blow?
On the fourth day it dawned red in the morning, the sailors took warning, the waves got steeper, the wind increased and backed north. By noon the sea was white all across, and we took in sail, running under double-reefed main and storm jib. By eight that evening, we were in serious trouble, the wind screaming up to a full gale. We took off everything but the storm jib. I gripped the wheel while Josey and my father rigged a chain and drogue, which is when I started to get frightened. When you rig a sea anchor it means that you are about to convert your handy sailboat into a plugged bottle, batten and tie everything down, strip to bare poles, lash yourself into your bunk, and pray that the bottle does not leak because if it does, you are fish food. The wind increased; the jib disappeared, whipped into the howling air with a crack like a shot; Dad heaved the anchor over, hustled us into our bunks, and tied us in with the auto safety belts he always carried aboard. I recall his placid smile, his reassuring voice.
The waves were by this time the size of two-story houses, which meant that every minute or so the Kite swooped from the roof peak of such a notional house to the ground and back up again, twisting hideously as she did so. We kids retched helplessly. Father sang “Haul Away Me Laddie-Oh,” although the wind was so loud we could hardly hear him. I suppose that is when my girlhood faith began to drain out of me. I recall praying without cease, using every church trick I had learned, Hail Marys, Our Fathers, Glory Bes without number, the Jesus prayer. I in my girlish pride had always thought myself devout, although I suppose my devotion was a way of being with Dad and getting back a little at Mom, and didn’t God know the difference, because now he refused to show. I can recall the knowledge growing in me that there was nothing there, that I was going to die, die, die, and have my face eaten by crabs, and feeling the absolute uncaring emptiness of the physical universe, that if God existed he was somewhere else than in this particular patch of wild ocean, or that if he did care, he cared in a way that would forever be beyond my understanding and useless for even a scrap of comfort. I began to despise my father for getting me into this.
It got worse as the night wore on; then we heard a horrible cracking sound, and the Kite seemed to leap forward and down, down, and then, incredibly, stop short, as if it had struck a stone wall. I slid forward in my straps and cracked my head painfully against the bulkhead. Then I seemed to be upside down, hanging from my bonds, looking down at the cabin ceiling, just inches from my face.
We had pitchpoled. The sea anchor had torn loose and we had shot forward, outpacing the waves, plunged our bow into the wave in front, and then, driven by the following wave, the boat had pivoted on her bow and turned over on her back. I can’t remember the rest. There were crashes and rending sounds, the crackle of wood smashing, the scream of tortured metal, and a sharp acid stench. The boat was breaking up. Another heave, we were upright again, and I heard my own voice screaming in my ears. I was beyond terror now, waiting for the water. Beyond this, I have no memory.
Then it was somehow dawn, the motion of the boat was easier, a mere ten-foot corkscrew, and we all untied ourselves and went out on deck. Both masts were gone, snapped off eight feet or so from the deck. The engine had torn loose from its mounts, the prop shaft was twisted, and worst of all, the batteries were smashed. We had no power, and no way to signal or, save by celestial navigation, to find out where we were.
My father seemed delighted with this predicament. At last he was back in the seventeenth century, an era far more true to his spirit than our own. Of course, we always sailed with a complete kit of hand tools, and so, by means of the most backbreaking, hand-ripping work I have ever done, we three cleared away the wreckage, skived and fidded the main boom to the stump of the foremast to make a jury rig, resized and rerigged the foremast gaff and boom to suit a scandalized gaffsail, set up the stays and shrouds for the new mast, shot the sun to determine our location (150 miles NNW of Bermuda) and set sail. I had never seen him happier. I hated him, and grumped about my tasks, and resented that he did not see I hated him. I hated myself more, for being a coward, for deserting God, and hated God for deserting me. I looked at Josey and saw that he knew what had happened to me, and I also knew we would never talk about it to each other or to Dad. Something loved was over, the saddest thing in the world.
He was singing “Flowers of Bermuda” over and over; and we both falsely played along with the merriment, because you would have had to have been a monster like Mom to crush that much boyish happiness, and neither of us was that bad. We even sang along on the chorus:
He was the captain of theNightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde, in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shore.
I suppose he would have liked to sail unobtrusively into Hamilton harbor and stroll into the yacht club as if nothing much had happened. My mother, however, had raised the alarm with her characteristic shrill energy, and so, as soon as the weather cleared, the air and sea were crammed with search planes and vessels. We were picked up seventy miles out and, over my father’s ferocious objections, put in tow back to the twentieth century, Hamilton, Government Dock, and my mother. She came running down the pier as we debarked from the coast guard cutter, ran up to my father, and slugged him in the mouth.
The sun sinks behind the city. We leave the lovely boat and walk back up the dock across the long shadows of the masts stretched across our path like bars. I pull a scrap of double-braided line from a waste barrel and I do some knots and string tricks for the amusement of my nondaughter, as my father used to do for me. In a few years, I will teach her to sail her first pram. Or not.
There will be no pram, Guitar is not Kite. Still, we both feel better for this, the healing power of salt water, or memory. We stroll back to the car, I make a turk’s head for her, and in my head comes And sure I could have another made, this in my father’s clear baritone, in the boatshop down in Dover
Later, getting ready for bed, Luz asks what flaky means and I ask her where she heard the word and she says that in the ice-cream parlor Betty Jean Stote came in with her mommy and Betty Jean Stote’s mommy asked who Amanda’s friend was “and that was me, Muffa, and Amanda’s mommy said who I was and she said my mommy was flaky. Is that like cornflakes?”
“Yes,” I say, and then she tells me she’s going to be in a play at Providence about Noah’s ark and I have to buy her a special clothes thing, but she forgot, but there is a note in her lunch box. I tell her I will look at it later. Then she says, “Amanda and me were playing princesses. I was a Pocahontas princess and Amanda was a fairy princess, because she has golden hair. Am I adopted?”
I swallow hard. “No, baby, you’re not.” Technically the truth. I could swear to it.
“Annie Williams is adopted from Korea. Is my daddy going to come and see us?”
“I don’t think so, baby.”
“Why not?”
“Because he died a long time ago.”
“He got sick and died,” she agreed. “But we could get a new daddy.”
“That’s right, we could.”
“Kids could get new daddies. Beth Weinberg has two new daddies. She’s so dumb. Me and Amanda hate her. Kids could get new mommies, too, couldn’t they? If their mommies get sick and die, or if they turn into witches.”
“Yes,” I say, my spine prickling, but the dreaded questions are not pressed home. She picks up the stack of books at the bedside, arranges them in order, and hands them to me. The first one is Are You My Mother? I read it with real feeling.
She goes out halfway through Goodnight Moon. Back in the kitchen I sit down at the table with my divination, and read through it several times. Ulune was a famous diviner as well as a sorcerer, an unusual combo, actually. It’s a little like baseball pitchers being good hitters, not impossible, but rare. Although Ulune’s clients were all believers, still they could not help but be astounded at the accuracy of his work. Typically, questioners don’t tell the Ifa diviner their questions. Ulune had to select the relevant verse from a number that related to the figure cast, and as far as I could tell he always chose the right one. In the present case, doing it for myself, I knew the question, but still this was a clear bull’s-eye. Okay, I won’t take a caravan to the north, check. It would be foolish to leave the farm right now. Check. Witches are definitely coming to carry off the eldest child, which is me, or maybe Luz, or maybe both of us. Check. My strength is no match for his, no question, check, especially if he is really going to go
