Americana (41 page)

“This is getting boring,” I said.

“You must permit me at least a fraction of the self-indulgence you reserve for your own tired ends. Not that I mean to sound harsh. But I’ve cooperated with you up to now and I’m willing to continue to whatever point you choose to take us. And you’ve asked for a bedtime story.”

“I’m sorry. Please go on.”

“Large issues will begin to manifest themselves out of the dull set of pieties I’ve been constructing here. This is not easy work for me.”

“Have you rehearsed any of this?” I said.

“In bed at night I often converse with the great English-speaking figures of history. I think I can admit that to you. I develop philosophies, legends, autobiographical notes, small bits of feminine wisdom, anecdotes and lies. I present these to someone like Swift or Blake; then, as Swift or Blake, I comment and criticize. It may be only an illusion but my mind seems to be at its best just before sleep. I’ve had some brilliant dialogues with myself, I think; or, more to the point, with the great figures of the past. So your instinct is quite correct. In a sense I’ve rehearsed this story. In fact I’ve told it many times, refining, editing, polishing, getting nearer and nearer the awesome truth. But I have never yet revealed that truth. I have never told the whole story, not to Coleridge, not to Melville, not to Conrad. I’ve never revealed the mystery of the final hours of that fog-shrouded day in a thirty-five-foot sloop in Somes Sound—not to a soul living or dead.”

“One second, please,” I said. “I want to turn out the light.”

“The rocking chairs went to and fro in perfect military formation.
Uncle looked out on that dead historic vista, that Yorktown, Shiloh, that headless glimpse of Khartoum. Then he said he planned to go sailing the next morning and he asked if I would care to join him. A jolt between the eyes. But of course I accepted. There was all the moment of a biblical confrontation. To turn down such an offer would be to damn those issues which had sent Uncle hightailing it to Belfast and the likes of my dear dad down to the local for a pint of the bitterest. We spent most of the rest of the night in silence. He cooked us some stew which he served in two unmatching bowls, proclaiming even to such a disinterested party as a blood relative the depth and tenacity of his confirmed bachelorhood. We slept at opposite ends of the house. My room was a touch of the madness of Captain Ahab—bare, frigid, tilted like an afterdeck; not a sign of love for one’s chosen element, not a sliver of scrimshawed ivory, not a mug, coastal rock, schooner print, even tombstone rubbing—bare, chilled, northern, damp as a foggy star. Cold cracking dawn it was when he hammered on my door. I went downstairs for a breakfast that was all molasses and agglutinating protein, some old seaman’s notion of the need to cement one’s bones for fear the wind will take them. In half an hour we were walking down the dock toward his dinghy and we rowed out through fog opened by the faintest lines of light and then his boat appeared, high on the water, green and white, heaving in easy slaps of tide, and even in that dimness I could see she had nothing of himself about her. We climbed aboard and he told me briefly where things were and what they did and how to crank this and ease off on that. The boat was called
Marston Moor
and she was the trimmest thing I’d ever seen. She was light and looked fast. Every inch of brightwork gleamed. She was a lovely thing, David, and brutally named, which was only to be expected. Uncle hoisted the jib. I cast us off the mooring and then raised the mainsail and we moved into a morning thick with unanswered questions, and unasked. Running lights picking out a red nun. Bells clanging. Gulls on the
buoys. Lobster boats mooning about in the fog, their horns lowing and a bundled figure or two peering at us from the decks, so silent, so strategically silent, the cursed eye of the sailor who dreams his bones at fifty fathoms and resents the intruder because the intruder has not earned that particular plot of sea. What large fools those lobstermen must have thought us to be prowling through that gruel. Uncle glanced over the small wheel into the binnacle directly before him. Compass, wheel and mainsheet were his. I handled the jib. We said next to nothing to each other. In two hours the fog began to lift and we could see the pine forests of Mount Desert Island and then in time the foothills and then the broad brown summits of Cadillac and Pemetic mountains. It was a sight. Mist still curdling over bald spots on the slopes. The low green pines and carriage roads. Surf etching into juts and shank of rock. Frenchman’s Bay. The bringing of the writ of royal Europe. By noon it was a different day, warmer, windier, all blue, crisp and squinting, sunlight beginning to butter us in godliness. For it was God’s world, David, and no thought might enter the mind which did not acknowledge this. It was a sight. The blue of that water was an angels blue. White lighthouses stood on jetties of land. We saw herring gulls and cormorants. Porpoises came bucking out of the sea and the black bells tolled. There was a sense of the firmament, an unencompassed word above us brushed by the tatters of a single cloud. The sunlight was a sword on that water. There was nothing out there that had been changed by anything but itself. God. The God-made and the untouched-by-hands. Even our boat, lovely leaning thing that she was, heeling in the wind across that great yoke of light, even
Marston Moor
was a mild virus, reducing our rag of sea to the status of a pretty photograph. Uncle pointed out Isle au Haut, that beautiful island which seemed to stand, as other islands sit or drowse, as the last high thing, the last of trees and soil, before the sweep of the Atlantic. I don’t think we were ever out of sight of land. Some of the islands were large, banked with spruce
and pine, and there were small villages set above the perimeter of rocks. Others were small and uninhabited, some not much more than sheer masses of granite. We were heeled way over now and I looked at Uncle. He still wore his foul-weather gear, right hand at the wheel, left trimming the main. He was riding that boat, not sailing it; he was riding a dolphin or a woman, a young bucking thing that might never be breached. I was starved and as soon as the wind dropped I went down to the cabin and cooked some lunch for us on the kerosene stove. He thanked me. Through the early part of the afternoon we were never quite becalmed but Uncle had to search out catspaws on the water to find some puff of wind. He never seemed to consider using the engine. I watched the islands through binoculars. I saw a woman carrying a laundry basket, and a boy running, and a man standing against the whitewashed curve of a lighthouse. They seemed incredible discoveries, pieces of rare blended mineral, land-sailors who had learned that straight lines kill. And the smaller islands. All blue and purest granite. Not a human soul. But not silent. No, they had the glory of a voice. Cry of sea birds and the endless spanning roar of surf. After a while I took the wheel and Uncle went below to consult his charts. The breeze freshened then and after a long tack into the sunset we lowered sail and motored into a cove formed by two tiny islands, mere smithereens of land, one almost solid rock, the other a bit larger and wooded. Uncle gave me the sounding lead and I tossed it in and called off the fathoms, trying to put a bit of nautical singsong in my hopeless voice. We dropped anchor then and sat on deck watching the sunset. Then we saw the windjammers, three of them, coming down at us out of that appallingly beautiful wound in the sky, square-rigged and running with the wind, blazing with the sky’s iodine, completely unreal, passing now behind the smaller of our islands, one gone, two, and as the last of them vanished the first reappeared, spars crossing high over the granite, the dignity of those ships, their burnt passage from the red horizon to
blue and now to darkness, the coming of the Magi. Uncle said they were packed to the bulkheads with tourists from Camden. Ah yes. After they’d gone we dined below on hash and eggs in the rocking bronze light. And I told him finally why I had come. The grievance was an old one, going even deeper than the fierce powder-burns between Orange and Green. Before his death—at St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York—my father had told me that Uncle Malcolm, after leaving Dublin, had managed by unjust means to acquire title to a family plot of land on the west coast of Scotland above Lochcarron. Land willed to the family by some distant ancestor who, the story went, had blood connections to ancient clans. Land held for generations by chieftains, lairds, earls, assorted elite. And then finally—history turning like the chamber of a gun—by merchants, fools and migrant sons. All this new to me. Some inch of Scotland in my blood. The origins were lost, of course, and the mixture known possibly only by that man who first crossed down the Highlands and sailed the Northern Channel no doubt to Belfast, perhaps taking himself a bride who bore him sons who returned, perhaps, some of them, to the ancestral land, and some of them, perhaps, wandering son from father and settling in Eire to begin the new line which harvested my father’s father, and himself, and his brother, my uncle Malcolm, soul of a cattle reiver. And telling this to me, more or less, my father by his eyes seemed to leave out bits and pieces. Get back the land. Be strong where I was docile. Settle all scores, avenge all injuries, please the memory of your dead mother who has also known the lows which that man has reached. Your poor dear mother. Poor lamb of an angel. Christ have mercy. I was to demand then what was my birthright. A speck of the Highlands. And there was the eye of it. All my rich hatreds and comfortable bigotries come to this. Scotch-Irish! American! (Ineluctable, Mr. Faulkner; coeval, Mr. Joyce.) Some sudden lurch in the runnings of my blood. Broadsword and pipers. Sagging dugs of the Ozarks. Centuries of the Scottish kirk. And that first part of it I told
to Malcolm—the land above Lochcarron. He said it was his, acquired honorably, and would hear no more of it. What plans did he have for it then? He would live the last years of his life there, he said, and be buried in that soil. A will had been drawn up. Things had been properly administered. I had his word. He went up on deck and I followed him. All was calm. We observed an hour of silence, listening to a deranged bird shriek in the woods. Belfast and Maine. Dungeons of silence. Tons and eons of silence. To learn that history cannot inform our blood unless we listen for it. Secrets of the stone-cutters of New England. All those tight towns boasting their Bulfinch steeples and Paul Revere bells. Whose navies built on Belfast’s silence. And aren’t there eighteen Belfasts in America? And didn’t Ulster stock the colonies? Men, potatoes and spinning wheels. Orange, not Green, dying in our revolution. But my hate could leap waterfalls with the insanity of salmon to find its pool of birth and truth. He sang me a song then, out there on deck in the darkness, barely voicing the words, a glimmer of Ireland and Scotland and even Shakespeare in his accent, and I don’t think he even knew he was singing aloud.

He repeated the verse several times, his voice a cradle-song, and then we went below. I slept in the cabin proper. Uncle settled down in the forepeak, coiled like heavy line. He talked in Gaelic in his sleep.”

“Is that it?” I said.

“And in the morning we headed back in gray drizzle and far out upon the line of the ocean I watched the fog-bank building and rolling, a low brownish menace of a thing, and I waited in vain for Uncle to offer some note of reassurance. But he talked of everything but fog. He talked, yes, as if only
some test, some hungry clap of danger, could blow away the mists in his soul. There were few boats out but those he saw inspired him to crisp elocutions of category and trait. Gaff-rigged. Or eating out to windward. Or beamy. Or port tack. Or watch her luff now. Or blue yawl from Darkharbor. Damned schoolmastering roundhead. We sailed all day through slow drizzle, a chill beginning to work deep into my bones and into the very rigging and floorboards of the sloop. And that shoulder of fog hunching toward us. And with it the yet unanswered questions, and unasked. This, David, as you will come to see, is basically a ghost story. Why had he asked me to join him on this pointless cruise? Did he know I had come to Maine with knowledge of the land? And my father. My pink soft pipe-smoking pint of a dad. What tiny delicacies had he neglected to serve from his final bed? Silence in the Tower of London. Silence on the village greens. Northern eye of wind. River of northern bloods devastating the starving dark south. In the name of the Christ of the dogs of war. Reiver fanning out to plunder lands and deities. Truly, England and the Church of God hath had a great favor from the Lord in this great victory given unto us; this is none other but the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory. Matchlock and leather doublets. Pikemen in the center, musketeers on the flanks. And how ends it, this prayer from Marston Moor? Cromwell’s axed head blinking on a pike at Tyburn gallows. And was Uncle then with his halloween tartan of Scot and Puritan and Ulster merely seeking to return to some sacred north? The land above Lochcarron. To wallow in the terrible gleaming mudhole of God and country. Black Knife, sitting wide as a stump on a moonlit night high in the Dakotas, had been the answering echo of my deepest hates. And the final question yet to be pondered as Mount Desert Island hove into view and Uncle ceased his chatter and made for the mouth of Somes Sound, an authentic fjord, a seven-mile gash in the high bluffs of the island. Had he thought to find refuge here, or greater danger for greater glory? The hills stood above us
on both sides and we were about two miles into the sound when I turned and saw it coming, only yards away now, and then we were in it, and silence had met its darkness. Nordic fog it was, cold, wet and dark, the northernmost point, and he had come to the edge of the mystery, and sailed her deeper into the fjord, eyes leaking fog and fire, riding that boat like a man in a fury of religious heat riding the loins of a woman, and I was terrified, David, scared out of my Irish wits, terrified of the fog, of himself, of the final question which now, and not until now, began to answer itself. For they had met again, I recalled, father and uncle, long after the latter’s renunciation of all held holy in the apostolic breast; had met shortly after my dad married my lovely frail lily of a mother; had come together in Derry, New Hampshire—where Uncle had then been living, a solid Ulster town—in a futile attempt to restore harmony. And some parts of this my mother had told me years before her death, that their simmerings and rages had nearly set the house ablaze, and something pale in her recollections, some loose end, could bring me now to my father’s deathbed—are you with me?—and his own tactical omissions and could bring me also to Uncle’s mention of a will and his word that the land, his own deathbed, would be rightly administered. And then a blade of silver struck across the darkness, viking sword on anvil, and we began to see faintly a trace of shoreline. Uncle’s passion had been truly heaven-directed, or hell, and we appeared in no danger of running aground. Again I waited for a word from him. Suddenly the winds came and the boom began to lift and swing—winds from all directions it seemed, skirling about us in a noise like pipes of battle, truly fearsome, lifting the fog a bit but manhandling our small boat until I was sure we would capsize at any moment. Wind blowing down off the bluffs. Wind coming straight over the water from the mouth of the sound and the sea far beyond. Wind from all directions pitching us dangerously to starboard, then to port, mast straining, boom swinging, a batten flying out of the mainsail past my head as I tried to level the boom.
And even Uncle, even Uncle then began to lose his Christian calm. For these winds were biblical, thunderheads of a wrathful God he had not met in any kirk or clapboard meetinghouse. A sailing boat hates indecision and Uncle did not know what to do.”