The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  But soon he was ready to leave. We packed the boat with groceries and water. Dad drove the car to a used-car lot and walked home with a pocket full of cash. We took a long day sail to Marathon and tied up at the marina. That night Dad crawled into his bunk early. Gerry fell asleep in the cockpit lying next to me while Dylan and I stared up at a dark circle of starless sky surrounded by bright security lights.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said to Dylan.

  He didn’t answer.

  I rose up carefully on one elbow so I wouldn’t wake Gerry.

  Dylan was already asleep. How could he sleep?

  It was just like the night after the movers had come when we had gone to bed on pallets we had made on the floor. That night Dylan’s breath had settled easily into his usual deep sleep, while I had stayed wide awake, staring at the sticker stars on our ceiling and hearing every reverberating sound in the house. Downstairs, Dad’s feet had thumped around in the empty rooms. Then the front door had opened and slammed shut. Dad had gone outside.

  All of a sudden I had decided to leave.

  I had crept downstairs carrying my duffel bag and shoes. Light from the streetlamps poured through the curtainless windows. I had headed toward the kitchen and the back door.

  Then I had stopped.

  Dad hadn’t gone outside. He was standing in the kitchen leaning against the sink. He was bent slightly forward, pressing a large cloth to his face. I saw it was an apron.

  “Dad?” I said.

  He dragged the apron down over his face and turned to me. Then he held it up for me to see. “Christine’s,” he said. “The movers missed it. It was all the way in the back of the drawer.”

  Upstairs Gerry called out. “Mom?”

  Dad looked down at the apron in his hands. “I wonder why they didn’t see it.”

  Gerry’s voice called louder. “Mom!”

  “Dad,” I said. “Gerry’s calling.”

  “What?”

  “Gerry’s calling Mom—again.”

  “Mom!” Gerry’s voice was going hysterical.

  Dad looked toward the stairs then pressed the apron to his face again.

  Gerry screamed.

  I dropped my bag. I took the stairs two at a time. I lay down beside Gerry on the pallet. “Ben,” he sobbed. I took the silky corner of Blankie and rubbed his cheek. He curved his body into mine. I felt him shuddering.

  The next morning, we had thrown our duffel bags in the car and started driving.

  Now I was lying next to Gerry again, this time in the cockpit of a boat called Chrysalis. Again in the morning we would leave. I looked at my sleeping brothers and then up, past the security lights, to the blank, black sky of night. I thought of the chart spread out on the navigation table down below and the long straight line Dad had drawn on it from Marathon to Bimini, the westernmost island of the Bahamas. In my mind, I looked at the line and it was like looking over the edge of a cliff and falling. Falling and falling and falling. Straight into the bottomless sea.

  THE BAHAMAS

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RIGHT UP UNTIL we threw off the lines in Marathon, I kept thinking Dad would change his mind. I kept thinking he would look at us all of a sudden and say, “Hey! What happened? Why are we here?” But it didn’t happen that way. Just as he had said we would, we left Marathon in the early afternoon and sailed east, south of the Keys and out of sight of land. All around us was nothing but ocean, ocean, and more ocean. Florida was a few miles north on our port side. Cuba was a hundred miles to starboard. The high summer sun was slowly curving down toward Mexico behind us.

  Ahead lay hundreds of islands, the Bahamas. We were pointing our boat toward Bimini, an island smaller than the lake at home. I sat in the cockpit, feeling the swells carry us rhythmically up and down and thinking maybe Bimini would be impossible to find even with Dad’s fancy new navigation tools. I thought maybe I didn’t really care, and if we were lucky, we’d keep right on sailing until we fell off the edge of the earth.

  I shifted on my cushion and saw Dylan sitting on the port side, hanging his legs over the edge, trying to catch his bare toes in the foam that curled up the side of the hull.

  “Toe bait,” I said. “Sharks love it.”

  Dylan smiled. “The water looks beautiful this way. Come see.”

  “No thanks. I prefer to be miserable on a cushion.”

  Gerry climbed into the cockpit from down below. He was dragging Blankie with him. He moved carefully to sit down next to Dad. He curled his legs under him and balled Blankie up under his chin. It looked like a beard.

  Dad didn’t move. “What’s our speed, Ben?” he asked.

  I leaned forward to look at the speedometer. “Six knots.”

  Dad frowned. “We should be going faster in this wind.”

  “You’re not steering high enough,” I said.

  “No.” Dad shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it.” He studied the sails a while longer. “We’re heeled over too far,” he said. “Got up too much sail. Why don’t we raise the working jib.”

  I’d sailed with Dad on the lake enough to know that you don’t argue. You don’t say “Oh, let’s not do that,” or “Why don’t you do it, Dad. I’m tired.” The captain is always right, and on the boat Dad is always the captain. So when Dad said “Why don’t we raise the working jib,” what he really meant was “Ben, raise the working jib.”

  I headed down below to get the other sail. When I came back up, Dylan was already on the foredeck getting ready to lower the genoa.

  “Lower away,” I shouted, and popped the halyard. The sail billowed down. Dylan gathered the folds and quickly un-hanked the sail, grabbing each metal clasp in a practiced motion and unhooking it from the forestay.

  Dylan on boats was a mystery to me. He always seemed to be willing to go, and when he was on the boat, he always knew what to do and he always did his job well. But he never asked to take the tiller. He would take it if Dad told him to, and he could handle it just fine. But he never seemed to want to do it. He always seemed to be just along for the ride.

  Now he was expertly stuffing the genoa into the sail bag and I was dragging the jib forward when Dad’s voice stopped us.

  “Wait,” he said. “I forgot. This is shakedown time. Everybody learns everything. Gerry, you go hank on the sail. Ben, stand by to raise it when Gerry’s done. Dylan, take the genoa down below and double-check our course.”

  It’s true the lightest man is usually foredeck crew—at least in racing. But Gerry was more than light. He was little. He was barely five years old.

  Dad pushed at him to get him moving. “Come on, buddy. Let’s go. Leave Blankie here.”

  “Dad,” he whispered. “I don’t want to. It’s too heavy.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, and started forward.

  “No, Ben. This is something Gerry can do. He’s part of the crew. He needs to learn.”

  “Daddy—” Gerry started.

  “Don’t whine,” Dad said. “Just go try.”

  Gerry crept to the foredeck on his hands and knees, then stood and grabbed the sail bag. It was heavy for him, but not too heavy. He managed to haul the sail out of the bag and stuff the bag down the forward hatch. Moving carefully, he ran his hand along the bottom edge of the sail, feeling for the tack. He snagged the huge grommet in the hook fixed on deck, then searched for the first hank.

  I watched him struggling to open it. It was stiff. His fingers were small. He pulled it open and slipped the hank onto the forestay. He felt for the next one. Two. Three. The sail must have had fifteen hanks along its leading edge. Each one had to be hooked on before we could raise the sail. Four. Five.

  “You’re doing great, Gerry,” Dad called. “But you need to hurry up. We need the jib to steady us.” Dad was sitting back, his fingertips on the tiller, his eyes studying the head of the main. Dylan was down below at the chart table measuring distances.

  Gerry balanced, concentrating on his job. His tongue stuck out and curl
ed up toward his nose. He reached up to push his hair off his face. Then the boat hit a wave, and Gerry wasn’t on the deck anymore.

  I felt myself leaping to the bow and then reaching over and grabbing his skinny wrist where he was clinging desperately to the base of the bow pulpit, his feet dragging in the water, too scared even to scream.

  I hauled him up and held him between my knees as we sat breathless on the bow. I squeezed him there, and neither of us looked back to the cockpit where Dad was standing now and shouting at us, “What happened? What’s going on?” Dylan stood in the companionway, quiet and watchful.

  Gerry and I stayed still. I could feel waves rolling over me that weren’t ocean. I could feel Gerry’s skinny shoulders pressed warm between my arms.

  “What’s happening?” Dad shouted again.

  “Gerry,” I said. “One hand for the boat. Always. No matter what. One hand for the boat. Got it? Now go sit down. I’ll finish this.”

  Gerry clung to the lifelines, moving so slowly that I had the sail hanked on and was raising it before he sat down in the companionway, frightened and chilled.

  I didn’t say anything to Dad as I winched the sail in close-hauled, leaning out to study the leading edge, bringing it in a little to relieve the luff. When the set suited me, I turned and looked at Dad.

  “What happened?” Dad asked.

  “Gerry fell overboard and I pulled him back on.”

  Dad’s eyes flicked to the sail and then to the companionway, where Gerry sat with his back to us, Blankie draped over his shoulders like a shawl.

  He didn’t say anything. Not to Gerry or to me.

  “Gerry fell overboard,” I repeated.

  “I heard you,” he said. “Gerry, go get on some dry clothes. Ben, Dylan, we need to discuss proper man-overboard procedure.”

  Gerry disappeared down below and Dylan came up. I sat and watched Dad. I felt my pulse throbbing all the way to the ends of my fingers.

  “Safety at sea,” Dad said. “It’s critical. We’ve got the equipment, but we need to know the procedures.”

  “Dad—” I said.

  He held up his hand to silence me. “We should have gone over this in Key West,” he continued. “Man overboard is fairly simple. In most cases you should throw over the life ring first. Then the man in the water swims to the ring while the boat turns around to pick him up.” He stopped talking and looked at the compass.

  “Dad.” I held my teeth tight. “I guess you forgot. Planning this whole trip, I would have thought you’d remember, but I guess you didn’t.” I looked at Dad again. He was watching the sail. “Dad,” I said, “Gerry can’t swim. Remember?”

  Something like a pain twisted across Dad’s face. Maybe it was a memory.

  Because the fact that Gerry couldn’t swim was a family joke. Mom couldn’t float. When we went to the pool, she loved to show off how she’d sink when she laid herself out to float on her back. “No moving,” we yelled, and jumped around. Then we counted how many seconds it took for her to be underwater. She claimed her bones were made of rocks. If she worked at it, she could stay afloat, of course. But treading water exhausted her, and though she could swim, she hated it. She said she didn’t know where Dylan and I came from. How had she spawned such fish, us both being swimmers practically at birth?

  Then came Gerry. If he looked at water, he sank. Being on boats didn’t change him. It just made Mom and Dad determined to teach him. When Dad tried, Gerry sank and cried, and Dad got mad. When Mom tried, he still sank, but Mom got sad. So at the pool Mom and Gerry splashed in the shallow end while the rest of us did backflips off the board and competed for who could hold his breath the longest. I always won.

  Had Dad forgotten all that! Had he forgotten the morning of the accident, when Gerry had had his first official swimming lesson, and he had sunk? Had he forgotten that Gerry cried and Dad fumed? That Mom was mad because Dad was mad, and she decided the only way to calm everybody down was a treat. So she would make banana splits. Only we were out of ice cream. Had he forgotten how she slammed the door on her way out to the store and he had yelled, “You don’t have to do this, you know,” and she had hissed back, “You don’t have to yell at a scared five-year-old!” Had he forgotten that the ice cream melted in the front seat while the ambulance—

  Dad spoke quietly. “I didn’t forget, Ben.”

  “Yes, you did,” I said.

  “I made a mistake. I should have told him to put on a life jacket.”

  “What about the ice cream? Did you forget the ice cream, too?”

  “Ben, don’t—”

  “Everything!” I said. “You’ve forgotten everything, haven’t you?”

  I stood then and left him sitting in the cockpit. I went forward to stand in the bow pulpit. The wind blew in my face and the sail flowed out behind me like a single giant wing, like I was some kind of mutilated butterfly who could flap around a lot but who would never, ever fly.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I STAYED THERE IN the bow pulpit, watching the waves disappear into the blurring evening, until far in front of us the horizon was dark and behind us the sun had sunk into a bank of clouds. To our left, past Florida and then across a sweep of earth, across trees and mountains, across rivers and lakes, was home.

  “Ben!” It was Dad’s voice. “Dinner.” As I stepped into the cockpit, he handed me a bowl. “Chili,” he said.

  I took the bowl and sat down. Nobody had anything to say, so we just listened to the autopilot. While I had been on the bow, Dad had set it up so no one would have to steer during the night. Now it was whining into our silence, adjusting the tiller slightly one way, then the other, holding a perfect course in the unchanging wind.

  Dad set down his empty bowl. “Boys,” he said, “this will be our first overnight passage. Everyone has a job to do. Gerry, your job is to sleep. The rest of us will have to take watches. Dylan, you’ll take the first one—eight to midnight. I’ll take midnight to four. Ben, I’ll wake you at four for your turn. Every hour we need to record our speed and direction for navigation purposes. Ben, you’ll be the one to spot Bimini, but it probably won’t be until dawn. When we anchor, we’ll all be on duty. We want to make sure we do it right.” He paused and looked at me. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  I looked down at my bowl. I hadn’t eaten anything. At home, I would be hungry. I would be just getting back from spending the day sailing alone or playing baseball and swimming in the lake with Andrew and the other guys. The little kids would be playing screaming tag games across the yards. The moms would be in the houses cooking dinner. By now those people, whoever they were, had moved into our house. They might find an old birthday candle on the back of a kitchen shelf. They might find an army man under the refrigerator or a baseball in the yard. They might open a drawer in Mom’s bathroom and find a comb. They would throw it all away.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not hungry.” I stood and tipped my chili into the sea.

  “That was your dinner,” Dad said, and snatched the bowl out of my hands. “There won’t be anything else until tomorrow after we’ve anchored.” He turned and went down below to clean up.

  Gerry watched him disappear then curled up on his side with his eyes closed. Since we had been on the boat, he hadn’t had a nightmare, but he had developed a habit of curling up and sort of disappearing, like one of those roly-poly bugs that rolls into a ball when you touch them.

  Dylan leaned back to look at the stars. “Look, Ben,” he said. “There’s the Milky Way.” At home he had shown us the moons of Jupiter through his telescope and made a mobile of the planets to hang under the stick-on stars on our ceiling. He used to go outside and lie in the damp grass to watch the night sky. “The sky’s so clear here,” he said quietly, “you can see everything.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Einstein,” I said, “but I don’t really care that much about the stars.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “But they never change,” he said. “And they’ve been there for
so long.”

  I shrugged.

  “I like stars,” Gerry said suddenly, sitting up. “Tell me.”

  “Look,” Dylan said. “That’s the Little Dipper. See? The last star in its handle is the Pole Star, the only one that never moves. All the others spin around it. Now look down. That’s the Big Dipper. It looks like the Little Dipper is pouring into the big one.”

  I followed his finger across the darkness. I thought maybe it would be good to look out into space and be blown away. I tried it. I looked up. I saw stars. I imagined space. But nothing happened. It was just night.

  “Now look down from the last star on the Big Dipper’s handle,” Dylan was telling Gerry. “That really bright one is called Arcturus. It’s not even forty light-years away.”

  Dad climbed back up into the cockpit and stood, looking forward into the dark.

  “What’s a light-year?” Gerry asked.

  “Six million million miles.”

  “Why is it miles if it’s years?”

  “It’s too complicated, Gerry,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Because that’s how far a ray of light can travel in one year,” Dylan explained.

  “Oh.” Gerry was quiet a moment. “How many light-years is it to heaven?”

  I felt heat wash over me and flashed a look at Dad.

  He turned and spoke. “Ben, why don’t you take Gerry and go on to bed.”

  “But I’m not sleepy.”

  “You have to be wide awake for your watch. You need to learn to sleep when you can. Go.”

  I started to say something, but then I stood and led Gerry down below. When I crawled into my tunnel, I could hear Dad and Dylan quietly talking above me and the water gurgling at my ear. Less than an inch of fiberglass stood between the ocean and me. Below me were fathoms of darkness and strange, goggle-eyed fish. Above me were the stars and the expanding universe. How was I supposed to go to sleep?

  I punched the pillow and sweated. Gerry whimpered and tossed. Eventually, Dad’s and Dylan’s voices stopped. Hours passed, and then Dylan moved quietly through the boat to bed. The rudder creaked in its housing. The boat’s braces groaned. A line thumped against the cockpit floor. I felt I had just slipped into sleep when Dad shook my foot to wake me.