Sins and Needles

by Monica Ferris

  “Whoa!” he exclaimed, stepping back. The opening was jammed nearly to the rafters with a huge old dismantled dining room table, faded and chipped lawn furniture, and sun-ruined hammocks.

  He opened the door all the way and then the other one—which was also blocked with rolled-up rugs, two pedal cars, three tricycles, a paint-spattered stepladder, a golf bag holding both clubs and croquet hammers, and assorted smaller items such as tennis and badminton rackets.

  “Why is that table out here instead of in the attic?” wondered Hugs.

  “Can you imagine hauling it up that ladder?” asked Stewart.

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I learned to ride a bike on that old thing!” Susan said, pointing. “And see that? We invented a game combining croquet and golf! Oh, I had such fun with the Hamblin twins!” She put a hand over her mouth, trying not to cry.

  Jan went to her mother and put an arm around her shoulder. “Such good memories,” she said, squeezing.

  “Yes, yes,” her mother replied, nodding. “Good memories.”

  “Well, how are we supposed to look at whatever is in here, when we can’t get in?” asked Bernie, very sensibly.

  CeeCee spoke up. “It’s empty in the back,” she said.

  Stewart turned quickly to ask, “What do you mean, empty? How do you know?”

  She took a step away from his sharp expression and said, “I just went to look through the back window, and it looks like everything is just piled up on the side with the door in it.”

  “Oh. I thought you meant you tried to crawl through this stuff.” He gestured at the heap blocking the door. “Might’ve pulled it all down on yourself.”

  “Dad, I’m not an idiot!”

  He smiled. “Glad to hear it. Come on, let’s move some of this out so we can see what’s back there.” He suited action to words and began quickly hauling table parts out onto the grass.

  A few minutes later, looking at the table leg in his hand, then around at the quartet already on the grass, he asked, “What is this, a spare?”

  “No,” said Susan. “The original table had five legs. One was in the center to support the leaves when they were put in.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “Yeah, I think I remember that. Have we found all three leaves?”

  “Right over here,” said Perry, putting the last one down beside the other two.

  “Look, there’s a Stickley label here on the underside,” said Jan, looking under the tabletop.

  “So?” said Bernie.

  “Stickley invented the Craftsman style, and his name on a piece raises its value tremendously.”

  “How come you know all this stuff about antiques?” asked Jason.

  “I’m a big fan of Antiques Roadshow. You should watch it sometime. It’s not only fun, it’s educational.”

  CeeCee, meanwhile, had found an opening in the heap of items still in the doorway and gone inside the shed. “Hey!” she shouted. “There’s a big old boat back here!”

  “CeeCee, where are you?” demanded her mother.

  “In here,” she said, more quietly. “With the boat.”

  “Didn’t you listen when your father warned you not to go in there?”

  “But there was a path through, and I was careful not to bump anything. You want me to come back out?”

  “No!” Terri, Stewart, Jan, Hugs, and Susan all spoke with one voice.

  “What kind of boat is it?” called Hugs.

  “I don’t know. Like a great big motorboat, all made of wood. But there’s no motor on the back. And it has a steering wheel. And a windshield.”

  “Oh, my God, it’s the Edali!” said Susan. “I thought she must have sold that old thing by now.”

  “What’s the Edali?” asked Katie, trying to peer through the pile of stuff.

  “A powerboat. Gosh, Grandfather bought that during the Depression for a few thousand dollars, and it came with the house to Aunt Edyth. We used to go for rides in it. It could go really fast.” She turned to her brother. “Remember, Stew?”

  He had a big smile on his face. “Boy, do I remember! It had a tremendous engine—made a heck of a racket—but it was the fastest thing on the lake.”

  “I thought Aunt Edyth never allowed boys on her property,” Hugs said.

  “Oh, once in a while she’d let me come for a visit,” said Stewart. “Sue would insist that it wasn’t fair to keep me away, and the old lady would give in and let me come for a day. Once I stayed for a weekend, but it was a good thing the weather was nice, because I had to sleep in that hammock out in the yard.”

  “Now, you wanted to,” Susan reminded him. “You said it was like camping out.”

  “All right, I did volunteer to sleep out,” admitted Stewart, his grin broader. “But she didn’t like me. Remember how she only let you drive the boat, not me?”

  “That’s right,” said Susan, smiling now herself. “And I was pretty good, too.”

  “Yeah, you only nearly swamped us one time.” Stewart began hauling stuff out of the way faster than before. “Gosh, I wonder what kind of shape that old boat is in?”

  It only took a few minutes more to clear a proper passage. The light inside was not the best, because the windows were clouded with dust and spider webs, and the bulb in the ceiling fixture was apparently burned out. Hugs and Jason kept clearing things out of the doorway so more light could get at the boat.

  “Wow, there she is all right!” said Stewart, his eyes big and shining. He walked up and took a big swipe at the side of it with his hand, revealing a rich, red brown color.

  The boat—it had to have been at least thirty feet long—sat in a wooden cradle fastened to a four-wheeled cart. All four tires were not only flat but decayed. The boat’s finish was bubbled and crazed under a heavy layer of dust and bird dirt. A tiny breeze began to stir the heavy, hot air of the shed. Alexandra sneezed.

  On the back of the boat, in dust-clogged, gold-leaf letters, was the name. “Edali,” read Susan, her tone fond.

  “What a funny name,” Bernie said. “Do you know where it came from?”

  Susan said, “It used to be the custom to name your boat after your daughter, or, if you had more than one, by combining syllables from their names. This boat was named after Edyth and Alice, Grandfather Hanraty’s two girls.”

  Hugs, having put the last bicycle out, came closer in for a look. “Oh, wow, look at her!” He sounded impressed.

  “Yeah, what a mess!” said Jason, in a disappointed voice. “They put a tarp on the Indian. Why didn’t they cover the boat? Look at all the crud on her! And her finish is ruined. If that’s how they treated her, I bet her bottom is rotted through.”

  “Let’s have a look,” said Stewart. He went back out for the stepladder and set it up beside the boat.

  But the ladder looked so rickety that he hesitated at the foot.

  “Let me!” said Bernie.

  “No, me!” said CeeCee. “I’m the littlest!” After some discussion, CeeCee was helped up the ladder. “There’s a place where you’re supposed to step into the boat—it’s black,” instructed Stewart, holding her hand over his own head.

  “I see it. It says Baby Gar on it.”

  “Who’s Baby Gar?” asked Katie.

  “Beats me,” said Jan.

  “Maybe it was the original name of the boat,” said Ronnie.

  “No, it’s the brand name,” said Jason. “See how the step is a part of the boat?” He had gone up a couple of steps behind CeeCee and could read it.

  “Too bad it’s not Chris-Craft,” said Stewart. “There’s a giant club for collectors of old Chris-Craft boats. Go ahead, CeeCee, climb in.”

  “Shall I go in the front or the middle?” asked CeeCee. The boat, in fact, had three compartments, but the ladder was well forward of the rearmost one.

  “The front,” said Stewart.

  CeeCee said, “Good thing these are my old jeans. It’s very dirty in here.” She plopped down on the front seat behind the steering whee
l, stirring up dust, which made her sneeze, then laugh. “Brummmmmm, brummmmm,” she said, moving the wheel. “This is nice!” She looked down between her feet. “And hey, Jason, there isn’t any hole in the bottom! I wish this boat was on the lake. We could wash it off and go for a ride!” She waved an invitation to her father and said, “Come up, Daddy!”

  “By God, I think I will!” he said, laughing, and climbed the ladder, which squeaked and trembled but held. CeeCee moved over, and he climbed in the front compartment to sit beside her. “Now this was a luxury boat!” he declared. “The leather’s not in bad shape,” he added, running a hand over the seat, which, as the dust and dirt were moved aside, proved to be a deep burgundy color.

  “Gar Wood, Marysville, Michigan,” said Bernie from under the boat.

  “What, honey?” said Terri.

  “There’s a label here on this thing holding the boat that says ‘Gar Wood, Marysville, Michigan.’” She came out from under to look up and call, “Dad? Have you ever heard of Gar Wood?”

  He pulled a forefinger down his cheek, thinking—and leaving a dark streak in the perspiration there. “Yes, I think so. Not nearly as famous as Chris-Craft, of course. And this is a Baby Gar, so I guess the other Gar Wood boats were even bigger.”

  “Well, it would probably cost what it’s worth to get it into running condition,” said Susan.

  “At least,” said Jason.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Hugs. “It would depend on what it’s worth—and if the motor is still in it.” He moved the ladder to the back of the boat and started climbing.

  Lexie said, “Still, it’s like from one of those old thirties movies. I can see William Powell and Myrna Loy driving around in one of these.” She was smiling, head tilted as if wearing a ridiculous Myrna Loy hat.

  “Holy cow, look at this!” Hugs had gotten into the last cockpit, from which he’d opened the double folding doors covering the engine compartment forward of it.

  Jason immediately climbed up to get in beside Hugs. “What the hell kind of an engine is that?” he asked, leaning over it.

  It was huge, with a lot of pipes coming off it. Hugs began counting aloud. “…Four, five, six, my God, it’s got twelve cylinders!”

  “Aunt Edyth always said it was an airplane engine,” said Susan.

  “That’s right,” said Stewart. “What kind of shape is it in?” he asked, kneeling up on the front seat and craning his neck, trying to see.

  “Can’t really tell, not for sure,” said Jason.

  “Let me see!” Ronnie said, climbing the ladder so he could peer into the engine compartment.

  Hugs, looking for labels and finding one, said in an awed voice, “You know what? Aunt Edyth was right. This is a Scripps aircraft engine. Twin carburetors—look at the size of them!”

  “I told you it was noisy!” said Stewart, tilting wildly as he stood on the seat, trying to see.

  “Pick this, Daddy!” CeeCee shouted. “Pick the boat!”

  “Hush, CeeCee!” scolded Terri, looking with distress at her husband, who was, in fact, climbing into the middle cockpit with a gleam in his eye.

  “You may have a good idea, CeeCee,” he said.

  Terri threw her arms in the air and left the shed, and, a few seconds later, Katie hurried anxiously after her.

  Susan would have followed them, but CeeCee shouted, “Hey, Aunt Susan, look at this!” She had found a storage compartment from which she had extracted a raggedy object that might once have been a pillow.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, CeeCee, give that to me!” Susan scolded, coming up to the side of the boat, snapping her fingers. “Right now!” she added, and CeeCee obediently dropped it into her open hands, then turned to rummage some more.

  “What is it?” Jan asked Susan.

  “It was a pillow. Now it’s a nest for mice!” said Susan, holding it at arm’s length. “Phew, it stinks, too!” She marched out of the shed with it. Jan got a glimpse of coarse weaving—or was it knitting?—on the front of it, wine, gray, and blue stripes, with yarn hanging loose from the bottom.

  “Look, a thermos!” called CeeCee, holding up a silver object and shaking it. It rattled.

  “Broken,” diagnosed Hugs. “Throw it away, too, honey.”

  “Awww, I want something I can keep,” grumbled CeeCee, tossing the thermos overboard. Ronnie reached for it, but missed. CeeCee climbed into the center compartment and opened another storage cabinet. This time she found a yellow silk scarf with white stars printed on it, also badly mouse-chewed and smelly. That was thrown overboard with no urging. But the last item was an old pair of red-framed sunglasses with the eyes shaped like a sunburst. She immediately put them on and said, “Can I keep these?”

  “Sure you can, sweetheart,” said Hugs, pausing briefly in his conversation with Stewart and Jason about the engine.

  CeeCee climbed into the front cockpit, resumed her seat behind the wheel, and began making engine noises again. Ronnie moved the ladder so he could come up and get in beside her. Jan went over to pick up the scarf and thermos.

  “You know, I bet with a little bit of elbow grease, I could get this old baby running again,” Stewart was saying.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Hugs. “This is a really old boat, and it’s been sitting for a long, long time. I mean, look at it. It’s a mess. I bet the seams have given way. It’ll leak like a sieve.”

  “And it’ll probably cost you a fortune before you realize you can’t afford to get it back in shape,” Jason added.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Stewart closed the engine compartment and sat down on it. “But you know something? It was running fine in the fifties. I can remember riding across the lake in it. What a rush!” He fell silent for a few seconds, a smile playing around his mouth.

  Then he turned around, looking for someone. “Where’s Terri?” he asked.

  “Outside somewhere,” said Jan. “Why?”

  “Because I want to tell her I think I’ve found what I want to claim.”

  Jan felt a rush of dismay. The Edali was far beyond even the cynical definition of a boat: a hole in the water into which you pour money. It would take thousands of dollars just to get it to the point of making a hole in the water. “Oh, Uncle Stew, not really! Terri doesn’t want it, she said so. Didn’t you hear her?”

  “She did?” asked Stewart, frowning. “Why? This boat is terrific!”

  Jan went to the door of the shed. “Aunt Terri?” she called. “Can you come here a minute?”

  But behind her she could hear her uncle saying, with the usual supreme confidence he displayed before making a disastrous mistake, “I can talk her around. Because I know it for sure. This is my choice.”

  Not wanting to be present at an unpleasantness, Jan left the shed to take the scarf and thermos over to the large white plastic bag that held the discarded remnants of the picnic. She pulled the drawstringed top open to toss them in—then saw the pillow in there, nestled against a plate smeared with Jello salad. She started to reach for it, then, for a reason she could not have articulated, looked around to be sure the coast was clear before pulling it out. She held it down, away from her nose; it did indeed smell, not just of rot but also of incontinent mice. About a foot square, its face was knitted in a U.S. flag pattern, faded to pinky wines, dull grays, and dusty blues, raveled along two sides. It was leaking furry stuffing.

  Something about the field of stars looked wrong and she frowned at it—then saw it had seven rows of seven stars. Forty-nine? How peculiar. Who had made this? Aunt Edyth, in an early showing of a failing mind? Except Aunt Edyth had seemed in full command of her faculties only a month or so ago.

  No, wait a minute, there had been a year when there were forty-nine stars, back in the fifties. Alaska had been admitted to the union a year before Hawaii. This thing was probably made then.

  Maybe it was knit by Susan, who spent many a summer weekend up here in her youth. No, Jan’s mother had stopped coming when she got into high schoo
l, which was before Alaska—wasn’t it? And anyway, this was knit rather competently; no pre-teen did this. So it was probably knit by a friend to give as a gift. Jan nearly tossed it back into the bag.

  But, said her brain, and she paused, waiting for the rest of the objection. But what if Aunt Edyth had in fact knit it? Her thumb rubbed the nubbly front of the pillow.

  Suppose this really was the work of Aunt Edyth’s hands, now stilled forever? She went to the basket she had brought to the picnic, selected a new plastic bag, pushed the pillow all the way to the bottom and wrapped it up tightly before putting it in the trunk of her car.

  As she slammed the lid down, she became aware of raised voices coming from the shed—Terri and Stewart.

  “It’s no good like it is, and we can’t afford to fix it!” Terri was shouting.

  “It won’t cost much to fix,” Stewart argued, “because I can do the work myself!”

  “You’ll try, and you’ll fail, and the thing will sit on our front yard like a…like a junker car! Stewart, I won’t allow that! Pick something else. Pick the Stickley table, or that Indian motorcycle. Pick the antique four-poster—something worth the money we can badly use! But not the boat; I won’t allow that boat on our property!”

  Jan started reluctantly for the shed, where Stewart could be heard saying, “Fine, I’ll keep it in Jason’s garage!”

  Jason said, “Now, hold on a second. I don’t want to be put in the middle here!” Jan felt a sad empathy for her brother. No one wanted to be involved in a family train wreck.

  “Hold on, Jason, you already said I could!” Stewart objected.

  “That was before I knew Aunt Terri was going to raise hell about it!”

  “Oh, she’ll come around when she sees how nice the boat turns out—won’t you, sweetheart?”

  Jan stopped at the door to the shed. Terri, white and shaking, was close enough to Jan for her to touch but didn’t seem to know she was there. “No, no, no! This is too much! I am not going to permit you to get involved in another scheme that only uses up money we don’t have to spare!”

  CeeCee said, “We can sell my Remington horse to fix the boat! I’ll give you my horse, Daddy.”