The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  Lying on his back, he held up his hand. “Pressure,” he said. I grabbed his hand and saw that the cuts sliced evenly across the inside of the second knuckle of all four fingers and through the middle of his palm. It was impossible to tell how deep they were. I pressed my hand against his and blood oozed between my fingers.

  Dylan and Gerry stood on Chrysalis, looking into the water. I followed their gaze. Sharks. Not very big, but sharks. Three of them.

  I turned and looked at Dad. Tears were sliding from under his closed eyes.

  “Your hand hurts,” I said.

  He shook his head. Then he spread his left hand across his chest and turned his face away. His lips barely moved. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  I held his hand and squeezed.

  That night Dylan and I sat out under the stars. I kept replaying in my mind Dad’s bleeding fist clutched against his chest and the warm, slick feel of the blood when I grabbed his arm to pull him on board.

  After we had gotten him on board, he had slowly opened his hand and begun to give us instructions—pressure, cloths, boiling water, antiseptic. We all worked, even Gerry, for an hour to clean and bandage his hand, to get everyone into blood-free clothes, and to clean the boats.

  He told us what had happened. He had untied the knife from the line and kicked his way under the boat. He was holding a prop blade with his left hand and cutting at a tightly wound piece of sargassum with the knife in his right hand. Suddenly the seaweed split away and he dropped the knife. It balanced momentarily on the prop shaft. He grabbed it just as it slipped free. When his hand closed, it closed around the blade.

  At lunchtime Dad had insisted that we eat. He sat in the cockpit fumbling with a sandwich, trying to hold it together with his left hand. Finally he let me cut it into four pieces for him. Then he let me pop the top of his soda.

  “People manage with one hand all the time,” he complained, and then pushed the sandwich away. “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “Why don’t you lie down?” I asked.

  “I’m not tired,” he snapped.

  “When I cut my foot,” Gerry said quietly, “Mom made me go to bed. She said getting hurt makes people tired.”

  Dad drew in a deep breath. He paused, then sat back and exhaled.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll rest. Ben, if anything—anything—happens, wake me.”

  I nodded.

  Dad slept all afternoon. When he got up, we changed his bandage because it was bloody. He wasn’t very hungry for dinner but sat quietly in the cockpit while we ate. Before long, Gerry went to bed, and then Dad, Dylan, and I were sitting in the dark.

  “Don’t you think we ought to take you to a doctor?” I said.

  “No,” he answered.

  “You’re hurt bad. You need a doctor.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Maybe you need stitches.”

  “They’re not that deep.”

  “What if they get infected?”

  “I am not going to a doctor.” He stood, holding his hand against his chest, and carefully negotiated the companionway ladder.

  Dylan and I were still as we listened to him climb into his bunk. Then we moved to the foredeck and lay down side by side. I expected Dylan to start a star lecture, but he was silent. Eventually I heard him breathing deeply. “You asleep?” I whispered.

  “No,” he said quickly.

  I propped myself up on one elbow and looked down at him. In the starlight I could see his cheeks were wet. “You’re crying,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. I lay back down. His breathing slowly grew quieter.

  “Is that the Pleiades?” I asked. “Just rising over there?”

  “Yes,” he answered, but said no more.

  “I never saw so much blood,” I offered after a while.

  “Me neither.”

  “Those sharks. They came from nowhere. They seem so stupid and then—”

  “They’re not stupid about blood.”

  We lay in silence again.

  “Right after Dad got in the dinghy,” I said, “tears were coming out of his eyes. I asked him if his hand hurt. He shook his head. Then he said he was sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  After a moment I went on. “I haven’t seen him cry since we got on the boat.”

  “Except once,” Dylan said.

  “When?”

  “The other day when you stayed on the island.”

  I held my hands in tight fists. “You just think he cried,” I said.

  “No,” Dylan said. “I watched him. He sat at the chart table after you left. At first he just stared. Then he covered his face with his hands and shook.”

  “Then he stopped.”

  “No. Then Gerry patted him on the shoulder and he took Gerry in his lap and then he stopped.”

  I took a deep breath, flexed my fingers, and slowly exhaled. “What did you do?”

  “I got out the Bahamas book and started reading about the Great Bahama Bank.”

  I turned to look at him. “You weren’t upset with me?”

  “I knew you’d come back,” he said.

  “How could you know that?”

  “You’re our brother,” he said. “You’d never leave us.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DYLAN MADE THE best doctor. He was good at changing Dad’s bandage. Gerry was good at handing Dylan the things he needed. I was good at getting out of the way.

  They sat in the cockpit, and Dylan slowly unwound the bandage from Dad’s hand. Then Dad held his hand out over the edge of the boat while Dylan washed it and poured antiseptic over it. Dad jumped and hissed every time the medicine hit his hand. Then Dylan rewrapped the hand in clean bandages and took the old ones to wash and boil.

  Dad said we would stay until he felt stronger. For the first few days, he spent most of the time lying in the cockpit and wouldn’t let us leave the boat. Gerry wanted to know if the sharks were still there. Dad said no, but he wouldn’t let us swim anyway. Then he completely changed his mind and decided I had to learn to use the speargun. Fresh fish would be good for us, and our supplies would last longer. He made Gerry watch a fishing line off the stern and sent Dylan and me in the dinghy with the speargun. It took me several times, but I finally brought back a grouper. Dad stood over me while I cleaned it to make sure I did it right. He told me how to cook it, and we had a fish feast that night.

  By the second week, Dad was much better and Dylan and I started taking the dinghy out just to explore, sometimes with Gerry. On the far side of Joulters Cay was a huge flat that lay bare at low tide. We walked out and felt we were walking into the middle of the ocean. We found conch hiding in patches of turtle grass and brought them back to the boat. Dylan wanted to eat them the way the Bahamians do, but we couldn’t figure out how to get the meat out of the shell. In the end, we just put them back in the water.

  When we got back to Chrysalis, Dad always had something he wanted me to do that he couldn’t manage with one hand. Once he had all the spare lines out and was trying to coil them again. It took me an hour to get them straightened out. Another time he was trying to inspect the emergency pack while we were all gone and dropped it overboard. He had pinned it up against the side of the boat with the boat hook, but he couldn’t lean over far enough to grab it. I don’t know how long he had stood like that waiting for us to get back, but I know he was angry when we returned. I always did what he asked and didn’t say anything. We would have just ended up fighting.

  By the third week, he was ready to swim, so we all took the dinghy to the beach. Dylan, Gerry, and I started a hole in the sand while Dad swam back and forth, looking as strong as he had ever been. After a while he called to me, “Ben. I’ll try the gun.”

  I waded out and handed it to him. He held it in his left hand and carefully fitted his right hand around the handle. He winced as his forefinger reached for the trigger.

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”
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  I took it back and turned toward the beach.

  “It’s time to leave,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  I stopped and looked back at him. “Leave?”

  “Head south. To Andros.”

  “Andros?”

  “I’m rested now. We’re running low on water and food. We’ve been here three weeks. It’s time to go, don’t you think?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “That’s decided then,” he said, and lay back in the water to float.

  At Andros, we tied up at Morgan’s Bluff just long enough to fill our cupboards with groceries and our tanks with gas and water. Then we anchored and went to look at the reef. The eastern side of Andros is edged with a shallow plateau that is only a few hundred yards wide on the northern end of the island but is a few miles wide farther south. The entire edge of the plateau is crusted with a continuous reef covered by only six feet of water. Just past the reef, the bottom plunges down a cliff to a depth of over eight thousand feet. The different kinds of coral on the cliff are so thick, they fight one another for space. Every shape, every color, every texture is laid out there in the water below you—and it’s all alive.

  Every day for a week, we dinghied out to the reef and swam. Though Dad’s hand was getting better and better, he still couldn’t handle the speargun, so I kept my job as chief hunter. Dylan positively identified a blacktip shark and started making a list of all the coral we had seen. And Gerry finally got tired of spending all his time alone in the dinghy. He didn’t actually learn to swim, but he started getting in the water in a life jacket. At first he just held on to the dinghy gunwale to learn what the life jacket felt like. Then he held on to a short line and kicked a little bit. It wasn’t really swimming, but it was as close as Gerry had ever gotten.

  After a week, we hauled up the anchor and sailed down the eastern side of Andros, ducking into each of the little harbors along the way to stay for a few days before heading south again. We had to learn to sail inside the reef. Gerry handled the depth finder, shouting out the numbers every time they changed. Dylan was an expert with the charts, matching up what he saw in real life with the numbers and lines on the paper. I stood on the bow and watched the sea. Before long, I could tell the depth by color before Gerry even read off the numbers.

  By the time we pulled up at Pigeon Cay before making the final run into Fresh Creek, we had developed a whole new afternoon routine. After anchoring, Dad and Gerry did boat chores while Dylan and I went fishing. Dad and Gerry were a good team. Gerry’s hands were small but agile, and Dad was patient with him. Dad got done the things he wanted to do, and Gerry was learning—how to tie off a line, tighten a screw, handle the pliers—all the things Dad still had trouble doing. Dylan and I made a good fishing team. Dylan didn’t want to use the gun, but he was good at spotting the best places to fish. I didn’t have his eye for fish hideouts, but I had good aim and timing underwater. If we were lucky, we had fish for dinner. If not, we opened a can.

  At Pigeon Cay, we were not lucky. Dylan and I took the dinghy out as usual, but soon clouds started piling up in the west, so we turned around and motored back to Chrysalis. When we got back, Dad and Gerry were not tinkering on the boat. They were reading in the cockpit, Gerry snuggled up next to Dad and leaning on his arm. Gerry was just finishing Mike Mulligan as the dinghy bow touched the stern.

  I snagged the towline on the cleat. “I didn’t know you could read.”

  “I’m learning,” Gerry said. “In boat school.”

  I nodded, then checked the motor and tilted it forward. At home, everybody was settled into classes. The leaves were turning and the nights were getting sharp with cold. But we weren’t at home. We were here. Instead of sitting in geometry class, we were plotting courses on a chart. Instead of memorizing biology vocabulary, we were learning about coral, conch, and fish. It was a strange sort of school, but there were parts of it I liked.

  Dylan secured the oars and gas can under the seat.

  “Get anything?” Dad said.

  “No. Clouds,” I answered, and pointed west.

  “Too bad,” Dad said, turning back to the books. “Okay. My turn again.” He pulled his poetry book from under Gerry’s stack of little-kid books and started reading in his poetry voice, kind of dreamy and heavy. “ ‘Pain—has an Element of Blank—’ ” he read. “ ‘It cannot recollect when it begun—or if there were a time when it was not—’ ”

  I handed the speargun to Dylan.

  “‘It has no Future—but itself—’” his voice read. “‘Its Infinite contain its Past—enlightened to perceive New Periods—of Pain.’ ”

  When Dad was quiet, I looked up. He was reading the poem again silently to himself. “That was a real cheerful poem,” I said.

  “But true,” Dad answered.

  Gerry sat quietly, holding Blankie’s silky corner against his leg and slowly rubbing it up and down.

  “I didn’t like that one,” Gerry said. “Let’s read this.” He handed Dad Where the Wild Things Are.

  As Dylan and I climbed into the cockpit, Dad looked up at me. “I must have read this book to you a thousand times, Ben.”

  Dylan sat down beside Gerry, and Dad’s real voice began to read about Max making mischief in his wolf suit.

  I lay down on the cockpit cushions and closed my eyes.

  Dad turned a page. “Look at that monster,” he said.

  I heard Dad’s hand smoothing down the page and the shift as he and Gerry adjusted positions.

  Pigeon Cay was not the best anchorage. The boat rocked a bit in the freshening breeze and the halyards clanged against the mast when the wake from a Bahamian fishing boat caught us. But now all that felt normal. When you live on a boat, your muscles are constantly adjusting to the moving ocean, but you never think about it. Not the moving or the noise—the pings and taps along the hull when you’re lying in your bunk, the knocks and slaps and gurgles when you’re in the cabin. You get used to it. I moved on the seat and felt the slight grit of sand and the stickiness of salt. Even that was normal now. I hardly noticed any of it anymore.

  Dad’s voice went on. The pages rustled as he and Gerry looked quietly at the pictures. I remembered stories. After dinner, Dad gave me a soldier bath—a wet washcloth and a crazy story about hardship in the desert. He dressed me in my Batman pajamas and we climbed onto my bed. I leaned against the muscle of his arm, which smelled a little like sweat and Dylan’s baby powder. When Dad read stories from a book, he pointed at the pictures. When he made up his own stories, he didn’t finish them.

  “Once upon a time, a boy named Ben had a boat and he sailed away.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. That’s your part of the story.”

  Sitting in the shade of the bimini on Chrysalis, he paused at the end of a page.

  “The monsters are mean,” Gerry said.

  “You think so?” Dad asked.

  Then Max said good-bye to the wild things, and they threatened to eat him up.

  “We love you,” they said, and I laughed again.

  Max stepped onto his private boat and we all came sailing home with him, through a year and “in and out of weeks,” and when I opened my eyes, it was still hot. Hot and about to rain. Gerry hopped down below with the books. Dylan and I piled the cockpit cushions under the bimini. The rain lasted only ten minutes, then Dad had us doing the end-of-storm routine. We opened all the hatches, dried the cockpit seats, set out the cushions, and hung the drying towel on the line. The rigging kept raining on us for a while. Big, fat, heavy drops fell—plop—right in the middle of the top of my head.

  “Ben.”

  I turned and saw Gerry standing just behind me, Blankie draped around his neck and his hands hidden behind his back. He handed me a wadded-up piece of drawing paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “Open it.”

  The paper was a little damp and tore as I pulled it open. Inside was one of Gerry’s cars.

  �
��Happy birthday,” Gerry said.

  “Surprise,” Dylan said.

  “Oh,” Dad said. “I forgot.”

  “I did too,” I said. I was sixteen now. “Thank you, Gerry,” I said. I looked at the rusty little car sitting in the torn paper and closed my fist around the toy.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WE LEFT ANDROS for Nassau in December. We came into the harbor from the west, threading our way through a cacophony of marine traffic—freighters, fishing boats, a sand dredge, private yachts, buzzing Jet Skis. We passed Prince George Wharf, which was wall-to-wall cruise ships, then sailed under the bridges and tied up at a marina just beyond Potters Cay. It was the first time Chrysalis had been in a slip since we left Marathon, and none of us liked it very much.

  We hadn’t finished tying off the lines when two little kids came running up with tiny straw baskets in their hands asking us to buy. When we said no and turned away, they just kept asking. We had to go down below before they would leave. Dad was writing a grocery list. He pulled some money from his wallet and handed it to me. “Take this list and find a grocery. All three of you. Go.”

  We hated Nassau. The crowds were too thick. The straw market was too fake. The cruise ships were too big. The casinos were too pink. Their palm trees were too perfect. The workers’ smiles were too big. Everyone wanted to braid our hair or get us a cab—for a fee, of course. One guy tried to hustle me some marijuana. Gerry wouldn’t let go of my hand. Dylan said it was time to find the grocery.

  The sun glared off the buildings as we walked back in the noontime heat carrying the heavy bags. The breeze from the harbor was blocked until we walked by the fish market where we caught the sudden, powerful smell of dead fish. Fishermen stood in the sterns of their boats and hawked the piles of fish lying at their feet while the women sorted or bagged or cleaned them.

  One guy had conch rolling around in the bottom of his boat. He picked up a conch and used the claw end of a hammer to whack a hole in the whorls at the top. He flashed a knife inside the hole and then grabbed the conch’s crawling claw, yanking the animal out of its shell in one slimy gray blob. The whole process took about five seconds. He handed the flat, palm-size, alien-looking creature to the waiting customer, picked up another shell, and did it all over again in another five seconds flat. They exchanged money, the fisherman sucked on a beer, and another customer came up.