Keelhaul
Spinnaker: a large sail used to sail downwind
A large, mounted salmon head flashing sharp teeth greeted visitors to his grandfather’s sail loft. It overlooked the counter’s cash machine and computer. An ashtray and a swivelling Scrabble game lay beside a model of a sloop whose spiky mast skewered a halfdozen invoices. The name on her transom read “Bill’s.”
The working area was divided in two. The first stretched from the office counter, where big sails were laid out for measuring and cutting. The three sewing pits reminded him of the Toronto sail loft where his dad had pulled sails through to sew them. He’d always finished a seam before looking up and smiling at him.
Rolls of sail material and plastic bins with things like stainless steel grommets were stowed beneath a thick-planked staircase. It led to an area used for smaller sails.
William followed the sounds of frying into the kitchen. These were Emmett’s private quarters he shared with Harley when she worked here. Harley’s foot tapped to the music.
She wheeled towards him with a raised cleaver and a diving mask on her face.
“Damn, you scared me,” she said, turning down the radio. The mask gave her voice a funny, nasal quality. She yanked it off. “Onions — they make me cry. Sorry!” She laughed.
“Hello. Anybody home?” interrupted a voice. They quickly turned and saw a man entering the loft carrying a red canvas bag.
Harley turned off the stove, peeled off her apron, and skipped past William. “Good morning, Mr. Dingle.”
“Morning, Harley.”
Harley grabbed a paper he was holding. “You’ve filled out your racing form, I see. William, could you enter this data onto the computer, then hit print? Oh, Mr. Dingle, meet my cousin, Will McCoy.”
“Hi, there, Will,” he said, shaking William’s hand. William said hello, and then watched as Mr. Dingle scooted through the loft and stared into the sewing pits as if he might catch someone hiding there.
William turned his attention to the task at hand. The computer was open at the website for the competition. He filled out the online form and noticed that Paul Dingle managed the local bank.
Emmett plodded down the stairs from the small work area. He slipped his scissors back into the sailmaker’s holster on his hip. He sewed a piece of sail fabric on his way over. The needle was pushed through the fabric with the leather palm strapped to his right hand. William’s father had owned a bunch of them. He knew the plastic over the meat of his thumb by the palm was dimpled like a golf ball. It secured the head of the needle. That way it wouldn’t slip under pressure and pierce the user’s hand.
Emmett scooped a half-smoked cigar from the ashtray and stuck it in the salmon’s open mouth. “Makes him look like a gangster, doesn’t it?” Emmett asked William. “We haven’t had one robbery since Frank the Fish,” he said, patting the fish head, “started chomping a stogy.”
Harley made a face. “Oh, right, like we’d have a robbery here without it.” She cut off Emmett’s reply. “And don’t tell me it obviously works.”
He cracked a smile and swung a wink in William’s direction.
“Granddad stuffs his old cigars in the fish’s mouth,” explained Harley. “Then I move them to the ashtray, and after a while they disintegrate and I’m allowed to throw them out.”
“There you go, Mr. Dingle, your registration and copy of the rules — which I think you know, considering they haven’t changed since I started writing them up — and deh, deh, deh, deh. How’s the lending business these days, Mr. Dingle?” William caught the disapproving look Emmett shot her way.
The door swung open. In glided the painter, Robert Trenton. That stopped any further discussion.
He complemented his grey suit with a subtle silk tie. He had wingtip shoes like the pair William’s dad had worn when he dressed up. His mother would have said it was the kind of taste money lets you wear.
“Hey, Harley, Paul. What’s the damage, again, Emmett?” He pulled out his chequebook and pen, trying to act at ease with everyone. Like Brad, he wasn’t convincing.
Harley whispered to William, “That’s a Mont Blanc pen.”
He figured she meant top of the line and expensive.
Trenton studied the invoice. “Right. That should cover it. Let me know when I can raise them.” He wrote and tore the cheque out. “This should make her unbeatable.”
Emmett bobbled his head in a noncommittal way. “Like I told you before, take five feet off the main boom and she’ll handle better in strong winds.”
Trenton spat out a laugh. “Well, I can’t blame you for trying to help Daniel win.”
He caught sight of William and that stopped him. “How many of us are racing?”
Harley said, “Daniel isn’t registered, if that’s what you want to know, Mr. Trenton.”
Trenton suppressed a smile. “Ah, too bad. It’s nice to win when the best are competing.” When nobody answered, he nodded to Emmett and left.
“Were you really trying to make his boat go slower?” William whispered to Emmett.
“Nope. The man asks for advice but won’t take it. What’s the point of getting a dog if you’re gonna do your own barking? He wants to win so badly he thinks we’d give him bad advice.” The “he” and “we” painted Trenton as an outsider of sorts.
“He doesn’t understand that a good race needs good competition. It’s about getting the most out of your boat and crew, not just crossing the finish line first. When Daniel raced, he made everybody better because they brought their game up a notch.”
Harley changed the topic. “Saw your boat out last week, Mr. Dingle — a beauty.”
Dingle cracked a smile. “She is at that. By the way, Trenton is the odds-on favourite this year.”
Emmett shook his head. “Dogs and the devil take us if he wins. He’ll gloat forever.”
Dingle lowered his voice. “Shall I put you down for your usual wager?”
Emmett scrunched his lips. “Not this year, Paul.”
Harley said, “Stiff competition when Emmett finishes Trenton’s new suit of sails.”
“Speaking of sails, Emmett, I blew out one of my spinnakers. Can you …?”
“Of course, Paul. Anything else you need done?”
“No, the rest are well-made McCoy sails.” He waved goodbye and strode out. Emmett and Harley dove on the sail bag he had brought in to examine the work to be done.
“Uh, Uncle Emmett, I wondered if you could use some extra help here in the shop.”
Harley laughed. “Aren’t sails a little old-fashioned for you?”
“I, uh, could use the money.”
Emmett scratched his head. “Well, I don’t know, everything’s pretty specialized …”
Harley jumped in. “C’mon, Grandpa, you could use a deckhand. Dingle’s just given you some work.” Emmett studied the sail’s tear.
She slipped the cigar from the fish to the ashtray. “And Daniel might even enter the race like you want him to if William sails with him, right? So start him as a deckhand.”
William’s face fell. “A deckhand on the boat? On the water?”
“On the water is where we usually find boats, Master William.”
By the time they’d closed the shop later that day, the breeze had freshened. Low tide uncovered a community of grey shore stones — grey, bald men sucking and floating water wisdom through beards of green algae. Their sightless faces contemplated the day’s events as they had for so long, with a calmness he envied.
Small waves rocked Emmett’s schooner, Mary, as it lay tethered to the dock. Except for the lack of a red jib, she was Fathom’s twin. Emmett and Harley sprang effortlessly onto her deck. His fear of water rooted William to the dock.
Emmett said, “The first thing I want you to do is remove that shackle from the sail. You’ll need a marlinspike. Take mine.” Emmett held out his knife.
William produced the knife he’d found. “I, uh, I have a marlinspike right here.”
Emmett marvelled, “So you got Jack’s rigging knife. We wondered where it had got to after the, um, accident.” He leaned in to admire it. “Right proper it should go to his son.”
William had one foot anchored to the dock. He struggled to force the other onto the deck of the boat. His stomach lurched. Perspiration beaded on his forehead. He pressed the point of the marlinspike in the small hole of the shackle pin and started to unscrew it. He tried to focus, but horrific images flooded his mind.
Water rose to the pickup’s hood, hissing as it steamed away from the hot engine. The headlights prodded the ocean. His father hung over the wheel, his face twisted towards him. Copper-tasting fear coated William’s mouth. Darkness swallowed the lights.
William’s knees buckled. The knife splashed into the harbour. “Damn, damn, damn!”
“Damn near three fathoms of water is what you have between yourself and your knife right now,” said Emmett as he leaned over the gunwale to peer into the water.
William fought to hold back tears. He couldn’t believe he had just lost his father’s knife — again. “I just can’t deal with the ocean.”
“The great-grandson of the Real McCoy can’t ‘deal’ with the ocean? He’d keelhaul you for your lack of seavoir faire,” tsked Emmett.
With a cry of frustration, William rushed from the dock. He clattered away on his bike in confusion and shame. He heard Harley admonish, “Grandpa, did you say ‘keelhaul’? Really?”
William biked past a building. Its brass plaque caught his eye: Robert Trenton, Real Estate Law, Mortgage Broker. So the painter was also a lawyer. The parking lot had two spots marked TrentonPrivate. One had a BMW convertible with FNSH LNE on its vanity plate. The bumper sticker read, Keep Austin Weird. Beside it was a glistening, new motorcycle. He wished he could jump on it and ride away from his problems.
Half an hour later, William coasted by the Trenton residence. He spied the trophy in its look-at-me window. Even from this distance he could see the new strip of silver on the bottom that identified it as his father’s trophy.
A man in a security guard’s uniform opened the gate for a nurse. She was on the road pushing a wheelchair carrying an old man with an oxygen mask.
William pulled abreast of them. The old man stared at him and pulled his mask off. How could a man with a nurse and guard have such yellow teeth? “Jack. Have you found the gold yet?” he wheezed. Too startled to answer, William kept pedalling.
-
William trudged up beside Daniel on the veranda, staring at the horizon.
“Granddad, look, I know you’re bummed out, but we really have to talk. Mom and I have a problem — a disagreement. And I wish I … well, I wish you’d do something, anything, keelhaul me even, whatever that means.”
Daniel bolted to his feet as if hit by lightning. “Keelhaul? KEELHAUL? Who said anything about keelhaul?” Startled by Daniel’s outburst, William staggered backward.
Daniel narrowed his eyes. “What’s going on with you?”
William stood his ground and shot back, “What’s going on with you?”
“Lad, in this part of the world, we don’t talk like that to our elders.”
William stammered, “I, I … haven’t seen much of my elders in this part of the world.”
“Hmn. Be that as it may, I’m here now. Who said anything about keelhaul?”
“Uncle Emmett. Said that because I was afraid of water, I should be keelhauled.”
“Nobody’s going to keelhaul my grandson.”
“Well, what does it mean, Granddad?”
Daniel grew gloomy. “It was an ancient form of maritime punishment. A sailor would be bound hand and foot and dragged beneath the keel. If he didn’t drown, the barnacles on the hull would likely cut him to ribbons.”
“Geez, I don’t think I’m up for that, Granddad.”
“It was only used in very rare occurrences — despite what Hollywood fiction writers pretend. A captain in the British navy needed every able-bodied sailor he could get. More likely to use the cat-o’-nine-tails — the whip — for discipline.”
“Then why do people say ‘keelhaul’?”
“It was meant to intimidate you. Nowadays, it’s just a figure of speech.” His granddad looked at him. “You want to stay here, did you say?”
“Mom and I, well, we’re not exactly getting along.” Daniel waited for more. William continued his answer with a sigh. “Mom works full-time now, see …” He paused to make sure his grand- father was still listening.
“She took my son. She pushed him to work so hard, his heart gave out.”
So this was the reason his mother and his granddad were distant. William might have snapped back at his granddad to defend his mother, but his granddad’s tone was more sad than harsh. Besides, he’d had enough fighting for one day.
“Uh, actually the doctors at the hospital said Dad had a bad heart and worried too much about his work. Anyway, Mom’s got this new friend. This guy who works with her, Brad. He’s always around and, well, like, I don’t think it’s right, Dad being dead just a year now. So I wondered if I could stay with you.”
All this information seemed to startle Daniel. William added something so his request wouldn’t sound too big. “Just for a while, you know, a little while.”
“Of course you’re welcome to stay. You’re my grandson. Mary’s … doing something… Halifax, I think. But she’ll be back tomorrow. We can talk to her tomorrow.”
“Okay, thanks, Granddad. Staying here with you would be … really cool.”
Daniel coughed. “For God’s sake you should know better than to sit out here in your shirt sleeves. You’ll freeze your tiller. Let’s see what Emmett brought us for dinner.”