Hilton Head Island: SHADOWS PART TWO

  Part Two

     

 1

 

   He lived in a room far from the sea.  Flat, rich farmland stretched for hundreds of miles around the room and the nearby buildings of a minor city that had been important only for a single generation when the country was first being settled.

   The room was one of two bedrooms, separated by a bathroom, which comprised the second floor of a small brick suburban house into which his widowed mother and her twice widowed mother and he moved after his father’s death.  “He might as well support you now that he’s dead; he never did when he was alive,” his mother declared with some satisfaction.  Nelson did not understand what she meant at the time and later assumed that there must have been insurance money, although he wondered that an insurance company would have paid out on a suicide.  Perhaps it was government insurance from when his father was in the army during the war.  His mother’s mother--he did not think of her as his grandmother--lived in the other upstairs bedroom.  His mother lived in the single bedroom downstairs.

   His room had windows on three sides.  Through the front window he could see the street, which ran uphill to end in a cul-de-sac and so had little traffic.  Through the side window he could look a few feet to the blind wall of the garage of the neighboring house, which held no interest until it was sold when he was thirteen to a family with two daughters a few years older than he.  He did not ever really get to know the daughters, but late one night he was awakened by uncontrollable sobs coming through an open window.  He left his bed and stood in the dark, looking toward the house, wondering why one of the girls was crying and what he should do and wishing someone else would hear.  But no one did and after an hour the crying stopped and he went back to bed.

   The back window was different.  During most of his years living in that room, the house was on the outskirts of the city, and his back window overlooked an open field of grass and weeds that ended in a line of trees.  The field belonged to a farmer who had been poor before a real estate developer ruined his life by buying the corner of his property in 1945 to build houses for returning servicemen, including the one in which Nelson lived.  Unfortunately for the farmer, his dream of sudden riches came to nothing during his own lifetime, for the building boom ended, and it was not until after he was dead that his sons successfully sold the remainder of the land.  Nelson came back from university one summer to discover that the field had become a subdivision.

   Sometimes Nelson played in the field with other children from the neighborhood.  It was a good place for hide and seek, but too wild for more organized games or sports and often he wandered there alone.

   The tree line was a boundary.  Playing in the field was permitted; venturing into the woods was not.  To a child of seven or eight, the trees were frightening.  But as he grew older, Nelson learned that they guarded only the mansions of the very rich; mostly members of one family who jointly owned a brewery.  Gathering his courage, he explored the perimeters of the great sweeps of lawn with their circular driveways, stables and private ponds.  One day he was chased by a man with two hunting dogs, and eluded him only by a flight of blind panic through the trees whose branches tore his clothes and skin.  His mother’s mother, who did all the housework while his mother endlessly read crime novels, scolded him about his ruined clothes when she came across them in the wash.

   This did not prevent Nelson from returning to the estates, where one summer afternoon he discovered a rowboat on a pond between the mansions and, for the first time in his life, ventured onto water.  That night his mother’s mother scolded him for the mud on his shoes and socks.  But those few moments of awkward flailing about with oars much too big for his hands were worth sharp words.

   Nelson had almost lost one of the oars in the middle of the pond and reached the nearby shore with great relief.  He did not understand exactly what he felt, but it was wonderful to be away from the shore, isolated by those few yards of shimmering water from the world, from the house, from his mother and her mother.  The only sounds were the buzzing of insects and the sigh of wind through the trees and water dripping from oars.  It was a peacefulness he had never known.  And years later, after Justine’s death, he sometimes found himself remembering those moments and thinking that all he had done with his life was increase the expanse of water he put between himself and the world from ponds to oceans.

   He returned often to the pond, and in time became proficient at rowing, though not more than a dozen strokes took him from shore to shore.  He always left the rowboat as he found it and was never caught.

   Other than the one man who chased him he never saw any of the people who lived and worked in the mansions, except from a distance.  The older girls who moved next door when he was thirteen did date some of the sons of the brewery family.  He saw the girls being driven home from horseback riding or swimming parties, and for some reason he thought that the sobs he heard that night were caused by one of the rich young men.

   More often than he played in the field and the trees, particularly in the winter when the trees were bare and provided no cover for the trespasser and the rowboat had been removed from the frozen pond, he sat at the window in his room and looked out over the field and dreamed.

   His daydreams were of openness and light, of deserts and oceans and mountains, of glory and of greatness, of escape from that silent house in which his mother and her mother and he moved in their orbits like solitary planets coming into only brief conjunction at meals.  He usually saw his mother from the hallway, where he caught glimpses of her lying on her bed, reading one of the books she obtained weekly from the public library.  Her health was delicate.  In winter she bundled up in sweaters and could not go outside because of the cold.  In summer, before air conditioning, she moved to a cot in the basement to escape the heat and sun, to which she claimed to be allergic.

   Her mother’s and his orbits were closer, if only because their bedrooms were.   He could hear her snoring at night or hawking and spitting and flushing the toilet in the morning.

   No one ever really talked to anyone else in that house.  For Nelson the world was downstairs and out the front door or out through the windows overlooking the field and the trees which were wild and green in summer, blazing with color for a few weeks in autumn, and stark black in winter.  At least he could look forward to growing up and leaving the house, not realizing that he would take it with him.  His mother and her mother, he knew, would die there.  Or the world was in books, which he read and upon which he based his dreams.

   After he discovered the rowboat, Nelson devoured everything he could about the sea, from copies of THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and YACHTING to the stories of Melville and Stevenson and Conrad.  It was from the photographs in the GEOGRAPHIC and the words of Conrad that he first became intrigued by the East.  Perhaps it was the exotic colors worn by the women; perhaps it was the women themselves; perhaps it was the contrast between the teeming pulse of Oriental life and his own solitude; perhaps it was simply that the East was about as far from his room as it was possible to travel.  Whatever the basis of the attraction, one of Nelson’s most persistent boyhood dreams was that one day he would have an adventure in the East.

   Nelson went downstairs and out the door to school; less frequently to Saturday afternoon movies, where when he was about thirteen he saw Rita Hayworth stand poised on the deck of a yacht for a moment before diving into warm blue water and swimming to a pure white beach fringed with palm trees; and he told himself that one day he would sail a boat like that with a woman like that to an island like that; and quite infrequently to other children’s houses to play.

   At school Nelson learned quickly and was good at sports.  He was the tallest boy in his class, until at age fourteen and 6’1” he stopped growing.  Being good at sports gained him some prestige and made the first tentative breaches in his isolation.  But Nelson did not know how to respond to overtures of friendship, and, because of his mother’s nerves could not invite other children home.  So he continued to spend most of his time alone.  He did not usually mind.

   One of the few things Nelson knew about his father was that he had been a pilot during the war.  He also knew--or had been told--that his father wanted to be a painter and was an alcoholic and a womanizer, who had been married three times.

   Like his mother Nelson was a reader.  Unlike her, for Nelson reading was not enough.

   From books about the war, his first ambition was to fly, but he wanted to fly fighters for the navy rather than bombers for the army as his father had.  Nelson went though a phase of building model airplanes and suspending them from the ceiling of his room by thread.

   His ambition progressed from airplanes to space, and for a while the walls of his room were covered with photographs of distant galaxies and wonderful illustrations from LOOK magazine drawn by a man called Willie Lea of rocket ships and orbiting space satellites, decades before such things actually existed.   For some years in his early teens, each night before he went to sleep, Nelson prayed to become the first man to walk on the moon.  It was his only prayer and it was abandoned when he had to start wearing eyeglasses.  By the time men did walk on the moon, Nelson knew that psychologically he would never have been chosen by a panel of bureaucrats to go into space.  And when he read of the space program, he learned that even as a teenager he had been too tall to fit into the early space capsules.  

   A period of athletic glory was marked by sports photographs replacing those of space.  He played halfback on the football team and ran hurdles in track.  But it was a moment in a gym class that stuck in his mind.  A soccer ball was cleared by the opposing team’s goal keeper. It floated toward him seemingly in slow motion.  He leapt and headed the ball back for a goal.  There was such pure joy in that leap, in the sense of his own young body, in the perfect control of his muscles.  More than the scoring of the goal, Nelson relived the leap, the sensation of rising into the air, the satisfying thump of the leather ball against his forehead.  He had known it would be a goal without needing to look.  He saw himself making such leaps before huge crowds.

   That fantasy was lost in a vision of God, the existence of whom he convinced himself upon the basis of the cosmological argument, although he did not know its formal name until a philosophy class in college.  Nelson was not given to compromise.  If God, existed, it followed that one should dedicate his life to Him totally.

   By this time, he was old enough to drive a car, and he brought to his room a reproduction of a painting from the city art museum of a hooded monk standing with a skull in his hands.  Whenever his mother let him use the car he returned to the museum to contemplate the original.

   It was not a great museum, but it did have a few lesser works of the Impressionists.  Nelson noticed them on his way to and from the painting of the monk.  Gradually their vibrant color came to appeal to him more than the melancholy religious.  He was sixteen years old, tall, handsome, scarred by his father’s suicide, and obsessed by normal adolescent desires that were unfulfillable because he was too shy even to try to kiss a girl.

   One day he turned away from belief in God as he turned away from the painting of the monk.  The cosmological argument was not convincing after all.  He saw that nothing necessarily follows from the existence of the universe, and most certainly not the illogical god preached by the minister in the Presbyterian church he attended with his mother whenever her heath and the weather permitted. 

   Nelson came to think of this god as the local myth.   At the art museum he bought a reproduction of a painting of water lilies by Monet and gave it the place of honor beside his bed formerly occupied by the monk, who was exiled to pursue his meditations in the far corner behind a closet.

   Inevitably he contemplated being a painter himself.  The only artifact of his father’s life was a watercolor sketch he had made of some sun drenched, red tile roofed houses.  They were not like any houses found in that city, and neither was the sunlight.  Nelson thought they must be Spanish or perhaps Italian, but when he asked, his mother burst into tears and said she didn’t want to talk about it.  Still she kept the watercolor hanging on the wall of the hallway between her bedroom and the kitchen.

   Nelson’s awkward drawings proved even to himself that he did not possess his father’s talent.  Therefore he made the obvious transition.  Books were much of his life.  He would become a great writer.  He would live on a boat and sail the world and write.

   He began to spend all his free time at the desk facing the back window of his room.  He wrote about the pond and the rowboat; he wrote about the girls who lived next door; and he wrote of the afternoon he came across the passage in MOBY DICK where a whale is found floating dead on the surface of the sea, killed by a misdirected harpoon that, initially insignificant, festered for years until finally it lodged in the whale’s heart.  The thought struck him:  What if at birth a needle is plunged like a harpoon into the sole of each baby’s foot and he or she dies when it works its way to the heart.  If so, where was the needle in his own body now:  at his knee?  his waist?  higher?  He wrote of stripping off his clothes and studying his naked body in a mirror, searching a sign of his death.

   Always he dreamed of the epic, and his brief literary career came to an end with two short pieces he called “Eve” and “Ahaseurus,” in which he created and destroyed a universe.

   No one was deliberately cruel to Nelson.  He was fed and clothed and sent to be educated.  But beyond that he was ignored and left to find his own way.  By age seventeen he understood that he came from a family of cripples, who could not do any more for themselves than they could for him.  

   Nelson was a senior in high school when he wrote “Eve” and “Ahaseurus”, which he considered to be his own local myths, but by the time he went away to college a year later, he no longer planned to be a writer.

   The guidance counselor at his high school told him that he was intelligent enough to do whatever he wanted.  Nelson knew that he wanted a career where he would receive the recognition and respect he so desperately needed, where he would earn enough to do things rather than just read about them, and where he could be his own boss.  Medicine was an obvious choice.  

   He knew that his father’s suicide had something to do with it too.  Nelson did not become a surgeon to heal as much as to confront death directly.  But for more than a quarter century, until that confrontation became too personal, he achieved great success by doing both.

 

2

   Dr. Nelson Alexander walked slowly down the hospital corridor.  As he passed the nurses’ station, he nodded to the two women standing there.  When he disappeared into a private room, one nurse said, “He has aged in the past few months.”  The other replied, “He shouldn’t visit so often.  It does no good.”  “But what else can he do?”  asked the first.  They both shrugged and returned to their duties.

   The cool and dimly lit room which Dr. Alexander entered seemed more a laboratory experiment than a patient’s room.  Motors hummed, gases hissed, lights flickered on monitors.  Tubes and wires led to where what was left of Justine lay on a bed.

   Her illness had been devastating.  From the first fainting spells to this shell, this unrecognizable desecration, had taken two years, though in an attempt to know a last interval of almost normal life, she had kept the first months from him.  When she finally had no choice but to tell him, she had smiled bravely.  It was the bravery of ignorance.  She could never have imagined the excruciating pain, culminating in raving insanity, which itself ended in this insentient, hideous, helpless thing.  It--she--could not hear, see, feel, think or move.  It--she--mocked every moment of his medical career.  He, who had cut into thousands of bodies, restoring life, improving life, helping, healing, could do nothing for the only body he had ever loved.  And not only could he do nothing, but all of medicine could do nothing; except, finally, almost as though in punishment for the pride he had taken in his skill, keep this pitiful remnant artificially alive.

   Nelson forced himself to walk over to the bed and lift the sheet.

   What was left of Justine weighed fifty pounds, was hairless, and covered with lesions.  Its unseeing eyes stared upward.  Justine’s full breasts had dissolved into shriveled nipples between sunken ribs.  Her long, once graceful, legs were twisted bones.  She was thirty-seven years old.  They had had ten years together from the day they met when she interviewed him for a magazine feature about prominent surgeons.    It had not all been idyllic.  There was a stillborn child; there was a time when she almost left him because he was giving too much of himself to his work and not enough to her.  Until that near separation, she had not realized how much she meant to him.  

   For the thousandth time he wanted to tear the wires and tubes from her body, to unplug the machines.  But this would only set off alarms which would summon nurses and other doctors, who would have no choice but to replace the tubes and wires and machines.  Legally this was still Justine.  Its perverse brain clung to life, still initiated useless electrical waves; and in the face of opposition from a Right To Life group, which, because of his prominence was making this a test case, his lawyers had yet to gain permission from the courts to terminate the support systems.  What he had loved:  Justine, medicine itself; he had come to hate.  And felt guilt because of that hate.  How could he have ever written that without death there is no dignity?

   He dropped the sheet and walked from the room.

3

   When Justine finally died, that is when one day the occasionally spiked green line on a fluorescent screen went flat, everyone at the hospital breathed a sigh of collective relief and expected that now Dr. Alexander would gradually become himself again.  His colleagues urged him to return to a full schedule of surgery, to lose his grief in the technical problems of curing others. 

   Dr. Alexander followed this advice for two months.  And then he sold his practice and his house and all of his possessions, except the sloop, JUSTINE, aboard which he threw himself against the ocean.

   He was amazed how completely all his adult life, which after his lonely childhood he had deliberately filled with people:  professors, fellow students, patients, nurses, his office staff, partners, his own students; vanished as he sailed away.  Books, studying late at night, lecture rooms, laboratories, dissections, examinations, that first incision into a living body, the unexpected resistance of skin to scalpel, the slippery red organs, sutures, sleepless years of internship and residency, gratitude of relatives after a success, tearful relatives and exhaustion after a failure, the increasing skill, the new techniques he had pioneered, the increasing wealth, bigger houses, more expensive cars, the respect of most of his peers, the envy of some:  a successful medical career:  a quarter century, including medical school:  gone:  as unreal as though it had never happened:  as ephemeral as JUSTINE’s wake among the waves.  Again he was alone in a room, though this one was smaller, wetter, and more uncomfortable than that of his childhood.  He felt as though he had always been alone in a room.

   He had no destination and sailed southwest until he came to high islands rising spectacularly from warm turquoise lagoons.  For a while he lingered there, preferring remote coves rather than busy harbors.  He swam; he read books; he listened to music; he watched fish and birds; he gazed indifferently at tranquil dawns and dramatic sunsets; he ate; he had one vodka and tonic without ice in the evenings.  He felt nothing.

   Green mountains covered with waterfalls leaping into the sea, rumbling surf on a reef beyond a crystal lagoon, flaming skies, scenery that has moved men to visions of paradise, were to him neither more interesting than a column of figures in the Nautical Almanac, nor less.  Everything meant precisely the same.  Everything meant nothing.  He tried not to think, though sometimes at night the bodies of those he had operated on appeared in his troubled sleep.  The bodies were naked and, inexplicably, pale blue.  Endlessly he cut them open. Endlessly he reached into the gaping bloody maw and poked and prodded and cut and stitched.  How many had he operated on?  How many had he ‘saved?’  To how many had he given more life?  And for what?  All night long he cut the pale blue bodies open, sewed them up, and new bodies appeared.

   During those first months, whenever another boat anchored nearby, Nelson sailed on.

4

   One day almost a year after Justine’s death, he found himself approaching a deserted atoll.  A true desert island is rare, for in its profusion homo sapiens has established itself on almost every scrap of land.  This particular island was renown for having been the home of a hermit, who wrote a book about his solitary years there before his death from stomach cancer.  The place was so small, less than fifty yards wide and only two hundred yards long, so remote, and had no regular source of water--the hermit  survived by storing rain from passing cyclones--that it had never been successfully inhabited for long.

   The pass through the reef was straightforward, and by now Nelson had been through enough passes so that he did not become overly concerned as coral heads reached up toward JUSTINE’s keel and waves broke furiously, but harmlessly, beside them for a few moments before they made the magical transition from ocean to lagoon; yet this time Nelson felt himself beginning to respond to that magic, to the utter peacefulness of the lagoon, as he brought JUSTINE around the corner of the reef to anchor in the lee of the island.  Perhaps it was because the place was completely deserted.

   Although he anchored in sixty feet of clear water at midday, Nelson did not bother to inflate the dinghy and go ashore.  Above him the sky was flecked with trade wind clouds.  Across the mile wide lagoon, a few scattered palm covered islets, even smaller than the one on which the hermit had lived, marked the location of the reef, but otherwise the sky and sea were great arches of flawless blue, unchanged and unmarred by eons of time or the hands of man.  That night he drank his cup of tea on deck, watching the full moon he had ignored for so many months rise red behind palm trees, change to gold then white as it climbed, shimmering silver on the water.

   After a rare good night’s sleep, Nelson started to swim ashore the following morning, but quickly discovered that the lagoon belonged to the sharks.  The hermit had written of their aggressiveness, never checked by an even more aggressive permanent human population, and Nelson saw them circling among the coral heads fathoms below.  As soon as he entered the water, the sharks spiraled toward him, so he retreated up the boarding ladder and inflated the dinghy and rowed ashore.  The sharks shadowed him until the water became too shallow for them.

   Nelson came to the beach alongside the ruins of a jetty which had been the hermit’s obsession.  Huge chunks of coral, some larger than it seemed possible one man could move, lay scattered about, tossed easily by cyclones that had struck since the hermit’s death, as he had recorded in his book they struck several times during his life.  The island was far from shipping lanes.  Rarely had more than one ship a year called at the atoll and then only when the captain of a passing vessel, usually a fishing boat,  found himself nearby during settled weather and ducked in the pass to see if the hermit was still alive and to leave him a bag or two of flour or other stores.

   Yet the hermit had spent most of his waking hours building the jetty, cutting coral from the reef, transporting it suspended beneath rafts of palm wood, beating off sharks, which the hermit came to hate, writing of them as dark angels of death lurking in his private paradise, though as they turned out to be less deadly than the malignant cells lurking in his own body, fitting the chunks together, and persistently reassembling them after every great storm.  Nelson found it curious that a man who chose to isolate himself from mankind should devote most of his energy to reaching out to others.  The jetty was never big enough for even small ships to come alongside, and ships’ boats could land directly on the beach.  Like Nelson’s boyhood stories, the jetty was an attempt at communication.

   The day was identical to the day before.  Sunny.  Hot.  Blue sky.  Puffs of trade wind clouds.  Here almost all days would be like this, Nelson thought.  Nothing on the atoll was taller than a palm tree.  The land rose no more than a few feet above the sea and would not catch clouds.  There would be some gray days when clouds drifted over on their way to drop rain on high islands to the west.  And there would be a few days, not more than a dozen a year, when a cyclone would pass close enough to cause heavy rain.  And there would be the devastation every five years or so when a cyclone hit the atoll, driving waves completely over the tiny patches of land, ripping tops from palm trees, obliterating whatever was in its path.  

   Nelson felt something in himself stir at that prospect, as something had stirred the previous day as JUSTINE entered the lagoon, and something had stirred at the rising moon.  It would be an experience to be here at the height of a cyclone.  Though certainly not at anchor.  The lagoon was not sheltered enough for that.  With a boat your only hope would be to get out the pass to the open ocean, if you had sufficient warning to do so before the storm sealed the pass with breaking waves.  No.  But to be ashore.  Tied to one of the trees.  He tried to imagine what it would be like.  The wind, rain, coconuts crashing through darkness, waves.  He had been in a hurricane at sea, but never on land. 

   A line of tiny crabs, disturbed by his intrusion on what they had come to consider their private preserve, parted before him, scurrying for the water.

   Just inside the shade of the palm trees, Nelson discovered a rough handmade bench.   He pictured the hermit sitting there in the evening, watching the sunset and contemplating the progress, or lack of progress, on his Sisyphean jetty.  Nelson’s mind passed beyond the obvious conclusions:  men need to labor:  all labor ends in ruins; as his gaze moved beyond the shoreline to where JUSTINE bobbed on the lagoon.  She was a beautiful boat, her lean lines uncompromised by excessive freeboard or by a high cabin.  She possessed that mystery shared by a few boats which are among the most beautiful and living of man’s creations.

   As he watched, a woman came on deck.  For a moment she stood poised at the lifelines.  She seemed so real that he started to shout to her about the sharks.  But before he could, she dove.  Her naked body formed a perfect arc in the air before it disappeared into the clear water.  Although he knew that she was not real, he found himself waiting anxiously until she reappeared halfway to the shore and began swimming toward him.  At water’s edge she stood and characteristically brushed her dark hair back with her fingers. Drops of water gathered and fell from her chin and nose, her fingertips, her breasts. “Justine?” he asked.  She smiled as she walked past him into the jungle.  He told himself again that she was not real, that she was a fabrication of his troubled mind; but there was such joy in seeing her like this again, vital, voluptuous, not as the withered corpse she had become.  He turned and followed.

   For three days and nights, she remained with him.

   That first day they explored the hermit’s shack together.  Much had been taken through the years by visitors from other boats; but a few mildewed books remained on a table; a few rusty pans in the kitchen; the framework of a bed; a wooden chair fashioned from a barrel.

   And they walked on the reefs together.

   The outer reef was volcanic rather than coral.  Those parts washed by the tides had been smoothed through the ages, but on the lagoon side the lava had cooled in jagged spikes just as it had exploded into the air.  The reef, black where the sea did not touch it, became salmon pink as it was uncovered by the outgoing tide.  Small, brightly colored fish, orange, blue, purple, red, yellow, green, were trapped in pools of water held by fissures in the lava, trying to hide from the frigate birds and terns soaring overhead, until the returning ocean released them.

   Nelson rose from studying a tide pool and turned to see Justine standing with her back to him, looking out to sea.  He felt as though they were on the edge of the world, a primitive, simple world of beauty where there were no other people and no disease.  A vast blue sky and sea, a white turmoil of waves breaking on the outer edge of the reef a few steps away, just beyond which the reef fell for a hundred fathoms; the lush green vegetation on the island; a narrow band of white sand; black lava; salmon pink lava; fish; scuttling crabs; the bright sun and the shadows of circling birds; the curves of Justine’s body.  It was a perfect, timeless moment.  He wanted to ask what she was looking at, but he knew that she was not really there, and for a moment he was angry that she was not.  She should have been.  They deserved such moments.  Who or what would have been harmed had she lived?  With difficulty he subdued his anger as she turned and walked toward him.

   She sat in the stern of the dinghy as he rowed out to the sloop.  She shared what had been his solitary meals.  They raised the anchor and ghosted--appropriately he thought--across the lagoon, dodging patches of coral, marked on the chart with such names as “The Frenchman’s Folly” and “Greenlander.”  They sat together sipping Laphroaig scotch, listening to music, and watching the moon rise at night.  She slept beside him; and for three mornings he awoke anxiously, relieved when he found her still there.

   Near noon on the third day, as they were getting ready to row ashore, he noticed her staring out to sea.  He followed her gaze.   Far to the south, just on the horizon, was a sail.  When he turned back, she was gone.

   He watched the sail grow larger.  He could not face anyone, and as the other boat drew near, he raised anchor and took JUSTINE, the sloop, alone to sea.

5

    His general course continued south and west, carving a great arc across the ocean.

   The farther west he sailed, the more the sea was dotted with islands, and the more the islands were divided politically into small, beautiful but poor countries, dependent on copra and tourism; and the more frequently he came across boats and people he had seen before.

   He discovered that he was a part of a modest migration of craft sailing among the islands on a loose schedule dictated by the annual cyclone season which extended from November to March and the exigencies of personal finance.  While he continued to keep to himself, increasingly people he had last seen months and thousands of miles earlier waved to him as JUSTINE sailed into an anchorage, asked him how his passage had been when they encountered him at the various dinghy landings, fell into step as he walked into town and waited in line with him to check for mail at the post office.  Gradually he found himself being drawn at least to the edge of this loose community of sailors from many countries and every continent, who had more in common with one another than with locals or tourists from their own native lands.

   The intervals in port made him aware how seldom he spoke aloud.

   Most of the boats were crewed by couples or families; but there were a few other single-handers such as himself.  Some of these men reminded him of old bulls driven from the herd.  

   There was one, a famous, but embittered and burned out solo sailor, who endlessly retold stories of his three circumnavigations, the most recent of which had taken place more than a decade earlier.

   When Nelson met him, the man still mentioned vague plans to voyage on.  But he had rotted in the warm latitudes for years, never actually sailing more than a few hundred miles,  surviving by performing simple repairs on other yachts, earning just enough to buy rice and fish and beer, and by sponging off the natives.  Nelson saw in the older man what he himself might become.  Not financially, but emotionally.  After Justine’s death, he had wanted to isolate himself from humanity forever, from pain and suffering.  With time he was becoming less certain.

   

   Nelson had not told anyone he was a doctor, but his name was well known, and one evening as he sat in JUSTINE’s cockpit with a final cup of tea, watching lights along the shore and the stars, a dinghy from a nearby boat came alongside.  The man in it asked if Nelson would look at his daughter’s ear, which was infected.  Nelson lanced the five year old girl’s ear and gave her some antibiotics.  She was his first patient since Justine.

   The next day the man’s wife stopped by and asked if he would come to dinner on their boat that evening.  Startled Nelson declined by claiming that he already had another commitment.  He even went ashore and ate alone at a restaurant so that they would see he was not aboard.  

   The woman did not repeat her invitation, but the following morning she stopped by and gave him a freshly baked loaf of banana bread.

6

 

   Most of the islands scattered about that ocean are relatively healthy, though at one Nelson saw an old woman struggling along a path on legs grotesquely deformed by elephantiasis, a disease which, along with leprosy, was once common but had due to modern medicine become rare; the same modern medicine which was unable to help Justine.

   As he sailed farther, the islands became poorer and disease more varied and prevalent and obvious.  Nelson began to find himself drawn to the small, understaffed, under equipped hospitals in the settlements.  He had never practiced general medicine, but he knew that he could be of use.  And he was becoming bored with pointlessly sailing onward.  Palm trees, surf on reefs, swimming in warm water, spectacular sunsets, had all come to be alike.  Ultimately they were cloying and, for him, inadequate.  A vacation, a respite, a period of recovery, yes.  For the rest of his life, no.

   Halfway through the cyclone season, which he was waiting out at one of the larger islands, he became overwhelmingly restless and took a calculated risk and sailed west.  He and JUSTINE were only at sea for a week and a thousand miles before they were out of the cyclone zone, and they did not encounter severe weather.

   Nelson knew by then that he would return to the practice of medicine.  He could do so anywhere, but, perhaps because of his boyhood reading, perhaps because he was tired of the islands and wanted as complete a change as possible from the life he had known with Justine, he was drawn onward to the East.

   The horror of Justine’s death had lessened with time and distance.  Mankind’s extravagantly proven capacity to endure is both strength and weakness, for if every loss can be endured, and every pain diminished, then perhaps nothing has lasting value.  Nelson felt that if he had really loved Justine--and he knew he did--he should never be able to get over her death.  He had not forgotten her.  But his grief was becoming manageable.  If he were not going to follow his father into suicide, he was going to have to return to work.  Ultimately his colleagues were right.  He felt that when he found the right place to stop, he would recognize it.

   And so he continued, his course forced northward by land and wind, until he came at last to the city in the East, the strait, and finally to the island in a storm.   

Hilton Head Island: just wondering

This is the view at 8:45 this morning from my usual place by our bedroom window.  Forty-five minutes later you could not see the marina through a deluge.  Twenty minutes after it had begun, it ended and you again saw the above.  An hour later and another deluge.  That has been our weather pattern ever since we returned from the West Coast two weeks ago.  Carol’s tennis has been rained out three days in a row and she is getting restless.  It would have been rained out today, too, but she drove me to my semi-annual skin cancer appointment and had none scheduled.  Of my exam I was reasonably certain I have at least one cancer.  Two growths were biopsied.  Results in a week or so.

Also in the photo you can see on my iPad Pro the number 1,165,000,000,000.  That should be preceded by a dollar sign.

You probably have heard or read that yesterday a politician promised every adult U.S. Citizen a payment of $5,000 if the Republican Party wins the primary election in November.  I thought:  that must be a lot of money and so googled how many U.S. citizens are 21 or older.  AI tells me 233,000,000 to 235,000,000, and who am I to doubt our soon to be master?  So I opened the calculator app and multiplied 233,000,000 by 5,000.  The result is 1,165,000,000,000.  That is one trillion one hundred and sixty-five billion.  Dollars.  Which is indeed a lot of money.  I wonder where it is going to come from.

Hilon Head Island: SHADOWS Part One

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.