When asked, she prefers to reply that she’s five foot eleven. She’ll say, “Around five eleven, give or take,” sometimes adding that she’s earned every inch. Yet Madeleine Orrock knows that she’s a mere eighth of an inch less than six feet. That eighth gives her license, she believes, but either way she finds herself crouching in the wheelhouse of a lobster boat, the Donna Beth. She tests whether or not she can stand upright without cracking her noggin on the ceiling, and she can, easily, yet in the rise and fall and crash through the waves of this small, stout boat and in the ominous dark she feels the ceiling loom as near, ready to conk her cranium. When standing and lifted by the momentum of the boat dropping off a wave, she bends at the waist, tilts her neck down, and cramps her shoulders to avoid being knocked out—scrunching up, a reflex tall girls are taught to avoid in the proper care of their posture. At times, the wheelhouse feels as though it is compressing around her.
Once more, Maddy ventures back through the cabin and out the stern door to the aft deck. The sea is rollicking. Rain and salt water slosh underfoot. Salty spindrift mingles with the sideways deluge as she keeps one hand on the boat and backs her way to the railing to upchuck whatever remains in her belly.
After extraordinary retching to regurgitate a smidgen of fluid, she has the dry heaves awhile, her stomach squeezing as though she’s bound in a constrictor’s grip. As the spasms subside, and they don’t go gently, she meanders back into the warmth of the cabin, mindful of the slippery footing and her rampant dizziness, and climbs up into Sticky McCarran’s diving, dipping, spinning wheelhouse.
She’s mildly embarrassed. Being sick on a boat is an indignity she’s loath to suffer, in part because it’s too girlie for her nature and an affront to her background, although intellectually she knows that it can happen to anyone unaccustomed to the motion. In the lights reflected off his instruments, the captain of the Donna Beth notices that she’s upset.
“I’ll say this for you, Miss Orrock.”
“Maddy.”
“You’re no landlubber. You remember the difference between the weather rail and the lee.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“More than you think. You’d be surprised how many go to the weather side first, because it’s higher, feels a bit safer. Until they try vomiting into the wind.”
“We all do that once. But once only.”
“You’re not used to the sea no more is all. Weather like this, not many are.”
“Christ, it’s lumpy,” she says, knowing that it’s way more than that.
“Freaking A,” he agrees.
She’s curious if he’d use a different word if she weren’t a woman.
They have close to eighteen nautical miles to cross and their progress against wind and current has been reduced to less than five over the ground per hour. The boat handles the conditions well enough, and early on Maddy is confident in that aspect. All things considered, the passage is safe and straightforward. If only her stomach would settle, or, more particularly, the gyrating toss and swing of the mechanisms of her inner ear, which seek a balance, some level plane, finding none.
“When I was kid,” she says, “I was taught to keep one hand on the boat and, if I felt nauseous, an eye on the horizon. That works. But only if there’s a horizon. That advice doesn’t do much good tonight.”
“It’s black out,” Sticky concurs.
“Pitch.”
“Turn around?” he asks her quietly. Blacks Harbour remains closer than Grand Manan, and the weather will be easier to ride in that direction.
Maddy shakes her head. She won’t tolerate retreat.
Seated alongside Sticky McCarran at the wheel, she must hang on as the boat spills off the back of a tall crest and careens down a nearly vertical descent. The bow rears up slightly toward the base of the wave, but what’s coming next is familiar yet always exciting as the bow buries itself and hard water surges across the deck to slam against the windows with all the violence of an automotive collision. She might well be driving her Porsche on a Ferris wheel through a car wash. In the darkness under so much water, one degree of blindness compounds another. The wipers swish uselessly a while, and as the buoyancy of the widely flared bow lifts the Donna Beth out of the sea again and they rise, the diesel never breaks its steady muttering pace, unperturbed by the matter. Maddy shakes her head as though washing the sea off herself, as though pushing squid and sardines and plankton back out of her ears and nostrils and larynx, as if during those many seconds while the boat is at its nadir she’s in a whale’s dark belly and now, as they scale the next roller, she’s spewed out the blowhole into the black sky again, afloat above it all momentarily.
She fears smacking her head.
Similar scenes from childhood wash back over her, not unlike the water that rushes off the deck, and she feels a strange release and expiation, as though this limited and probably safe ordeal is a debt she pays, something she just has to get through, a way of making amends. But for what, and why does she feel so guilty? Because her father is dying? Old age does that to people. Because they’ve been estranged for so long? Whose fault is that, pray tell? she argues to the sea and to the blackness beyond the wheelhouse. Not mine. Yet she agrees with herself that she may not be the guilty party here, but neither is she free of her past, and especially not on this rambunctious crossing.
Maddy feels the need to break out of herself a little. Not only is she road-weary from the day and now storm-tossed, plagued by guilt and a lurking, impending grief that she cannot wholly understand or even begin to accept, but she’s feeling claustrophobic and torn, and not a speck of her malaise, she fears, is related to being seasick. Yet being seasick is bad enough.
Being seasick is the worst thing there is or can be at the moment.
She turns to Sticky to see if they can talk, deflect the gloom, get something going to release her from a battery of complaints and afflictions.
“Have you worked for my dad, Sticky? Over the years? He gave me your number—I presume you know him.”
“You don’t remember me?”
“Should I?”
He shrugs off the question. “When I got my first boat, he helped me out.”
“My father helped you out.” If she weren’t a seasick dog, she’d laugh. He had to be telling a joke.
“Sure he did. I got my boat young. It’s not easy being a young fellow carrying that kind of bank loan, interest what it was back in the day. I had the experience, with my old guy, you know. I was at his knee nearly from the day I was born, so I knew I could fish or catch lobster or pull up whatever the sea was willing to provide. The bank seemed to agree with me, too, on account of my family. There’s six of us boys and five of us got our own boats. I got mine at a younger age than any of them, and that’s a risk. A so-so year early on and the whole idea is doomed. Your dad was a big help to me with that.”
So this is no joke. “Sticky, I’m sorry, but my dad doesn’t go around helping people out. What did he get out of it?”
At least, given his expression, he seems to understand her objection. He isn’t living in some alternative world. “I know what people say. Your old man’s a hard crust. But you ever deal with the folks in Dark Harbour? Some are good people, most are, but if it’s not a harpoon between your ribs from a few of the men living there, it’s a shiv. There’s lunatics in that crowd, in my opinion.”
“Maybe. But they might also have justification for their grievances. Some do. Anyway, what do you know about Dark Harbour? You’re a mainlander.”
“When I started with your father, I used to pick him up there.”
Again, similar to his remark about her father’s helpfulness, this makes no sense.
“Sticky, what are you talking about? My dad never lived in Dark Harbour.”
“Of course not. But he’d like to go there. Down to that beach. He had business with the people harvesting dulse, for one thing.”
“That’s true, but why would you pick him up? He could drive himself.”
“He liked to walk.”
“What? He didn’t.” This she cannot believe.
“Sometimes you came with him.”
“I did not. You must be thinking of someone else.”
“You were a babe in arms, Maddy. He liked to hike there. Across the back of Seven Days Work, over the Whistle, on along that escarpment. He’d take you on his back. You in a pack. Then the long descent on the trail to Dark Harbour, and after he did his business there, I’d pick him up and take both of you home by boat.”
Maddy goes quiet. She can remember something like that. Not as a babe in arms or as a toddler, but perhaps later? As a child? “Sticky, did you pick my dad and me up when I was a bit older?”
“Sure did. He loved his hikes. Loved bringing his little girl along, too.”
No, he didn’t, Maddy’s insisting to herself, but she questions how much she really knew about it back then. Perhaps less than Sticky McCarran does.
“So, you were like a water taxi for him? Is that right?”
This time, he takes a turn at being silent. Maddy holds her stomach as a bad moment passes, then suddenly she’s rapt, astounded by the steepness of their descent down a wave. She’d scream if she hadn’t taught herself not to do that, to bear through the fright and the wildness of the sea. This time when the hull slams hard, the impact jars her teeth and bones.
“Ooompf.” Maddy’s expiration vocalizes what the boat feels.
“Sorry,” Sticky says, but it’s no fault of his that they’re out on this night.
Perhaps he’s forgotten her question as the boat begins to rise again, but momentarily he adds, “In the early days, me not much more than a kid, and your dad becoming a successful man, from the fishery. He started with dulse when it was small potatoes.”
“It’s still small potatoes.”
Sticky isn’t willing to concede that. “He did well with it. He saw the potential, your old man. Him and me, we hauled the dulse that he reduced down to powder into the United States. Totally legal now. I’m not saying it was then.”
“Pulverized dulse isn’t alcohol. It’s not a drug. When was it not legal?”
“It’s an importation. Subject to taxes, rules and regulations. People ingest it. That’s a whole other book of forms you need to fill out, and a bunch of tests, not to mention pay the fees, the fines, and, like I said, the taxes.”
“So you smuggled dulse powder so my dad could avoid taxes.”
“He was just starting out and I had big payments on the boat. The risk was worth it back then.”
Maddy looks more closely at Sticky this time. Something makes sense to her. If someone on the island worked with her father to illegally smuggle dulse into the United States, then someone else on the island would have found out about it and reported him. Few would have had any compunction against betraying him. So he contracted with someone off-island to help keep an illicit enterprise secret.
“He arranged it for you, didn’t he?” Maddy asks him.
“Arranged?” McCarran asks in turn.
“Your boat loan. He got it for you.” That way, he could own him.
Sticky nods.
“It all worked out,” he says. “I did those shipments. Didn’t like it much, but bills got paid. A few good years and your dad’s powder business prospers, he can go legit, bring it aboveboard. My loan on the boat is under control, that puts my fishing life in half-decent shape. Until the cod ran out so now it’s lobster. A short season here, not like in the States. So I still run errands for him. I like your father. He’s been fair to me. He’s a good one.”
Run errands. She knows a euphemism when she hears one.
In her lifetime, no one has ever called her father good or fair within Maddy’s earshot. She just can’t believe this guy, or these other aspects about her dad. A hiker? He did something for recreation that he enjoyed? He took along his daughter? The news strikes her as incomprehensible, and coming while she is on her way to hear his last words before his death, she scarcely believes her own ears.
“My father,” she says. “You’re not describing him in terms I usually hear.”
Sticky spins the wheel to cross a wave. Hard to see in the dark, though, and they bury the bow again.
“I know what you’re saying,” he tells her. “I know how people talk about him. Maybe they have reason. He’s a hard crust. But with me, at sea, I think he was more himself. I tell people that, they doubt what I say. But when it was just the two of us out on the water, Mr. Orrock was a contented man. I’ll tell you what—always, he was fair and good to me.”
In a way, hearing these words about her father makes her angrier still. If he was capable of being fair and good, then why wasn’t he that way more often? Or once in a while at least? Or all the time? Or with her? In the past, she bolstered her morale by reminding herself that her father was not capable of normal, kind behavior. She is discovering now that that might not be true, which means that when he was being unkind, it was not merely a consequence of his nature, but a conscious choice. He made it his business to be unkind. That makes everything worse.
She won’t attempt to explain any of it to Sticky, and after their talk they brave the night in a silence that is rarely interrupted. For no reason that she can fathom, Maddy is not violently ill again. Instead, she suffers a different sort of misery.