I SLEPT with the loaded riot gun under my bed for a week. Nothing happened. No more visitors, no threats of any kind. I tucked the shotgun away into my clothing cupboard and left it unloaded, which would not have pleased Mark but made me more comfortable. I continued to see light green Volkswagens at every turn. I even saw the one with the OOP number plate once, parked in front of a cinema in Patrick Street, in Cork. If I hadn’t been in a hurry to get Connie Lydon into bed at the time, I might have hung around until the movie let out to see who was the driver.
In spite of my loving Annie from afar, as it were, and lusting for Jane Berkeley from an even greater distance, I was attracted to Connie in a way that endured. She was always fresh and new to me whether we were at a hooley, in the tub together, or sailing Toscana in Cork Harbour on a Sunday afternoon. Although I had never done anything as rash as to profess love, she seemed happy and made no demands for declarations, to my relief. Pressed into a corner, I probably would have told her anything she wanted to hear; I was much happier seeing her than not.
We continued to sail, even as the weather turned cooler, then cold, and ever wetter. It rains a lot in Ireland, almost any time of year, but in the late autumn it gets serious. We’d slip the mooring in front of the cottage, motor down past the Royal Cork Yacht Club, and sail idly around the big harbor, tying up at Dirty Murphy’s, a pub on the eastern shore, and have a Guinness in front of a turf fire in the smoky lounge bar. Sometimes Connie would cook dinner aboard, and we would make love in the forepeak double berth and not pick up our mooring until nearly midnight, having slipped past the moored yachts at the club on our way upriver.
Work on the yacht continued steadily. By mid-November we were ready to turn the hull, which had been constructed upside-down, and begin work on the interior structure and the decking. The job went surprisingly quickly. We rigged a chain hoist from an overhead support system to one side of the hull, hauled it as far upright as we dared without having it fall on top of us, then braced it, took the chain hoist to eyes set in the wooden keel and, while everybody stood bracing with four-by-fours, let down until the hull was suspended upright from the chains, hanging just over the lead keel, which had been ordered from England. We then lowered the hull gently until the stainless steel keelbolts mated with the holes in the wooden keel and then screwed down the nuts tightly. The hull was left resting on its lead keel, which held it some six feet off the floor, and the keel, in turn, rested on a sturdy little rail car, on which it would roll to the water at launching time. The chain hoist would not be powerful enough to lift the whole boat when it was completed, so the car had to be in place early. The hull was then braced all round with four-by-fours, which were chocked, and, finally, the chain lift was unhooked. The hull stood gleaming with its seven skins of varnish, three more still to come when the entire boat was nearer completion.
“Jesus,” Mark said. “She begins to look like a yacht, doesn’t she?” It was the first time he had referred to the hull as ‘she.’ “
“Have you decided on a name, yet, Mark?” I asked. We had once made a list of possibilities, but Mark had ignored it, saying that the proper name would emerge at the proper moment.
Mark grinned. “She’s going to cost 150,000 pounds sterling before she’s all done. I think I’ll call her Expensive.”
I laughed. “You’ll certainly have the sympathy of every boat owner in the world.”
The entire crew, except for Denny O’Donnell, stood and looked at her in awe for a moment. She was the largest vessel to have been built at Cork Harbour Boatyard: sixty feet in length, fourteen feet of beam, and eight and a half feet of draft. Denny O’Donnell was already out of the building before anyone else stirred. His twin looked sorrowfully after him. The brothers did not seem to be getting on well lately. Donal was now arriving in his own car, and rumor had it that he had moved out of his lodgings with Denny and found a place of his own. Denny had returned to his usual sour disposition, and Donal, while still friendly, seemed somehow detached.
Mark and I were the last to leave the yard, and it was nearly seven when we arrived home, exhausted. “I thought you two would never show,” Annie said. She was wearing a dress, a rare event. “Peter-Patrick and Joan Coolmore have invited us all to dinner at the Royal Cork, and I accepted for us. We’re due there at seven-thirty. Mark and I exchanged a glance. We were careful not to rile her these days, after her earlier explosion. Annie continued, “Mark, you have the tub first, and you and I will go ahead. Willie can join us when he’s got himself together.” We did as we were told.
They had been gone half an hour before I was bathed and dressed, and as I tied my necktie, a sudden memory hit me. Mark had left the building shed first and I had come after him, carrying an armful of wood scraps that we burned in the cottage fireplace. I had not gone back to lock the shed door. The padlock had been left hanging open on the hasp, and I would have to go and lock it before joining the Coolmores at the yacht club. Cursing my carelessness, I raced over the back roads to the boatyard and skidded to a halt in a spray of gravel before the shed door. The wind was getting up a bit and the skies were threatening; a nearly full moon lit the big shed intermittently as clouds scuddered past it. The door was wide open, banging against the shed as the wind whipped it back and forth. As I was about to close it I glanced inside the shed and noticed that the light in Finbar’s office was on. I must have forgotten that, too, I thought; I stepped inside, secured the banging door, and walked toward the office. On the other side of the chocked-up yacht, a rat ran at the sound of my footsteps, making little scraping noises on the cement floor. Then I heard another, different sound that stopped me in my tracks.
Over the howl of the wind around the tin shed, I heard it again: a creaking of timber under strain. I looked over at the hull, its size seemingly increased by its confines, and thought just for a moment that I saw it move. That was absurd, of course; it was carefully chocked in place. I jerked as I might have if struck by lightning; yet another sound caused this—the sound of a four-by-four piece of timber striking concrete and bouncing. By the time the second four-by-four struck the floor I was moving toward the hull; when the third one fell, I was running. Now the sound was of timber scraping across cement as the huge hull began to lean toward me. All around the hull, four by fours were falling as they came loose; the timber nearest me maintained contact with the hull at its center, but the other end of it slid slowly, noisily across the concrete floor.
Stupidly, I flung myself at it as if tackling a running back head on. Miraculously, it stopped sliding. Pushing hard against the timber with my shoulder I looked about me; the hull was leaning toward me, hovering over me at an angle of about thirty degrees off the vertical; all of the seven other four-by-fours supporting it had fallen and lay scattered about; the only thing keeping the hull from crashing to the concrete floor was the single timber to which I clung. And, I quickly discovered when I moved, all that was holding the timber in place was my weight.
I tried jamming it further into place, but every time I took any weight off it, the timber’s end slid further along the floor away from the hull, and the hull leaned even further toward me. It was absurd. A single timber, fortuitously placed at exactly the right spot along the hull’s length, was all that kept the hull from falling. If it had been placed a foot differently in either direction, the unreinforced hull would have spun on its keel and crashed to the concrete floor, ruining weeks, months of work. I saw that if I released the timber now, this would still happen, and moreover, the bloody thing would fall on me.
I looked around for some way of shoring up the hull so that I could move. Another of the four by fours was no more than five feet from me. I reached out with a toe in an attempt to drag it toward me. At the shift in my weight, the timber to which I clung slid a bit more, and the whole hull threatened again to fall. That was clearly no good. I tried to think of some way to call for help; the telephone was thirty feet away on Finbar’s desk. No good, either. There was no point in shouting, because the shed was a hundred yards from the road. Even a passer-by on foot would not hear me, what with the wind putting up such a howl. It slowly became clear to me that I was stuck in this ridiculous position until help arrived or the hull crashed down on top of me, whichever came first.
I lay on top of the timber and wedged a toe under its tip. That allowed me to relax one leg a bit, but I had to push hard with the other leg to keep the pressure on the timber. I looked at my watch. There was no watch. In my rush to dress and get to the Royal Cork I had forgotten to wear it. I tried to figure out what time it was. It had been almost 7:30 when Mark and Annie had left the cottage; I was about half an hour behind them. It took ten or twelve minutes to drive to the yard, and I had been there, what, all of five minutes? They wouldn’t even miss me until they had had a couple of drinks and were getting hungry, say about 8:30, then they would call the cottage to see if I had left. When they got no answer they would assume I was on the way and would be there momentarily. When I didn’t show, then what?
The leg with which I was pushing was starting to get very tired. By pushing extra hard on the timber, I was able to get my other toe under it and shift the load to my other leg. I had to do this about every five minutes, I reckoned, in order to keep from getting leg cramps. How had this happened? We had chocked all the timbers, hammering them in firmly with a sledge. Of course, if one slipped, then the opposite one might, too, with less pressure on it. But all of them? Could there have been some sort of chain reaction? Or was that really a rat I’d heard when I walked into the shed?
Time passed. The telephone suddenly rang, the extra-loud bell that Finbar had rigged cutting over the howl of the wind. I wished to God that I could answer it. It rang twelve times before it stopped. It had to be Mark, and when he got no reply he’d assume that I hadn’t gone to the boatyard. It began to sink in that no help would come before morning, when Finbar or Mark arrived. My legs were getting tired, I was having to switch about every three minutes. I knew I would not be able to hold out for another ten or eleven hours. I craned my neck and looked up at the hull. I knew, too, that I could not let go of the timber and get out of the way fast enough before the hull fell on me. I was stuck, and as well as being tired, I was starting to get scared.
A cramp started to creep into my left leg, which was pushing to keep the pressure on the timber. I made the switch, and almost immediately my right leg began to cramp, too. I was going to have to let go and try to get out of the way; maybe I could dive under the hull and get clear near the keel, but if the lead keel hit me, that would be even worse than being struck by the hull, which, without all its interior supports, might at least give a little. Changing back to my left leg, I measured the distance; six or seven feet to get clear, I reckoned. God, I thought, tomorrow morning they’re going to find me under the smashed hull, squashed like a bug. Poor Mark, he was going to lose three, four months on rebuilding. I gathered myself for the dive, taking deep breaths; I would go on three. One … two …
There was a loud, metallic clank from across the shed. Someone had slid back the iron bolt that fastened the door. The door creaked open, and I heard a footstep on the cement floor.
“Mark?” I called out. There was no reply. My leg was cramping badly, trembling with fatigue; I was not sure I could switch to the other leg, now, without losing the timber, everything. Footsteps walked slowly toward me; I couldn’t see over my shoulder.
“And what would you be doing, Willie?” a voice asked. I knew the voice.
“For Christ’s sake, get some weight on this with me! I’m about to lose it!”
A figure appeared in the corner of my eye. I heard the scrape of another timber on the concrete, heard it bump against the hull. “Hang on,” the voice said. He walked a few steps away and came back. I could feel the shock through the hull and down my timber as he pounded the other four-by-four into place with the sledgehammer. “Hang on another minute,” he said, then repeated the process on the other side of me. “Okay, relax.”
I let go of the timber and sank to my knees, panting. “You all right?” he asked, taking my arm. “Better get out from under there in case it goes.” He helped me move a few steps away. My legs were both cramped up, and I could not walk properly. I sat back and looked into his face for the first time, trying to relax.
“Denny?” Now I was worried again.
He shook his head. “Donal.”
I heaved a great sigh. “Boy, am I glad to see you.”
“What happened? How did you get into that fix?”
I told him. He didn’t seem surprised. “What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“What are you both doing here?” The voice made us both jump. Mark stood just inside the door; as he walked toward us I saw the .45 automatic pistol in his hand, dangling at his side.
Donal recovered first. “I was passing and saw Willie’s car. I found him holding that up, all by himself,” he said, pointing at the hull.
“Jesus,” Mark said, “Let’s get some more support in there.” I tried to get up but couldn’t. Mark and Donal quickly picked up the other timbers and jammed them into place. When the hull was secure, Mark put a ladder against it, climbed in, hooked the chain lift to the inside of the hull and took up the slack on the chain. “That’ll hold it till morning when the full crew gets in. We’ll have to get it vertical again, then rechock it and hammer the chocks to the concrete with spikes.” He checked to see that the little rail car on which the hull rested was still safely chocked. “Now, what the hell happened?”
I told my story again while rubbing my legs. “It’s damn lucky you came by when you did, Donal. What made you stop?”
“Dunno. Just a feeling something was wrong, I guess.”
Mark nodded. “I had the same feeling.”
Donal didn’t ask Mark why he was carrying a gun. He seemed to think it perfectly normal.