Spartina (37 page)

H
e woke up from the tugging on his lifeline. He was on his side, looking out the wheelhouse door. The sky had darkened some. The far-off clouds were as puffed as those in
A Child’s Garden of Verses.

He lay for a moment longer, half dazed, half alert to his own motion as he rolled fore and aft, snubbed on his roll toward the doorway by the line. His hands were wet, his left cheek was sticky with salt water. The motion would have been comforting except for the tug at his waist.

It was when he touched his puckered hand to his face that he woke up fully. In a sudden panic he tugged himself upright by the lifeline. Through the windshield he saw the huge glowing western sky, shooting off reds through the clouds.
Spartina
’s gray foredeck gave off a pretty violet as it dipped and caught the early-evening fall of light. He saw the line to the sea anchor stir in the chock.

He said, “You’re a lucky son of a bitch, you dumb son of a bitch.”

He let
Spartina
lie to a while longer. He found a Hershey bar and a last swallow of cold coffee in the thermos. He felt slow and
strangely heavy when he moved. He was dully stiff all over except for his side, which hurt sharply. All in all, not so bad.

As long as she was lying to with some comfort, he got his sextant and stepped outside the door. The wind was fresh, and the seas still running fairly high, but regular. It took him a long while to get a reading, even with his back braced against the door. His legs were still wobbly, and his hand-eye coordination was slow.

After he’d worked out the bearings, he swore at himself. The chart had washed away. He pawed through the shelf of the intact locker and got a larger-scale chart. His notion of
Spartina
’s position was worse than approximate, but even a mile of error wouldn’t kill him.

Spartina
had been pushed north some. She was about forty-five miles east of Stone Horse Lightship off Monomoy Point. That suited him. He’d take her home along Cape Cod—some seas might be running, but the wind would keep him offshore. He checked the tide table. If he got a move on, he could catch the tide turning his way from Woods Hole to Cuttyhunk, pick up a few knots for that leg. With luck, he’d be home for breakfast.

He took another ten minutes to go below and fill the thermos with tea and condensed milk. His appetite grew sharp, but he kept himself from shoving in too much at once. He settled for a cup of instant chicken-noodle soup, hot enough so he had to drink it slow. He wrapped two cheese sandwiches for later.

The sun was down. He swore at himself, and by last light he ran the bilge pumps. They spat, then ran heavy enough so he came to attention. They eased. He went below for a look, the lights down here worked, just a quick glance at everything. Nothing wrong he could see. That amount of water could come from a lot of things. Maybe one of the wells wasn’t tight, or had sloshed some when she’d been knocked on her beam end.

Just before going back on deck, he stood still. He’d spent quite
some time right here, a few hours pretty nearly every day for the better part of four years. But holding on now, listening to her move, her wooden creaks and sighs clear in the silence of the engine, he felt she was all new to him. He knew where everything was, it wasn’t that. But this view of her took him by surprise, like when he’d walked in to see May after Charlie was born.

He went back up, cranked the engine, took in the sea anchor, and got her under way. She wasn’t home yet.

He saw the first light, counted the interval … one thousand nine, one thousand ten, blink. He knew where he was. He’d be able to pick up the light at Monomoy, some more lights along Cape Cod, and through Vineyard Sound he’d even be able to see the islands.

At first light he was in Vineyard Sound. The Vineyard was a dark rise against the eastern sky, but Naushon, Nashaweena, Pasque, and Cuttyhunk turned from granite gray to purple, from purple to rose as the early light touched them.
Spartina
picked up some speed as the tide began to run hard with her. When he pushed past Cuttyhunk he saw Two-Mile Light flash around, a dart of unnatural strobe-silver about to be subdued by day.

And then Sakonnet Point. Then Brenton Reef Light, off the bow, and then abeam. And dead ahead Point Judith. He said, “Now you smell the barn.” And for the first time it occurred to him to wonder what kind of shape the barn would be in.

As he came up to the harbor of refuge he could see the tide still dumping, pushing out a steady pulse of muddy water through the gap in the breakwater. When he nosed
Spartina
inside and headed for the breachway into the salt pond, he was hailed by a Coast Guard tug. He cut the throttle back and let her come alongside. A Coast Guard lieutenant addressed him through a bullhorn. “If you’re going into Point Judith Pond … watch out for floating wreckage. It might be better … to wait for the tide to turn … before you go in.”

That speech was polite enough, so he put her in neutral and came out on deck to acknowledge it. He saw there was a seventy-foot fishing boat on the Galilee Road.

The hands on the tug threw him a line, and then another, and he pulled
Spartina
against the huge bumpers of the tug and made her fast.

He pointed at the boat on the road.

A chief said, “It’s worse inside the harbor.”

“How long till low water?”

“It should’ve been slack now,” the chief said, “but that’s a lot of water in there.”

The tug was bigger than
Spartina
but her afterdeck lower, so when the chief ordered coffee for Dick, the seaman he sent to fetch the pot had to reach up to
Spartina
’s rail to fill Dick’s mug.

The lieutenant and the chief told Dick that this was worse than ’54, but not so bad as ’38. So far as they knew, no one was killed, at least around here. They’d been in Wickford when it hit and just got to the harbor of refuge this morning. For the moment they were standing by for any distress signals, and after a bit they were going to help clear the channel.

Dick was grateful for the coffee and the news. But when they looked
Spartina
over and asked him where he’d been, he felt uncomfortable.

The chief noticed the bare patches on the wheelhouse, and some more along the hull. The lieutenant asked if his crew was below.

Dick said, “I took her out alone,” and was embarrassed. He saw himself standing there naked, stripped down to his folly. His affection for
Spartina
, his pride in her, his satisfaction that he’d done okay handling her, and his relief at being home were gone for the moment. He knew what he’d think of some damn fool who took a boat alone across the path of a hurricane. He’d admire his luck, but he wouldn’t admire him.

Without raising his eyes, he said, “I got sideswiped some by the other side. I’d hoped to get clear to the east.”

The lieutenant said, “How long have you been out?”

The chief said, “Looks like more than sideswiped.”

“Three days.”

“You must be tired,” the lieutenant said.

“You been on your radio?” the chief asked. “Let someone know you’re back?”

“The radio’s out.”

The chief said to the lieutenant, “Maybe we should contact the station, sir. They may have this vessel missing.” He turned to Dick. “At least we didn’t have to go look for you.”

The lieutenant ordered a seaman to get on the radio. He turned to Dick. “What’s the name of your vessel?”

“Spartina-May.”

“Is there anyone you’d like the station to call? Of course the phone lines may be down.”

“Eddie Wormsley. In Perryville. That’s where my wife and kids are.”

Dick started to ask what the damage was like at the top of the pond, but these men hadn’t been there, and Dick didn’t want to hear what they’d only heard.

He said, “I’m going to go take a look at something. I’ll be back when the tide turns.”

He cast off from the tug and headed out the west gap in the breakwater. It was less than two miles to the opening into Sawtooth Pond. It took him a minute to take in what was different about the beach. There wasn’t a single beach house. There had been two dozen, not to mention the trailer camp on the high ground of Matunuck Point. The old undermined seawall, a ruin for twenty-five years, was unmoved.

When he got just outside the cut to Sawtooth Pond he saw that
the storm had torn it wide open. It had been fifteen yards across, now it was fifty.

Looking up the cut, he saw the Wedding Cake was still standing. He got out his binoculars. The fretwork on the front porch was smashed, some of the shutters were torn off, and the windows were broken. The paint was scoured even more than
Spartina
’s. The wind would have picked up sand from the top of the dunes and blown it at the house like birdshot.

There wasn’t a tree or a bush upright on Sawtooth Island. Just a few pieces of wood wedged among the close-set rocks.

The tide was still running out of the cut in slow brown coils that were laced with grass and leaves and the occasional whiteness of a split branch bobbing just under the surface. A whole willow swam by looking like a giant jellyfish. Darker, heavier matter was moving too. Dick put
Spartina
in neutral and let the wind back her off the junk spewing and spreading in the slow coastwise current. Looking at the flow, Dick realized the sandbar had been cut by the storm—there seemed to be a sea-dredged channel through it.

The cottages which were set back up Sawtooth Point looked okay, but the ones right along the creek had taken a beating. Schuyler and Marie’s had a line of water stain and flecks of grass, seaweed, and silt up to the second story. The picture window was smashed and the waterfront porch was half torn away and sagging into the creek.

Dick wondered how far up the creek the surge had gone. Could be his house was flooded.

He looked beyond the flat shore up to the tangled growth covering the Matunuck Hills, then back along the dunes, where the low grasses had held on, and then to the confluence of Sawtooth Creek and Pierce Creek and the low table of spartina that spread out between them. His calculations of damage gave way,
not to another thought, but to a rush of green. He lowered the binoculars. The air was scrubbed so clean, the wind had winnowed the dead brown away so completely, the green was so bright in the morning light that particular blades jumped across the water to his eyes. Green against the black muck of the marsh, green against the crystals of new-sifted sand, and green on the hills against the quick blue sky.

Just this place, the shore from Green Hill to Galilee, the upland from the beach to the Great Swamp, the Matunuck Hills, and Wakefield, just five miles wide and five miles deep, was just about all the land he knew. He hadn’t thought it could come on him like this. It was as if he’d been blown clean as the marsh grass, been scoured even more than
Spartina
’s wheelhouse or the Wedding Cake. Each time he looked along the stretch of land, the green came into him like a stroke of paint on parched clean wood.

He saw a jeep coming along the bird-sanctuary beach. He let
Spartina
blow a little farther offshore, then put her in gear and made his way cautiously back through the breakwater.

H
e followed the Coast Guard tug in through the breachway, keeping an eye on the tug’s wake and the water slipping by her hull for anything likely to foul his propeller or even just give it a good whack. He didn’t have time to take more than a quick look to port toward Joxer’s crab-processing plant. The roof was still on, the sandbags still piled against the walls and windows. The
Lydia P.
wasn’t home yet. There seemed to be some damage to the tightly clustered houses in Jerusalem. The bridge across the slough from Point Judith Pond to Potter Pond was out.

On the other side of the channel, the piers by Galilee were a shambles. The Co-op and George’s Restaurant were still standing, but all the smaller buildings and sheds were scattered in pieces all the way to the Escape Road. There were some trucks and bulldozers at work clearing the road and parking lot. The boats that had been hauled far back and tied down looked to have scraped through okay. One near the pier had a utility pole across her deck, her bulwarks smashed, but her hull intact. The boats left in the slips were better off the closer they were to the dock. The outermost boats must have provided some shelter, even after they sank. The innermost boats had been smashed around on top, but their hulls seemed to be tight.
Mamzelle
was on the bottom. Even at low tide Dick could only see a bit of her wheelhouse. The rest of her superstructure was gone.