Under the Eye of the Storm

by John Hersey

  “You said it: Let’s go. I’m a big grown boy, Thomas. Dr. Medlar wears what he wants to wear, and Dr. Hamdown wears what he wanna wear. I told you I like rain. Right on little me.”

  Tom felt, as if rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, the hard-set texture of Flick’s stubbornness, yet he thought he must try again. “Look,” he said, “I’m going to need every bit of your strength—all day. Waterproofs’ll help you save it. We bought them for you!” He was sorry at once he had said that last, which put him so in the wrong.

  Flicker’s face was suddenly washed clean of all its flippancy and contrariness, and was dead in earnest. “What’s your intention, Tom? What are you planning to do? I think I’m entitled to know what the plan is…We are.” Did that afterthought-plural include both the girls, or only Audrey and Flick himself? How proprietary could he get?

  “I told you before all I have in mind. I’m going to cut our anchor away and then see what happens. With the trysail on. We’ll put that on first.”

  “ ‘See what happens’ doesn’t quite satisfy me.”

  “You mean the think-machine wants a more rational program?” Tom heard the raw childish bitterness in his own voice.

  It did not soften his bitterness to hear Audrey intervene. “We want to know what’s going to happen to us, darling.”

  He would say it to Audrey. “I’m going to have to see what we can do under power and trysail. Maybe we can stay here in the pond, but I doubt it. I don’t know if we’ll even be able to come about. I think we’ll probably have to go outside. There’ll be a choice if we do—either stay under the lee of Block Island, where the big seas will be broken but the water will be very confused, I’d guess—backwash from swells looping around the sides of the island—wind chop—and if you can’t hold up to it there and the storm’s prolonged, you risk the lee shore, Rhode Island, Connecticut; or the other choice is to take a chance on the open ocean and at least hope to keep going as the wind veers. It’s not”—here his eyes shifted back to Flick—“an easy pick—not a choice of caution or daring. It’s just something you have to wait and see about, see what makes sense.”

  Tom half expected some abusive line about chicken shit; but the big man looked rather pale.

  Dottie’s eyes were huge; she kept swallowing, perhaps in an unsuccessful effort to speak.

  Audrey spoke for her. “You’re bats, darling. You really are. Why not just let her drag slowly down the pond? Might take all day and the storm be over.”

  “Her side would be bashed in by that damned house. We’d sink in the middle of the pond.”

  “Then why not cut and just let her go ashore inside here? Why prolong the agony?”

  This was the question Tom could not really answer. All he could say was: “I want to have something to do with what happens.”

  Flick was looking hectic. He was going to press for the open-ocean alternative, Tom felt. He looked hungry and quite dangerous. “Let’s go, boss,” he said.

  “What about the waterproofs?”

  “You heard him, darling,” Audrey said. “He refuses to wear them.”

  “Don’t call me ‘darling.’ ”

  “Really, darling. You’re out of your mind.” But there was an unfamiliar unsureness in Audrey’s eyes.

  “Calling me crazy—you’ve done it twice just now—doesn’t solve anything.”

  “Oh, Tommy”—here suddenly for a moment was Audrey herself, the known Audrey—“I’m sorry. It was just a…an expression.”

  “O.K., mulehead,” Tom said to Flick, “andiam. Hand me the sail when I get up.”

  Tom climbed the ladder into the storm, took the sailbag from Flick and wrestled it to the deck. Then, shocked yet again, he watched Flicker clamber out, watched for the shock to hit the other man, the thief.

  Tom should have known that Flicker Hamden would have a style all his own. Flick scrambled down into the cockpit, turned, gripped the cabin trunk, stood up facing the storm, and began to shout. He was soaked through in an instant. He looked wildly happy. Soon both of his arms were sawing the air; he looked like an Italian tenor—a little fat, rapturous, self-important, wooden-armed. The wind caught in the cavern of his mouth, blew out his cheeks, and ripped away his shouts, so Tom could only hear thin, fluttering vowels, ostensibly of celebration: “Ah!…Ooooh!…Ha!…Uh-h-h!…Hiyah-h-h!”

  Tom began flipping his hand at Flick, beckoning him to get to work.

  Flick saw him, and opened his mouth wider than ever. “Ha-a-a-ah!”

  Tom rolled over and began sliding and crawling along the deck with the sail under his belly. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Flick was following—and saw, too, that Flick, unencumbered by life jacket and waterproofs, moved about much more efficiently and easily than he did.

  They were at the mast. Now began the experience of work in this mad air. Both together held the sailbag with their knees, both grasped the clew of the sail, pulling it from the bag, and both strove to get the first slide of the foot onto the track on the boom. Flick was strong. He clenched his jaw and made a struggler’s face. Together they seemed to be frozen in this first effort. The wind, screeching in the stays, fought to tear the heavy cloth from their hands. For a moment Tom felt caught, as if in a photograph, in an eternity of not being able to move or change expression. At last they heaved together. There! The first slide was on.

  The slides, one by one, were like the shocks of emergence into the storm; experience did not seem to help. Each slide asked a peak labor of alertness, timing, and strength, each wanted a long day’s work from two laborers. At last the foot was all attached; now the luff had to be fastened to the mast. How could there be strength enough to finish this job and then deal with the storm? The little lipped metal grips tore at Tom’s fingers as he guided them toward the track, and the more sail they threaded into place, the more the fabric shook back and forth, like a powerful dog trying to break a captive creature’s neck.

  Flick was strong, and he was responsive to Tom’s lead, and he sang out like a sheet man on a full rigger, happy as a puppy. The rain was streaming across his face and his clothes were dark with wetness. For a moment Tom was in awe of the force—was it no more than the wind?—that had brought about his co-operation, so intimate, so interdependent, so willing, with this robber, of all men. What did he and Hamden want in common?

  It was all bent on. Tom signalled to Flick by gestures—for this word-snatching storm was clearly going to train them to be deaf men, speaking through charading hands—to throw his weight over the boom and onto the bunched sail, which Flick obediently did, and Tom turned his attention to the cleat of the halyard, and he began to fight the wet linen rope, to free it. He uncleated the line part way, passed the loose end beside Flick over the sail, and Flick moved, and with several turns of the rope end Tom stopped down the convulsive cloth. Then he pointed below, meaning, “The girls. It’s time for them to come up.”

  They slid aft, the two partners in work, on opposite decks of Harmony, and when Tom pushed open the hatch both their faces looked downward. Audrey reached up—toward him, Tom!—a paper cup of steaming coffee. Miraculous Audrey! How had she thought to do that? How long had it taken to put on the sail? Tom saw that Audrey had filled a thermos, too, for later; at this moment Dottie was spooning sugar—they’d need that—into the mouth of the container. Wonderful women! He and Flick could not possibly have drunk from paper cups in the gale, for the coffee would have flown out and down-pond just like the words the wind had pickpocketed from within their mouths, but hot coffee would be so fortifying that it would justify the effort of climbing down and up again, to drink it.

  Tom gestured: After you.

  Flick was dripping at the foot of the ladder when Tom got down. Tom felt so grateful to Audrey for this sign of confidence, and suddenly so hopeful, that he reached his wet face forward and kissed her dry cheek. Audrey, in the act of putting the
coffee pot down, was surprised; annoyed; suddenly wore a worked-up pleased face. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s instant. I know how you two loathe instant coffee.” Two? How know? She ripped several sheets of paper towel from the roller over the sink and dried Tom’s face; repeated the consideration, vitiating Tom’s gratitude, by drying Flick’s face and then his matted hair.

  As soon as his face came out from behind the towel, Flick began telling the girls how super it was to be out in the storm. “It’s like free-falling through space,” he said. “You put out your arms and you just fly.” And Flick demonstrated in the still cabin, groaning with pleasure.

  In spite of Flick’s rhapsodic grunts, Audrey remained prosey and skeptical. She asked Tom, “You really think we’d be better off up there, do you?”

  “No question about it. Safer—and far more comfortable. You’ll get used to it pretty soon. It’s a noseful at first, don’t be surprised. But you’ll get onto it.”

  Tom saw that she believed him, and that Dottie, who appeared to be speechless with anxiety, hung on his words. The heat of the coffee and their acceptance of what he said worked together as a bracer he needed after the work at the mast. They made him think that he knew what he was doing.

  “Mind getting your gear on? We’d really better get started.”

  Crump.

  Tom waited for the girls to be ready; he wanted to be close to them when the gail first took their breaths away. He motioned Flick up first; it would be good to have him sawing away at La Bohème, or whatever he’d be putting on, when they arrived in the big windy gray opera house of the outdoors.

  Audrey. Then Dottie.

  Then he. He found the two girls crouching in the first full shock down on the deck of the cockpit. Sure enough, Flick was standing over them, gesturing grandly and burping out great sea-lion roars. This wind was like a scandal, amazing and ruinous; yet for Tom, for the first time, the surprise and awe were diminished. He made flat-hands motions to the girls, meaning, “Stay right there. That’s fine.” And moving forward he clapped his hands at Flick, applauding his aria, and then beckoned him toward the mast.

  Their next career—the chore might last forever and become a life work—would be raising the sail. Tom crouched by the mast wondering what to do first: unstop the sail from the boom, set the winch handle, uncleat the halyard the rest of the way? He positioned Flick to tail the halyard off the drum of the winch as he cranked.

  Then came a new surprise: It was all easy. He unwound the halyard end from the sail, uncleated it all the way, and simply pulled the sail up. It shot up like a self-service elevator, only faster. It exploded as it rose into a shaking that caused a chattering series of reports as of a machinegun. Right through the waterproof hood, right through the acoustical opacity of the storm, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a…

  He wrapped the halyard end around the drum, and set the handle, and cranked; Flick tugged at the tail. They got it cleated down taut, and that was that. That was all too soon that. He did not want what had to come now.

  He motioned Flick aft, made hand signs meaning, “Wheel. Spin it to the right.” So that, backing off the cut line, Harmony would throw herself onto the starboard tack: more room in the pond that way.

  Then Tom crawled to the bow and wrapped his hands around the anchor line, and he clung to it for a moment as to an idea—that he would simply haul it in, pull up the anchor, and sail away on a cruise that couldn’t miss being happy. Ha! That word for people with solid marriages, or maybe for people lacking imagination. The thought of cutting was suddenly excruciatingly painful, as though active and reflexive modes were bound into one. There would be something self-wounding about this cut. The nasty thought of cost came in from an oblique angle here and made Tom furious—not at the notice of loss but at himself for having the thought. Fluke anchor, twenty feet of chain, more or less a hundred and twenty feet of three-quarter-inch Nylon anchor line, still as white as cottage cheese in its newness. That rope was murder: forty-seven cents a foot. Times one hundred twenty. Let’s see…Oh, yes, and the flywheel. And the dinghy already gone. Harmony! Harmony! There were, there had been, money problems in their lives. The basic chafe was the affectation of a scorn for money. The shabby values of materialism, all that. But when it had come right down to it, concerning their own kitchen, the value question had been which had more—Norge or Westinghouse or G.E. or Hotpoint or Whirlpool? He had a throttle-hold on the creamy white and slightly slippery Nylon anchor line, as if he wanted to choke out of it the answer to the question: What of value am I about to lose? He had risen to his knees. He would pull the damned thing up. Sail away cruise. Happy.

  But his self-directed right hand was reaching into the pocket of his waterproof, and out leaped the knife on its elastic lanyard. Beautiful, glistening stainless-steel object. Spike lying one way, its dirk-point safely couched between two flanges, and the big dorsal sailfin of the blade, with its dark thumbnail slot like a hair of a new moon on a north-wind night. It was a sea thing, all right; lying in his hand it looked like a snub-nosed, flattish fish.

  He opened the blade—whetted to a wedge of vanished metal. He held it up so it cut the wind. He could have used it at the operating table: it would inquire its way through flesh rather than crudely cut.

  He looked around. There was only one other boat left at anchor. Couldn’t he just wait here, holding his knife at the ready? How fine to be the very last! The seas were a dirty green; foul sick froth out of some devil’s washing machine was flying from wavetop to wavetop. They were now almost half way to the end of the long marina dock, so much had Harmony dragged. The rain seemed to be driving horizontally above the water, like the parallel lines that make fantasy out of the grimmest reality on a television tube. The wind pushed at his neck and shoulders. Wait. Couldn’t he wait? To be the last and best?

  Crump.

  He rose to his knees and brought the cutting edge of his knife gently against the taut elastic artificial fibers. The wind made his surgeon’s hand grossly waver. Could he wait at least for a lull? How would he move aft fast enough to take command?

  How hard it was to cut! Here went umbilicus.

  He pressed and drew the knife edge once. Razor edge! One strand of the full-stretched rope was three quarters severed; another short stroke and that strand broke with a loud crack and withdrew forward right through the chafing gear at the chock and down toward the house and the waves like an insidiously spiraling sea snake slithering into its element.

  Now that the commitment had been made, Tom was resolute, and snick, snick, snick: with three strokes and two loud reports, the remaining serpents leaped forward and away and down, and Harmony was on her own.

  Tom saw the house in the water, like a huge, sluggish beast hardly knowing it was free, heave a shingled shoulder and slowly, soggily turn—but it was fifty feet away…It was a hundred feet away! Jesus!

  Tom scrambled aft on the high side. Harmony had gone off surely enough on the starboard tack. The sail had not been trimmed, and it still was giving out its machinegun reports. She was falling broadside to the wind, and she heeled over hard; the tip of the boom was in the water. Would she falter and fill in these first moments? Flick’s jaw was slack, and he was blinking at the stinging rain drops; he looked suddenly different. The crux of his opera seemed to have escaped him entirely.

  Tom moved as fast as he could, crashed into the cockpit, hurting a hip, seized the main sheet, and with all his strength hauled at it, to trim the chattering sail. By God, it began to draw, and Harmony suddenly recovered a certain composure, as, shivering like a wet dog, she rose a bit, took a bite of the wind, and began to go with some purpose toward Indian Head Neck.

  Elbowing Flick aside, Tom took the helm, standing, and at once he felt great pride in Harmony, for she was holding up and actually making something to windward. The waves in this protected place were enough to make the fat boat canter, and her bows caught the slapping
tops and threw white spray that arched upward and whipped across the cockpit to bring a salt taste to Tom’s lips. He leaned down once and turned on the ignition key and pressed the starter button; then after some moments he bent down again and saw by the tachometer that the engine was running, and he threw the shift lever into forward gear and advanced the throttle.

  Now! Harmony was under control, and his own mind was as profound and clear as a windless Arizona sky—antithesis of Esmé there and then. He felt a flood of exuberance, and he glanced down at the two girls, who had pulled themselves up from the cockpit deck and were sitting on the seats and gripping the coaming with both hands and often looking up at him. He was keeping balance by holding the coaming himself with his right hand, and he let go for a moment to hold his hand up and form a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Flick was throwing gestures to the wind and still crying out from time to time—or at least opening his mouth like a goldfish into enormous O’s that should on another day have produced huge shouts—but his lips were blue; he was beginning to look like a child who had been swimming too long and didn’t want to come out yet. Just once more, just one more time.

  If they could come about from one tack to the other, head-to-wind, and providing that no vital gear gave way and that they did not run down a floating danger, there was no reason why they could not reach straight back and forth right here in the pond and not lose ground to leeward. The test on tacking would come very soon. The alternative? To turn tail-to-wind might capsize Harmony or take her mast out like a matchstick snapped between thumb and two fingers, for a jibe in such a wind as this was surely the most dangerous maneuver in all of seamanship. Tom realized with a sickening dive of his confidence that he had already passed the point of no return, for he could no longer simply bear off and run down the pond and out the channel; if she failed now to come about head-to-wind, he could not avoid the possibly fatal trial of a jibe.

  There remained, as he remembered the chart, six or seven hundred feet of good water in a cove in the shoals to the right of that black can. Better try to come about now, leaving some room to maneuver in case she could not make it. He pushed the throttle forward dangerously far, to get as much thrust as possible from the engine, and he put the helm all the way down, and in all the clatter and shivering of the storm he felt his heart leaping in his chest.