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That night in the heavy calm before the wind rose Thomas Hudson sat in his chair and tried to read. The others were all in bed but he knew he could not sleep and he wanted to read until he was sleepy. He could not read and he thought about the day. He thought about it from the beginning until the end and it seemed as though all of his children except Tom had gone a long way away from him or he had gone away from them.

David had gone with Roger. He wanted David to get everything he could from Roger, who was as beautiful and sound in action as he was unbeautiful and unsound in his life and in his work. David was always a mystery to Thomas Hudson. He was a well-loved mystery. But Roger understood him better than his own father did. He was happy they did understand each other so well but tonight he felt lonely in some way about it.

Then he had not liked the way Andrew had behaved, although he knew Andrew was Andrew and a little boy and that it was unfair to judge him. He had done nothing bad and he had really behaved very well. But there was something about him that you could not trust.

What a miserable, selfish way to be thinking about people that you love, he thought. Why don’t you remember the day and not analyze it and tear it to pieces? Go to bed now, he told himself, and make yourself sleep. The hell with anything else. And pick up the rhythm of your life in the morning. You don’t have the boys for much longer. See how happy a time you can make for them. I’ve tried, he said to himself. I’ve tried truly and for Roger, too. And you have been very happy yourself, he told himself. Yes, of course. But something about today frightened me. Then he told himself: truly, there is something about every day to frighten you. Go on to bed and maybe you’ll sleep well. Remember you want them to be happy tomorrow.

A big southwest wind came up in the night and by daylight it was slowing with almost the force of a gale. The palms were bent with it and shutters slammed and papers blew and a surf was piling on the beach.

Roger was gone when Thomas Hudson came down to breakfast alone. The boys were still sleeping and he read his mail that had come from the mainland on the run-boat that brought ice, meat, fresh vegetables, gas, and other supplies once a week. It was blowing so hard he put a coffee cup on a letter to hold it when he laid it down on the table.

“Want me to shut the doors?” Joseph asked.

“No. Only if things start to break.”

“Mr. Roger gone walking on the beach,” Joseph said. “Headed up toward the end of the island.”

Thomas Hudson kept on reading his mail.

“Here’s the paper,” Joseph said. “I ironed her out.”

“Thank you, Joseph.”

“Mister Tom, is it true about the fish? What Eddy was telling me?”

“What did he say?”

“About how big he was and having him right up to the gaff.”

“It’s true.”

“God Almighty. If that run-boat hadn’t come so I had to stay in to carry ice and groceries I’d have been along. I’d have dove right in after him and gaffed him.”

“Eddy dove in,” Thomas Hudson said.

“He didn’t tell me,” Joseph said, subdued.

“I’d like some more coffee, please, Joseph, and another piece of papaw,” Thomas Hudson said. He was hungry and the wind gave him even more appetite. “Didn’t the run-boat bring any bacon?”

“I believe I can find some,” Joseph said. “You’re eating good this morning.”

“Ask Eddy to come in please.”

“Eddy went home to fix his eye.”

“What happened to his eye?”

“Somebody balled their fist in it.”

Thomas Hudson believed he knew why this might have happened.

“Is he hurt anywhere else?”

“He’s beat pretty bad,” Joseph said. “On account of people not believing him in different bars. People ain’t never going to believe him that story he tells. Certainly is a pity.”

“Where’d he fight?”

“Everywhere. Everywhere where they wouldn’t believe him. Nobody believe him yet. People took to not believing him late at night that didn’t know what it was about even just to get him to fight. He must have fought all the fighting men on the island. Tonight, sure as you eating breakfast, men’ll come up from Middle Key just to doubt his word. Couple real bad fighting men down at Middle Key now on that construction.”

“Mr. Roger better go out with him,” Thomas Hudson said.

“Oh boy,” Joseph’s face lighted up. “Tonight’s the night we got fun.”

Thomas Hudson drank the coffee and ate the cold papaw with fresh lime squeezed over it and four more strips of bacon that Joseph brought in.

“I see you were in an eating mood,” Joseph said. “When I see you like that, I want to make something out of it.”

“I eat plenty.”

“Sometimes,” Joseph said.

He came in with another cup of coffee and Thomas Hudson took it up to his desk to answer the two letters he needed to get off in the mail boat.

“Go up to Eddy’s house and get him to make out the list of what we need to order by the run-boat,” he said to Joseph. “Then bring it to me to check. Is there coffee for Mr. Roger?”

“He had his,” Joseph said.

Thomas Hudson finished the two letters at the work desk upstairs and Eddy came over with the list of supplies for the next week’s run-boat. Eddy looked bad enough. His eye had not responded to treatment and his mouth and cheeks were swollen. One ear was swollen, too. He had put Mercurochrome on his mouth where it was cut and the bright color made him look very untragic.

“I didn’t do any good last night,” he said. “I think everything is on here, Tom.”

“Why don’t you layoff today and go home and take it easy?”

“I feel worse at home,” he said.

“I’ll go to bed early tonight.”

“Don’t get in any more fights about that,” Thomas Hudson said. “It doesn’t do any good.”

“You’re talking to the right man,” Eddy said through the scarlet of his split and swollen lips. “I kept waiting for truth and right to win and then somebody new would knock truth and right right on its ass.”

“Joseph said you had a lot of them.”

“Till somebody took me home,” Eddy said. “Big-hearted Benny I guess it was. He and Constable probably saved me from getting hurt.”

“You aren’t hurt?”

“I hurt but I ain’t hurt. Hell, you ought to have been there, Tom.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t. Did anybody try to really hurt you?”

“I don’t think so. They were just proving to me I was wrong. Constable believed me.”

“Did he?”

“Yes sir. Him and Bobby. Only people believed me, all right. Constable said any man who hit me first he’d lock him up. Asked me this morning if there was anybody hit me first. I told him yes but I hit at them first. It was a bad night for truth and right, Tom. Bad night all right.”

“Do you really want to cook lunch?”

“Why not?” Eddy said. “We’ve got steaks on the run-boat. Real sirloin steak. You ought to see her. I figured to have it with mashed potatoes and gravy and some lima beans. We got that cabbage lettuce and fresh grapefruit for a salad. The boys would like a pie and we got canned loganberries makes a hell of a pie. We got ice cream from the run-boat to put on top of it. How’s that? I want to feed that goddamn David up.”

“What did you figure to do when you dove overboard with the gaff?”

“I was going to get the gaff hook into him right underneath his fin where it would kill him when he came taut on the rope and then get the hell away from there and back on board.”

“What did he look like underwater?”

“He was as wide as a dinghy, Tom. All purple and his eye looked as big as your hand is long. It was black and he was silver underneath and his sword was terrible to see. He just kept on going down, settling slow, and I couldn’t get down to him because that big haft on the gaff was too buoyant. I couldn’t sink with it. So it wasn’t any use.”

“Did he look at you?”

“I couldn’t tell. He just looked like he was there and nothing made any difference to him.”

“Do you think he was tired?”

“I think he was through. I think he’d decided to give up.”

“We’ll never see anything like that again.”

“No. Not in our lifetimes. And I know enough now not to try to make people believe it.”

“I’m going to paint a picture of it for David.”

“You make it just like it was then. Don’t make it comic like some of those comic ones you paint.”

“I’m going to paint it truer than a photograph.”

“That’s the way I like it when you paint.”

“It’s going to be awfully hard to paint the underwater part.”

“Will it be like that waterspout picture down at Bobby’s?”

“No. This will be different but I hope it will be better. I’m going to make sketches for it today.”

“I like that waterspout picture,” Eddy said. “Bobby, he’s crazy about it and he can make anybody believe there was that many waterspouts that time when they see the picture. But this will be a hell of a one to paint with the fish in the water.”

“I think I can do it,” Thomas Hudson said.

“You couldn’t paint him jumping, too, could you?”

“I think I can.”

“Paint him the two of them, Tom. Paint him jumping and then with Roger bringing him up on the leader and Davy in the chair and me on the stern. We can get photographs took of it.”

“I’ll start the sketches.”

“Anything you want to ask me,” Eddy said. “I’ll be in the kitchen. The boys still asleep?”

“All three of them.”

“Hell,” Eddy said. “I don’t give a damn about anything since that fish. But we’ve got to have a good meal.”

“I wish I had a leech for that eye.”

“Hell, I don’t give a damn about the eye. I can see out of it fine.”

“I’m going to let the boys sleep as long as they can.”

“Joe, he’ll tell me when they’re up and I’ll give them breakfast. If they wake up too late, I won’t give them too much so as not to spoil lunch. You didn’t see that piece of meat we got?”

“No.”

“Goddam she sure costs money but it’s beautiful meat, Tom. Nobody on this island has eaten meat like that in their whole lives. I wonder what those beef cattle look like that meat comes from.”

“They’re built right down close to the ground,” Thomas Hudson said. “And they’re almost as wide as they are long.”

“God, they must be fat,” Eddy said. “I’d like to see them alive sometime. Here nobody ever butchers a cow till just before it’s going to die from starving. The meat’s bitter. People here’d go crazy with meat like that we got. They wouldn’t know what it was. Probably make them sick.”

“I have to finish these letters,” Thomas Hudson said.

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

After he finished the mail, answering two other business letters that he had intended to put off until the next week’s boat, checking the list for the next week’s needs and writing a check for the week’s supplies plus the flat ten percent the government charged on all imports from the Mainland, Thomas Hudson walked down to the run-boat that was loading at the government wharf. The captain was taking orders from the islanders for supplies, dry goods, medicines, hardware, spare parts, and all the things that came into the island from the Mainland. The run-boat was loading live crawfish and conches and a deck load of conch shells and empty gasoline and Diesel oil drums and the islanders stood in line in the heavy wind waiting their turn in the cabin.

“Was everything all right, Tom?” Captain Ralph called out the cabin window to Thomas Hudson.

“Hey, get back out of this cabin, you boy, and come in your turn,” he said to a big Negro in a straw hat. “I had to substitute on a few things. How was the meat?”

“Eddy says it’s wonderful.”

“Good. Let me have those letters and the list. Blowing a gale outside. I want to get out over the bar on this next tide. Sorry I’m so busy.”

“See you next week, Ralph. Don’t let me hold you up. Thanks very much, boy.”

“I’ll try to have everything next week. Need any money?”

“No. I’m all right from last week.”

“Got plenty of it here if you want it. OK. Now, you, Lucius, what’s your trouble? What you spending money on now?”

Thomas Hudson walked back along the dock where the Negroes were laughing at what the wind was doing to the girls’ and the women’s cotton dresses and then up the coral road to the Ponce de León.

“Tom,” Mr. Bobby said. “Come in and sit down. By God where’ve you been? We’re just swept out and she’s officially open. Come on and have the best one of the day.”

“It’s pretty early.”

“Nonsense. That’s good imported beer. We got Dog’s Head ale too.” He reached into a tub of ice, opened a bottle of Pilsner, and handed it to Thomas Hudson. “You don’t want a glass, do you? Put that down and then decide if you want a drink or not.”

“I won’t work then.”

“Who gives a damn? You work too much as it is. You got a duty to yourself, Tom. Your one and only life. You can’t just paint all the time.”

“We were in the boat yesterday and I didn’t work.” Thomas Hudson was looking at the big canvas of the waterspouts that hung on the wall at the end of the bar. It was a good painting, Thomas Hudson thought. As good as he could do as of today, he thought.

“I got to hang her higher,” Bobby said. “Some gentleman got excited last night and tried to climb into the skiff. I told him it would cost him ten thousand dollars if he put his foot through her. Constable told him the same. Constable’s got an idea for one he wants you to paint to hang in his home.”

“What is it?”

“Constable wouldn’t say. Just that he had a very valuable idea he had intention to discuss with you.”

Thomas Hudson was looking at the canvas closely. It showed certain signs of wear.

“By God, she sure stands up,” Bobby said proudly. “The other night a gentleman let out a shout and threw a full mug of beer at the column of one of the waterspouts trying to break it down. You wouldn’t have known she’d ever been hit. Never dented her. Beer run off her like water. By God, Tom, you sure painted her solid.”

“She’ll only take about so much though.”

“By God,” said Bobby. “I ain’t seen nothing faze her yet. But I’m going to hang her higher just the same. That gentleman last night worried me.”

He handed Thomas Hudson another bottle of the ice-cold Pilsner.

“Tom, I want to tell you how sorry I am about the fish. I know Eddy since we were boys and I never heard him lie. About anything important, I mean. I mean if you asked him to tell you something true.”

“It was a hell of a thing. I’m not going to tell anybody about it.”

“That’s the right way,” Bobby said. “I just wanted you to know how sorry I was. Why don’t you finish that beer and have a drink? We don’t want to start feeling sad this early. What would make you feel good?”

“I feel good enough. I’m going to work this afternoon and I don’t want to get logy.”

“Oh well, if I can’t break you out maybe somebody will come in that I can. Look at that damn yacht. She must have taken a beating coming across with that shallow draft.”

Thomas Hudson looked out the open door and saw the handsome, white, houseboat type craft coming up the channel. She was one of the type that chartered out of a Mainland port to go down through the Florida Keys and on a day such as yesterday, calm and flat, she could have crossed the Gulf Stream without incident. But today she must have taken a beating with her shallow draft and so much superstructure. Thomas Hudson wondered that she had been able to come in over the bar with the sea that was running.

The houseboat ran up the harbor a little further to anchor and Thomas Hudson and Bobby watched her from the doorway, all white and brass and everyone that showed on her in whites.

“Customers,” Mr. Bobby said. “Hope they’re nice people. We haven’t had a full-sized yacht in here since the tuna run was over.”

“Who is she?”

“I never seen her before. Pretty boat, all right. Certainly not built for the Gulf, though.”

“She probably left at midnight when it was calm and this hit her on the way over.”

“That’s about it,” Bobby said. “Must have been some rolling and some crashing. It’s really blowing. Well, we’ll see who they are shortly. Tom, let me make you something, boy. You make me nervous not drinking.”

“All right. I’ll have a gin and tonic.”

“No tonic water. Joe took the last case up to the house.”

“A whisky sour then.”

“With Irish whisky and no sugar,” Bobby said. “Three of them. Here comes Roger.” Thomas Hudson saw him through the open door.

Roger came in. He was barefooted, wore a faded pair of dungarees, and an old striped fisherman’s shirt that was shrunken from washings. You could see the back muscles move under it as he leaned forward and put his arms on the bar. In the dim light of Bobby’s, his skin showed very dark and his hair was salt-and sun-streaked.

“They’re still sleeping,” he said to Thomas Hudson. “Somebody beat up Eddy. Did you see?”

“He was having fights all last night,” Bobby told him. “They didn’t amount to anything.”

“I don’t like things to happen to Eddy,” Roger said.

“Wasn’t anything bad, Roger,” Bobby assured him. “He was drinking and fighting people who wouldn’t believe him. Nobody did anything wrong to him.”

“I feel bad about David,” Roger said to Thomas Hudson.

“We shouldn’t have ever let him do it.”

“He’s probably all right,” Thomas Hudson said. “He was sleeping well. But it was my responsibility. I was the one to call it off.”

“No. You trusted me.”

“The father has the responsibility,” Thomas Hudson said. “And I turned it over to you when I had no right to. It isn’t anything to delegate.”

“But I took it,” Roger said. “I didn’t think it was harming him. Neither did Eddy.”

“I know,” Thomas Hudson said. “I didn’t think it was either. I thought something else was at stake.”

“So did I,” Roger said. “But now I feel selfish and guilty as hell.”

“I’m his father,” Thomas Hudson said. “It was my fault.”

“Damn bad thing about that fish,” Bobby said, handing them the whisky sours and taking one himself. “Let’s drink to a bigger one.”

“No,” Roger said. “I don’t want to ever see a bigger one.”

“What’s the matter with you, Roger?” Bobby asked.

“Nothing,” Roger said.

“I’m going to paint a couple of pictures of him for David.”

“That’s wonderful. Do you think you can get it?”

“With luck, maybe. I can see it and I think I know how to do it.”

“You can do it all right. You can do anything. I wonder who’s on the yacht?”

“Look, Roger, you’ve been walking your remorse all over the island—”

“Barefooted,” he said.

“I just brought mine down here by way of Captain Ralph’s run-boat.”

“I couldn’t walk mine out and I’m certainly not going to try to drink it out,” Roger said. “This is a mighty nice drink though, Bobby.”

“Yes sir,” Bobby said. “I’ll make you another one. Get that old remorse on the run.”

“I had no business gambling with a kid,” Roger said. “Somebody else’s boy.”

“It depends on what you were gambling for.”

“No, it doesn’t. You shouldn’t gamble with kids.”

“I know. I know what I was gambling for. It wasn’t a fish, either.”

“Sure,” Roger said. “But it was the one you didn’t need to do it to. The one you didn’t need to ever let anything like that happen to.”

“He’ll be fine when he wakes up. You’ll see. He’s a very intact boy.”

“He’s my goddamnned hero,” Roger said.

“That’s a damned sight better than when you used to be your own goddamnned hero.”

“Isn’t it?” Roger said. “He’s yours, too.”

“I know it,” Thomas Hudson said. “He’s good for both of us.”

“Roger,” Mr. Bobby said. “Are you and Tom any sort of kin?”

“Why?”

“I thought you were. You don’t look too different.”

“Thanks,” Thomas Hudson said. “Thank him yourself, Roger.”

“Thank you very much, Bobby,” Roger said. “Do you really think I look like this combination man and painter?”

“You look like quarter brothers and the boys look like both of you.”

“We’re no kin,” Thomas Hudson said. “We just used to live in the same town and make some of the same mistakes.”

“Well, the hell with it,” Mister Bobby said. “Drink up and quit all this remorse talk. It don’t sound good this time of day in a bar. I got remorse from Negroes, mates on charter boats, cooks off yachts, millionaires and their wives, big rum runners, grocery store people, one-eyed men off turtle boats, sons of bitches, anybody. Don’t let’s have no morning remorse. A big wind is the time to drink. We’re through with remorse. That remorse is old stuff anyway. Since they got the radio everybody just listens to the BBC. There ain’t no time and no room for remorse.”

“Do you listen to it, Bobby?”

“Just to Big Ben. The rest of it makes me restless.”

“Bobby,” Roger said. “You’re a great and good man.”

“Neither. But I’m certainly pleased to see you looking more cheerful.”

“I am,” said Roger. “What sort of people do you think we’ll get off that yacht?”

“Customers,” said Bobby. “Let’s drink one more so I’ll feel like serving them, however they are.”

While Bobby was squeezing the limes and making the drinks Roger said to Thomas Hudson, “I didn’t mean to be wet about Davy.”

“You weren’t.”

“What I meant was. Oh hell, I’ll try to work it out simply. That was a sound crack you made about when I was my own hero.”

“I’ve got no business making cracks.”

“You have as far as I’m concerned. The trouble is there hasn’t been anything in life that was simple for such a damn long time and I try to make it simple all the time.”

“You’re going to write straight and simple and good now. That’s the start.”

“What if I’m not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?”

“Write how you are but make it straight.”

“I’ve got to try to understand it better, Tom.”

“You are. Remember last time I saw you before this summer was in New York with that cigarette-butt bitch.”

“She killed herself,” Roger said.

“When?”

“While I was up in the hills. Before I went on to the Coast and wrote that picture.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas Hudson said.

“She was headed for it all the time,” Roger said. “I‘m glad I stepped out in time.”

“You wouldn’t ever do that.”

“I don’t know,” Roger said. “I’ve seen it look very logical.”

“One reason you wouldn’t do it is because it would be a hell of an example for the boys. How would Dave feel?”

“He’d probably understand. Anyway when you get into that business that far you don’t think much about examples.”

“Now you are talking wet.”

Bobby pushed over the drinks. “Roger, you talk that kind of stuff you get even me depressed. I’m paid to listen to anything people say. But I don’t want to hear my friends talk that way. Roger, you stop it.”

“I’ve stopped it.”

“Good,” Bobby said. “Drink up. We had a gentleman here from New York lived down at the Inn and he used to come here and drink most of the day. All he used to talk about was how he was going to kill himself. Made everybody nervous half the winter. Constable warned him it was an illegal act. I tried to get Constable to warn him that talking about it was an illegal act. But Constable said he’d have to get an opinion on that from Nassau. After a while people sort of got used to his project and then a lot of the drinkers started siding with him. Especially one day he was talking to Big Harry and he told Big Harry he was thinking of killing himself and he wanted to take somebody with him.

“‘I’m your man,’ Big Harry told him. ‘I’m who you’ve been looking for.’ So then Big Harry tries to encourage him that they should go to New York City and really pitch one and stay drunk until they couldn’t stand it and then jump off of the highest part of the city straight into oblivion. I think Big Harry figured oblivion was some sort of a suburb. Probably an Irish neighborhood.

“Well, the suicide gentleman took kindly to this idea and they’d talk it over every day. Others tried to get in on it and proposed they form an excursion of death seekers and just go as far as Nassau for the preliminaries. But Big Harry, he held out for New York City and finally he confided to the suicide gentleman that he couldn’t stand this life no longer and he was ready to go.

“Big Harry, he had to go out for a couple days crawfishing on a order he had from Captain Ralph and while he was gone the suicide gentleman took to drinking too much. Then he’d take some kind of ammonia from up north that would seem to sober him up and he’d come down to drink here again. But it was accumulating in him some way.

“We all called him Suicides by then so I said to him, ‘Suicides, you better layoff or you’ll never live to reach oblivion.’ ‘I’m bound for it now,’ he says. ‘I’m en route. I’m headed for it. Take the money for these drinks. I’ve made my dread decision.’

“‘Here’s your change,’ I said to him.

“‘I don’t want no change. Keep it for Big Harry so he can have a drink before he joins me.’

“So he goes out in a rush and he dives off of Johnny Black’s dock into the channel with the tide going out and it’s dark and no moon and nobody sees him any more until he washes up on the point in two days. Everybody looked for him good that night, too. I figured he must have struck his head on some old concrete and went out with the tide. Big Harry come in and he mourned him until the change was all drunk up. It was change from a twenty-dollar bill too. Then Big Harry said to me, ‘You know, Bobby, I think old Suicides was crazy.’ He was right, too, because when his family sent for him the man who came explained to Commissioner old Suicides had suffered from a thing called Mechanic’s Depressive. You never had that, did you, Roger?”

“No,” said Roger. “And now I think I never will.”

“That’s the stuff,” Mr. Bobby said. “And don’t you ever fool with that old oblivion stuff.”

“Fuck oblivion,” said Roger.