Authors: John Benditt
He puts the lamp down on his bench. His cigarette has burned to a glowing dot. He drops it to the floor and grinds it out.
“I can see you're building a boat. What I want to know is:
Why?
”
“To sail to Big Island.”
“Big Island? Why in the world would you do that?”
She feels light, but not in a good way: She is empty and panicky, like a cloud floating on the spring wind above the trees outside. She wills herself back down into the shed and onto the dirt floor, wills herself to stay there.
“Because I'm going to do it.”
She knows from his tone that he won't say anything more about his reasons. He's drawn a line, like the ones he draws with his carpenter's pencil. On the other side of the line there is nothing to say.
“You don't know how to build a boat.”
He smiles, looking at the thing on the floor of the extended shed. The skeleton is well on its way to being a classic Small Island double-ender. The keel is oak. Also the upcurving ribs that remind her of a sea monster. The bow and stern are almost symmetrical, the bow a little higher and longer. It is a boat that can easily be sailed by one, though it would usually carry two, or even three. It looks frail, but Small Islanders have sailed and rowed boats like this into the northern sea for generationsâand usually returned.
“The boatbuilder families will be angry. You know they don't allow anyone else to build boats.”
At this he does not smile. He crosses behind her and closes the door, puts the hammer and chisel down. Stands close to her, leaning down, his face close to hers. He still looks thin, after his illness, but then he always looks thin.
She feels like a field mouse on the snow, hearing the whir of owl wings in the cold air above. He reaches down and unbuttons her coat, one button at a time, with a carpenter's roughened fingers, until her coat hangs open. Then he slides his fingers under the coat, feeling for her, finding her.
He is rough and gentle at the same time. It feels as if he is reaching right into the center of her. After a time, he
begins opening and closing her again, many times, on the dirt floor, next to the skeleton of his boat.
When she comes back to herself, several things are in her mind. She lies there running over those things while she feels the two of them cooling apart where they were connected. She feels him shrink out of her and slip away.
He gets up, finds the threadbare blanket he sleeps under, lies down and pulls it around them. On the roof and walls of canvas extending from the shed, shadows of new maple leaves move back and forth. The small leaves move away in the wind and then return to their original places, as if they know where their homes are.
She rolls on her side, looking him square in the face and says, “If you want to go to Big Island, why don't you just take the steamer?” As soon as the words leave her mouth, she is embarrassed and wishes she could reel them back in.
He looks into her eyes, as dark as his own. He pushes the blanket off, gets up and stands with his narrow back to her, the bones of the spine showing clearly, the skin pale where the sun doesn't reach. He walks around the unfinished boat, touching it here and there, bending over to pick up her clothes and bring them to her. He finds his own clothes, slips into his longjohns, overalls and boots. Strikes a match, relights the lantern. From the lantern lights a cigarette. Stands, lantern in hand, cigarette in the
corner of his mouth, smoke rolling up around his face, looking at his unfinished work without speaking.
She came to this shed with a purpose in mind: to give him back the money he left in the blue envelope. Now that she's here, she knows she can't return it. He won't accept it. She's angry, not sure exactly who she's angry with. Angry or not, she knows that the envelope in her coat pocket must go back down through the woods with her. As she walks home, she will think about what to do with his money, which she cannot keep but cannot return. She gets up from under the blanket and dresses herself.
She looks at him where he stands examining his work as if he has forgotten she is there with him. Suddenly she is sure he will drown, like his brother. Everyone on the island knows that story. For her, there is no death worse than drowning. It's bad enough when men fight in Harbortown, slashing each other across the throat and bleeding to death in the sawdust on the floor. But drowning is worse: There is nothing to say goodbye to. Even if the sea generously chooses to return his body, as it did his brother's, it will likely be on some other shore.
She pulls on the rest of her clothes, walks to the door and lets herself out into the night without disturbing him. She takes the path through the woods, being careful not to crush the green crocus shoots before they have
their chance to bloom. The blue envelope in her pocket is a riddle, but she is good at riddles. She has liked them ever since she was a girl.
By the time she reaches the clearing where her house stands, the moon is setting on the horizon, out past Harbortown. The sky is pale. She walks faster in order to be home before her daughter wakes.
Inside, she takes off her coat, hangs it behind the door, puts the envelope in the drawer of the table the man made for her. She has to press it flat to get the drawer closed. Why, she wonders, would a carpenter who has never been out on the ocean decide to build a boat and sail away from Small Island? Especially one who has been frightened of the sea since his only brother drowned.
The answer must lie somewhere in the story of his family, she thinks. But where? It's such a tangle. After the man's brother died, their mother, the best seamstress on Small Island, raged, drank and beat her husband and anyone who tried to pull them apart. One night in Harbortown it took three men to get her off him and drag her back to her house, where she passed out. The husband followed, yelling the whole time, then passed out next to her with his arms around her. No one could understand why he stayed. Finally she threw him out, and he built a house on a bleak finger of land called Gallagher's Point, where the wind is so
steady and strong that there are very few houses among the pines, stunted and twisted, that cling to the cliff. People say he has a woman up there, but no one goes to visit.
When the mother isn't drunk, she is still a seamstress who can sew anything. She makes embroidery more elegant than anything else on Small Island, a tradition passed down to her from her mother and her mother's mother. Even when she drinks, her hand is steady, but ultimately she reaches a point where the work blurs and she blacks out. After his brother died, she shunned the boy. People on the island felt pity, but they didn't want to have much to do with him. He was bad luck. Despite her shunning him, he is much like his mother in one way: He has hands that can make anything.
When the package arrives, the woman is working in the general store. The bell over the door rings, and the postman steps in. They get a lot of mail in the store addressed to
General Delivery, Harbortown, Small Island
. Only the well-to-do, like Valter, have their own postal address. Mail comes on the steamer from Big Island once a week, except in the dead of winter, when the ice is too thick to cut through. The steamer anchors in the harbor and a lighter is rowed to the stony beach carrying mail for the shop and orders for customers, things not found on Small Island. Many on the island cannot read or write,
and she helps them with their letters. It has always surprised her how well the man who was sick can read. It was something his mother taught him.
“Here's one for you,” says Finnarson. The postman has the Small Island look: narrow and wiry, drooping mustache. He holds out a package along with a pile of letters. The package is small and square, tied with twine. It has come all the way from another world: the Mainland, near the capital. For a moment, the sight of the package freezes her.
“
One for you, I said.
”
“
I hear you, Finnarson. There's no reason to shout.
”
“I wasn't shouting.”
Finnarson is sweet on her. She is even-tempered, accepting Finnarson's timid advances in good humor. When she and Valter were living together, she was invisible to men. Now they seem alert to the slightest change in her, as if they can smell it, the way dogs do. It tires her.
Normally she would stop and chat for a while with Finnarson. Not today. She takes the letters and package without a word, sets them down and turns back to what she was doing before the postman entered.
Finnarson stands still, startled by her rudeness, then turns and clumps out and down the wooden sidewalk, the bell ringing behind him as he wonders:
What in the hell is wrong with her?
She takes the package home in her coat. It stretches the pocket, but she doesn't want it in her hands as she walks through Harbortown, doesn't want anyone asking slyly: “A package from the Mainland, eh?”
She leaves her coat unbuttoned, almost doesn't need it. The spring air smells of mud. His boots will be wet. He is working again. She hears of him from time to time but pretends not to notice. He's stopped drinking. But he's stopped before; she doesn't expect it to last. This boat is nothing more than foolishness. He won't finish it. He'll give up and go back to what he always did before: drink and work, drink and work. And even if he does, by some miracle, finish his ridiculous boat, he'll never actually leave. Sailing to Big Island. What nonsense. She is afraid. But part of her cannot help but admire.
In his shed the man of Small Island works on his boat without thinking. When he is sober, he can always find work. After he got well, he took the jobs he found until he had enough money to repay her, with something left over for his journey. Now that the debt is paid, he can work far into the night, as quickly or as slowly as he wishes. No one expects this boat; no one is paying for it. No one even knows about it, except the woman. As spring deepens, the boat grows and takes shape under the maples, whose leaves, now fully open, make shadows like hands on the white canvas extending out into the woods.
After laying the keel and joining the ribs to it, he fills in the hull, steaming and bending cedar planks into shape. Although he is afraid of the ocean, he has been fascinated by boats since his brother was taken by the sea. He has watched how the boatbuilder families assemble the parts
in time-tested ways. But as he works in the shed, he is not exactly imitating: He is making something that is his own. And the boat is teaching him how to build it, showing him at each step what needs doing next.
He squats on the dirt floor, smoking a cigarette and examining the hull. Cedar planking is now three-quarters of the way up to the gunwales. Spring is almost full. The beginning of summer will be a good time to put the boat in the water. As he looks over his work, he considers how he will get his boat over the bluff and down through the woods to the beach below Harbortown. But before that can happen, there are things to be fashioned, including the sail. And a visit he needs to make.
At the woman's house, things are moving easily. She hasn't seen the man in a while, and when she doesn't see him, her life takes its own pace, like the pansies coming up in her window box, the crocuses blooming in the woods, the mud drying on the plank sidewalk in Harbortown, sending up showers of dust as heavy boots come down. She goes to work, leaves the store, collects the girl, comes home, makes dinner. She hears Valter has a new woman in Harbortown, which doesn't surpriseâor even particularly interestâher.
Occasionally her husband comes to her door and knocks his familiar knock: two soft and one loud.
Sometimes she lets him come in and take her upstairs. Valter has a violent temper and it wouldn't be good for things to get any worse than they are now. But it isn't just to keep the peace that she lets Valter have his way with her. She isn't strong enough to say no every time. If the other man would claim herâreally claim herâperhaps she could. But he doesn't. He stays in his shed in the woods, working on the sea monster growing up from the dirt floor.
The package from the Mainland, addressed to her at the general store in a blue clerical hand, sits on the table he left her. The girl asks what is in the package, hoping it's for her, a birthday present, even though her birthday isn't until October. The woman doesn't answer. The days are warmer, and they don't race toward sunset; they dawdle. Spring has come forward and possessed Small Island. Now in its turn it is beginning to give way to a new invader: summer. The maple leaves in the grove above his shed will be large and green. She knows that the thing she has ordered for him, all the way from the Mainland, must be delivered.
In the woods, he works into the night, leaving the door open and letting smoke from his cigarette drift out. Almost every day the boat teaches him something new, and he pauses to think:
I didn't know that.
This doesn't
happen when he builds houses or does carpentry jobs. When he's doing those things, he knows exactly what will happen, even before the job starts. Not with this.
He has wrapped cedar planking around the oak ribs. The hull is now formed all the way to the gunwales, and he has begun putting in decking made of seasoned maple from trees nearby. The centerboard well has risen from the keel. The place where the mast will be stepped is visible. Less and less imagination is needed to see what this boat will be when it is finished: a classic Small Island double-ender, gaff-rigged, the mast stepped well forward. Made for fishing and transport. Sturdy, and capable of surviving the storms off Small Island. He stands in the doorway of his shed, smoking and waiting for the boat to show him what to do next.