Storm Glass (10 page)

Near the end of summer, Amy’s weekly visits abruptly stopped. I asked no questions, assuming her absence was the result of some adult decision over which I had no control. Besides, my sisters had spied on one of our extended entertainments, had seen the kissing part, and had given me no peace since. And so, released from the responsibilities of playing both the good and evil male, and the longing for a little girl’s possessions that her presence induced, I was vaguely relieved by Amy’s absence. I reverted to my games with sticks and dust and happily forgot about ribbons and curls. At least for a while.

Then, just when the trees on our lane were beginning to turn, my father received a letter that caused a great stir in the
kitchen. When he passed it silently to my mother to read, her eyes opened wide, as if she were greatly surprised. My older sisters gathered round and, having read the contents, fluttered and gasped. Soon they and my mother were busy pulling mixing bowls and baking tins out of the cupboards, while my father explained that the following day we were all to visit the Jeffersons’ farm.

This, I knew, was to be an important event. A party, no doubt, in Amy’s honour. I could scarcely sit still at the dinner table, squirmed in pure joy for several minutes until I lapsed once again into an attack of raw jealousy. I had never had a party after all, just a cake at supper with my family. And my parents had
never
been this awestruck by any event related to me. Even later that night, after I had gone to bed, I could hear them muttering Amy’s name in the kitchen, and that of her father, over and over.

I was not at all surprised to discover that Amy Jefferson’s house was an imposing structure with two porches, one on top of another. The front yard was immense and was bisected by a narrow cement walk edged by two perfectly clipped hedges. These extended to surround most of the lawn, which was itself beautifully mown; Amy Jefferson’s farm was equipped with a machine expressly for that purpose. Rising from the grass was a large oak tree and hanging from that a child’s swing. For Amy Jefferson’s private amusement.

At the side of the house, beyond the small walls of the hedgerows, a number of women were gathered. They were placing white tablecloths on wooden tables. It was a breezy day, which made their activities difficult, and four women were
required to cover one table—two to shake the cloth, brilliant in the sun, out into the wind, two more to catch the flapping corners on the opposite side. Dressed in the long, dark skirts of the period, these women looked like black shadows dancing slow upon the lawn, unfurling white banners, serious and quiet at their task. I envied Amy Jefferson these shadows who were so obviously dedicated to her pleasure.

We entered the kitchen and deposited there the food that my mother and sisters had spent the previous evening preparing. But the wealth of edibles already there suggested that they need not have bothered. More dark-skirted women drifted silently around the table, moving dishes to make room for the baked goods we had brought. We stood uncomfortably to one side until one of the women, who identified herself as the housekeeper, asked if we would like to see Amy and led us down a long hall, with remarkably polished floors, and into the parlour where a large number of adults were collected in a murmuring crowd.

Once inside this room my parents shook off their hesitation and seemed to know exactly what to do. They took hold of me, each by one hand, and walked towards the opposite side of the room. I remember looking down, envying Amy Jefferson the colours on her parlour carpet. Then I remember being lifted up by my father to be presented with the white face and still body of Amy herself. She was dressed in pink, her puffed sleeves crushed against the mauve satin of the coffin’s interior, her golden curls motionless against her chest. Her skin looked smooth and hard, like porcelain. She resembled a china doll.

“Kiss her,” my mother said.

The afternoon passed like an Indian summer dream. Tens of wagons journeyed out to a cemetery where they put Amy in the ground; satin, puffed sleeves and curls, down into damp and dark. And we returned to the lawn where the dark-skirted ladies tempted me with cakes and said what a nice little boy I was. Cumulus clouds carried the ghosts of Amy’s possessions over the crowd of adult mourners, who murmured and shook their heads and ate all of the food that had covered the kitchen table. Rags appeared and was fed table scraps. Amy’s swing moved back and forth in a warm wind.

When it was all over and we were about to leave I noticed Amy’s father standing apart from his guests, looking off in the distance towards the woods at the back of his farm. His face was immobile but his eyes were like clenched fists. I suspected that his mind at that moment was filled with the image of an old, old man, dressed in the costume of a tramp, with enough blond curls on his shoulders for two good-sized wigs. I was amazed and relieved by his apparent naivety. For I knew whose sinful longings had sucked the life out of his treasured victim. I presumed that my envy and obsession had weakened and destroyed Amy as surely as any poisoned apple. I turned and was horribly sick as a result of all the sweets I had eaten at the large white table, and the half-hour spent afterwards playing on Amy Jefferson’s private swing.

All the way home I examined the texture of my own short hair, expecting that, at any minute, the blond curls of my guilt might come into evidence all over my head.

PRIDE

T
he children spotted it first and simply watched it in an attitude children will take—plastic pails hanging, forgotten, from their hands, muscles tensed, alert. It looked to them like a wounded sea monster, thrashing and lurching in the waves. But when it moved closer and they saw it was a boat, they ran to us in great excitement. For although impressive yachts and sleek fibreglass sail-boats floated through their days at the beach, this craft, coming as it so obviously did from somewhere else, and heading for their very own shore, seemed to them to be the essence of what a boat should be.

I sat in my deck-chair under a colourful umbrella, reading the paper and staring at the ocean. My wife knitted. We seldom spoke, except to the grandchildren. To call them back in concern, to tie hats firmly on small heads to prevent sunstroke, or to apply more sun-tan lotion. I was golden brown and quite fat. I looked vaguely tired in the manner of older people who are only halfway through the two-week visit with children of
whom they are overly fond. My wife had brought a picnic lunch with her to the beach and she was thinking about that now—the small problems associated with eating there: keeping the grandchildren from eating too fast, or from eating nothing but chips and cookies, or from eating too much sand. The appearance of the boat interrupted her midday thoughts as even she shaded her eyes to determine the nature of the distressed vessel.

Its mast, which I would later come to know was made from the trunk of a slender tree, slapped the surface of the water, and then, as if involved in a desperate struggle, hauled itself upward, totem-like, against the sky. Hanging down from this, attached by a series of disorganized ropes, was a sail of real canvas. Part of it lay crumpled in the interior of the boat, but the major portion was draped over the gunwales and bubbled in the water. Unbleached, the beige colour seemed so unfamiliar, so non-plastic, that in its altered, broken state it was like the ghost of an earlier time and it frightened me somewhat, though I didn’t know why.

Having caught the attention of everyone on the beach directly before it, the boat made its limping progress towards the shore. Propelled forward by one six-foot wave, it would pause briefly, rock slightly, and wait for the thrust of the next, moving sometimes sideways, sometimes forward as it was meant to. By now the life-guard, who was posted at our rear, could see through his binoculars that the boat, at one time, had probably belonged to a fisherman and was meant to be managed by a series of large oars. The mast and sail, then, would have had to be a later addition, made for the purpose of moving the boat out of the calm of some harbour and into the thick of an inexplicable journey. He could also see that whoever had planned this
journey was absent, as were any passengers, that they had either been rescued at sea, or more likely had been swept overboard by the huge waves that had existed on the ocean for the last few days. Laying down his binoculars on his tanned thighs he relaxed his shoulders feeling functionless in this particular drama.

Within a half an hour the boat had ended its marine performance and had, with one last determined shove, buried its prow in the wet sand at the shoreline. There it rested, listing somewhat to the starboard side, its sail moving back and forth in the water with the motion of the waves. The children ran to it to peer inside. I, too, left my deck-chair, my Styrofoam cooler, my newspaper, to look at what the sea had brought in.

The children, of course, were most interested in the boat as an object. They responded instantly to the brightly coloured boards and twisted ropes. And they especially loved the broken parts of the boat where the flat planks had separated from the frame and tiny waterfalls appeared with each new wave. Small lakes had gathered at the bottom of the hull and beneath the prow was a perfect, enclosed, damp space where several small people might huddle together and giggle. Their hands automatically reached up to the gunwales in their desire to climb inside, to claim the boat as their own.

But I held them back. Sensing the blacker side, I knew that the boat called to my mind something I had forgotten so completely that I could not remember it even now with the fact of it rolling there in front of me at the edge of the ocean. And when I saw the open suitcase, the clothing, the portable baby’s bed, the toothbrush, the shoes, all of which littered the hull, I understood that whoever had set out to sea in such a craft had arrived in my world despite rescue or death.

The life-guard and I hauled the boat farther up onto the beach, beyond the tide line. Then, standing slightly back, we began to speculate about its origins. The astonishing lack of synthetic fibre suggested to us that the boat was most certainly foreign. I thought it might have come from one of the smaller, more obscure Caribbean islands. He suggested South America. Our conversation dwindled. It seemed futile to discuss the fate of the boat’s passengers, or even their reason for attempting to cross the sea in such a dangerous fashion. So we stood back and looked, our arms folded, feeling cheated, a bit, of the sensationalism that so often accompanies accidental death in our own country.

That night, tucked snugly away in our climate-controlled condominium, I dreamt a hundred dreams of the boat. In one dream I was building the boat, or at least working on part of it. Sometimes I pushed large sharp needles through tough canvas. Sometimes I wove ropes. In some far corner of my brain, where I remembered my father’s carpentry shop, I steamed and bent wood for the frame long into the night. Then I fitted the skeleton-like construction together in record time. My mother, whom I had all but forgotten, appeared in one of the dreams, saying over and over in a carping, critical fashion, “It looks like the ribcage of a dead elephant. It looks like the ribcage of a dead elephant,” until I shouted at her, in a way I never would have done in real life, “Well,
you
are elephant flesh; grey, loose and wrinkling!” Then I dreamt I was planking the frame—setting the thin bevelled boards higher and higher, fastening them with bright galvanized nails. I whispered to myself in an unfamiliar language. “Garboard, shutter, sheerstake,” I
said quietly, but with amazing confidence. The work went well.

My wife, because she had been a mother, dreamt about mending the boat—caulking the seams with cotton dresses she had thrown away years before and patching the holes with oilcloth and horse-hoof glue. She claimed she spent half the night untying the knots in the ropes and winding them up into well-organized, tidy coils. Then she carefully stitched the torn sail, sometimes with brightly coloured embroidery thread, sometimes with the more functional white variety. Later she repainted the simple geometric design, which had, in some places, been rubbed off the stern. And finally, she dreamt that she hauled the sail away from the place where it lay in the damp sand, put it through the wash cycle in an enormous machine, and hung it out to dry on a clothes-line strung between two telephone poles. And all the Lincolns, Chryslers and Cadillacs on Ocean Boulevard ground to a halt, amazed to see this expanse of canvas, like a brown flag with grommets, flap up towards the sky.

The children dreamt of sailing the boat, or of driving it, or flying it, depending on their personalities, just as it was—injured, wrecked—with sand and water spilling into its hull and its sail dragging behind it like long drowned hair. They were too young, too satisfied, to actively search for change in their dreams and so they dreamt of the fact of the boat and of access to that fact; of scaling the sides, leaping over the gunwales and sitting at the rudderless helm. In truth they dreamt of taking command of the boat as something the sea had arbitrarily given them.

When we arrived at the beach the following morning the boat looked more familiar, less foreign to us. I brought my little black camera with me and marched down the beach with it to capture
the image of the boat from all sides, forever. My wife fussed and clucked, almost affectionately, about the untidiness of the boat. Some of the clothing, which had earlier spilled from the hull, had been brought in by the waves and had formed a colourful strip at the tide line. She moved slowly towards this and, gingerly picking up the pieces of fabric, dropped them in a neat pile, hoping that the machine that came at night to bury seaweed would dispose, as well, of this reminder of the human factor.

The children began to play with the portable baby’s bed. Unnoticed behind the stern they constructed a sail from a large stick and a plaid cotton shirt. Borrowing the laces from an unmatched shoe that hung from the port gunwale, they were able to tie miniature ropes through the buttonholes and pull the fabric tight enough to catch the wind. They pounded the stick through the canvas bottom of the tiny bed and placed the youngest child inside as a navigator. Then, screaming with joy, they propelled their little craft out to sea where it turned slowly round a few times before being pushed under by the white froth of an incoming wave.