When his father cut the engine, Robert felt relief in the silence. The two of them got into the dinghy, and while his father rowed toward shore Robert paid line over the stern. “Life jacket?” his father said.
“I forgot it.”
His father looked at him. “This water’s fifty degrees,” he said.
Robert nodded.
Ashore, they secured the first line to a birch tree and then hopped over the rocks and looped a second stern-tie around a large piece of driftwood his father said must’ve rolled from a log boom offshore. Maybe on its way from Alaska. It looked like it’d been there for years, sunk deep, near its base, in the sand. Three points of contact, now. Robert could see his father relax. They would not drag anchor. They were secure.
On the way back to the dinghy, Robert caught the toe of his heavy shore boot on the lip of a rock and fell on his hands. Barnacles dug into his palm, but he kept from crying. His father put a hand on his back and led him down to the shore, and the boy put his hands in the salt water until the sting was gone. “Cold, huh?” his father said. Back aboard Pamier his father rummaged through a drawer by the stove and came topsides with some Band-Aids.
The stern-ties were perhaps an unnecessary precaution. For the last four days the weather had been beautiful and calm—the barometer had climbed and plateaued, and the voice on the ship-to-shore radio mounted over the instrument panel droned on and on about pleasant conditions. There was no mention of the storm, nothing of the shipwrecks Robert, before going to sleep, imagined. No distress signals. No calls for help.
“How’s the hand?” his father said.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Later that afternoon Robert went by himself in the dinghy to set the crab-trap, and then rowed over to a kelp-bed and leaned over the side with what his father called the look-box: a cylindrical plastic bucket with a Plexiglas bottom. It worked like a reverse periscope, and below the surface of the water Robert could see starfish, orange and deep purple, some with too many legs to count. He watched an anemone contract its bluish suckers and then release them to wave gently in the current. He’d remembered his life jacket, and it made hunching over the dinghy’s side uncomfortable, but that was the deal if he wanted to go rowing by himself: life jacket at all times, and stay within sight of Pamier.
Ashore, his father showed him how to fillet the salmon they’d caught the day before, which made him squeamish but also, as he put one gloved hand on the body of the fish and with his other made his first cut, exhilarated. As he felt for the spine with the knife, he remembered how his father had brought the club down on the fish’s head, three whacks, until it stopped flipping around and lay in the cockpit, stunned at its own suffocation, its gills clapping open and shut. Robert had never seen his father hit anything, and watching this he’d felt his own weight to be less than the fish’s. He had caught it. He had hooked and reeled it in. His father had been at his shoulder, excitedly shouting instructions about line tension and angle, finally grabbing the fish with one hand while the other reached for the club. The wet blows sounded like a cabinet shutting. “That’s your fish!” his father had said, holding it up for appraisal before dropping it on the deck. Robert had smiled, but then had felt ashamed. He wanted to throw it back, or at least part of him did, but the blood was dark, and its scales, like small mirrors in the sun, had flecked off onto his shoe. It could not be undone.
After they’d collected enough wood for a fire, Robert walked on the beach below the tide line, picking up sand dollars and skipping them back into the water so they wouldn’t dry in the sun. He flipped rocks and watched tiny crabs scuttle over one another in the sand. He delicately carried a crab in the basin of his shirt to a tide pool, crouched down, and dropped the crab into a sea anemone, which closed itself around the crab. It looked to him like a hug; a greeting. He didn’t know whether or not anemones ate crabs, but eventually the crab stopped moving, and the anemone opened itself again.
They cooked and ate the salmon ashore, and after dinner they sat facing the water as the sun went down. As the light flattened, they saw an eagle, and watched it dive and swoop just beyond Pamier. Soon it was dark. When Robert began to get sleepy, he and his father stood and peed on the fire side by side and then his father kicked sand over the remaining embers. On board, they slept in the main cabin, together. It had been this way since his mother and sister had left, the two of them bunking up, and it was a comfort to Robert. He would not have admitted it, would not have said it aloud, but he was unable to sleep in the unfamiliar boat, with its stays and halyards constantly adjusting in the wind, knocking into the mast, without knowing his father was two feet away from him, in a matching and old-smelling sleeping bag.
The storm had come up suddenly, and had been more severe than the man on the weather channel had predicted. When the wind picked up, his father jokingly announced it was time to batten the hatches and get out the board games. “I don’t think this is funny, Joshua,” his mother had said. His father looked at her and shrugged. He went topsides to check the anchor and returned below to say there was nothing to worry about. Robert’s sister was two years younger and scared of the wind. When they were in their sleeping bags in the bow cabin that first night, the cabin the two of them had decided to call “the cave,” he’d let her sleep on his bunk between him and the hull.
The next morning a front rolled in, bringing with it a gale-force warning. His parents discussed trying to make it to Ucluelet, but by the time they’d decided to leave, the wind had already arrived, and his father said it was too late. It would be safer to stern-tie to shore and hunker down than to attempt an open-water crossing.
“There are no other boats here,” his mother said.
“We’ll be fine,” his father said.
“You think, or you know?”
His father didn’t answer but turned to Robert and told him to put on his foul weather gear.
“You must be joking,” his mother said. Robert had never seen her so angry. “He’s not going out there with you.” Outside, through the hatch, it was dark.
“I need someone to help with the stern-tie.”
“Well, not him.”
Robert already had his slicker, but his mother told him to put it away. “How could you do this to us?” she said to his father, almost under her breath.
“What do you want me to say? I’m sorry.”
“You knew it was late in the season to be out here. You told me.” She opened the closet near the galley and pulled out a pair of rain pants and slammed the door shut. “You might have grown up sailing, but no one else here did. You understand? This might not be scary to you. But I’m telling you. This isn’t fun for the rest of us.”
His father watched her stomp rain boots on. When she stood, he was still watching her.
She turned to Robert and his sister and told them not to worry, and then she climbed topsides after her husband.
The two of them watched the storm and their parents’ progress through the oval-shaped cabin windows. The trees onshore whipped and swayed. The rain was coming down sideways and in sheets, and looked at times to be billowing in the wind. He could hear his parents shouting, but it sounded like a combination of directional advice and nonsense.
“What if they don’t come back?” his sister said. She was nine and shorter than he was by a foot, with her mother’s brown hair.
“That’s stupid.”
“What if?”
After a while they heard their parents scrambling back aboard and Robert turned to his sister, who was crying, and said, “See?”
That night his sister whimpered until their mother brought her sleeping bag into the forward cabin and slept with the two of them. In the morning the storm seemed to have passed over them at least partially, but the voice on the radio said that in the north, hurricane winds were being reported and an all-craft advisory was issued. They spent the day in the cabin playing cards and board games. When the wind kicked up again, Robert’s father went topsi
des to check the anchor and returned wet and angry. “We’re dragging,” he said.
“What can we do?” his mother said. It was the first time they’d spoken to each other all day.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Robert’s sister began crying again. “That helps,” his father said. “The crying helps.”
At some point, Robert fell asleep, and when he woke up he was surprised at how quiet it was in the main cabin. The storm had stopped. Morning light was streaming in through the hatches, which were now open. His father sat at the chart table with the radio on low volume.
“We’re taking your mother and sister to Ucluelet,” he said. “They’ll catch a bus and then a ferry home.”
“What about me?”
“I need you,” he said. “The boat has to come down. I can’t do it by myself. The storm’s over. It’ll be fun.” He stood and stretched. “We can poke around the islands for a few days before heading down. Me and you. It’ll be fun. I promise.”
It took six hours under power to get to Ucluelet. As they pulled past the breakwater, his sister pointed to the shore abutting the marina, where a number of the boats that had been free anchored were stacked almost on top of each other, as if they’d been swept into a corner by a large broom.
Robert hugged his mother and said good-bye to his sister at the bus station. His sister was crying for no reason. She gave him a drawing of a tree, and he thanked her for it. They waited for the bus to pull out, and then he and his father returned to Pamier.
Later, they talked about Robert’s mother. “She thinks I put us in danger,” his father said. Robert nodded. “I don’t know what she told you and your sister. But I want to tell you I didn’t do that. She’s wrong about that. I was maybe not as careful as I could’ve been. But look, I got us out of it, right?” Robert nodded again. “No one’s hurt.” They were playing Rummy-Block on the foldout table in the main cabin. The wick on the kerosene lamp was low, and the light was soft.
“I figure as long as we avoid the pirates, we’ll be fine from here on out,” his father said. He cocked an eyebrow.
“That’s lame, Dad,” Robert said, putting his tiles on the board.
“Not true!” his father said. “I heard them, just last night. Rowing around the boat, singing yo-ho-ho. I didn’t want to wake you. I didn’t want to scare you.”
“I wouldn’t be scared of that.”
“Oh yeah, tough guy? What would scare you?”
Robert felt like he’d been kicked, caught by surprise. He wasn’t ready for this. He’d thought about it, but thinking wasn’t the problem. He wanted to say, being alone. He wanted to say the kids at camp this summer, so sure of themselves, scared him. But he couldn’t. What could his father possibly say? These kids, they had hated him for no reason he could think of except that he was there by himself and hadn’t, like them, signed up with a group of friends. He wanted to tell his father that when these kids had lured him deep in the woods, and tied him to a tremendous oak and left him, he’d been scared. It wasn’t when they were there, though, laughing, and pulling his shoes off, that he’d been truly frightened; that deeper fear had only come after they’d left, and there was almost no sound in any direction, nothing for him to grab onto at all, and he’d understood he was lost. It was an isolation he’d never felt before. When he’d finally untied the knots, it was getting dark, and he still didn’t know which direction the camp was; he’d sat at the base of the tree and cried until a counselor had come to find him. He hadn’t moved, just like he’d been instructed to do. No one apologized, but he hadn’t wanted anyone to apologize. He’d wanted to disappear. He’d wanted to just be blown to the ground and stepped on as if he wasn’t there. He’d told no one. Not his father. Not his mother when she came to pick him up at the end of the week. He kept it to himself, hardening his memory of that long afternoon until it was diamond sharp. It had happened to him, and it couldn’t be changed.
“Not pirates,” Robert said.
His father let him win the game, and then they turned in.
The next day at Wower, Robert woke early. He’d slept in his clothes, which made him aware of his mother’s absence and also made him feel older somehow. His father wasn’t in the opposite bunk. He went topsides, rubbing the crust from his eyes and squinting at the morning sun. The air smelled fresh. His father sat in the cockpit, reading Louis L’Amour and drinking coffee.
“Want some?” he said. Robert nodded, and his father poured coffee from a thermos into a cup. The cup was made from red plastic, and across the front BOSUN was written in maritime font. His father drank from the FIRST MATE cup. Robert never drank coffee at home, and having it this morning with his father felt like a secret between them. He went below and came back with his own book, a Gary Paulsen novel he’d already read about a young boy surviving alone in the wilderness, and sat next to his father until the sun was high enough that it didn’t feel like morning anymore.
When his mother and sister had been aboard the days had been crowded with shore exploration and card games and elaborate hunts for pirate treasure, but the four days with his father had been punctuated only by occasional conversation and eagle spottings. The hours unraveled, and then it was time to eat. Or time to pull up the anchor and brush the deck down. Robert preferred it this way. It wasn’t that he didn’t miss his mother and sister. It was just different without them. Quieter. Grown-up.
His father stood. “You want to help me wash her down?” he said. Robert shrugged. “Get your stuff, then,” his father said.
After he changed his clothes and put on his life jacket, he handed the bucket of soap water to his father, who was sitting in the dinghy, holding on to the toe-rail. Then he turned and climbed backward into the dinghy, searching blindly with his foot for the seat. He felt his father’s hand on his back, felt the seat with his toe, and let himself down.
They spent a good half hour washing the port side, his father inspecting every scratch and wondering aloud if it had been there before the storm. It was hot and his father pulled his shirt over his head and threw it on deck. When they got to the bow, his father told him to sit down and then grabbed ahold of the anchor chain and pulled them under. As they moved under the chain, Robert looked up from the bottom of the dinghy, where he’d been watching sand swish back and forth in an inch of seawater, and toward shore. Standing at the tide line was a man in a red flannel shirt. His arms were crossed, and though he was more than fifty yards away, Robert could feel he was staring at them.
“Dad,” he said.
His father turned. At first, the man did nothing. Then his father cupped his hands and said, “Hello?”
The man slowly raised his hand. He was the first person they’d seen in the islands since the storm.
Robert’s father stood still in the boat, watching the man. He reached for the toe-rail and missed it, reached again and grabbed it to keep them from drifting.
“Thank God you came!” the man said. He didn’t shout. His voice carried over the water. It sounded like his voice was coming from behind them. The man’s hair was brown and disheveled. Something about the way he stood struck Robert as odd, as if one leg were longer than the other.
Robert’s father looked over his shoulder, scanning the bay to see if he’d missed a boat. He laughed. “We came?”
“I’m wrecked,” the man said. “On the other side. Of the island. You’re the first boat I’ve seen.”
His father asked him if he was all right. The man said yes.
“Do you have a radio?” his father said. “Did you radio it in?”
The man said nothing. Then he said, “Yes, it’s a little frazzled now though. I never got a time, but they said they’d be coming.”
“The coast guard?”
“The coast guard.”
His father turned and put his hand on the rail and then turned back to the man. “You need help?”
The man dug his boot into the sand. Then he laughed. A rough sound, more like coughing.
He kneeled down, picked something out of the sand near his boot, and as he stood, put whatever it was in his shirt pocket. “Clearly,” he said.
Robert’s father looked at his son, and then back to the man. “Okay,” he said. “Hold on. We’ll be right there.”
His father told Robert to climb aboard and tie the dinghy. Then he heaved himself aboard as well. Robert tried a buoy knot his father taught him, but it didn’t take, so he tied a square knot. He looked at the man, who was standing perfectly still, and then followed his father below.
“Are we going?” he said.
His father was looking at the ship-to-shore radio. He sat for a while not saying anything. Then, finally, he told Robert to get some food from the cabinet and put it in a paper bag. He packed some Doritos and crackers. Some cottage cheese. As he was reaching for the soda, his father said, “Sort of came out of nowhere, didn’t he?”
Robert nodded. “Maybe we should call someone,” he said.
His father didn’t respond. Robert looked out one of the cabin windows but couldn’t see the man. He went farther stern and looked out another window and then saw the man standing near one of their stern-ties, inspecting it. “Well, let’s go,” his father said.
Robert sat in the stern of the dinghy as his father rowed toward shore. The dinghy pulled left and every five strokes or so his father glanced over his shoulder and corrected their path with a few port strokes. Robert held the stern line in his lap and practiced tying bowlines so he wouldn’t have to look at the man, who was waiting for them on the beach, standing almost perfectly still. When they landed, he made no move to help them.
“Father-son thing, huh?” the man said.
Robert climbed over the bow, and he and his father pulled the boat over the sand until it was above the tide line. They found a rock and looped the bowline around it.
“You got it,” the father said.
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 12