me, Aunt, but I must rest,” she muttered, eyes closed, face toward the bottom of the boat.
Molly said nothing. After a moment Wendy looked up. Molly was staring south, toward the navy yard, but now her face showed something more than just apathy and despondence. There was something else there. A spark. And if she was still not the Molly Atkins of yesterday, neither was she the nearly dead thing that Wendy had pulled from the house.
Molly shifted her eyes from the shipyard and met Wendy’s. “I think I saw an anchor,” she said. She pulled her oar in, laid it on the thwarts, and climbed forward. The tide was carrying them upriver again, sweeping them back over the distance they had so laboriously covered.
Wendy half turned to see what Molly was doing. Her aunt had found an anchor, like a small grappling hook, up in the bow. She threw it over, let the thin anchor line run through her hands. She took a turn around a cleat, the line came taut, and the boat snubbed to a stop.
“There,” Molly said. “Now we can pause to think, without having all our labor undone by the tide.” The punishing work at the oars seemed to have done much to restore her.
The wind was steady from the west. Wendy turned her face into it, let the cool breeze sweep over her flushed skin. “The tide has to turn sometime,” she suggested.
“Humph,” Molly said. “Yes, well, it had better hurry the hell up.
The Yankees’ll add murder to our list of crimes, if they catch us.” “They cannot catch us. We must get clear of here.” They were quiet for a moment, then Molly said, “Goddamn
that John Tucker and his goddamned promises! Where the hell was he? How could he leave us?”
Wendy let the question pass. She was looking at a wooden bucket stuck under the stern sheets, a thing she had not noticed before. It had a checked cloth over it that looked very much like a napkin. With some effort she pulled her oar in and laid it on the thwarts, then stood awkwardly, her legs protesting after being cramped in a sitting position and subjected to the effort of rowing.
The heavy boat was stable enough for her to stand with confidence. She made her way aft, picked up the bucket, and looked inside. She saw four fresh ship’s biscuits, a chunk of ham, two apples, a knife, and a folded paper. She unfolded the paper, read the note.
“Molly, listen to this!” she said, then read out loud.
Molly looked down at the poles and folded canvas that lay across the thwarts. “Sailing rig,” she muttered. “Of course, that is what it is…”
Wendy was too busy tearing off a chunk of bread and attacking the ham with the knife to look at the mast and sail. She stuffed her mouth full, struggling to chew. She recalled her manners, cut a more sensible piece for Molly, and handed it over.
The two women, famished, sat on the thwarts and ate in silence, bobbing on the Elizabeth River. Upstream of them, the black columns of smoke from the burning yard rolled away to the east, partially obscuring the town of Norfolk off their starboard side. But overhead the skies were blue, the day warm, and the water just slightly ruffled by the wind. The weather seemed too pleasant for their world to be collapsing around them.
They ate all there was to eat and found the water butt and drank and then Wendy stood. “Very well, let us get the mast stepped and the sail set.”
Molly looked up at her as if she were speaking nonsense. “Stepped?”
“That is what you call putting a mast in place.”
“Did you learn all this from your sailor boy?”
Wendy flushed, waiting for some ribald comment to follow, but Molly said no more. “I have read stories of the sea since I was a girl,” Wendy said, “and have picked up a thing or two.”
Her tone was more confident than she was. She had never actually sailed a boat herself, and had only been aboard small boats under sail three or four times. As she unfolded the canvas and looked with dismay at the tangle of ropes and the various varnished spars, she chastised herself for having reveled in the beauty and romance of the thing without paying strict attention to how it was done.
“Well, the longest one must be the mast,” she said. She looked around. There was a hole through one of the thwarts and a block of wood with a matching hole in the bottom of the boat. “And this must be where it goes,” she added. “Here, Aunt, bear a hand.”
The mast had been laid down in the proper orientation for stepping, which Wendy thought was fortunate until it occurred to her that it was probably put like that on purpose. They maneuvered the heel of the mast in place, and then hauling, straining, cursing, they lifted the pole, eighteen feet long, and worked the heel into the hole. At last the mast came straight up and then dropped in place with a thump that made the boat quiver underfoot.
Wendy looked up with satisfaction. They had “stepped the mast,” a thing she had often read about and now had accomplished. But that was only part of the job. There were half a dozen or so lines coming down from the masthead and pooling at her feet. She pulled them apart, followed them up the pole with her eyes, trying to divine their purpose.
“This one”-she gave it a little tug-“raises the sail. I forget what it is called. Here, hold this.” She handed the line to Molly. “These”-she untwisted the lines; they ran from the top of the mast, with a small block and tackle at the lower end-“are…” She was not certain.
The lower block had a hook on it.
She looked around. On the outboard edge of the thwart aft of the one through which the mast stepped were eyebolts, port and starboard, that looked very much as if they would accept the hooks, so Wendy tried one.
“Oh!” The lines were some kind of rigging to support the mast. She pulled on the end of the rope and hauled the line taut. And there, as further proof of the correctness of her hypothesis, was a cleat on which to make the line fast. She set up the other supporting rope on the starboard side. She looked up. All the lines were now accounted for.
“I think that is it, Aunt!” Wendy smiled. “Let’s hoist the sail now.”
The line that Molly held ran from her hand, up through a hole in the mast and down again. It was attached to a light gaff to which the head of the sail was laced. Wendy stepped around until she and Molly were side by side. She reached up and took hold of the rope and together they pulled. The gaff and sail lifted off the thwart. They pulled again and again. The sail unfolded, fluttered in the breeze as they pulled it up.
The manila line was agony on blistered and bleeding hands, but they hauled together, and soon the gaff was as high as it would go. The boat began to heel to starboard and the foot of the sail flogged gently in the breeze.
“We have to pull up the anchor,” Molly said, as much a question as a statement. They went forward and tugged on the anchor line, but they could not move it. They could not pull against the pressure of the wind and the tide on the boat. The anchor line was like a solid thing.
“Just untie it and let it go,” Wendy said. “Wait for my word.” She went aft, sat on the stern sheets, and took the tiller. She held it amidships. It was the third time in her life she had held a boat’s tiller, having been allowed brief and closely supervised turns at steering on two of her previous outings.
“All right, untie it!” she called. Molly unwrapped the line from the cleat. It leaped from her hands, spun overboard, and suddenly the boat was free, swinging away to starboard, lively with motion. Wendy pushed the tiller to starboard to bring the boat back on course. It turned, farther and farther, and the sail began to flap, so she turned it the other way.
So now she concentrated on steering small and on how the sail was setting. It looked right, except that the bottom corner nearest her was too far out. “Molly, could you pull on this rope.” Wendy pointed with her left hand. “I think the sail is too loose.”
