Spartina

by John D. Casey

  Another problem Dick foresaw was that, if he was pushed too far north by the southeast wind, he’d end up over Georges Bank. It was almost as bad as a lee shore. The waves, as they felt the tug of the rising bottom of Georges Bank, would bunch up, grow steeper, break.

  Dick had been at the wheel of a Coast Guard vessel in ’59, winds at just hurricane force. At half-power, bow into the wind, she’d still been moving backward. If everything the Lydia P. reported was correct, Spartina was in for winds some forty knots harder. Dick couldn’t calculate the force exactly. He’d read that the force of the wind increased not just with the velocity of the wind, but with the square of the velocity. So a sixty-knot wind pushed at about fifteen pounds a square foot, but a 120-knot wind pushed not at thirty pounds but at almost eighty pounds a square foot.

  If Spartina caught a wind like that broadside, it would be like being pushed by a tugboat the same size as her.

  Dick looked at the chart. It was easy, on paper, just looking at numbers and lines. Spartina laboring eastward at six knots. The hurricane boiling northward at forty knots—right along 71°30’, as though it was a rail. He could hope the storm would slow down. If she slowed to thirty knots, he’d get out almost to her eastern edge. If she slowed to twenty knots, he’d be able to slip beyond her reach. Right out there with Captain Texeira’s lucky ships, even now the Bom Sonho headed toward the Azores, the stars shining on her.

  Dick checked with the Lydia P. every couple of hours. The hurricane was still coming at full speed, straight as an express train. The distance between the Lydia P. and Spartina was now greater than could be accounted for by their different hull speeds. It was the size of the swells that was cutting Spartina’s way.

  At what should have been sunrise, light began to ooze through the cloud cover, an amber glow with tinges of green. The swell, now visible, was enormous. Every time Spartina reached a rounded crest, Dick could see three or four crests to the south. The swell seemed almost stationary, foothills of a mountain range.

  At ten o’clock he checked the barometer. Twenty-eight. He was about to call the Lydia P. once more when he looked to the south. He didn’t need to call. He could see the abrupt line where the amber glow of the cloud cover and round swell gave way to darkness. And yet in the darkness there was a flickering. At first he thought it might be lightning, then he thought it might be whitecaps catching the last light. Before he got close enough to decide, his visibility dropped.

  He was scared, but his fear seemed remote from his body. He drank a Coke and ate a Hershey bar. He took out another Hershey bar but left it in its white inner wrapper in his jacket pocket. He turned on the pump and put some more sea water in the lobster wells. He hooked the door to the wheelhouse open and ran a twist of wire around the hook and eye. One thing he didn’t need was to pop the windows out when the pressure dropped.

  When the first wind hit, he watched the needle on the dial of the anemometer. It spurted up to seventy and then fell off as Spartina slid into a trough. He eased back on the throttle. The seas were steeper than the swell had been, but not as high. The peaks were blown flat by the wind. He caught the anemometer dial out of the corner of his eye. The needle flung itself all the way to the right. Spartina moved nicely into the next trough, and Dick eased up even more on the throttle. He couldn’t see anything beyond the bow except water. He had no sense of its movement, whether it was coming at him or whether it was rising or falling. He felt Spartina rise. He watched the needle spurt to the right and then fall back. He was puzzled for an instant, but then felt Spartina nosing down into the dark of the next trough.

  From the noise of the wind and the quick scribblings of spray across the glass in front of him it seemed he was engulfed in speed, but the one true sense he had—hearing and sight conveying no meaning—was of slow motion.

  He caught a glimpse of the anemometer needle slack at zero. He realized the cups had blown off.

  He checked her depth. Plenty of water under her.

  He broke off a bit of chocolate every half-hour. Then he realized he was making time drag on him by checking his watch. He saved the last bit of chocolate for a lull.

  It struck him as odd that his legs got tired before his arms did. And as his calves and thighs began to bother him with twinges, his confidence weakened. He felt tired and stupid and unlucky.

  There came a lull. For a terrible moment he feared it was the eye. The eye would be a disaster. It would mean the storm had curved out to sea toward him. It would mean that the winds yet to come would be violently opposed to how the sea was running, Spartina would be caught in confused seas, freak waves. But it was just a lull. The wind still southeast as far as he could tell, Spartina tucked into the lee of the mountainous seas. In his momentary panic he’d forgotten to eat the rest of his Hershey bar. In the next trough he mashed it into his mouth and got both hands back on the wheel. When Spartina was deep in the trough, the windshield wasn’t lashed with spray. He could make out just enough of the hole he was in to see Spartina as a bug in a toilet bowl.

  He tried to calculate how long before the storm would blow by. If Spartina didn’t get pushed north, and the storm kept moving at forty knots, it would be less than ten hours. He’d have to wait for another lull to check the loran against the chart, to see if Spartina was making any headway.

  Eventually the wind would move from southeast to south, and then around to southwest. By the time he’d be leaving the storm at the bottom of the cyclonic movement, the wind would be all the way around to the northwest, maybe down from hurricane force to gale force. The thought of coming out the bottom cheered him up. So far Spartina was taking it. Still tight as a tick, still coming up nicely.

  The weak point was him. He began to swear at himself. He swore out loud, calling himself a stupid son of a bitch, a dumb asshole. He was trying to numb some sharper thought of what he really was. Stupid was just making a mistake. There was something in him that had done worse than that, that had prepared him for deliberate harm to himself. Spartina was fine. Captain Texeira was right about her lines, she gave no flat argument to the force of the seas. He’d done that part fine. But he’d left some bad part of his effort inside himself. Perhaps it was the part he’d thought was tough bitterness, but now, washed once with a terror that he might give in, it turned out flawed. Worse than flawed—rotten. Worse than rotten—rotting, spreading rot.

  He ran out of cursing. He shook his head. He was afraid he was getting a little dingo, as though he’d got dizzy from too much sun.

  He held on. He felt thick and dull but okay. Maybe he should have taken a nap while Spartina was steaming east, before the swell got too big. He spent a long time deciding whether to drink another Coke or to crack the thermos of coffee. He leaned over to pick a can of Coke out of the cooler in the locker. As he stood back up, Spartina suddenly slid forward as though she was greased. She stuck her nose into a wave. He felt her held down, caught, then lifted by the bow and spun sideways. He leaned against the spokes of the wheel. No effect. She fell back on her beam. He clung to the wheel post with one hand to keep from falling over. For a long moment he had no idea where she was or which way was up. Then she came back on her own. He felt her stern wag, but he couldn’t tell whether it was her answering the helm—still hard over—or a lucky push of the sea. And then she was nestled in the next trough as though nothing had happened. The inner rasp of adrenaline smoothed out. The taste of zinc left his mouth.

  He felt a slow roiling of his sense of Spartina. He’d made her. He’d made her, but now she was the good one. She was better than him. It wasn’t alarming to hear this news, it was deeply, thickly soothing. She was lightened of a dangerous disabling weight. She wasn’t him. She’d become separate from him, and yet she was staying with him.

  He feared he was getting dingo again. But at least his nerves had pricked him awake. No need for the can of Coke. He glanced around his feet but couldn’t find it. The thermos was still stuck in its bracket over the locker.

  H
e willed himself to keep attentive to Spartina’s motion, but some of his thoughts began to wander. He found himself thinking of the books Miss Perry gave the boys. He couldn’t get the one he disliked most out of his head. A Christmas book, not a birthday book. He could see the pretty fluffy drawings of curly-headed boys and girls, the boys in sailor suits, the girls in billowed dresses under pretty fluffy summer clouds. Everything puffed—the children’s hair and cheeks and clothes, the pretty cloud above the pretty children. A Child’s Garden of Verses.

  He said out loud, “ ‘O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!’ ” He couldn’t remember any other part of the poem. Except the title—“The Lamplighter.” The line played itself again in his ear, “O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!” And again. He felt the little poem tug at some other thought, as though it was the current in a salt creek tugging at a stick half on the mud bank, half bobbing in the water.

  He’d read all those damn little poems to the boys. He wouldn’t have guessed they’d have stuck. It came loose: “Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea, And my Papa’s a banker …”

  The boys had said, “Miss Perry says ‘papa.’ ‘And my papa’s a banker.’ It goes ‘papa.’ And Miss Perry says ‘Mar-eye-ah.’ Not ‘Mar-ee-ah.’ ”

  It came again, trickling into his ear. “—and Maria go to sea, and my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be, But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,” he shouted out loud, “ ‘O LEERIE, I’LL GO ROUND AT NIGHT AND LIGHT THE LAMPS WITH YOU!’ ”

  He found the line turning to Charlie. When Charlie was six and seven, he’d admired everything Dick did. Every dumb ordinary thing. If he split wood, dug clams, or opened a beer, Charlie would be there with his face swiveled on him like a searchlight.

  Tom hadn’t been like that. Of course Tom’d had the problem of keeping up with Charlie, that’d kept him more closed in, he’d had to pretend to be indifferent to anything he couldn’t do or understand—until he got it and could spring it on Charlie whole. But Charlie had followed Dick around like a duckling—Charlie’s wide-open face had looked at Dick like Dick invented everything they found in water or mud—lobster, fish, clams. That knives could cut, that boats could float. O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you.

  Dick now thought it amazing that Charlie hadn’t turned sour when Dick did. Charlie hadn’t followed him into bitterness, he just wandered off his own sweet way. Maybe he’d found another Leerie to go round with.

  What faint light there was began to darken. Dick could still see the dark of the sea against the lighter blur of sky, but now he lost his short glimpses across the trough to the defined planes of the wave face, facets of chipped flint. He still had a sense of the enormous distance between waves. Each trough a small valley. And he had an even more puzzled sense of whether it was Spartina who moved toward the wave or the wave which came toward her, until she lifted up and went blind in the blown spray across her windshield.

  It was full dark when he sensed that the seas were growing confused. From the direction of the spattering across the windshield he figured the wind had pulled around to the southwest. Maybe west. The main roll of the sea was still from the south, but he could feel Spartina responding to bulges and shoves of wind on her starboard bow.

  This was good news and bad news. The good news was that the wind shift meant Spartina was getting to the bottom of the hurricane. The bad news was that she might take some funny bounces. He couldn’t see how high the seas were running, but the time Spartina spent climbing seemed shorter. It took him a while to figure out what else was different—it was the pitch of the wind. The higher register was intermittent and more variable, rising and falling, instead of solid noise. And he could hear Spartina now. He couldn’t hear the engine, but at less than half-power that wouldn’t be very loud. What he could hear was her timbers working, groaning and creaking.

  As she rolled to port in a little cross sea, he felt his right foot nudged by the Coke can.

  He scooped it up, popped the top, and sucked it in. He hadn’t realized how dry he was. Almost immediately he began to sweat. He felt it popping out on his forehead and running down his sides. He reached for the thermos of coffee but put both hands on the wheel as Spartina slid sideways and rolled sharply to starboard. He turned his head at the first noise. It sounded as though he was grinding his teeth but it was the port section of window. In the glow of instrument lights, he saw the black window turn crackling white. He ducked away, his left hand still on the wheel, his right hand skidding on the floor. His left hand came loose. He was flattened against something, he couldn’t tell what. He was being pulled sideways. His left hand found an edge. It came to him slowly that what was pulling him was water.

  He felt it pull past his waist, past his knees. He was lying against the door of a locker. It occurred to him with careful instructional slowness that the reason he was lying on what was normally an upright door was that Spartina was over on her starboard beam.

  He was too dazed to move his body, though he felt his hand move under his face, brush his cheek. After an instant he felt his feet touch the floor. His senses cleared enough for him to feel Spartina coming back. He turned and grabbed the edge of the instrument shelf and then the wheel.

  Spartina was more or less on her feet. There were no lights on the instruments. Only the binnacle light was still on.

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought he remembered seeing bluish light when he was lying down. The wiring shorting out from the water? Where had all the water gone? He began to shake now. The weight of the wheelhouse full of water could have pushed her over—with all that weight so high she could have turned turtle.

  He leaned over and opened the locker door with his right hand and groped for the flashlight. He shone it first on the broken window. There were a few pieces of glass in the frame. He knocked them out with the flashlight so they wouldn’t blow loose. He shone the flashlight around the wheelhouse. There was an inch or two of water left sloshing around. The instruments were still in their mountings. The loose charts were gone. There was a soggy piece of one plastered to the jamb of the doorway.

  He put both hands on the wheel, breathed through his nose. The open door was a piece of good luck. The water had poured out the door before its weight rolled Spartina. Once out on deck, it’d just slid away.

  Of course the other piece of luck was that he hadn’t gone out the door too. And surfed on over the rail.

  He could feel his hands shaking, even though they were tight on the spokes of the wheel.

  In the lull of the next long valley he tried to turn his mind to sealing the broken window.

  It was on the lee side now, so the wind wasn’t blowing the spray in, but another freak wave and he’d be up to his knees again. And if Spartina buried her bow again …

  He could feel the edge of adrenaline ebb away. He looked for something to seal the hole. He thought of the mattress on the bunk. The wheelhouse door. The locker door.

  The problem kept him in an alert state of indecision. He could hear the noise of the wind humming across the open hole. He lost track of time.

  What brought him to was that he had to take a leak. He shook his head. He realized he’d been close to nodding off on his feet. He unsnapped his bib, shoved it down, and pissed into the inch of water still sliding around his feet.

  He examined the window with the flashlight. Maybe not as bad as he thought. Only three feet by two feet. He took the thermos out of its bracket and put the flashlight in its place. It shone bleakly on the dead instruments, on the film of water at his feet. He drank the coffee and tossed the thermos into the locker.

  Spartina took a wave over her bow that danced around the wheelhouse. By the flashlight Dick saw a bucketful of wave spill in the window. It was the locker door banging loose that nudged him. He filled his jacket pocket with nails. He took a cat’s paw from his tool box and tore the locker-door hinges loose.


  In the next long trough he held the door up to the window. It didn’t fit, but better too big than too small. In the relative lull of each trough he banged in a couple of nails, through the plywood door, into the frame.

  Back at the wheel he looked sideways at it. It looked like hell. One good smack of another cross-wave and it’d come flying in and he’d be lying on it like a damn Indian yogi on a bed of nails. He got his screw gun out of his tool chest. He couldn’t remember if the batteries had got wet. No. The locker door had been closed then. He was clumsy with the screw gun, he wasn’t used to using it left-handed. He zapped the first screw in askew, but the next six spun in straight. He was sweating again. The piece of plywood still seemed ominous. He got a short piece of wire and used his left hand to take some turns around the knob of the locker door. He made the other end fast to a bracket on the wall. At least this way, if the whole thing got knocked in, it would pull up short before it took his head off.

  His jumping around and banging had revved him up some. Or maybe the coffee was kicking in. He checked his watch and turned out the flashlight. Getting on to midnight. Unless Spartina had drifted back a whole lot, she should be coming out.

  He could feel the seas diminishing. The crests were steeper—he could hear them sizzle over the bow—but the size of everything was settling down. The time in each trough was shorter, and the time climbing the next wave. He felt a small upward pressure of hope through his chest and shoulders. And a pain in his rib cage, a twinge in his right side when he breathed. He couldn’t remember hurting himself.

  He began checking his watch too often. He’d wait and wait and then sneak a look, only to find that what he’d hoped would be an elapsed hour had only been fifteen minutes.

  At three in the morning he began to talk to himself. “No more looking. Forget the goddamn watch. The watch is nothing to do with it.” He pushed the watch up under his sleeve so it wouldn’t be so easy to get a look at it.