by John Hersey
He soon found that there was no hope at all of freeing the anchor line this way. It was held down as tightly as if the house had been built right from its foundations on it. What was brought to bear at the point of snarling? A hook, a hinge, a nail? Would it claw through the rope? He tried to reach a foot down to see if he could push the roof away, but the wind took the big sail of the waterproof legging and slammed his limb back against the bow cheeks. It was no easy matter to get it back aboard.
Crump.
He had to make a decision. To delay might be disastrous, to rush might be worse. He put his hooded head down on the deck to rest his neck—for just to hold one’s head up in such a blow took fortitude and muscle—and to think. Did he have all the facts he needed in order to decide?
He knew at once that he had not, and he began to make his way aft. How weak and tired he felt without having made a significant move!
What about the boathook? Might need it later. He dragged it along. He paused on his way back down the deck to lash it down again—and here he won a tiny lift to his courage, for he had had the presence of mind, in refastening the mop, to leave ends of the cording free, so now he could make fast the boathook without having to untie the mop again. That was not a matter of chance; he had thought it through. He could think of things. He and “things.”
Crump.
He hastened below. Without pausing at the foot of the ladder to take off his dripping togs, he moved forward through the cabin.
“Darling, you’re getting everything sopping.”
Through the hood he heard her. Would she call him “darling” forever? He did not answer but went into the forward cabin and clambered over gear and sailbags far up into the forepeak, and he ran his hand along the skin of the hull and up and down the ribs around the area where the blows must have been delivered, and he examined planks and frames, and as far as he could see there was no checking or cracking anywhere. Robust Harmony! She was going to knock the house to pieces.
All the same, he wanted to back away from the bows before another of those enormous drumbeats came. One more “thing” to observe. He slithered backwards down from the forepeak and stepped into the after cabin and looked out the starboard porthole. The pier. But where was the gable? Oh, God, there it was. Out of line to the right. They were dragging anchor now. Just no question about it: Harmony and her assailant were on the move.
He turned and faced the three.
Flick brought the flat of a hand down hard on the table and said, “For Christ’s sake, what is it?”
Tom did not want to answer, he wanted to think. Where could he think? Not forward: one of those awful blows would knock any sense right out of his head. Not above: Esmé would talk him out of a rational decision. Not here in the cabin, where those three pairs of eyes and Flick’s question pressed him to hurry too much.
He stumbled into the tiny box of the head and pulled the door shut and sat down on the john in his waterproofs. He would think about what to do, about how to deal with the bitch storm, about fate and whether and how to fight it—sitting on the crapper. He’d better cut. That was his first thought. The house might stove a hole in lovely Harmony any moment, and she’d go to the bottom, and they’d all drown in the wind-fanged Pond. Beach her to leeward? The chart showed rocks beyond the marina pier and rocks in the mouth of Cormorant Cove farther on, and even if she found a sand shoal she might trip over and fill in the fierce chop far from land. Or, as the wind was blowing at this moment, from the southeast, she might even drift right out the channel to sea. He would need to be able to control her, have steerageway somehow; the engine would not be enough, not upwind. Better put on the tiny storm trysail that was made of cloth like iron. Without it the engine would never be strong enough to bring Harmony head-to-wind, in case he needed to turn, or was driven out to sea and wanted to heave to. He thought then tenderly of Harmony, and at once in a reaction against his love for his boat he began to search his mind for the small print in his marine insurance policy, and he could not for his life remember what in the line of storm damage was covered, or whether total-loss-by-Esmé would bring him money…That kind of thinking would sink them for sure…Once he had the trysail on, wouldn’t it be better to keep control of the boat, take her out through the channel and hug the lee shore of Block Island? If he could control her it would be madness to try to sail around in the Pond, with hazards on every side. A little sail. Was Audrey going to be proved right about him, as she usually was? But surely this wasn’t his choice; it was being forced on him. Or was it? Shouldn’t he just cut and let fate take care of a beaching? Why fight it? To salvage what?
Crump. He stood up at that and looked at his face in the mirror. The orange hood was drawn tight around his forehead and cheeks and chin, and all that showed was an oval of indecision. Mercy and knowingness, though, of a doctor’s face were also there; he could see traces of a doctor in the face…He wondered what it was like for a dying man to look in that face; he remembered one of his patients, a month back, a remarkable old man named Ellis, a retired judge of the circuit court, rare primary carcinoma of the liver, lying on a hospital bed and saying goodbye to him. Ellis had great shrubs of eyebrows and a record of probity and compassion. He was so weak that he could barely raise his hand but he wanted to shake hands with Dr. Medlar. He knew. His face was sallow and his eyes glittered, but he was a man of powerful character; the look was outward. He clearly did not wish to express thanks or sorrow or fear or regrets; instead, Tom felt that Judge Ellis examined his face with interest and concern. It seemed to be a look of encouragement more than anything else. Why should the dying man offer such a message as that to the well man? What did that glimmer of concern mean? Tom shook the man’s hand for a long time. Judge Ellis died late that night. Standing before the mirror now, Tom felt a belated blow of grief for old man Ellis. Then Harmony shuddered at a gust, and Tom shook his head as if to throw off confusion—to align grief with appropriate objects in the context; to defy the memory of the old man’s jaundiced look of concern; to be a doctor; to be husband to Audrey, will she, nill she; to be at least himself. His face was wet from the storm’s rain, and it was pale beside the flaming orange of the waterproof. The eyes?
He opened the door to the head and stepped out into the cabin.
“What the hell were you doing?” Flick asked. “Throwing up?”
“Some kind of shed or house has floated down on us,” Tom said. “We’re dragging, and I’ve got to cut. I’m going to ask you to help me to bend on the storm trysail, Flick.”
“Whatever that means.” Flick shrugged; he was trying in extremity to be humorous.
Tom saw that Audrey was all right; they were all going to be all right. Audrey was not going to make a bitter crack about the little sail he was going to take them out on. They had all badly needed a decisive word; they looked quite cheered up.
“Darling,” he said, “would you and Dottie secure everything down below here? I mean really get things buttoned down. We can’t have a lot of groceries and pot lids flying around down here.”
“Sure, Tommy,” Audrey said. “What are we going to do?”
“Going to get the trysail on and cut and then see what we can make of it.” He knew that all decisions after this one were going to have to be reached more swiftly than this had been.
How nice it was to be below! He clung to being in the cabin—found a number of things he needed to do before he could go out in the storm. He took a long look at the Block Island chart to fix every shoal and promontory and bell in his mind. He looked up, in The Boatsman’s Manual, all the reminders on heavy-weather sailing and on storms and hurricanes—not to learn things he had not known but simply to bring every trick he might need into the forefront of his memory. He took down his log book—thinking, What does it matter at this moment if there is a cut in a black piece of cardboard?—and he entered, with the most careful discrimination, only those observations that
might affect choices later; then, having written them down, he knew he would not forget them.
While he did these things the house struck the boat once…twice…again. He was being too deliberate. But—
From the locker under the port bunk he took out four safety belts, and he showed the others how to put them on. “Over your waterproofs. You step through here, you see, so these two straps go under your crotch, and then the main belt goes tight around your waist—listen, you’d all better go to the head before you get yourselves locked into these chastity belts. Then wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, even if it’s only holding on, you attach one of these snaphooks on these free straps to the lifelines. Gives you about three feet of play.”
Flick said, “He’d make a good airline stewardess, wouldn’t he?”
Dottie was horrified. “You mean we have to go upstairs?”
“Above. On a boat we say ‘above.’ ” It was Flick again, with that “we” again. He was really tuning up.
“We’ll all be much safer up there,” Tom said. “After you get your belts on I want you to put on life jackets. The orange ones up in the forepeak, Audrey. I’d get them but I think I ought to get to work. Oh, one more thing. The Bonamine. Where is it, Aud?”
“In the medicine cabinet in the head.”
Tom fetched the little bottle, and he pumped up some drinking water, and he offered the pills around. Dottie and Audrey took theirs, but Flick shook his head. “It would make me go bye-bye. Sleepyhead.”
“Don’t be a damn fool. This is one day you’re not going to fall asleep, I guarantee. It’s Dramamine that does that, anyway.”
“Never touch the stuff.”
“Look, I’m taking one.” And Tom did, to show that taking a pill was not unmanly.
“Nighty-night,” Flick said.
“Oh, come on, Flick. A sick sailor’s a burden.”
“Unh-unh. I made a New Year’s resolution. No more bonzies. I was on ’em for a while there, did you know that? Was hooked on seasick pills. So I said to myself, ‘No more. I’ve taken my last last bonzy.’ ”
But the house hit Harmony then, and Tom shrugged. He turned suddenly to Audrey and said, “You’ll have to be his governess. I’m going to be too busy to take care of him today.”
Audrey played her part. “I’ll put a didie on his darling little mouth,” she said.
“I’ve got to go above now,” Tom said, thinking of the uses of the word “darling.” “Don’t forget to batten down every damned thing down below here, Aud.”
“You see?” Flick said to Dottie. “He says ‘above’ and ‘below.’ Not ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs.’ ”
“I’ll need your help,” Tom said to Flick, “as soon as I’ve checked some things.”
“Aye, aye, Commahndah.”
Before going up, Tom took one more look at the bearings ashore. Oh, yes. Harmony’s anchor had given up thirty or forty feet. There were now only two other craft whose anchors had held. What a pity, Tom thought; the kedge had been beautifully set, and Harmony might have been the only vessel in the Great Pond to ride it out from beginning to end. But now—
Now it really was time to climb out.
On this round, the shock of emergence—of being reborn into the outer world—was worst of all, because now the storm was no longer an adversary for mere anchor and line, not an enemy simply to hold bottom ground against; now it was an elemental exposure within which he was going to have to be a sailor. He was going to have to cut and sail his Harmony—in this.
And this had changed, it seemed to him. There was an insistence now, a steadiness, and even though the frightful wind was still coming down off the land, it was no longer coming in gusty williwaws. It had an even force, as if there were no island in its path, as if it had blown the land away. Could one really speak of a lee shore any more?
Tom faced aft, gulping at this flying air. And saw the dinghy. It was half full of water: rain and splashes. They could never tow it; it would swamp and be a dangerous drag. Could he possibly, even with the help of all the other three, haul it aboard and turn it over and lash it down on the cabin trunk? The mainsail was in the dinghy’s cradle. He would have to cast the dink adrift—but even to free its rain-tightened painter from the cleat would be ferocious work in this. Cut. He would have to cut it free. There was nothing to do but cut away his last connection with the shore.
Once more Tom had a small reason to congratulate himself, and at this moment even such a smallness loomed into a powerful consolation. In putting on his waterproofs and safety belt, he had gone to the trouble—as a matter of course, he now told himself—to take his big lockspike knife out of his trouser pocket, to slip the loop of its lanyard over the safety belt, and to put the knife in the pocket of the waterproof jacket. A real marlinspike-seaman of a sailor feels about his knife as a violinist does about his fiddle. The knife’s fid opens shackles and forces the lay of ropes for splices, and its blade, often honed, makes sausage of hemp and Nylon and goes into wood as into butter. Weapon, rescuer, whittler, friend. Scalpel. Oh, yes, he was a doc first and last. He was wildly glad that he had made the little move that now rendered the blade accessible at once; otherwise he would have had to go below and tear at his waterproofs and fish it out and be angry with himself. “I am going to drown in smugness,” Tom thought, and the thought gave him great pleasure.
With his left arm crooked around the mizzenmast, Tom swung aft and pulled the knife out by its lanyard and opened it and in one slash cut the dinghy painter. He was astonished by the speed with which the cockleshell ran down the pond. It sped as if self-impelled by terror. Tom leaned a long time looking at it, telling himself, as he lingered, that he must hurry. How wide the greenish, spindrift-flecked pond seemed to have grown, and how tiny the dinghy eventually became in the distance! Hurry, Tom…There it is, just a speck. Tom saw in his mind that sun-soaked and now incalculably precious moment when the dinghy had touched the sand that afternoon at Quicks Hole, in the sensuous tropical heat, when he had been a watcher of what seemed to be the freedom and joy of those three, back before the end of innocence and trust, and long before the onset of this world’s-end wind. He lost sight of the dinghy in the rain.
Now he knew he must turn and face the gale. He must see if all was in order for the hoisting of the little bikini of a sail. He dragged himself forward along the starboard deck, observing as he went. The mainsail was well tucked in. The halyards were all slapping again, but no matter; they were well cleated. It was going to be hell freeing the main halyard so as to hoist the trysail, and getting the sail on the track, and pulling it up.
Crump. Tom put his head down on the deck, for it seemed that this had not been a blow of house against boat but of thought against mind. The flaw. Harmony’s sick place. The thought was simply there, a nasty obtrusion. He knew that there was absolutely nothing he could do about the flaw, and that its existence changed nothing—it had been there all along. It was only that it had not entered his mind once during his recent calculations about what he should do. How queer! What a shock to that smugness in which he had been taking such delight! Might he be forgetting other important considerations? As to the flaw, there was nothing to do but ignore it—bank on the thickness of the keelson. One simply could not think about Harmony’s breaking her back.
Having faced the flaw at last, Tom found himself prepared to act. He must stop this nonsense of checking “things” and go below for the trysail.
He climbed down. It struck him at once that Audrey was making a glorious game of securing everything loose. The cabin was stripped—plastic cups, ashtrays, pillows, condiments from the galley shelf; all had disappeared. She had taken the ice pick out of its sheath by the ice chest and had removed the glass chimney and globe from the gimbeled kerosene lamp and had even unscrewed the electric light bulbs from their sockets. She had evidently stowed these objects, and others, in the loc
kers under the berths, and she was now lashing down the seat covers over the lockers with some spare lines from the forepeak. All this, with Flick and Dottie helping, was being carried out in a spirit of mockery. Safety had become a big joke. Well, wasn’t it, after all?
Tom went forward and saw that the smallest of the sailbags, containing the never-tried trysail, was of course at the bottom of the heap of spare sails. He burrowed and heaved and dragged the little bag out. This sail was the epitome of Tom’s precautionary fervor. Every salty character along the line—the sailmaker’s front man, the owner of the boatyard, even a snotty young Coast Guard inspector—had praised Tom for ordering and having a trysail, yet all of them had eyed him in a curious way, when discussing it, as though being sensible were a sure sign of being a little screwy. He had ordered the sail to be made of ten-ounce Dacron; synthetic sheet metal. Only twelve feet up the luff and four feet along the foot—an absurd little handkerchief on a mast three times its height and a boom four times its foot-length. He had had it on just once, to fit it. It had looked silly; he had ever since been somewhat ashamed of it. There it had lain in its bag all this time, waiting for this day.
He frugged into a life jacket.
When he re-entered the cabin, carrying the bag before him and obviously appearing in orange jacket over orange waterproofs to have been inflated like a swimming-pool toy, the other three, so playful in their preparations, all laughed at the sight of him; but in the middle of their laughter arrived the pale skins and suddenly wan mouths of realization: It was all quite a lot more than a cabin game of hide-the-unidentified-flying-object.
“Come on, Flick,” Tom impatiently said. “Get on your horse. I said I was going to need your help.”
“I’m all set. Rarin’, pardner.”
But all he had on was the webbed safety belt, which dangled outside his sport clothes like some shameful under-harness; a rupture truss.
“Get your stuff on and let’s go.”