The Big Both Ways (23 page)

The wind continued to shriek through the trees as she sat cross-legged in her damp dungarees. She wanted him to come down to her now. She wanted him to fly down from the limbs and curl up in her hands, and the more she suffered for it the more she believed it would happen.

But it didn’t, and she sat for an hour listening to the trees sizzle and the waves pound against the rocks. She thought she heard the voices of the adults calling somewhere in the wind, but there was no direction to the sounds entering her bower. She sat and waited. She didn’t think and she didn’t remember anything from her past. The surge of the wind pushed against her clothes and she felt it move around her as if she too had become a tree. She waited without any faith and without promise.

But still she was not rewarded. Even when she emptied her mind of her cravings, they were neither fulfilled nor diminished when she returned to her desiring mind. She got up and walked away.

Soon the voices of the adults percolated through the trees from the direction of the beach. She walked past the ruined buildings of Brother Twelve’s compound, past the outhouse and the electrical plant. She walked past the chapel and the stone fence around the massive house in the center. She walked through the beach fringe where the driftwood piled in windrows, where the wreckage of the holy man’s compound had drifted out into the inlet and then back again. She walked right up to where Slip was lashing the sail rig to the outside deck.

“Hey, girl, where you been?” Slip asked, turning from his work.

“I was looking for Buddy.”

“You have any luck?” Slip brushed the twigs off the back of Annabelle’s dungarees.

“No.” The girl shook her head and looked down at the sand.

“Let me show you something. Come on,” Slip said. He took her by the hand.

Even before they got close to the dory Annabelle could see him. There, in the bow of the dory, standing on top of the cage, eating from a cup that Slip had wired in place, was Buddy.

“I don’t think he’ll go back in the cage,” Slip said.

She ran to him, and as she thrust her hands out toward him the bird lifted up and flew away. Then she slumped onto the sand.

“Just sit quiet,” Slip whispered in her ear.

They sat by the dory for some minutes. Soon the yellow bird curled down out of the trees and landed on top of the cage once again, and calmly pecked seeds from the cup.

“Guess he’s not much for the grub the other birds eat,” Slip said, stowing a bundle of blankets.

“Are we going to go out in this storm?” Annabelle asked.

“It’s calming down some. And if we don’t, we’re going to have to wait another day to go through the narrows in daylight.”

“The wind’s with us. I’ll row if you want,” Annabelle said.

Slip turned back to the dory. “That’s all right. Thanks.”

“Do you think he’ll ever go back in his cage?” Annabelle asked.

“Don’t know,” Slip said. “But my guess is he likes the taste of freedom.”

“Then why’d he come back?”

“Where the heck else is he going to go, other than with you?”

Slip finished securing the dory and then went back to hauling wood for Mary. He made a tremendous pile near the door to the chapel. He wrapped up a hindquarter of the lamb and put it in the cooling box she kept near the cistern. Just to be sure he secured his tools in the dory. He retied the lanyards on the U-shaped oarlocks to make sure they could not fall overboard and sink. He made sure the mast and the extra oar were well tied to the narrow deck. He secured the trunk of cooking gear and filled the jugs with fresh water. He tried to even out the load so the boat would ride level through the chop.

Annabelle slipped quietly into the bow. The yellow bird allowed her to come close, but as soon as she moved her hands toward him he would ruffle and back away. She sat as still as a photograph, looking at Buddy as if her eyes could bind him.

Ellie put on her warmest coat and several dry shirts underneath. She double-checked Slip’s work on the oarlocks and pulled the leather bindings tight on the oars.

Finally, Mary and Slip walked down to the beach together. Mary was speaking steadily, calmly, not as if she were arguing or trying to convince but as if she were holding on to Slip with her words. She nodded and smiled. He nodded and kept walking.

Ellie walked over to Slip with a sheaf of yellow papers in her hand. “Hand me that little tin of yours,” she said.

“Why?”

“Just get it. Quick now. I’m not crazy for Annabelle to see.”

Slip dug under the middle seat and got the tobacco tin from his tool kit. He handed it to Ellie. She folded the yellow papers into a tight square and jammed them in on top of the money.

“This is how I’m going to take care of you,” she said. “You keep these papers.”

Slip was about to argue. He was at least going to take them out and read them. But Mary stepped closer and interrupted him.

“You should stay until tomorrow at least,” Mary said.

Slip turned to secure the axe in the dory. “We’ll be fine. If we have any trouble we’ll come back and eat some mutton with you,” he said, knowing they both were aware this was not true.

Slip finished with the axe and put the tin back in his kit. He stood next to the small boat, ready to slide it into the water.

“God bless you, children,” Mary said. “Take good care of that bird.”

Slip and Ellie pulled the dory down the beach with Annabelle and Buddy in their places. Ellie got into the stern with the chart and the steering oar and Slip took the middle seat.

Annabelle waved to the old woman on the beach and she waved back. “Is she going to be all right?” the girl asked.

Ellie said, “Just worry about yourself there, missy. You get settled and get that tarp over you.”

Slip worked the oars and Ellie began to steer. As the dory poked out into the main channel, the waves hit hard on their port side and they turned to put them to their stern. There were other boats lining up once again to travel through the narrows. The dory cantered easily up and down the waves with the wind pushing it along. The drowsy mood of the island where Mary waited for her holy man gave way to turbulent motion once again, the foaming of the sea and the slap of water.

The wind was too strong for Buddy to stand on top of his cage so he hopped down under the tarp where Annabelle covered her head. Soon Slip could hear the girl singing under the muffling canvas, and he smiled at Ellie as he pulled on the oars.

Dodd Narrows was indeed a thin passage. A small child could throw a rock across it at its narrowest point. Even at slack tide the water boiled up on the surface. The wind set up a nice chop that was crosshatched by the wakes of the boats going in both directions. Slip pulled and Ellie steered the dory close to the rocks to give the fishing boats and the larger cargo tugs room to pass them. In the narrowest part, the water was a mass of colliding waves and crosscurrents, and in places the surface spouted straight up into the air. The bruised logger pulled the dory through thousands of pointy water spouts and roiling wakes. Great rocks kept smooth by the powerful currents passed underneath the dory, and they slid through the final narrows and out into the sound just south of Nanaimo. The waves were now a lather of white.

Ellie ground her teeth together as she looked at the waves building beyond the narrows. The current was changing and the boat seemed to be sliding down a slope like a sled. The current was carrying them out into the bay and straight into the collision
of current and wind. She pushed the steering oar to port, hoping to take them back into shore, but the boat only moved sideways in the current.

They pulled all day without making much progress. The northerly weather humped up the seas. Clouds built up behind them and suddenly the winds shifted with a chaotic swirl of crosscurrents. The afternoon wore on in a rumble of wind and water splashing in the boat. Ellie dug into the food box looking for something to feed the girl. There was a jug of what was marked as lantern fuel but when she opened it to see if she could use it in the little stove, she found that it was rum.

Annabelle ate pilot bread and moldy cheese while Ellie and Slip drank from the jug. They even let the girl have several sips of rum to warm her up. But Annabelle winced when she swallowed it and even preferred the cheese gone bad to the sourness of rum.

Soon the wind was spraying water up their stern and lifting the little boat higher on the crest of the waves. Slip and Ellie were singing and their cheeks were red. Annabelle hunkered down in the bow and pulled the tarp over herself and the bird.

Voices arguing and singing, flirting and laughing mingled in the shrieking wind. Annabelle peeked out from the tarp while the wind battered down on them through the cresting waves. One moment the horizon was above them churning the water white as if they were lumbering uphill, and the next the dory fell away into a valley and all she could see were the green sides of the waves that were scratched by the fingernails of the wind. In the distance she could see the black hull of another boat following a course parallel with theirs.

Buddy stayed in the most forward point of the dory. He sat there calmly as the boat heaved and fell and the wind rumbled over the top of them like a train. Annabelle held out a handful of seeds and Buddy ate from her hand as calmly as if he were sitting in a restaurant. Annabelle liked looking at him. She was happy now that he wasn’t in his cage. She imagined that if the dory sank, Buddy
would fly up and away from them, and that was all the reassurance she needed in the middle of the storm.

Slip rowed only to keep the dory in a stable position in relation to the waves. Ellie helped him steer. But they were both too drunk to do much of anything. Ellie was trying to steer a course for the lee of two islands to the west, but the wind and the seas were not kindly to her course. All they could do was keep the dory upright and let the storm determine their course, and hope that it didn’t take them into the shallows where the waves would grind them against the rocks.

Slip pulled, and as he did he butchered the words to a popular song, “When You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Red, Red Nose,” as he smiled at Ellie. He was pulling on the oars out of a kind of fatalism now. He might as well die right here, right now. He was growing tired of the suspense.

As he looked over the stern, the sea looked like a moving stretch of prairie, the hills pushing and moving all around him. He was too drunk to see the black hull coming from his stern quarter. He pulled against the oars, and with each stroke he felt an iciness easing around the false warmth of the rum. This must be the way the world looked to Noah, he thought, the mounting waves having washed the sinful world away. This must be what it looks like when the world ends. The tops of the waves were shredding off into white foam that carried down the water like broken teeth.

To the south he could see a steamship pulling out into the straits. It was late afternoon and the ship was lit up like a birthday cake. As the dory rose and fell, the steamship churned steadily along to the north, its stacks laying a black streamer down on the bottom side of the fast-moving clouds.

Slip nodded with his chin to the steamship. “I think we should have taken a bigger boat.”

Ellie looked back and smiled. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I doubt that they would have let me steer.”

THIRTEEN
 

In the dining room of the
Admiral Rodman
, a steward was pouring hot water on the tablecloths. They were expecting only a few passengers in the dining room for an early supper, but even so they didn’t want the china to slide off the tables into their laps. George Hanson sat by himself at one of the tables and glanced at his reports. He read quickly and scanned his notes when he could, for he didn’t like the sensation in his head and stomach when he read for too long on the rough seas.

George had been ashore in Nanaimo and had asked questions along the docks. There was no report of a small boatload of Americans traveling with a child. The RCMP had been polite but not particularly enthusiastic about his investigation. The customs officers were even less than forthcoming. All they said was that they had no records for any of the names George offered.

He spoke to several fishermen and was met with friendly interest but not much in the way of information. A man had told him there was a group of people traveling in the Gulf Islands who were said to have poached a lamb, and that the owner of the lamb had discovered the gut pile and was quite upset, but this was all by way of mail boat gossip.

The ship was lurching side to side. George gathered up his files, walked to the outer deck, and stood at the rail. The sea was a mass of gray and white, he could see no birds flying, but low on the water the tops of the waves were ripping off and the lather rolled downwind.

Just three hundred yards to the port of the ship he could see a small boat sliding up the face of a swell, the stern rising and the bow pushing down into the trough. George leaned forward. He squinted, and held his hand in front of his face to block the wind from his eyes. The wave overtook the dory and lifted it into the air. He saw a man at the oars and a woman steering. As the dory rose up on the face of the next wave, George thought he saw a small pair of legs in the bow of the boat. The stern sank into the next trough and the rower put his weight into the oars as foam flecked over the dory.