A heavy smack on the side of the boat startled him as he leaned into the tiller, turning the boat before it collided with the swimmers. He wheeled to find a man hanging on the railing of the boat by one arm. Beneath the sheeting rain, the man’s face was familiar.
“Are you gonna just stare or actually be of some use?” the man shouted.
It had been so long since Effram had spoken to anyone that his tongue felt numb. His tongue flopped and twisted around the unfamiliar words, and when the words finally slipped past it, his voice was rusty and unused. “Be of use?”
The man thrust his free hand toward Effram as far as he could. When Effram didn’t take his hand, the man gave out a loud sound of disgust, then he grunted and wriggled himself clumsily up over the side and into the boat. He brought a wave of water with him, and he squished as he struggled to right himself.
Effram stared at him, not sure what to do. Never once in all the years of cutting and sawing and shaping and tarring had he ever pictured anyone else aboard his boat. It didn’t seem quite right. In fact, it seemed sacrilege. The sodden heap of the man’s colorful clothing against the shining wet of the deck was too bright. Garish. As incongruous as a harlot in a temple or a cowled priest bellied up to a raucous bar. It made the boat seem lopsided, weighted down. But that was crazy, for while his boat was not huge, it was not so small that the weight of one wet, squishing man could be felt.
The man rolled to his feet and swayed clumsily to stay upright. “You could’a lent a hand to help me in,” he growled.
Still shocked to have feet other than his own on the deck of the boat, Effram stared as the man stumbled toward him, awkward but menacing. In a flash of lightning and daydream, he saw himself tossing the man back overboard like so much unwanted driftwood. Effram shook his head, dispelling the image as unworthy, but he thought he should at least protest the alien presence on his deck.
The man couldn’t possibly stand up to him, for Effram was tall, strong and broad shouldered from years of cutting down trees and carting them home, from sawing planks and working them into place single-handedly.
The top of the man’s head barely came up to Effram’s chin. The man’s arms looked spindly and easily breakable, but the man’s fear was huge. His terror, as he glanced over his shoulder at the encroaching sea, was larger than both men.
The man lurched the last few steps toward Effram, grabbing his arm at the last moment to stay upright. “Turn the boat!” he shouted. “You’re going the wrong way.”
As shocking as it had been to see someone upon his deck, it was even more shocking to be touched, to feel the man’s weight and the clammy, hot press of his hands.
As Effram backed away, the man grabbed for the tiller.
“No!” Effram pushed the man’s hand off. “Don’t touch my boat!”
“Then turn it around!” The man grappled with him, trying to grab the tiller through Effram’s longer reach. “There are people over there-children who aren’t strong enough to swim!”
The boat rocked as another man dragged himself over the rail. The movement was slight, but enough for Effrarn to feel it. This man was bigger than the one who had managed to get one hand on the end of the tiller.
“Trouble, Blaies?” he rumbled.
“This fellow don’t want to go back for the others.”
Effram opened his mouth to protest, but still his tongue felt rusty, tarred to the roof of his mouth.
“Sure he does,” the bigger man said easily, fixing Effram with a glare every bit as sharp as a flash of lightning. “You just gotta explain it to him right. If he don’t wanta swim, he can turn this tub around.”
Then the man turned away from the shocked Effram and fished a bedraggled child from the sea. Then another. He slapped a boy, who was coughing and crying at the same time, on the back. “You’re all right, boy. Stop yer sniveling and sit down.” He thrust the child to the middle of the deck.
Blaies tugged, then pushed on the tiller, trying to break Effram’s hold on it, but he was pushing the wrong way and the boat turned even more toward the dock. The man swore softly. He pointed toward the closest of the beached ships. “That way. There’s more in the water. And more on that house.” He paused to swipe water from his face. “Unless you want to swim?”
“All right. Just…” Effram shoved his hand away from the tiller. “Just move away.”
Blaies released his hold and moved away to give Effram room to work.
Effram thrust the tiller away. It was not that he feared going into the water, but he would do anything, anything, to keep another’s hands from controlling his boat. The boat slipped across the water in the direction Blaies indicated.
As the boat slipped past some of the people who had taken to the water upon seeing Effram, the bigger man scurried along the rail to help the stragglers over the stern. Blaies stumbled forward to help them move to the center of the deck. Coughing and gagging, they fell onto the deck and lay where they’d landed until pushed amidship.
Effram stared at the soaked, half-drowned people littering his deck. He did not register Blaies’s demand that he sail further among the old shipwrecks until he said it a second time. Even then, it didn’t register as words. Only as annoyance and a buzzing sound of fear that cut through the rage of the storm.
“Here.” One of the men on the deck crawled to his feet. “I have money, if that’s what you want.” He took two ungainly, rolling steps towards Effram and thrust a small bag of coins into his hand. “Go that way. That house right over there. The smaller one. In the middle. That’s where my family is.”
Effram stared at the leather bag in his palm. It had a heavy, rich feel to it. He didn’t even have to jiggle it to know it was full of steel coins-more money, in just the one small moment, than he’d ever made in a month of selling carved bits of wood and old books.
Effram looked up to find Blaies and the bigger man watching him intently, knowingly. As if it was just what they’d expected. As if they’d thought, all along, that behind his facade of craziness had roiled greed and any number of other unsavory motivations.
“I don’t want money,” Effram said, and he handed the small, weighty bag back to the man. He tugged on the tiller until the boat moved in the direction the man had pointed. The man had the grace to look away, to flush and mumble, “Thanks.”
Blaies rolled his eyes, obviously thinking this was just more evidence of craziness. He braced himself against the rail, looking down into the water for more survivors.
The water was already up past the door that had been cut into the side of the small merchant vessel. The man’s wife and a passel of dark-haired children hung out the windows. Effram maneuvered alongside, and the man held up his arms to receive the first child. They came out the window one by one and huddled, wet and miserable, amidst the clutter of people already in the boat.
Effram peered at them through the rain, wondering if any of these were the brats who had yelled into his windows, thrown rocks at his porch, and climbed over his piles of freshly cut wood. All children looked alike to him, save for the differing colors of their hair.
He looked down at one of the children the man had handed into the boat, a little boy who was probably blond but whose hair was so wet and plastered to his skull that it looked as dark as Effram’s own. The child stuck out his tongue at him, than clambered to his feet and jumped up to grab onto the boom. He swung from it like a monkey.
Effram gave it a vicious twitch and jerked the child off. The child thumped in a heap to the deck and sent up a wail to rival the thunder. A woman crawled over, cuddled him, and looked in fear at Effram.
“Hush, now, you’re not hurt,” she said to the child. “You musn’t play on Captain Effram’s boat. Not after he’s saved us.”
Effram turned away, more uncomfortable with the kind words than he had been with the child’s playing. At least the child’s transgression was straightforward devilment. These adult’s words were something else. He’d seen her fear. He’d heard it.
By the time the last child had been dragged onboard, shouts could be heard from the ship-house next door. The man who had offered to pay him pushed the boat away from his house with his hands and pointed at the next one.
The boat was more sluggish, weighed down, and difficult to steer amongst the ships where there was less current.
There was another husband and wife and three soaked children clinging to the next ship. “I can’t believe this
