laps the hull or rushes past with a sigh, the surf’s rise and fall, the lake breathing.
A sharp command brings him back and sets him in motion, but he drifts before long and forgets the order and leaves the job incomplete.
“Show me your hands,” says his grandfather.
He holds out his hands, palms up.
“That’s what I thought. Better for work that’s delicate.”
HIS FATHER nods, “Your name has a story, too.”
Then they wave at H.M., who stands like a post on the seawall and grows smaller as they move away from shore.
“It kills me,” says his father, “when H.M. goes off about fiberglass. According to him, new boats – each and every one of them – come decked out in lies. ‘No maintenance! No worries! That’s how they’re sold,’ he says. ‘Why believe it when you know it’s not true?’”
The wind picks up and the boat heels.
“But H.M. goes sour – you can see it on his face – when the wind’s thin and his boat refuses to point high, the hull designed to an old rule, too much underbody and too much keel.”
He watches as his father trims the main. “Are you and H.M. fighting?” he says.
“No,” says his father. “I like wood, too. It gives a boat character, a solid foundation, or, as your grandfather would say, a place in the long history of trees.”
“When I was out with Grandpa, we saw a big sailboat that he said was made of wood – but I didn’t think so.”
“Was the hull perfect and a blinding white?”
“I had to squint.”
“Then you were probably right.”
He likes the sound of his father’s words. “Grandpa wouldn’t listen,” he says.
Now, with the shore disappearing and the wind even stronger than before, he imitates his father and looks up at the wind vane, a buffeted black arrow, and checks the forward edge of the jib. He feels the boat gaining, gliding, skimming across the water like a perfect stone.
“JASON,” says H.M., “I need you to give a hand.”
He helps his grandfather pull and then listens to the gulls and pretends that he’s a bird migrating from one summer to the next – flying through seasons and school years, watching almost everything in the world, except the huge lake, disappear beneath him in a blur.
He hears everyone talk about time. His dad worries about how much of it gets spent at the store as opposed to sailing. His mom looks forward to the day when they’ll leave their small house forever. “Sometime soon,” she says. And Grandma and Grandpa talk about time running out, as if tomorrow they’d cease to exist.
He feels his stomach drop when the boat heels, then he watches for the light at Port Austin Reef, the one marker he recognizes from a distance.
Floating in the water is a large bird, not a seagull, with its wings stretched out and unmoving like the arms of a crucified man.
“Did it drown?” he says.
“Probably not,” says his grandfather.
“Then how did it die?”
“A broken wing, maybe. Or a sickness. Maybe it was old.”
“Why do things stop when they’re old?”
“Things run down. They get tired.”
“What makes them?” he says, turning away from the bird.
“A lot of things or nothing. It isn’t easy to say. All right, Jason, prepare to come about.”
“Will you run down?”
“Yes. We all do.”
“I’ll never run down.”
“You’ve got a long time to go, that’s true. It must seem like forever.”
“Can we stay on the boat forever?”
“We can if the weather holds. We can stay as long as you want.”
HE’S BEEN told that his grandmother feels weak. She’s been confined to her bed in the house with the spiral staircase. She rarely
ventures downstairs. The family doctor can’t find a thing that’s wrong, but the fatigue, the tiredness, won’t go away.
Time drags or runs like water.
Now, more often than before, he visits with his mom and dad. They bring flowers and fresh bread.
His grandmother puts on a good face, tries rising to the occasion, but she looks entirely wrung out by the time the visit is over and they close the bedroom door.
The frequent trips are monotonous. He complains about always having to go. Now that he’s older, he wants to stay home on his own. He needs to practice. He’d rather hang out and play records or make a few bucks cutting grass.
To tell the truth, he likes staying in Port Austin because it’s the place where his grandfather keeps the ketch. He feels good being near the big boat. He rides his bike to the water and sits with the ketch when H.M. isn’t there. He knows that smaller boats, the ones with single masts, the ones good for racing and sailing alone, get old and worn-out. He’s seen snapshots of the boats that aren’t around anymore. But the ketch is tireless. He believes it’ll never wear out. “It’s built of wood,” says his grandfather. “It takes hard work to keep her Bristol, but with foresight and care she’ll last a lifetime.”
H.M. doesn’t believe in new boats. “Your dad’s sloop, I’m telling you, is a plastic tub. It’s a white whale.”
He wonders what his grandfather means. “But both the ketch and the sloop are white,” he says.
“It’s a matter of substance,” says H.M. “A boat is a living thing because it’s made of living things. There’s no life in plastic. It’s empty. It’s blank – like a white whale.”
SCHOOLMATES in bright white T-shirts come tearing down the street shouting and laughing. He can feel them gaining and knows that if he looks over his shoulder he’ll lose speed, but he can’t resist and his head begins turning and he sees a boy almost at his heels. He rounds the corner and spots the familiar fence and jumps over the closed gate but catches his foot and goes sprawling on the tiny front lawn – on the thick grass that should’ve been cut before now except that the rain made it impossible. He starts to get up when a boy pounces on his back and holds his face to the ground, cursing in his ear. He hears the voices of the other boys closing in and they fall on him, too, their fists pounding his rib cage and the back of his head, and all the boys yelling or screaming, “Nigger pile. Nigger pile.”
Of Song and Water Page 10