Dead Man Sailing
Ahoy: a sailor’s call to attract attention, akin to hello
William wiped his tears and runny nose with his sleeve. He must be tired, that’s all. That’s what his mother always said whenever she cried over his father. Tears never helped achieve anything.
He washed and dried his face at the kitchen sink. His grandmother must be busy with something really important to let her garden dry up like this. According to Harley, she’d be back for tomorrow’s memorial.
A flick of his index finger popped the eyehooks on either side of the window screen. Like his grandmother had shown him, he made sure the water wasn’t too cold. He pulled the shower head out of the sink and gave the bush a desperately needed drink.
On the veranda, William noticed an old-style school bell secured to the wall. The inscription refused to fade in the oxidized brass: To Mary McCoy in honour of her retirement, from three decades of students and faculty of the Academy. We have all learned from her humanity and dedication to teaching. Okay, but where was she?
In the front yard he saw the last rays of the sun playing off the water. This wasn’t the homecoming William had counted on. One smiling grandparent wasn’t here. The other wasn’t saying much of anything, let alone smiling.
Harley rang the brass bell to gather everyone to dinner at the picnic table. He half enjoyed the meatloaf, onions, green beans, rice, and coleslaw that Harley had prepared. It wasn’t the joyous meal he’d dreamed of on the bus. Maybe sneaking away to Lunenburg hadn’t been such a great idea. Now he felt guilty about wondering whether his grandmother’s absence was going to complicate his dream of being allowed to stay with them. He might have to go back and deal with Brad and his mother.
-
Everyone was gone. His grandfather had retired for the night. William lay on the bed in his father’s old bedroom with Treasure Island but was too distracted to read.
He studied the two sets of horizontal pencil markings on the door jamb. One set marked his father’s annual height until his eighteenth birthday. The other marked his own height until age eight. He’d been a couple of inches taller than his father at the same age. They hadn’t visited after William’s eighth birthday. His dad had been too busy renovating their house and trying to make a living in Toronto.
There were photos on the wall of his father racing sailboats and as a student, working in D & E Sailmakers like Harley did now. The shelf was lined with small trophies, mostly for sailing. Hanging in the cupboard was his father’s Dalhousie University rowing team jacket. The black and gold colours still looked sharp despite dust on the shoulders. On a shelf by the bed he spied a hand-carved model of a dinghy. It was signed “Jack McCoy” and wore the number “16” on its sails.
He listened to the ticking of the grandfather clock downstairs mingling with the steady rhythm of whooshing waves through the two open seaside windows. It almost lulled him to sleep. He forced his eyes wide open. The sooner he talked to his granddad about his problems, the sooner he could tell his mother of his plans to stay here, away from Brad and in a house that wasn’t going to be sold out from under him. He went downstairs. He’d promised to call his mom.
From the kitchen stool he listened as his home number rang, three times, four times. It was an hour earlier in Toronto. He could picture her in their kitchen clipping discount coupons to hang on the pin board next to the calendar. She had taken down the honeymoon photo of her and his dad in Paris. She might stare at the photo of the two them smiling at him as a baby, sleeping in the belly of a sail with “16” stitched on it.
The same photo hung right beside him now on a cupboard in this kitchen.
“Ferne McCoy’s residence,” a man answered.
He felt himself flush with anger. Yes, it was Ferne’s home. Our home. So what was Brad doing answering the phone at this hour? At any hour? He hung up.
He crept back upstairs and tiptoed down the hallway and knocked on his grandfather’s door. No answer. He knocked again — nothing. “Granddad, I have a favour to ask you.” He put his ear to the door and listened. A frightened animal’s wailing clawed through the door. He’d never heard his father or his grandfather cry before. His granddad was just like his mother. They cried when you asked questions.
He retreated back to his father’s old room.
“You and your stupid sailboats!” moaned William, grabbing the model boat. He reached back to fling it sidearm through the open window. He was stopped cold, his gaze drawn to the moonlit ocean.
A red jib pulled an unmanned schooner along the shore. A familiar shadowy figure appeared in the cockpit. He waved to William.
The curtains on the window where he stood were blowing back. Those on the room’s other window, ten feet away, were absolutely still. What kind of wind only blew at one window?
William looked from the far curtains to the window in front of him. The schooner had disappeared. The wind died altogether. He placed the model back where it belonged and shot a look at the glass of well water by his bed. Was this the kind of trick Emmett had warned him about?
Rattled by images of boats, now here, now gone, he went downstairs to phone his mother again. This time she answered.
“I almost died when Emmett said you were in Lunenburg.” There was hurt in her voice. A small piece of him would have preferred the “supremely annoyed” treatment. “Can’t believe you went all the way there for … A memorial is just postponing the inevitable. Dragging it out.”
“We can’t forget about Dad overnight, Mom. We can’t wash it all away after just a year.”
“Depends on the year, Will.” She blew her nose. “Why didn’t you tell me you were —”
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a new boyfriend?”
“Brad’s not my boyfriend. Just somebody from work who’s … become a friend. Somebody who wants to see me, and us, happy.”
“It’s not working. He should just back off. Or are you going to marry him?”
“It’s a little early to be talking marriage.” She laughed.
“It’s a little early to be seeing somebody. A fake, a guy who, who’s … nothing like Dad.”
She sighed. “Oh, Willy-boy, he’s just a nice guy who’s … trying to be there for me.”
William left a long pause to voice his disbelief and disapproval.
“He was just here helping me sort through your father’s things.”
“He shouldn’t be touching any of Dad’s things,” he snapped.
“I tried —”
“He shouldn’t be there at all!” he thundered.
There was another long pause.
“You’ll get to know your cousin Harley, spend time with her. That’s good.”
Silence.
“Do you want me to send you some money, maybe your allowance?”
“I’m okay on my own,” he lied.
“Oh Willy-boy, these are tough times, aren’t they?” she asked, stating the obvious. “I miss you already.” She left him room to tell her he missed her. He didn’t.
“Okay, well, goodbye then,” she offered.
Silence.
“And good night.” She said it like she always did, like he was in the same room, not half a country away. “I love you, Willy-boy.”
He laid the phone back in its cradle, hoping she would appreciate that he’d put it back gently. He ran his index and middle fingers along the receiver, reaching out to her in a way his anger wouldn’t allow him to voice.
Too wired to sleep, he walked into the living room and looked for something to watch on the DVD player. On the shelf he found a few DVDs he’d seen. There was one marked “The Rescue of Daddy’s Girl.” He had seen his father’s copy a long time ago.
He turned on the television and the DVD player. He slipped the DVD in and pressed play.
The original footage had been film his father had copied for family members. William played the sound low so as not to disturb his grandfather.
It was grainy TV news footage shot in a storm. The wind tore at the reporter’s raincoat as he brought his microphone closer. “The South Shore was rocked by an early August storm today. It was no place for fish or fowl, who all took refuge where they could. The Coast Guard had every man and boat out for rescue operations up and down the coast, so there was nobody to answer the mayday call put out by the three-man crew of the fishing boat Daddy’s Girl when she took on water and began to founder. The Coast Guard was too far off and nobody would face the wrath of the Atlantic — except skipper Daniel McCoy and his threeman crew in a daring rescue we were able to capture on film.”
Now the cameraman was positioned up on a cliff. Between the blasts of rain one glimpsed a schooner. She had bare poles except for her storm jib wrestling for control from wind and battering waves. The cameraman tried to zoom in. He settled for a wide shot. The schooner ran up beside the sinking boat. Two fishers leapt from the roof of her pilothouse onto the schooner’s open deck where McCoy’s crew pulled them in.
The reporter narrated over images of the rescue. “It seemed impossible that the schooner could run so close without smashing her hull against the partially submerged boat, but she did. The last man still aboard the sinking craft had broken his leg. He wasn’t able to leap. So McCoy’s cousin, Emmett McCann, lashed himself to the far end of the main’s boom. The skipper sailed her with his cousin hanging from that boom. He timed the swell of tide and wind to dip him close enough to grab the injured man without smashing the rescuer on the Cape Islander’s roof.”
The camera captured rescuer and victim clinging to each other at the end of the boom. Refusing to give up its prey, the ocean swung at them with a pounding wave. “On deck, their backs bent, the two crews pulled the line hand over hand till they freed the two men from the staggering weight of water. With the wounded fisher snatched from the cold Atlantic, McCoy brought his crew, the rescued party, and his boat safely back to port.”
The storm had abated when the image cut to the Lunenburg dock. An ambulance crew rolled the wounded man on a gurney. Colour had returned to the screen but the fisherman’s face was ashen with pain when he spoke. “We was done for. Sunk. When dis ghost boat appeared to pluck us from certain death. The man was a rock. A rock.”
The image jumped to a man, beaming at being alive with his crew mates, shaking the water from his hair. The reporter slid opposite him on the dock. It was Emmett with less grey hair but the same lean build.
“Mr. McCann, weren’t you frightened out on that boom?” He snapped the microphone over the gunwale for Emmett’s reply.
Emmett flashed his impish grin. “Not nearly as frightened as I would have been behind the wheel. You see the way Daniel surfed down the side of that wave then took her to starboard?” His hands reenacted the rescue. “He rode the motor so we could crest just as the roof and that fisher rose to us. Dogs and the devil take him, that man’s got more nerve than a barge horse.” The crew’s nervous laughter drowned out any thought they might well not have come back.
The image jumped to William’s father, Jack, at around his age, holding Daniel’s dripping life jacket and walking beside him. His face was turned up to him in awe. Daniel waved off the journalists’ questions with an answer as simple as his smile. “Excuse us. The lad and I need a cup of tea.”
“Well, that was just, just amazing,” sputtered the journalist.
Young Jack tilted his head up to the microphone. “My dad’s like that.”
The reporter commented, “There goes Daniel McCoy, a twolegged piece of granite holding his son’s hand, undeterred by the riptide of questions trying to pull them back to the cameras.” The reporter closed with a subdued, “Must be nice to have a hero for a dad.”
William turned off the TV and DVD player. He felt better when he heard the reporter speak of his grandfather as the “hero” he was going to ask for help.
His grandmother was coming back for the memorial. Surely she’d understand his need to get away from Brad and find some place to be a regular.