At the bottom, he can’t breathe, already breathless from running, and he believes that he’ll suffocate, drown in the watery grass, and he feels a hot pressure building behind his eyes, his arms and legs pinned to the ground, when suddenly a tremendous blast, an explosion, blows everything into silence.
He looks up. The weight rolls off his body. On the porch steps is Otis with a shotgun aimed at heaven.
“You boys got no business here,” he says. “You best run on home before I come down there and get mean.”
Like ghosts disappearing on the air, the boys scatter and slip away.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Young.” He manages to pick himself up. “I looked back and really didn’t think – ”
“There you go again with your Mr. Young,” says Otis. “What else are you sorry for?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I didn’t mean to start something.”
“Well, we already have. You see, everybody’s left their dinner on the table. They don’t care if it gets cold.” Otis smiles at the scared faces. “It’s all right,” he says. “Nobody’s been shot.”
The woman next door says to her husband, “That’s the white boy who always comes ’round – I think his name’s Jason.”
He hears the edge in her voice and brushes himself off and starts for the gate.
“Slow down,” says Otis. “You got somewhere to be?”
He shakes his head.
“Then get yourself in here. We’ll have some lemonade.”
He walks slowly toward the house and, climbing the four porch steps, notices that his knees are weak, that his whole body feels shaky.
After they’re inside, Otis tucks the shotgun under his arm, opens the breech, and removes the spent shell. “Take my reading chair. It’s more comfortable than the front lawn.”
He falls into the chair and sinks into the soft cushion, his heart still pounding. He suddenly feels heavy and wants to sleep for a long time.
Otis goes into the kitchen and soon returns with two lemonades. “Try some of this,” he says, handing off the glass.
“Thanks.” He wraps his fingers around the drink but can’t keep his hand from shaking. He spills lemonade on his shirt before he can get the glass to his lips.
“Careful,” says Otis. “I was thinking we could have your lesson today, now that you’re here and all, but – ”
“I didn’t bring my guitar,” he says.
“I realize that,” says Otis. “I figured you could use mine, but with hands like that, there’s no use.” He sips his lemonade. “What did those boys want with you anyway?”
“They don’t like me.”
“Really?”
“Something happened at school.”
“You mean those boys got after you on the playground and then chased you all the way out here?”
He nods.
“Did you sock one of ’em in the eye?”
He shakes his head.
“Did you call ’em names?”
“No.” He raises the glass of lemonade to his lips and this time he doesn’t spill, though his hand is still trembling.
“Let me guess,” says Otis. “Those boys don’t like the fact that I pay you to cut my grass. They don’t like the fact that you come here for lessons. They’re scared that you know something they don’t.”
He’d been trying not to cry since he sat down but now he can’t help it. He starts to sob and spills more lemonade as he sets the glass on the table beside the chair.
“It’s all right,” says Otis. “But you should’ve told me.”
“I thought you’d get mad,” he says, trying to breathe.
“So what? What if I did get mad? What if it hurt my feelings? Do you think you’re old enough and wise enough and powerful enough to protect me?”
“No.”
“Then you should’ve just told me. Told me flat out.”
He nods, wiping away tears with the back of his hand.
“I’ve seen some things,” says Otis. “You will, too. Things you shouldn’t keep to yourself.” Otis grinds an ice cube between his teeth. “I’ve gotta make some calls and pay a few bills. You can stay here as long as you want. I’ll be out back if you need me.”
He sees Otis pick up a stack of envelopes and an address book and then hears him go down the hall and out the back door. He settles deeper into the chair and closes his eyes.
He remembers that when he finally woke up the room was dusky and silent. After a while, he heard a clock ticking, its white face glowing through the shadows, and knew that his parents, if they hadn’t already, would soon call the police. He decided it didn’t matter. The chair felt better than his bed at home and the sweet smell of the leather made him feel safe. He thinks now that he slept there, that somehow he never left.
“FAYA’S much worse,” says a doctor. “Bed rest by itself isn’t working.”
These words, spoken with routine precision, give way to a hospital, a white gown, and a team of well-meaning specialists. Despite the nurses and the additional care, she gradually declines, baffling the physicians who order test after test but fail to put forward a convincing theory. Eventually, they abandon all hope for a diagnosis.
Time drags or runs like water.
It’s repeated in whispers that the old man abhors his helplessness. He speaks to no one – no one will know his story for now – and he tries to ignore a new worry, a cramp in his abdomen, a sensation that grows from bothersome to chronic to debilitating in a period of weeks.
When the pain makes him sweat, he tells a young doctor, who performs an examination and wants him admitted without delay. He says he’ll give himself up, but only if the hospital agrees to put him nowhere near Faya.
The young doctor makes a swift and precise diagnosis, cancer of the spleen.
For several days, Havelock occupies a private room on the second floor. When visiting hours begin, he removes his robe and puts on his suit and tie, descends by elevator to the lobby gift shop, buys a bouquet of flowers, nothing extravagant, and then takes the elevator up to the fourth floor and sits with Faya, as if he’d just arrived from home.
Eventually, a surgeon stops by and prods him and decides quickly, having already studied the X-rays, that the cancer is inoperable.
“There’s no other course?” says Havelock.
“No,” says the surgeon. “No other course.”
Havelock looks in the mirror. His gray beard is bushy. He sees weathered skin and dark recesses under his eyes. He lifts both hands and touches his face. “I can’t feel it,” he says.
He turns and glances around the room. The surgeon is gone. He rubs his hands as if his fingers were cold. He touches his face and again feels nothing. “I’ll be damned,” he says.
THE YOUNG doctor processes Havelock’s discharge, walks the old man to the front door, and hands him a bottle of painkillers.
There’s relief in the smell of fresh air. He’d like to go out on Lake Huron, run with the singlehanders for the last time. Instead, he continues his routine, visiting Faya each day, always dressed in his suit and tie, stopping first at the lobby gift shop for flowers.
Through the end of winter and into the spring, the young doctor, in awe of Havelock’s constitution, rewrites the prescription again and again, increasing both strength and dosage over time.
Havelock swallows the pills. He checks the wind and sky each morning but keeps himself close to home and steers clear of Saginaw Bay. Lake Huron falls away like a broken dream.
ON A morning in late June, just before sunrise, Faya stops breathing.
When the nurse arrives with Faya’s pills, she finds Havelock dressed in his suit and tie sitting near the bed, a small bouquet of flowers in his hand.
He signs the necessary papers and pays the bill.
After that, he drives to Port Austin. He makes one turn after another until the old summer cottage comes into view. He stops at the curb, staying a safe distance away, and sees a line of fresh linens in the midmorning
sun, the bedsheets billowing in the wind like sails.
He parks his car near the water and walks down to the ketch, his eyes tracing the lovely lines of her hull. He boards and goes below.
He opens a locked storage compartment and takes out a sawed-off shotgun, a souvenir from his days in bootlegging. He opens the breech, tucks the gun under his left arm, and reaches for a shell. The warning on the thin cardboard box is faded. He shoves in the shell and locks the breech. He puts the muzzle under his chin and fires.
“JASON,” says his father, “stay close.”
They push their way through a small gathering of gawkers, gossips, and policemen.
His father boards and goes below while an officer waits on deck. He emerges a minute or two later, visibly shaken, unable to step off the ketch without assistance.
“Your grandfather’s not there,” he says.
“Where is he then?”
His father looks back at the ketch. “Down below. But you can’t go aboard.”
“If he’s there, then I want to see him.”
“You can’t. It’s not possible.”
He feels the grip of his father’s hands. “Why not? Why can’t I see him?”
“There’s nothing to see.”
He tries to twist out of his father’s arms. “Let me go,” he says. “Did he say he won’t see me? Why won’t you let me – ?”
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing to see. There’s no face. Your grandfather has no face.”
chapter five
THE BOAT rests easy in its cradle. Humbug Marina, thawing in the April sun, smells like a spring meadow, a second chance, as if the brittle ground, despite wood shavings and rusty debris, had opened itself like a flower. Now, thinks Coleman, I’ll make a go of it. She’ll be ready by June. I’ll take her upriver, through the narrows, to sail on an inland sea, the clouds swelling in the sky like waves.
A breeze comes up from the water. He feels light on his feet, almost buoyant. He breathes.
The scent of damp soil carries him back to a waning spring, to warm nights thick with humidity, the fast but narrow roads between Detroit and Port Austin, sad songs on the radio, the darkness of Lake Huron on one side and a blur of trees on the other.
“A full-throttle weekend,” says a voice over the airwaves. And so he goes, anxious for the end of high school, driving with the windows open and the radio turned up, hoping to see Otis and the light at Port Austin Reef. Needling him is the inescapable fact that he’s in his father’s car. He fiddles with the tuning knob, annoyed by static and the fading signal.
He glances in the rearview mirror, feels a shot of adrenaline. “You made the decision. And you finished it,” he says, seeing his father in the backseat. “You tore the guts out of Halyard & Mast. We’d barely gotten H.M. over the side and already the plan was in motion.”
He looks again but there’s no one there.
Never once did he question his father’s course. Never once did he get in the way. He punches the accelerator and the engine unwinds. But how do you stop a thing like that? He was too young. He barely made a sound in his father’s world. Even so, he blames himself for being a willing accomplice, for working closely with his father, cleaning and repairing the ketch, making it Bristol, and then standing by in silence while his father, without hesitation, turned the ketch over to a collector of fine antiques, a trophy hunter, a man with no interest in sailing.
“YOU MUST be crazy,” says Otis, “driving up here in the dark like a bat out of hell.”
“I would’ve waited till tomorrow,” he says, “but I saw the light on – ”
“It’s nearly midnight,” says Otis. “Suppose you’d rung at the wrong moment? What then?”
He checks Otis’s collar for lipstick. “You’d ignore it, I guess.”
“Is that what you guess?” Otis chuckles. “All right, Jason, get your sorry ass in here. I just brewed a fresh pot. I guess I can spare a cup.”
He steps through the door and picks up the scent of coffee and old leather. “A couple of weeks,” he says, “and I’ll be finished with school.” He follows Otis into the kitchen.
“What’s your plan?” says Otis.
“Boston College,” he says. “They gave me a scholarship.”
“Then you’re not really done with school.”
“I meant high school. I’m gonna buy a used car and drive to the coast.”
“Guitar going with you?”
“Naturally.”
“You want cream and sugar?”
“Black,” he says.
After handing off the first cup, Otis pours one for himself and stirs in two teaspoons of sugar and a lot of cream. “You swing by the old store?”
He shakes his head. “I came straight here.”
“It’s still boarded up,” says Otis. “No businessman wants it. It’s a sorry sight. I wish your old man was still there.”
“You teaching?”
“Off and on,” says Otis. “Every so often I get a boy who reminds me of you, but it doesn’t pan out. Port Austin is a small town. Folks just pick up and leave.” He takes a slow sip of his coffee. “How’s Detroit?”
“It’s big,” he says. “I didn’t know how big till I started driving.”
“You get downtown much?”
“Sure,” he says. “All the time.”
“But now you’re heading for Boston.”
“As soon as I can.”
“That’s how it goes,” says Otis.
He looks at Otis looking at his coffee. “How what goes?”
“You just got off Gross Ile and into Detroit and already you’re planning to leave.”
“Wayne State is too close to home,” he says.
“That’s true,” says Otis. “But there’s more to it than that. Like me and everybody else – you get tired of the people you’re with. You like to imagine yourself in a neighborhood that’s different from the one you’re in. The whole thing makes me irritable.”
“But they’re offering me a free ride.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about staying with a place. When people pick up and leave, it breaks things up. It changes the landscape.”
“You left Detroit and New York.”
Otis nods. “I did.” He walks over to the sink and rinses his cup. “In any case, you’re too young to settle down. You’re right. You go to school. If Boston turns out to be your place, then stay there. You want more coffee?”
“No thanks,” he says. “I gotta use the can.”
“You got a room somewhere?” says Otis.
“No. I brought a sleeping bag. I’ll go down to the lake.”
“Looks like rain,” says Otis.
“You think so?”
“The sofa’s free. You better sleep here. It’ll rain for sure if you don’t.”
COLEMAN carries a five-gallon bucket. In it are rags, paper towels, oil, regular and waterproof grease, wrenches, screwdrivers, hose clamps, a wire brush, and a flashlight. He shifts the bucket from one hand to the other when he feels a cramp.
Sitting on blocks near the fence is a giant cruiser, a Chris-Craft, with a rotting hull. He’s never seen anyone go near it. The local philosopher, a gaunt alcoholic, calls it a ghost ship – the yard’s monument to damage and disrepair. Next to the cruiser is another wooden boat that looks brand-new. The river sparkles beyond the docks.
He keeps walking and takes a deep breath and tries to keep himself steady. Lately, when he leaves work, his clothes, even his hands, smell like beer. There’s plenty of daylight left, he thinks. Humbug is better in the daylight. Loads of fresh air – and enough dreams and defeats to go around.
He stops at the Pequod, the smooth fiberglass hull curving away from him toward the bow. He bends and sets his bucket on the ground next to the ladder. I’ll open the cabin, he thinks. I’ll let out everything that’s stale.
He pulls a slip of yellow paper out of his shirt pocket. He checks the list of jobs that need to be done. He k
nows the work is critical for both safety and comfort, but most of the repairs are more than he can do. Spring commissioning, or so H.M. liked to say, involves know-how, keen observation, and planning. “But it takes more than that,” he mumbles, realizing that in the yard, with the boat cradled and dry, it’s easy to drift off, sink into currents of sanguine reverie, evade or somehow deny the fact that there’s no real hope at Humbug, no chance, without talent, money, and time.
He looks around. No one else is out this early, he thinks. A jump on the season should count for something.
Even with the snow almost gone and the sun shining, Humbug offers little more than gray, silver, and white. He tells himself that Jen would plant flowers here. He remembers in the darkest months how she often came home with bouquets for the kitchen and bedroom, with French soap, honeysuckle or lavender, for the dish on the pedestal sink.
In Tobermory, the houses on the harbor are red, yellow, and blue – a line from a letter long ago, and now he repeats it like the chorus of a song. “In Tobermory,” he says out loud, “the houses on the harbor are red, yellow, and blue.”
HE THINKS of the call from Cape Hurd and the journey to salvage his father’s boat, the trip unfolding in the last spring of the millennium, the scent of warm earth rising around him like fog. The long drive made him feel cramped and stiff, a bit older than forty-five, as he sped across the Ambassador Bridge and passed through Windsor in a flash, traveling north through Ontario and up the Bruce Peninsula to arrive unannounced at Jennifer’s door.
Of Song and Water Page 11