I finished rereading THE BOUNTY TRILOGY for, I think, the third time over the decades with pleasure and then sought my next book. The first two I tried did not hold my attention and then I chanced upon in my ebook library my own SHADOWS AND OTHER STORIES. I have not read it for many years. I started and found it interesting. Of course I would, but I am not the only one to have done so. A fellow sailor wrote. 'I was expecting a book by a sailor who writes. I found a work of literature by a writer who sails. Words and ideas from this book are still bouncing around inside my skull.'
So while the heat in the Low Country is still limiting, I am going to serialize SHADOWS here. There are four parts. Today Part 1 which in the beginning is intentionally Conradian. The remaining three on successive Mondays. I welcome your comments as to whether this is worth doing.
Part One
1
One morning two boats left a city in the East.
It was an unusually logical city, governed under the theories of an American psychologist by a Chinese man educated in England. Nominally a democracy, the government held one-party elections before telling the people what to do. It told them clearly and repeatedly, and it rewarded them when they did what they were told and it punished them when they did not.
The government sponsored a great many campaigns. There were campaigns in favor of birth control, education, short hair for men, higher work productivity, and the wearing of seat belts in automobiles. There were campaigns against littering, drugs, spitting in public, and the use of minor languages. But even logic can lead to absurdity, such as the huge poster in the General Port Office, which commanded: Speak More Mandarin; Less Dialects. Unfortunately for the theories of the American psychologist, this was written in English.
It was not a city given to laughter, particularly at itself, and generally these campaigns resulted in the city being what the government wanted it to be: serious, hard working, prosperous, and dull. It was the cleanest city in the East, and the most characterless.
The city was situated on an island at the mouth of a great strait. The island was roughly diamond shaped, fifteen miles north/south and twenty miles east/west.
One hundred years earlier, the island was the private hunting preserve of a sultan, whose Muslim ancestors had a few centuries still earlier conquered the adjacent peninsula in the name of Allah. Then a young Englishman came to make his fortune in the service of the East India Company, saw the commercial value of the island, and founded a trading post there.
Now three million people lived on the island. Most of them were Chinese. All of them were immigrants or the sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants. But those now living on the island considered it to be their own and did not welcome new immigrants. They particularly did not welcome refugees arriving by the boatload from other less prosperous and less stable lands, which in that part of the world meant practically everywhere. Such refugees were kept in detention camps until they were sent elsewhere for resettlement. The government declared that it would order its warships to sink boatloads of refugees if other countries refused to accept them.
The gulf from which the refugees appeared lay to the east of the city. To the north a peninsula dangled like an udder from the fertile cow of Asia. To the south and west sat some of the largest islands in the world. Between those islands and the peninsula was the strait.
The city was flat and ugly and had no assets other than its strategic location and the vision and determination of its aging Chinese leader. Because it was on the Equator, its climate was almost intolerable. Probably that is why no one had lived there before the Englishman came unwittingly to prepare the stage for his country’s most humiliating and decisive defeat.
For only brief periods at dawn and sometimes after sunset was the city pleasant. Most nights and most afternoons were filled with rain. But dawn was often clear and cool and still. The waters surrounding the city mirrored the pastel purples and lavenders that the early sun brought to the sky. The vast fleet of ships lying off the southern shore of the city was asleep. The skyscrapers in which most of the city’s inhabitants lived and worked were silent. The streets were empty. Shadows were long.
In less than an hour all this would change. As the rising sun burned away the delicate pastels of dawn, the anthill came to life. Small figures moved about the ships and skyscrapers, slowly at first, then more frenetically. Streets filled, then clogged, with cars and busses and bicycles. Lighters and launches and barges rushed from ship to shore. The sky filled with the first drops of moist haze that would by noon coalesce into towering thunderheads.
It was during one of these lovely dawns that two boats left the city. One was a fishing boat; one a sloop. The fishing boat had two men aboard. The sloop only one. The fishing boat left from a wharf crowded with similar boats on the northwest side of the city; the sloop from a marina on the southeast. Under power, both craft headed for the strait, their bows cutting easily through glassy, oily water.
In two days a storm would bring them together.
2
Nhu almost smiled.
The fishing boat he had named the MAI KEW after his wife and daughter was old. Beneath his hands he felt the spokes of her wheel smoothed by years beneath other hands. But her hull and machinery were sound. And she was by far the largest boat he had ever owned, fifty feet on deck. Many would have considered him fortunate. Perhaps he was fortunate that Mai had befriended the family of rich Kiang. Perhaps he was fortunate that, although the group that escaped with Kiang had sailed east, they were picked up by a ship heading west. Perhaps he was fortunate that Kiang had heard he was in the detention camp and, through his influential friends, had made it possible for him and Deng to be among the few refugees to be permitted to remain in the city, and had provided the loan so that he could buy such a boat.
Nhu tried to consider himself fortunate; but there was too much else. His ritual thanks to the gods, the lighted sticks of incense, the flowers, had become perfunctory. They--the foreigners, the revolutionaries, the pirates, the very gods themselves--had taken too much for him to be consoled by this boat. Anger flared for a moment and his fingers tightened, white-knuckled, around the spokes of the wheel as though he were trying to strangle something. His eyes remained fixed upon a point beyond the bow, until the frightened voice of Deng reached him. “Father!”
Instantly he spun the wheel hard and the MAI KEW missed a black buoy marking the side of the shipping channel by a yard. Nhu watched it pass the wheelhouse, bobbing in their bow wave.
From the foredeck Deng stared at him. Nhu glanced down at his hands. They were scarred and calloused and burned almost black by a half century of sun and wind. They looked like the claws of some of the creatures he pulled from the sea. He willed them to relax.
When he looked up, Deng’s mouth was open as though he were about to shout something above the diesel. Peremptorily Nhu gestured for him to turn around and keep his eyes forward. After a moment Deng complied.
The MAI KEW throbbed steadily down the muddy channel between low jungle-covered shores.
----
On the other side of the island, Nelson Alexander sat sipping a cup of coffee in the cockpit of the forty foot sloop, JUSTINE, which he had named after his wife. The autopilot steered the sloop a half mile off a concrete shore where a few shabby palm trees huddled before towering bank buildings and apartment blocks.
Every few minutes Nelson pushed the dodge button on the autopilot as the JUSTINE made her way through the ships lying in the roads. Collectively there was a majesty about the fleet, though individually many of the vessels were derelicts. Few ports in the world were so crowded.
For hours and miles the comparatively tiny sloop moved past hundreds of ships, from small rusty coasters lying nearest the wharves to great tankers lying far out. Ships of every flag and men of every race filled the roads. In the boredom of waiting to load, to off load, for officials to give them clearance to enter or depart, for agents to find cargoes, for chandlers to provide stores, for owners to radio orders, for captains to permit them shore leave so they could sample the insipid pleasures of the once wicked but now puritanical city, many sailors lined the rails of the ships. A few of those men waved or called to Nelson. A few gazed down at the sloop with envy; a few with contempt. But most simply watched her with the indifference they would have accorded a water bug whose movement caught their eyes.
The day was far advanced when the JUSTINE cleared the last of the super tankers, whose hulls dwarfed her. She passed from their monstrous shadows as though moving from a narrow mountain pass onto the open plain of the sea. Behind them, black thunderheads towered over the city. Far to the south passed a steady procession of ships carrying mundane cargoes and dreams, mostly of avarice, between distant ports and too similar people.
As the first fat drops of rain splattered on the yellow water, Nelson Alexander noticed a fishing boat a few miles ahead of him. Then the rain poured down and the other boat was lost from view.
3
For two days Nelson awakened at dawn at anchor off a green coast, drank a cup of coffee while waiting for the sea breeze, then sailed until late afternoon, covering forty or fifty miles before the wind died and he anchored again. He could have remained out in the strait, but that would have meant sleepless nights dodging shipping and using the diesel. There was no reason to push hard. In time, he would come upon the right clinic or hospital.
On this second evening he was anchored off a village that consisted of three square wood houses and two outrigger fishing boats pulled above the high tide mark. A road ran down a hill to the houses, one of which was a store. Radio music and laughing voices drifted out to him. A truck came over the hill and stopped in front of the store. A dog barked. The twilight sky dimmed. Nelson could hear unseen waves lapping desultorily at the beach and voices murmuring in a language he did not understand.
A row of sticks driven in the nearby water to form a fish trap reminded him of bare tree limbs in the middle of his own country, where he had been a child in a city far from the sea, and of winters such as this land never knew. After all these years he was uncertain what he remembered and what he had learned later. The photographs his grandmother kept. The back issues of newspapers he had looked up in the library when he was in college, with their grainy photographs of the hotel showing his father’s leap as a broken line from a window on the eleventh floor.
Nelson was three years old then. He could picture himself bundled up in a hooded snowsuit, scarf and galoshes, but most probably that image came later from seeing photographs. What he thought he could actually remember was his mother’s hysteria, and a crowded train station, and most of all stark trees, black outlines against snow covered farm fields, muted winter light, smudged Pullman windows, as a train took them south to stay with his aunt until the reporters lost interest.
About his mother, the train stations, all the rest, even his father, whom he had seen only twice, he was uncertain. But the trees he could still see vividly. Bare trees against snow were his earliest memory. Even fifty years later here in the tropics where trees never lost their foliage, for a moment he was cold.
4
The snake came over the stern in the net. Normally timid, though venomous, it was confused. When Deng saw the snake in the pile of fish flopping and gasping and dying on the teak deck, he reached for his parang and casually cut it in two. The bewildered half snakes curled together. Deng pushed them to one side with the blade. Snake meat would make a welcome change from the constant diet of fish, and the tiny sacks of venom could be sold to an herbalist in the city, who would later resell them as an aphrodisiac.
It was dark by the time all the long net was pulled aboard and the last of the fish kicked into the hold.
Nhu switched off the winch and made his way through abrupt silence to the stern. He peered down. The hold was nearly full, and their ice was melting fast. They would have to take the catch to port tomorrow. He slid the hatch cover into place and walked forward to where Deng was boiling rice over a fire in a cutoff oil drum. He squatted beside his son. My only remaining family, he thought; though some of them are probably still alive.
“The fishing is much better here than it was at home, Father.”
“Yes.”
“Here is something special for you, Father.”
The older man stiffened. Even momentary happiness, the least note of pleasure in a voice, seemed wrong. Yet it was not Deng’s fault, or so Nhu thought. The boy, who was in fact a man, meant no harm.
“Thank you, Deng.”
Nhu reached out and took half the raw snake. Slitting the skin with his thumbnail, he peeled it back with his teeth. The sweet white meat came away easily from the delicate bone. It did taste good. He enjoyed the flavor, until he remembered to wonder what, or who, Kew was tasting that night. He did not bother to think about the other daughter. And Mai was almost certainly dead, or if alive, too old to do more for them than cook. The idea that they were using her too, that they were using all his women, was too much. He spit the snake over the side.
Deng started as something splashed in the black water.
When Nhu went to sleep that night, lying on a mat on deck, he dreamed of when he was a boy and he and his father sat waiting on the steps of a temple several hours’ walk inland from the sea. The sun was very hot, and others sat beneath palm trees or beside huts along a track leading away from the temple. From time to time Nhu had to move aside for women going up or down the steps or for girls selling food or clothing, which they carried tied in bundles on their heads.
Everyone waited patiently, although even in the shade sweat ran. For the first hour most of the people in the crowd were tourists. These were the first Nhu had ever seen. He found himself staring at a beautiful, tall, blond girl in a purple sari with metallic threads that flashed in the sunlight when she moved, and at a fat hairy man who kept making adjustments to a movie camera on a tripod. Nhu did not know what the camera was and asked his father, who did not know either and told him to be quiet. After a while the crowd began to swell with people from other villages.
Just before midday a man climbed the stone steps of the temple and began to beat out a slow rhythm on a gong.
When the gong stopped, men burst from the compound and ran to a bamboo tower. The tower was ten feet tall and covered with white and gold paper and with streamers of every color. It was tapered and capped by a gold canopy over a narrow pallet. With a grunt, the men lifted the tower and carried it around to the entrance of the temple.
Women filed silently down the steps and began to shuffle along the road. Over their heads they held a long train of white cloth. From a distance they looked like the legs of a giant centipede.
A bamboo ladder was positioned against the tower, and a body brought out of the temple. Nhu’s father had told him what they were going to see, but the body was wrapped in white cloth and Nhu did not understand. He did understand that his father would not welcome further questions. The bundle, whatever it was, was heavy, and the men strained as they handed it up the ladder.
One man remained on one side of the tower and tied the bundle to the pallet with bamboo lashings, while another placed offerings of clothing and food and cups and ornaments in the tower. Two live birds with white feathers were tied to the corner of the canopy. Nhu felt sorry for the captive birds.
When everything was in place, curtains were drawn around the pallet until only the end of the bundle could be seen, and the men started off.
Soon the procession became a parade.
The men sweated and strained as they carried the tower through the village, but they were happy, not solemn. People came from shops to join them, crossing the drainage ditch beside the road on planks of wood, as though crossing a moat.
At the crossroads in the middle of the village, the tower was turned in a circle three times. Nhu’s father was pleased to be able to explain that this was to confuse the man’s spirit so that it would not be able to return. Nhu was too timid to ask again what a spirit is. The crowd cheered the completion of each revolution. Once the tower tilted over so far it seemed certain to fall, but men rushed from the crowd to help, and the body did not touch the earth.
Their way, even after they left the narrow road for an even narrower path beside a rice paddy, was always bordered by walls: walls hundreds of years old hidden beneath thick layers of dirt and green-black mold; ruined walls, carved with crumbling gods; new walls of brick; walls so high they could not see over them; walls so low they were mere suggestions of ownership; well cared for walls, covered with fresh paint; long forgotten walls, reclaimed by the jungle.
Thousands jammed the cremation ground. The heat and smell became stifling as Nhu’s father dragged him by the hand toward one of the bamboo towers that rose like islands from a sea of people. Some of the towers were shaped like animals; some like mythological beasts; some like flesh-consuming gods. Three held bodies.
The body they had followed was placed inside a white paper cow, along with the offerings of food and clothing, but not, Nhu was pleased to see, the live birds. The squawking birds were tossed into the clamoring hands of the men who had carried the tower through the village.
It seemed to take much longer to transfer the offerings from the tower than it had taken to place them there. The crowd sagged as people began to faint. Finally the back of the cow was lowered.
A cloud of smoke drifted down on Nhu. Then there was smoke everywhere and flames leapt into the sky as all the towers were fired.
The white cow crumbled in a wave of sparks. Ashes filled the sky and covered the ground. Nhu's father lifted him up to sit on his shoulders. Nhu buried his fingers in his father’s hair as the smoke thickened, then swirled to reveal a monstrous face, a mask still untouched, striped red and black and white, its’ great mouth gaping in a hideous grin. Nhu’s eyes became huge as suddenly he understood: one day that would be him, there in the flames.
5
The rhythms of the open ocean are measured. Seldom if ever does the weather change over blue water without warning. The barometer moves; the wind increases or drops away to nothing, veers or backs; waves change size and shape; new clouds appear; perhaps a swell from an unexpected direction; and, on vessels under sail, which move with the elements rather than bludgeon through them, an experienced sailor may simply sense a change in his ship’s motion, an uneasiness, a stumbling, a loss of stride. But near land, and most particularly on those straits and seas and channels and lakes where weather passes rapidly from land to water and back again, often there is no warning, for the rhythms of the open ocean are never established there. Landsmen fear the open sea; sailors worry about the land.
The sky was clear, except for a few clouds hanging over the five hundred mile long island on the western side of the strait, when Nelson Alexander raised anchor on the JUSTINE that morning, and, a few miles to the north, Nhu and Deng raised anchor on the MAI KEW. All three men knew that the strait is susceptible to sudden storms, but none of them anticipated what was about to happen.
The JUSTINE sailed slowly north in a light breeze whose cats-paws just ruffled the brown water and barely filled her sails. The MAI KEW powered purposefully north toward a port twenty miles up the coast where she could sell her catch.
The two boats were separated by only three miles and a point of land when the storm, which had been massing behind the mountains of the island to the west, burst over that barrier and rushed down the strait. In five minutes half the sky was boiling with low black clouds and the wind had increased from four knots to thirty-five. In five more minutes, not a speck of blue sky remained, and the wind was gusting sixty.
The JUSTINE was hit first.
Nelson was sitting in the cockpit, steering through conditions too light for the self-steering vane to handle, when he felt a single cool breath against his neck. Glancing over his shoulder, he froze for a second in disbelief. Even as he recovered and leapt for the jib furling line, JUSTINE heeled far over onto her side. The jib flogged as he cast off the sheet. There was no time to furl the sail smoothly. It took all his strength to bring the line in with both hands as the jib shook the sloop. Gradually the flogging decreased as he managed inch by inch to reduce sail. But even after the sail was fully furled, JUSTINE continued to lie on her side, masthead in the water, pressed down by the wind in her mainsail.
Nelson felt an odd sense of timelessness. The wind had come so suddenly it had yet to create waves. The boat was not being flung about. There was no noise from the water. No shriek in the rigging. Everything was calm and normal, except that the horizon was not in place and angles were wrong. He was standing parallel to the deck, his feet on what was usually the side of the cockpit. The sky had shifted.
Bracing himself, he swung forward until he reached the main sheet. As he cast it off, JUSTINE came upright and the world recognizable again. The momentary eerie stillness was shattered by the mainsail, whose boom began to flail about just above his head. Frantically he crawled to the mast to release the halyard and claw down the sail, which fought like a frightened animal.
Back in the cockpit, Nelson hesitated before deciding to reset a few feet of the jib he had just struggled to furl. In the open ocean, he would have let JUSTINE run ahead of such overwhelming wind under bare poles, but here the sloop was being driven toward the nearby shore. Her engine was not powerful enough to oppose this wind. He would have to try to sail across the face of the storm.
The wind began to tear the surface off the water. Nelson could not let go of the tiller long enough to reach his foul weather gear, only a few feet away inside the cabin, and soon he was soaked and shivering with cold on this, a midsummer’s day near the Equator. More and more water filled the air, flung back from the bow as the sloop slashed forward at eight knots under the merest scrap of sail. Nelson had to breathe shallowly. Much of the time he felt as though he were under water. Boat speed and wind instruments two feet from his face were not visible. He had to lean far over to read the compass. The mast, the bow, much less anything beyond--another vessel? the Asian mainland? one of the many small islands that dotted the strait?--was completely obliterated.
The tiller began to hum in his hand as JUSTINE exceeded her theoretical maximum speed and began to surf. At this rate they would close with the far side of the strait in less than three hours. The chart was a world away in the cabin. As far as he could recall there was nothing ahead for at least ten miles, except, of course, the parade of shipping always present in the strait. At about ten miles, there was a small island. He could not recall its name. And perhaps it was a group of islands. If only he could engage the self-steering vane long enough to duck below. He turned his face aft. Hard drops of water struck his eyes. Nelson flinched and his hand involuntarily moved the tiller. JUSTINE broached. Again she lay beam on to the wind, as she had earlier under mainsail alone, but the storm had grown in violence. He thought he heard something break. For an instant he thought the mast was gone.
The wind was blowing the tops off waves as quickly as they formed, but one wave survived long enough to lift the sloop and slam her down on her side. Nelson braced both feet against the far side of the cockpit and strained at the tiller. The lower third of the deck was under water. He wondered if enough of the rudder was still submerged to be effective. He could not move the tiller. Perhaps the breaking sound had come from the steering gear.
He had sailed JUSTINE for years and thousands of miles. He had been in heavy weather in her many times and thought he knew her well; yet now everything was out of control, as it had been in the end with her namesake. And, he thought, as with Justine, there is nothing I can do. Yet this time it is clearly my fault. If I had not turned to set the self-steering, the sloop would not have broached.
He strained harder on the tiller. Another wave lifted and dropped the boat. JUSTINE shuddered with the impact. Suddenly the tiller moved easily. Had the shaft broken? Or the rudder fallen off? But the bow began to swing away from the wind and he could hear and feel, though he could not see, the scrap of jib fill. So the rudder was still there and so was the mast.
He did not know what had caused the breaking sound. His mind created images of sprung bulkheads or sections of furling gear peeling apart like a banana skin. He would deal with those when he had to. For now he could only try to steer.
----
The MAI KEW fared better during the first hour of the storm.
Nhu had seen the sky darken behind them and ordered Deng, who was in the wheelhouse, to head away from the shore. Still the power of the wind surprised him.
Nhu ducked into the partial protection of the wheelhouse. “How does she feel?” he asked his son.
“Awkward. The stern is trying to go faster than the bow.”
Nhu nodded. The cargo of fish in the hold was making the boat sluggish, but was also providing ballast. They should be all right as long as the fish did not shift and as long as they did not take water through the hatches. “It will be almost as though you are sailing again.” Usually on the MAI KEW they ignored the wind; but for most of their lives, they had fished under sail from small outriggers called gujongs. The two men exchanged smiles. Sailing gujongs was almost the last happy memory Nhu had.
“I will like that,” Deng said.
“Not if this gets much worse, you won’t. Try to cut back the power. Find the speed where she feels best, where you have most control. And steer a little more offshore. Usually when it comes up this fast, it does not last long.”
Nhu started to ask if the deck hatches were well secured, but his son had enough to do at the helm. He pulled on an old, yellow slicker and crawled out into the blinding rain to check the hatches himself.
6
The storm flung the JUSTINE carelessly down the strait. Nelson knew that they were moving much too fast, but it was either that or drift under bare poles. He could not see much beyond the jib, which was itself seldom visible. He hoped that he would see land or another ship in time. Perhaps he saw nothing because nothing was there; but perhaps a shadowy shape of hull or land would suddenly loom over him.
He pressed the button that changed the cockpit instrument display to show distance covered rather than boat speed. At intervals he lowered his face close enough to read the numbers. When after an hour they reached double figures, he became increasingly worried. Currents were strong in the strait and unpredictable in the storm. JUSTINE might have covered less than ten miles over the bottom, but she might just as easily have covered more. Nelson had almost decided that he would have to chance leaving the tiller to go below to check the chart, when he felt the island.
At first he did not know what it was. Although the rain continued relentlessly, something had changed. The wind was less intense, and the short, steep waves had decreased. Something was out there. Nelson recalled looking up at the slab sides of the huge ships anchored off the city. Was one of them bearing down on him? Surely even in this chaos of wind and wave, he would hear a ship close enough to create a lee. Then he did hear breaking waves. Were they crashing against the bow of a ship or against rocks? He tensed for an impact that did not come, then acted instinctively. All his life he had preferred action over waiting. He had waited enough as a child. That was one of the reasons he had become a surgeon. He tied a line around the tiller to hold it amidships; furled the jib; and, leaving JUSTINE to lie ahull, scrambled into the cabin.
Water streamed from his face and clothes onto the chart table. Using his thumb as a measure, he found a small crescent-shaped island near their probable position. He switched on the depth finder, which steadied at a reading of only twenty-three feet. Although the strait was shallow, it was not that shallow. A ship could not be here. JUSTINE must have just missed one end of the island. He did not know which end, and realized that it did not matter. Even as he watched, the depth reading changed to twenty-five feet. Nelson climbed back up the companionway ladder and turned the engine ignition key. The waves and shrieking wind obscured the sound of the diesel and he was not certain it had started, but when he pushed the gear lever forward, he felt the propeller began to turn.
Leaving the engine more or less holding the sloop in place, he went forward and began to unlash the anchor from the bow roller. As his fingers automatically untied knots, he stared into the rain, futilely searching for land.
When the anchor was free, Nelson return to the cockpit. The depth finder had a second readout there. The wind had pushed them further off. They were now in thirty feet, and from the increased wave motion, losing the protection of the island.
Nelson increased the engine’s RPM’s. The rain was solid, impenetrable. With his face almost touching the readouts, he could see that they had no apparent boat speed. Not until he gave the diesel full throttle did JUSTINE begin to creep forward. That was all right. He did not want to go fast.
The anchor was on a two hundred foot length of 3/8 inch chain. He could anchor where they were, but he wanted to move closer in case of a wind shift. He did so blindly, using the instruments.
Gradually, foot by foot, the depth readings and the wind and waves decreased as JUSTINE neared the still invisible island. When the depth finder was at fifteen feet, Nelson released the anchor. Chain rattled over the bow roller, until at the seventy-five foot marker he locked the windlass and let the wind set the anchor for him. The chain snapped from the water and became bar tight. Nelson pulled another twenty-five feet of chain onto the deck and tied a snubbing line at the one hundred foot mark, then cleated the line and let the remaining chain go.
He stared forward. The island could not be more than thirty or forty yards away, but he could see nothing.
----
In the windows of travel agencies along the crowded streets of the city, Deng had seen posters of skiers on snowy mountains. This is what it must be like, he thought, as he struggled to keep MAI KEW under control. He had never actually seen snow or ice or even real mountains, though the inland hills were sometimes called mountains. In his experience, it felt as though the MAI KEW was slipping on a smooth stone, polished for centuries in a stream and covered with slime. Like the stones on which he and his brother and sisters used to play in the stream behind their hut. But it was not quite the same; so he concluded that it must be like ice.
The storm filled Deng with exhilaration. This was the first time his father had let him keep the helm during such weather. He felt wonderfully alive and powerful. He almost wished the MAI KEW did not have a wheelhouse so he could stand outside steering, open to the elements, feeling the wind and rain beat against his skin as he spun the wheel.
Nhu was at that moment wondering if he should take over. This was a serious storm and it showed no sign of weakening as he had expected. But Deng was doing well enough, and he was now almost a man and had already changed their lives by bringing the warning so they could flee their village in time. As always Nhu could not prevent the doubt from rising: What if they had not fled? Surely things could be no worse. But that was not Deng’s fault. Deng had only told him that the officials had decided to resettle the family on a collective farm. The decision to leave had been his. He had known the risks. Or thought he had. The storm tired him. The storm and his memories. Nhu squatted in the corner of the wheelhouse and watched Deng. He knew that he had a better feel for the helm and the sea, but Deng was keeping the boat mostly under control.
“How does she feel?”
Deng hesitated before deciding that he did not dare to say ‘like ice.’ “Like being on a slippery stone.”
Nhu saw them then, all his children, playing in the stream as he came home at midday, after a night fishing, sailing the gujong onto the beach; Mai’s betel nut stained smile as the women came down to help pull the boats to the tree line, then carry the fish away in baskets balanced on their heads. Often he and the other men were exhausted; often they caught little or nothing and the village went hungry; but in retrospect it seemed idyllic.
“Do you want me to steer for a while?”
“Of course, if you want to, Father.”
“No. I was only asking. You are doing well. You continue.”
Nhu stood and turned aft. He tried to see through the rain streaked glass. Enclosed in here he could not judge the weather. Disgusted, he recalled how often during squalls he had sat huddled in an open gujong, desiring the comfort of a larger, decked boat. He had been taught that desire is wrong, and so it is. All he had really wanted was to be left alone to live quietly with his family around him. But they would not permit him even that.
Impatient with these recurring thoughts, he pulled the yellow slicker tighter around his knotted body and went out into the rain.
----
When they came upon the island, where they had often anchored in the past, Nhu took the helm and steered cautiously around a rock that was just visible through the rain. In familiar waters he was concerned by the likelihood that other fishing boats had sought the same refuge; but as they slowly powered around the rock into the lee of the island and were sheltered from the full force of wind and wave, he saw nothing. “This will do,” he told Deng, who ran forward and let go the anchor.
Less than a hundred yards away, Nelson Alexander thought he heard an errant sound and stood and stared through the cabin ports without seeing anything but uniform grayness that might be rain or sky or sea. The infinite universe was reduced to arm’s length. It had sounded like chain running through a hawse hole. Nelson stood silently, but the cabin was filled with sounds: water against hull, rain against deck, halyards inside mast, squeaking bow roller, wind through rigging. All these were explicable. When after a few minutes, he did not hear the sound again, he returned to the bowl of soup he had left on the galley counter top.
When Deng had let run what he felt was enough chain, he turned the brake lever on the ancient windlass. That lever was one of the few parts of the windlass which still worked. The rest was rusty and useless. Deng could see only a few feet of the chain. The wind was blowing the sound of the MAI KEW’s engine away from him, but he assumed that his father was backing down. When he saw the chain lift from the water, he turned and made his way aft to tell his father that the anchor was set.
----
The storm continued for the rest of the day. Nelson and Nhu and Deng sat inside their boats unaware of the other’s presence.
Nelson and Nhu were uneasy. Both men prowled their cabins. Although the invisible island continued to offer some shelter, fists of wind increasingly reached over the land and pounded the boats, which snapped and tugged at their anchors. After one gust flattened both boats, heeling them so far over onto their beams that Nhu thought that the fish in the hold, the now rapidly spoiling fish, would shift and capsize the MAI KEW, both men thought: if it is this bad here, how much worse must it be in open water? And both wondered if their anchors would hold. And both felt great relief when the gust passed and the boats righted themselves. Nelson tried to return his attention to the book he was holding in his hands, pretending to read, while actually waiting for the next blow and trying to decide if he should go through the ordeal of dragging out and setting the big hurricane anchor; and Nhu tried to concentrate on mending a torn net he had dragged into the wheel house.
Only Deng ate much for dinner that evening. Nhu and Nelson settled for cabin crackers and countless cups of tea. Not long after the gray shroud enveloping the boats turned black, the electric lights aboard the JUSTINE and the kerosene lantern aboard the MAI KEW were extinguished.
The three seamen lay in darkness, the minds of Nelson and Nhu attuned to the storm; that of Deng full of pride at his performance at the helm that day and of hopeful plans for the future, until he alone fell asleep.
7
During the night the center of the storm passed over the boats and brought with it a change in the wind. Instantly both Nhu and Nelson were on deck. The wind was now blowing onto the island, which instead of providing shelter had become a dangerous lee shore. Each man knew that if this wind approached the force of that which had preceded it, he would have no choice but to slip anchor and try to claw his way to open water.
For an hour they sat in the darkness as the wind gradually increased; but when it peaked at only thirty knots and then dropped back to twenty, Nhu and Nelson gratefully returned to their bunks, and near dawn both fell into troubled sleep.
Only then did the anchor chain break.
