by John Hersey
She turned in a driven hurry and scrambled recklessly down the companionway.
Yet Tom sat twiddling the wheel, pinned there, in what must have looked like serenity, on a recognition: He was suffering a mental block. Sometimes seeing in the city a well-known face he lost the name that went with it; he would struggle, associate, grope, and have a feeling that the name was being whispered to him just out of earshot. The books would say that this meant the name was linked in the towers of his head with hatred, but he would doubt it. A good friend. He knew the name very well. Too late the answer would come. So it was now, about the thrumming. Something memorable had come into his mind at the swiftest pitch of the skid, just before he had committed himself to throw the wheel to port. It was something so obvious, so significant—so easy! But as to that, there was a synapse locked wide open; a gap of loud, humming blankness.
He told himself to think of something else; this swollen item would come back into his head with a resounding slam, as of a door blowing shut. Audrey had gone down to get Flick a sweater; she intended to make him put on the slickers after all. That must have been her errand. Audrey of those many nights; that bumpy face which had seemed once to proclaim with its odd planes and surprising curves certain inner grips on life, having to do with loyalty, ability to digest setbacks, a woman’s patience and courage, a kind of taking wrapped up in giving. But now? Now? It was all for the lump. She and not the sun would warm Flick’s cold blood.
Suddenly Dottie’s look from the hatchway came back in memory to startle him. He rose with a gasp from the wheel, astounded once again at the sluggishness of his responses and the unreliability of his scanning apparatus. That look of hers had been a silent scream.
He stopped by Flick, bent down, and sharply commanded, “Take the wheel!”
Flick’s eyes swung around as if on a slow compass card from the northeast and came to rest on the attraction of a look of Tom’s which Tom felt to be very cross. Flick’s eyes were not empty by any means; only insolent. They seemed to say, “Audrey said she’d be right back.” Tom imagined a black patch over the left eye: the playful masquerader who never worked.
Tom careened on a violent tipping of the deck and found himself looking down the hatchway.
Dottie was killing Audrey. There were two feet of water in the cabin, and there were waves on the water down there. He had a glimpse of blood lapped by water on Audrey’s styrofoam-white face. She was lying on her back floating in the water, her life preserver was keeping her up. Her hair was fanned out like seaweed. Dottie was bending over her, hitting or clawing, partially blocking Tom’s view of her. Dottie fell and sloshed and rose again dripping. Gentle Dottie, helpless Dottie—she was taking her dark, dark revenge on Audrey: murdering her. What was the weapon? Somehow Dottie had drawn blood from that ashen face, and now she was going to drown Audrey, fight the buoyancy of the life jacket and hold her face down under. Were Audrey’s eyes open? Was Audrey conscious? A striking sleeve blocked his view; a shoulder got in the way. Yes, Audrey was fighting! An arm came up, raking fingers. Dottie fell again, and they rolled on those inner seas in a ball of a death struggle.
Tom quickly raised his head and saw that Harmony was still going in more or less the same direction as before, as if, cold to her innermost timbers, she was homing towards the hot sun. Tom looked at Flick—could he possibly believe that gentle Dottie was trying to take Audrey’s life on account of that lump of lard?—and he shouted, “Steer! Steer the boat!” And he pointed with great authority at the wheel, wagging his forefinger. All he got was the pirate eye.
He floundered into the hole of the hatch, clumsy in his precautionary gear, and crashed down the ladder to restrain the killer. Dottie was up again. She was surely no match in strength for Audrey, yet somehow she had gotten an early advantage—struck her on the face with something heavy; a winch handle?
With his feet on the cabin deck and water up to his knees, Tom took in with a glance in the dim cavern the seriousness of Dottie’s assault. Audrey’s face was so wan, the blood on it so stark! Dottie had taloned hands on Audrey’s shoulders. Audrey’s head went under water. After all he had done to save lives—
But while his eyes were reading the murder his whole head seemed to have been grasped by the ears. The thrumming. Down here the waves on the water were miniature; it was sound that had become monstrous, gigantic. It was all around him. It bathed him. As if it were solid water, it would engulf him and drown him. Here he was in the sounding box of the instrument; he would shatter like crystal in these vibrations.
In the very moment of reaching out his hands to pull Dottie away from Audrey, the synapse tripped and closed, and, filled with the thrumming until his whole skeleton shook with it, he remembered what it was he had lost in his head. Of course; so obvious. The keel. When the thrumming had stopped in that great skid, he had thought: The keel. The keel has taken hold. It was a vibration of the keel, that sound—a sum of vibrations, building on one another like those ripples on waves on seas on swells, accumulating into the flutter effect that could topple steel bridges when they began to hum in high winds.
His hands touched Dottie briefly, in nothing but a kind of double pat, almost a caress, and then, as she toppled again across Audrey, kneeing the floating orange chest to force the victim under, Tom with great urgency lifted a leg high and splashed past the two of them. His hip hit Dottie, and he was dimly aware that she fell sideways and that for a moment Audrey’s head came out of the water. But his back was turned on the act of killing, and he was sloshing forward through the cabin, gasping for breath as if the sound he heard was itself pouring into his lungs like some choking, poisonous miasma. The water, made wild by the wildness of Harmony’s plunging, lapped the cabin settees, and in his haste Tom tripped and fell between the folded-down table and the starboard seat, and he went splashing onward pellmell on his hands and knees into the forward cabin. With the rising deck up there the water was somewhat shallower. Now he was at the very pole of the thrumming; it swirled in a vortex around him.
He rose to his knees and flung open the lid of the locker in the vee of the forecastle bunks and with flying hands he dug down past sail-mending kit and light tool bag and balls of twine and marlin, down through heaps of unwanted spare items, until his right hand closed on the great shank of an enormous Stillson wrench. He pulled it up and out. It was nearly three feet long, oiled, sleek, and hideous. If anyone wanted to murder, surely this was the aptest tool.
He pivoted where he kneeled, crawled back into the forepart of the cabin, turned with his back to whatever was happening in the rest of the cabin, and, plunging a hand into the water, tore up the removable floorboards. There, clearly seen under the sunlight pouring down through the cabin skylight, red, six-sided, magnified by these inner shallows, distorted by the refraction of the waves so it seemed to bulge, swell out, wobble, shrink, and jump, was the cap of Harmony’s flaw and his negligence, the nut on the vital keel bolt.
He whirled the worm grip of the wrench to open the jaws wide, wide, and he took a fast hold on the nut with the mouth of the wrench and with both hands under water tightened the vise of the wrench onto the nut. With some part of his mind that had managed to keep itself islanded away from the thrumming he knew that what he was doing was folly, hopelessly impossible while the two tons of the keel hung down, but most of his mind urged him on, and he took purchase and heaved to tighten, as to close a faucet, he thought, and he heaved, till his back hurt, and he heaved. But at the peak of his efforts the vibration seemed to become a growl, a snarl; and a power beyond reckoning took hold of the weird mechanics of loosening, and the nut turned of its own thrumming accord on its thread counter-clockwise, in the freeing direction, pulling wrench, arms, and man in the opposite direction from all his willed strength. With its flutteration the keel was working itself loose before his eyes and against his every sinew. He was filled with a sense of horror and of blind superstitious dread: a malevolent, pu
rposeful, vengeful force was at work against him. Was this what the porpoises had been trying to warn of? The island in his mind whispered: Illusion! Illusion! It’s not really turning, it only seems to turn. But much louder and dominant over his hands and arms and straining back was the continual fluttering of a lowered keel. How far down had it worked itself? An eighth of an inch? A half inch? He was hit by the appalling idea of the keel’s dropping right off and plunging to the bottom of the sea, the towering spars toppling, the hollow chest of the hull lying on its side in the water as Esmé would return in the high fury of the other half of the storm beyond the eye. He knew, he knew, he knew this could not happen. After all, there was another huge keel bolt aft lodged in good sound wood. Yet he shook with frustration and wild forebodings.
Then, in a shoulder-stooped attitude, he checked himself. He would not allow the unseen hand below to loosen the nut any further; not a single thread would he let it be unscrewed. He would use cunning in place of strength. He let up the bite of the wrench on the big nut and reset it, taking up the jaws tight and then wedging the huge handle against the nearest floor beam, in such a way that the nut could not turn without tearing out the guts of the hull. He settled back, kneeling in the sea’s invading salt water and with his own inner salt water streaming from his pores down his face, feeling clever and, yes, smug. The thrumming continued, but it no longer set up those excruciating harmonic vibrations in his nerves.
His sense of completion and mastery, however, was short-lived. Staring down at his nut-trap, the braced wrench undulating in refractions under the sunlit bilgewater, he succumbed to a horrifying conviction that the keel bolt was not a mere detail, and could not be dealt with as if it were.
The full force of the sunlight pouring down through the plexiglas skylight struck the crown of his head—was the boat turning?—and as if penetrating his skull flooded his mind with a dreadful bright light of understanding: He had got everything all wrong! All that about the loosening nut had been a seeming; there were two human beings in a death lock back there in the cabin. Details! Details! Life was running away!
“Jesu, let her go down! Let her sink!”
At the outer limits of despair, he did not know whether he had shouted that curse-like wish out loud or only heard it rush through his head. He rose and keeping himself upright with stiff arms, which reached out to each side like shoring timbers, he rushed aft, wearing skirts of splashes of his churning knees, and he scarcely paused at the orange-colored confusion of Dottie’s intention to do away with Audrey, except to think: Why was she so inept? Why had she half-hauled Audrey up onto the starboard settee, where the victim’s back was arched, blood scarfing half that milky face? He recognized a flickering half-thought that Dottie was not really trying to kill Audrey at all. He could not wait for clarity but fled up the ladder. Let her go! Let her go down!
Flick was at the wheel. The big man with plastered hair sat there as nonchalant as ever a steersman could be. Tom saw at once that Flick had turned the yawl around and was going toward Block Island.
The impetus of Tom’s charge up from the bowels of the boat was spent; and so was whatever had made him do all that he had done, and not done, below, and he thought: Let the bastard steer north. We have plenty of sea room. The storm will be back right away.
And yes, there, lying low to the south and east was the new scudding circle of torn shreds and solid sickish gray.
Tom lifted the seat lid and began to pump.
He did not even wonder why. He pumped two hundred strokes and rested.
He was well into another hundred when a bloody hand hooked itself over the companionway door-boards. Two heads came up over the edge at once: Audrey’s crimsoned, shock-pale face and drooping eyes, a half-dead face, and, behind, Dottie’s, twisted, a lip being bitten hard. The bungling murderess was helping her would-be victim climb the ladder!
Tom went right on pumping.
Dottie propped Audrey against the door-boards; pushed from behind until Audrey stood waist-high at the boards. Then on a sea-bounce Audrey fell face forward over the boards and hung limp there. Dottie climbed over her and with a surprising strength hauled Audrey bodily out from the hatchway and lowered her into the cockpit, stacking her up like some awkward flexible object, a narrow mattress perhaps, against the high seat-back on the port side.
Flick left the wheel. He appeared to have become bored with the activity of steering. But no: He had an errand; he sat beside Audrey and retched beyond the coaming.
Audrey weakly turned in the seat and also threw up. The pair of lovers were heartily sick side by side.
Tom had reached four hundred strokes. There would be no end to this work.
Dottie sat beside him. She was smiling. The sunlight picked out on her sensitive face a look of appeal for help. She was saying something.
Tom let go the pump handle and leaned toward her, the better to hear.
She repeated: “It’s all over, isn’t it?”
“Over? What do you mean?”
“The storm’s over. It’s finished, isn’t it?”
“No, lamb,” Tom said. “This was just the eye.”
As if to grant him, in the maelstrom of his losses, at least a stint of truthfulness, a cloud just then covered the sun. Tom kept himself from saying that the worst was yet to come. What he did say, kicking his chin toward the convulsive gatherings of Flick’s back, was: “You’d better get him his waterproofs.”
But she shook her head; her dainty, golden earrings trembled, though her wet hair hung heavy. “I couldn’t go down there again.”
“O.K., then. Pump.”
Tom went below himself and got the brand-new waterproofs, and he climbed up and stuffed Flicker into them, limb by limb. It had grown dark. Dottie was pumping with a will.
Lifting up and cording tight his hood, Tom sat at the wheel, and as he was in the process of turning Harmony toward the northwest a seething edge of white froth came across the lumpy waters. The new wind, rain-laced, took his breath right away.
4
The Secret Place
There stood the gate of heaven, gleaming in evening sunlight: the marker bell outside tolling with that true-bronze tone of good cheer that sea bells have when the sky is blue; the long jetty of blasted rocks with veins of quartz and flecks of mica giving off diamond glints; the black cans and the red nuns and the two spindles steadfastly marking the sweet channel; and there, off to the left, on Indian Head—yes, that primitive dream of dry land—rocks and sand and bayberry bushes bathed in the light of the sun. The breeze, fresh but dry, was out of the north; the sea, so soon, was growing calm. They were coming back, all alive and afloat.
Harmony looked like one of those old junkmen’s wagons that used to clop around city streets picking up scrap metal and rags and broken furniture and mildewy-dusty magazines and papers, the driver chanting or perhaps pounding with a hammer on a clanging gong of a rusty wheel rim. Everything portable was coming up from below to dry; Dottie was scurrying with a pursed mouth, bringing things up, wringing them out, and spreading them here and there. The mattresses were slung over the main boom, clothing and towels flapped along the lifelines, and with Tom’s help she had even rigged bedsheets on the fly from the main and jib halyards, enormous flags of truce.
Audrey was at the wheel, her face like an ancient cliff; the rocks of her endurance had been rounded off not by weather but by pain. The gash over her left cheekbone, no longer bleeding but blood-caked, was putting out all around it a bloom of greenish bruise. Her right shoulder slumped; she steered with her left hand.
Flick rocked on the pump like a satyr at his endless labor of intrusion and withdrawal, up and down, in and out. He had pumped now with a mechanical insatiability for two hours, and he had won: there were only four inches of slop above the cabin floorboards now. Mute and dull, he was gaining on the flaw.
No one spoke. They were automatons,
Tom thought, performing what had to be gotten through, not with energies of blood sugar and flash-flaming oxygen and sparking nerves, for those had been spent long since, early in the morning, but rather with some deep, sluggish reserve of aching and yearning tenacity which seemed to be drawn from the very marrow of the bones; or maybe (though he knew better) it somehow came from the gruesome liver. In any case, they moved; the crew did work as they had not in fair sailing. Tom’s own exhaustion was so profound that he felt as if he were hip-deep in some viscous quagmire, were being sucked down not by a quicksand but by a slowsand, if there could be such a thing; yet his legs and arms functioned as if some damp gray power akin to the invisible force of storms were pushing at them, some terrible wind of life and motion that he did not want to try just yet to understand.
He went forward to rig the Danforth anchor. There it lay in its seating near the mainmast, firmly lashed down and ready—could that be a tiny glimmer of smugness he felt on this side of the storm over something he had done?—and when he had untied its stock and shank and flat, angular palms and had lifted it to carry it forward, it seemed as light in his arms as papier-maché. How could it hold a yawl in a wind? With dead-looking fingers, wrinkled by hours of wetness, he unlashed the linen anchor line from its rack on the port side and made fast the shackle and cleated the line and hung the anchor out over the sheave on the bowsprit, all set to be let go once again to that deep mud bottom where its big brother, the fluke anchor, lay derelict, lost forever.
He looked up and saw that they were already inside the Great Salt Pond, and that they were in fact just passing the Coast Guard station, where, he noticed, the flags, both of warning and of patriotism, had been taken in from the huge cross-treed flagstaff; the huge doors at the top of the boat track yawned open. A jerking reflex made him look at his watch; it was running, and it said: six-twenty-three.