by Ferenc Máté
In a lull, the drowned ketch began lethargically to rise. She rose slowly, held down by the water in her sails, whose weight, as she righted, began to tear the seams. Stitching parted and distended panels burst. The ketch stood upright and dumped Dugger on deck. The clouds cleaved, the moon shone down, the torn slabs of canvas fluttered like great laundry.
Nello helped Kate up, and turned the wheel. Dugger knelt on the foredeck and with resolute calmness wrapped the sheets around the jib and staysail, then tied them to the lifelines to keep them from flying overboard. Then he uncleated the mainsail halyard to drop the main, but it wouldn’t fall. Its lower panels rippled freely, but an upper panel, still one with the bolt rope, had wrapped itself around a shroud and held the halyard tight.
“It’s stuck!” Dugger shouted, yanking at the rope to show Nello. “Need the bosun’s chair!”
Nello came forward through the buffeting wind.
“I have to go up and free it,” Dugger yelled, his voice shaking with worry. “Or we’ll lose it.”
“So we lose it!”
“And sail with what? If we save the pieces . . .”
“We have a storm sail!”
“The size of a handkerchief! It’ll take us a year to reach Tahiti!”
“It’ll take you longer if you drown!”
“How can I drown? I’ll be tied in! For Chrissake, get the chair!”
Nello considered ignoring him, but Dugger’s face remained unrelenting. He turned and headed below to find the chair.
“Get Guillaume to tail!” he heard Dugger call.
The ketch slid down a wave rolling from side to side, the masts drawing fierce arcs across the ragged clouds.
GUILLAUME TAILED THE JIB HALYARD as Nello cranked the winch.
Dugger, his feet dangling from the narrow plank of the bosun’s chair, his hands clutching its canvas sides, was pulled slowly up the mast. Don’t look down, he told himself. You’re tied in, you can’t fall. And if you do, what the hell? With the ketch rolling, you’d be pitched overboard. It’s only water.
With no sails to dampen the roll, the masts swung like a metronome. He was thrown against the shrouds on one side, then flung through the air into the shrouds on the other. He grabbed the halyard with both hands. Tatters of the sail thrashed him like bullwhips and the rain slashed through the moonlight in silver streaks.
He was past the spreaders. From up so high, the ketch seemed in another world, struggling in immense seas that besieged her from every side. The lantern’s yellow glow wandered in confused circles, now lighting the flooded cockpit, now the tangled ropes near the mast.
Darina had come up and gripped the mizzen shrouds. This is no Inishturk storm, she thought. There, you stood on solid granite. This is the violence of heaven sent to destroy the ketch. And crew. Who can it be after but me? Me. The sisters warned you there was no escape. You can escape the Magdalenes, but heaven will always find you. She closed her eyes and clasped her hands and prayed. Forgive me Father, your worst sinner. Mea culpa, mea culpa. I deserve all your wrath. But please, Lord Father, let them live.
KATE STEERED. She could barely make out Dugger near the top of the mast, swaying from side to side, and she mumbled, “Dear God, bring him down safely.” As the mast swung, he flew from starboard, kicked the head-stay, and, forty feet above the deck, was pitched toward the mast. He hit hard but hung on. The rain poured down his face, into his eyes, but he began to unwrap the sail. Calmly, Cappy, he told himself. Don’t yank or tug, or you’ll just make it tighter. It’s just a piece of canvas, an old lady could do this. Like untying a shawl. He managed to ignore the height and wind, but his heart was pounding and he had to force a breath. He unwound the tangled canvas from the shroud, then rolled it up and knotted it so it wouldn’t tangle again.
Nello roared, “Well done, Cappy!” and Guillaume shouted too, and Kate was so thrilled that for a second she closed her eyes. A wave caught the rudder and the ketch spun to port. The next wave knocked her down.
Guillaume was thrown against a stanchion. He lost his grip on the halyard he’d been tailing and it fed quickly out over the winch. With the halyard now free, the bosun’s chair was loose—Dugger fell. The fierce swing of the ketch catapulted him away from the mast, out over the waves. He plunged in a deadfall with the rope trailing behind, and vanished in the abyss of wildly heaving seas.
HE SURFACED. The seas loomed like cliffs around him. Far up among them, the lantern glowed, then grew faltering and faint, until it vanished in the darkness.
Chapter 18
Dugger floated on his back and tried to catch his breath. Breaking crests and dangling clouds loomed high over him. A wave lifted him, and his hopes rose too that from the top of the wave he might see the ketch, already turned, coming in the moonlight, but once on the crest he glanced around and saw only foaming seas.
He made a brief attempt at swimming, but his bad shoulder ached when he raised his arm too high. Besides, he was unsure of the direction, so he stopped. His head hit something hard—it was a piece of wood; the seat of the bosun’s chair. With the halyard still attached, trailing behind. He clutched it. The sound of rushing seas came at him through the dark, passed by, then crashed, as if on unseen reefs. Once in a while there was silence; the wind dropped, the seas fell, and the world became so peaceful he thought the storm could not return.
Then it did.
A savage gust churned up the sea and he closed his eyes and tried to forget where he was. He let his head fall back into the sea. Think of something else, he told himself, something good. In the darkness behind his lids, Kate’s face came alive. She looked sad; holding back tears.
He felt immeasuarble warmth flowing from her; from her arms that clutched him in need, or in passion; from her mouth that clamped over his with urgency; from her whisper, “This is another world.”
A black wave broke over him; he swallowed water and coughed. He kept his eyes shut and summoned more visions—one at a time—always close enough to touch. Why her? After so many years, so many women, why suddenly her? Maybe because she loved with such fervor, as if there were only that moment, murmuring, “I never imagined life could be so exciting.”
HE SHOOK HIS HEAD. If these are your last hours, he thought, at least put up a fight. He took a deep breath and began swimming. I’m not dying until I see her again. If they can’t find me, I’ll find them. Or land. It can be done. Remember the Burmese who fell overboard off West Africa a hundred miles from land, and all he did was follow the rising sun, swimming no more than maybe fifteen miles a day—drank rain, even caught a fish that came close out of curiosity. He knew that as long as he kept on, endured, and sang—yes, that was a big thing, wasn’t it, he sang, sea songs and folk songs, even lullabies his mother used to sing. Over and over, songs without a break, for hours on end. He sang and swam for six days; the ship’s log bore him witness. By then he had no strength for singing, not even humming, but he kept thinking the songs. And on the evening of the sixth day, he heard a song. A new song. And he saw, with swollen eyes, a sand spit of the shore. His eyes were much too dry for even a single tear.
So Dugger swam. The clouds were riddled with moonlight and he marked that as east, and swam. And sang. It was a song about an aging highwayman, his hair turning like winter’s early frost, his face lined by love and loss and laughter, but even though his eyes still blazed bright, the young and fickle women no longer looked his way. It was a melancholy melody, and he swam slowly, crawling up the waves and sliding like a child in a sled down their shiny backs. Fifteen miles a day, he thought, and one day you’ll reach the coast of Chile or Peru. He wasn’t sure which, but he was sure of the distance—he would be there by Easter.
“And those fickle women never even look my way.”
HE SWAM WITH HIS EYES CLOSED and saw Kate in the shadows of that long-ago moonlit night, only the white of her breasts and her eyes, and he felt her flesh against his mouth, then tasted the sweet damp of her thighs and heard her gentle voice and h
is head filled with her fragrance of a jungle flower and smoke. And he felt his head in her caress.
Then later, when they were wound around each other, he whispered, “I love your taste.”
“You can taste me forever,” she whispered back. After a long while she said, sighing, “I wish time would stop.”
And he remembered feeling a great calm and thinking, This is where life begins.
She kissed away a tear from the corner of his eye and whispered, “You will always have my love.”
HE SWAM UNTIL HIS ARMS SHOOK from exhaustion. He lay out of breath in the storm-torn sea. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, “I would have died for you.” It’s such a waste to die saving a torn sail. But maybe it will help. Maybe Nello can pull the sail down now, and when the storm is over and the sun warm again, you can sit in the shade of the awning with needle and sailmaker’s palm and sew up the pieces. And maybe you can sing to pass the time; a good song, a cheery song . . . any song except “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” because by then your Bonnie might be miles under the sea.
HE SWAM.
Chapter 19
An ominous stillness fell upon the ship. The wind ebbed and the only sound was the lantern squeaking, swinging in the bale. They all stood in disbelief, staring at the darkness where Dugger had vanished.
Nello moved first. With all the force he could muster, he hurled the life ring far into the gloom. It splashed on the wave behind which Dugger had sunk. Yanking his shirt over his head, he yelled, “Throw in anything. We need markers!” He bundled it up and threw it after the ring. Then he dove down the companionway to crank the engine, shouting at Kate, “Turn back! Turn back!” He groped for the flywheel handle in the dark.
Kate spun the wheel. “Dugger, don’t leave me,” she murmured. The ketch headed upwind and, degree by degree, kept turning in the dark. But where is back? Kate thought. Where on earth is, back? She looked for the life ring but it had vanished among the waves. She wanted to call Nello to help, but he was down below.
With a pummeling gust the wind returned. The ketch struggled. Kate turned aimlessly into the seas that loomed as high as bluffs. She watched the compass spinning. One hundred. Two hundred, a voice rang in her head. “Yes!” she hissed. “That’s it!” I was steering one hundred. The opposite of one hundred . . . No! No, idiot! The inverse of one hundred degrees is . . . Then, in a luminous rush, she remembered it all. She saw the long blackboard at school, the severe face of Frau Kleine, and the numbers, the circles, the neat columns of sums, all of it came back—a long, continuous, crystal-clear memory. There are three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle. So the inverse of a number is the number minus half the circle, hence minus one-eighty. One hundred degrees minus one-eighty leaves minus eighty. Three-sixty minus eighty is two hundred and eighty. “That’s back! Dammit!” she hissed, “Two-eighty is back! Thank you, Frau Kleine.!” She spun the wheel. She heard the engine sputter, then start up with a roar. She felt the propeller bite. The compass card wobbled. She watched and stopped it at two hundred and eighty.
NELLO CLAMBERED OUT onto the bridge deck. “I’m holding two-eighty!” Kate shouted through the roar. A wave broke over the bow and swept the deck so only the masts and the skiff remained above the surface. Nello unclipped the lantern from the bale and waded through the boarding sea onto the bowsprit. Clutching the forestay, he held the lantern high, and with the bow pitching wildly he was flung waist-deep into the sea. Then the bow swung high and he stood above the waves, throwing a feeble patch of light into the night.
Kate thought she saw the bosun’s chair float by and ran at the rail, forgetting that Dugger had tied the rope around her waist. She fought the knot with one hand, the other on the wheel. Darina saw her struggle and grabbed on to her arms.
“I can swim!” Kate shouted. “I saw him!”
“It was just Nello’s shirt!” Darina shouted back, and she held her in her grip as tightly as a vise.
Nello stumbled aft with the lantern.
“I saw him!” Kate yelled.
“It was the shirt,” Darina countered. “But I did see the rope.”
They were down in a trough with a wave hiding the moon, and only as the wave moved on and they climbed did they see the jib halyard on the smooth face of the wave, snaking like a serpent, slowly in the moonlight, up the face of the wave, into the foaming crest.
Kate pointed the ketch at the middle of the rope, held that course, then searched the waters as the ketch crabbed sideways, rolling across the seas. Nello clipped in the lantern and untied the boathook, and with a knee braced on the cabin side, he scanned the sea. They neared the rope.
DUGGER FELT NO FEAR. Lying on his back, turned away from the wind, he breathed well, taking a bit of salt splash now and then, the rest of the time feeling the rain falling softly on his forehead. He felt a deep sorrow that he would never touch her face again. It isn’t fair, he thought. I’d give anything to touch her a last time. His mind drifted. He smiled. Anything? Like what? You haven’t much to give. The bosun’s chair? Your shirt?
He shook his head. Stop it! If you drift, you’re dead. Look for the tip of the mast. Or even the lantern’s glow bouncing off a cloud.
He swam fifty hard strokes toward what he judged to be a glow, but when he stopped, the glow was gone. He treaded water and rested. The night hung thick over him. The wind fell, and for a moment the only sound was the rain hissing on the sea. He felt an overwhelming thirst; opened his mouth and drank the rain.
THE KETCH CLIMBED A WAVE slowly into moonlight. Nello lay on his stomach on the port deck and slid as far as he could out over the gunwale, reaching with the boathook out toward the rope.
Darina came and knelt beside him, holding down his calves to keep him from teetering and slipping overboard. Twice he lunged too soon and the bronze tip splashed short, churning phosphorescence in the black water.
On the third try, he reached the rope. He held the boathook firmly and twisted it with care to get the rope to cinch around the bronze tip of the hook.
With riveted concentration, Kate steered. She could see the rope bulge over the hook and adjusted the wheel to the slightest gust of wind, each nudge of sea, to keep the bow from falling away and pulling the hook loose from the rope.
Then she looked at the top of the wave where the rope vanished in the foam. She convinced herself that she saw Dugger there, now swimming hard toward them, now treading water, sometimes still, sometimes waving, but always smiling, so happy to see her. But when she blinked he was gone, leaving only the foamy crest or, when the wave moved on, the sloping, hollow darkness.
Nello had the rope twisted around the hook and he felt the weight of the rope now as it was cinching, and he hauled in the hook inch by inch, as if playing a fickle fish. The rope was coming slowly when the rogue wave hit.
DUGGER SWAM HARD, pushing the board of the bosun’s chair with his shoulder. When he tired, he draped an arm around the board and rested. He rested looking sideways at the clouds, black with ragged edges lit by feeble moonlight, and he tried to be systematic searching cloud by cloud for the lantern’s glow, working the sky a quadrant at a time.
He remembered falling into the water west of the ketch, so he concentrated on the two eastern quadrants, forcing his eyes to move slowly back and forth across the moon, forcing his brain to think hard and not miss a single cloud. Next, next, next, he told himself, the ketch can’t be too far. Nello is running the ship. If anyone can find you in this hell, it’s Nello. He figured he had been in the water almost an hour, but the water was warm and so full of salt he floated well, especially with the board.
His heart almost stopped when he saw the glow. It was a dim yellow speck, as faint as a candle flame through thickly falling snow, but no amount of blinking could wash it from the sky. Take a calm breath, he told himself, but it was no use, he was already thrashing and shouting as he swam, drinking, choking, spitting, and tangling in the rope. Near the glow, white in the pale moonlight, was the tip of the mainmas
t with the tattered sail. Swim! Goddamn you! Swim!
Then, with a brutal blast of wind, the mast vanished from sight.
THE ROGUE WAVE FELL LIKE AN AVALANCHE on the ketch. Its black wall had loomed, rising higher in the moonlight, then collapsing with a deafening boom onto the deck. It threw Nello against the cabin. When it passed, the boathook was gone, its handle bobbing and sinking off to starboard. He lunged for the skiff and struggled with the lashings. Darina grabbed his hand. “You can’t row in this wind!” she shouted.
“I can’t leave him there!”
“You can swim to get the hook!”
“I can’t swim!” Nello snapped.
Darina straightened up. “I can.”
She stepped over the lifeline and, with a headlong leap, plunged into the sea. The first thing she felt was the warmth of the water.
She swam with even strokes and when she got to the boathook, she heaved it as hard as she could toward the ketch. It banged the hull and Nello hoisted it on deck.
She continued with angular strokes toward the rope at the edge of the lantern’s light. Grabbing it, she caught her breath. She tied a loop in the end and pulled the rest of it until it gave resistance. She then slung the loop over her shoulder, turned toward the ketch, and with steady, powerful strokes, she swam. She was less than a boat-length away when unexpectedly the rope went tight. She went under. Nello hung from a lifeline and reached the pole toward her, but she was too far out. She was coughing up water and struggling awkwardly to swim again.
Nello coiled up the mainsheet and with a wide swing threw the coil right at her. She draped a tired arm over it. Treading water, she took the loop from her shoulder and tied the mainsheet through the loop. She waved to Nello and he pulled the main-sheet tight. She was too worn out to hang on; the rope slipped from her hand.
Nello hauled the rope in and Guillaume came to help. They saw the bosun’s chair bobbing on a wave, and pulled and pulled until they saw Dugger, with an arm over the chair, bobbing behind. A unanimous shout cut into the night. Dugger raised his head. He looked half dead, and as he neared they saw his eyes just white slits, but in the corner of his mouth curled a little smile.