The Boatmaker
Authors: John Benditt
Copyright © 2015 John Benditt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West,
1700 Fourth St.,
Berkeley, CA 94710,
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benditt, John, author.
The boatmaker / John Benditt.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-935639-99-2 (ebook)
1.
 Â
DreamsâFiction. 2.
 Â
Self-disclosureâFiction. 3.
 Â
BoatbuildersâFiction.
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I. Title.
PS3602.E66145B63 2015
813'.6âdc23
2014037936
First US edition 2015
Interior design by Jakob Vala
In memory
Earl Philip Benditt
(1916â1996)
But if the self does not become itself, it is in despair, whether it knows that or not.
âSøren Kierkegaard
Contents
The man of Small Island is dreaming of a wolf. The wolf has blue fur and green eyes, eyes unlike any the man has ever seen in waking life. The boy, really, because in the dream he is a boy again: eight years old, with skinny legs and short pants. Just the age he was when his brother went into the sea and never came back.
In his dream, the boy walks toward a big tree standing by itself in a clearing not far from the sea. On Small Island nothing is very far from the sea. The tree is an oak, one of the tallest on the island. The wind blows hard on Small Island most of the year, and not many trees grow to be tall. Above the boy's head, oak leaves rustle in a light breeze. Everything else is quiet; no insects or birds are singing. It's high summer, the time of afternoon when the sun stands still and everything hushes. Even the sea.
The boy walks to the spot where his brother is buried. Awake, he has never come to this place. He refused to come to the funeral, a tiny gathering that included only his mother, a few of her relatives and the pastor. His father stayed away, drunk for three days. His mother insisted on his brother being put into the earth here and not in the little cemetery, overgrown with stones, where all the other dead of Small Island are buried. He doesn't know why she wanted this. Many things are mysterious to himâand nothing is more mysterious than whatever was between his mother and his brother.
His brother went into the sea and did not come back for three days. On the third day, the sea decided it had had his brother long enough and returned his body gently to a rocky beach not far from this oak. The boy is not sure he wants to see where his brother is buried, and he moves slowly but is unable to stop. He is small and thin, and with each step his boots weigh more. As he approaches the tree, he feels as if he is lifting the entire island with every step.
His brother's stone is a small rectangle facing the sky between gnarled, polished roots. He moves toward it, helpless. In daylight he doesn't feel this way. In daylight he is a man of Small Island, with a man's tools, a man's drink. But in the dream the flat stone seems magnetized,
and he moves toward it step by step, with no will of his own. Extending from the stone is a patch of grass as long as a fourteen-year-old boy and darker than the grass around it.
He puts his left foot on the darker grass, and the wolf comes into view, long forelegs appearing first from behind the tree. The wolf's coat is the blue of the sky. On his belly, legs and muzzle, the blue shades into white. His eyes are green: glowing and human, full of sorrow and knowledge. They look straight into the boy. At first he thinks the wolf means to eat him, and it takes every bit of his courage not to look away. He knows the wolf has something to tell him and that if he looks away, wolf and message will vanish forever.
In the daylight world, there are no wolves on Small Island: They were hunted away long ago. There are still wolves in some parts of the Mainland, and every child has seen them in picture books. While the boy stares, the wolf's eyes soften, as if the beast has decided to spare this child. The wolf says nothing that ears can hear, but his eyes speak clearly, telling the boy what he must do.
The man wakes slowly under sheets heavy with sweat. He can't tell whether he is hot or cold. He knows he is still sick, sicker than he has ever been before. People on Small Island don't get sick often. When they do, it is usually
just before they die. But mostly they die in other ways than from sickness. They drink themselves to death, fall through the ice into the sea, cut each other with knives on Saturday night in Harbortown. All of this they understand and take for granted. But they don't know much about being sick.
The man doesn't know how to do it or what it requires of him. He looks to the woman sitting on the edge of the bed, which is her bed, for a sign. She is small and dark, barely denting the mattress. Her palm takes some of the heat from his forehead.
“Have I been sleeping long?”
“A little while.” To tell him the truth about how long he has been in and out of waking would frighten her. She reaches a towel into a basin of water, twists the water out, folds the towel and presses it to his forehead. He lies back and closes his eyes.
He has been in her house above Harbortown for two weeks with a bad fever. She has been changing the sheets, bathing his forehead with the towel dipped in water, wringing a few drops into his mouth, trying to see that he doesn't burn up.
“How did I get here?”
It is the first time he has slept in her house. In the time they have been together, he has met her at her door,
walked away with her through the snow in winter, over the wet earth in spring, the grass in summer, but until now he has never been in her house more than a few minutes at a time. The sheets are scratchy. He has a fever. He knows what fever is, as the children of Small Island know what a wolf is without ever having seen one except in books. But he doesn't know what to do about it. In his world, there is a tool for every job. For sickness, he has no tools.
“Don't worry about how you got here.” She wrings the towel out into the basin and presses it to his forehead. His face is narrow, his eyes a brown so dark it is almost black. His mustache droops over his mouth, gold sprinkled through the brown. There is dark stubble on his cheeks. Usually he is cleanshaven, except for the mustache. By Small Island standards he is a tidy man, though frequently drunk, sometimes for weeks at a time. On Small Island, this is not worthy of notice or comment.
She brought him to her house in a wheelbarrow, the one that usually stands outside his shed. He was in no shape to walk. When he hadn't come to see her for three weeks, she was frightened. She knew he had been drinking. When he is drinking, he doesn't come to see her for days, and she knows he will be in one of the bars in Harbortown. But they've been growing closer recentlyâat
least she feels they haveâand three weeks is too long for him to give no sign. Ignoring her shame, she asked after him in town, but no one had seen him.
She walked up to his shed, standing in a grove of maples away from other houses. He was sweating and delirious, lying on the floor. He didn't recognize her, pushed her away when she reached for him. His wheelbarrow was outside the shed under a tarp, his hoe, axe and shovel piled in it. She took the tools out, went inside and took him under the arms. She has no idea how she got him into the wheelbarrow.
She wheeled him out under the leafless maples and over the packed snow to her house, his arms and legs dangling. The snow squeaked under her boots and the barrow's wooden wheel. It took hours to get him to her house and walk and carry him up the narrow stairs to her bed. For the two weeks since, she has slept in the next room with her daughter, sleeping lightly, waking at every sound.
“Was I drinking?”
“Yes. But that's not it. It's fever. I brought you here to get better.”
What she does not say is:
I was afraid you would die.
He looks at her, not knowing what to think. His dark eyes glow above purple half-moons. With his head against the pillow, the bald spot at the back of his head isn't visible.
Under the stubble he is paler and thinner than when he's healthy, and there's a red spot on each cheek. The way he looks tears at something inside her.
Waking this way, helpless in her bed, he feels suspicious. Suspicious of her and also grateful to herânot an easy combination. She reaches to touch his shoulder above the bedclothes. His body is hot. She knows the fever is not finished with him. And she is reaching the limit of her powers. She is tired, all the way to the bone. She thinks of calling the doctor, then puts that thought away.
He hears a soft noise and turns his head, his neck painful. The girl is in the doorway. In her build she resembles the woman: small, tightly knit, strong. But where the woman has dark hair and eyes, the girl has thick blond hair and blue eyes. The girl watches him in bed, making him feel weak, exposed. He has spent little time with the girl, and not all of it has been easy.