The mortician, a guy named Gene Lechtenheimer, showed up at eight the next morning. Foregoing the casket entirely, Ivan, wrapped like a mummy, was loaded onto the swim platform. Doris showed up a half hour later dressed in widow weeds complete with a black veil. She was mightily upset that Ivan wasn’t going to share her berth and she put up quite a fuss until Ernie calmed her down. My regret meter was tilting toward red.
We departed on schedule. Under full sail with clear skies and fair winds, we made Montauk at 1345 hours and headed southwest for the Atlantic Canyon, a distance of about sixty nautical miles. I pinned the ETA at 0400 hours the next morning. Doris slept most of the way in the aft quarters which included a fully appointed head. Ernie took care of Doris like she was a princess. Curmudgeon that he was, his softer side overflowed with tenderness. The Atlantic, balmy winds with soft swells, turned That Good Night into a cradle; a few lullabies and I could have slept through the entire passage. As it was, Ernie and I set up a two-hour watch, so I did manage to get a few hours of sleep. Commercial traffic was light. We spotted one freighter but it was far enough off to pose any threat. It was a great sail under starry skies with one dramatic exception.
I had relieved Ernie for the 0100 watch. He went down below to check on Doris while I curled up to the helm. A few minutes later, Ernie was back in the cockpit.
“We have a slight problem,” he said much too calmly.
“What now!”
“Doris,” he responded quietly. “She’s dead.”
“Doris is dead?”
“Dead. Broken heart.”
I sat dumbfounded. Where the hell was I, in the Twilight Zone? Was I Charon ferrying the dead? One on the swim platform, another down below. My gorgeous vessel was becoming a transport to the great beyond.
“We need to make a decision,” Ernie said.
“My decision is that I screwed up making this trip in the first place.”
“Let’s not get carried away. Why don’t we just bury Doris along with Ivan? Seems pretty simple to me.”
“Simple,” I protested. “What the hell is so simple about burying two bodies at sea? And how do we explain the disappearance of Doris? We get back to port and no Doris. Explain that to her family!”
“What’s to explain? She died, we buried her. That’s that. Happens all the time.”
“All the time! Yeah, who cares if people go sailing and come back less one or two? The Coast Guard understands those kinds of things. Oh, they died and we dumped them overboard. ‘Good for you,’ they say. What, do you expect to get a medal for this? We could have murdered the old lady. Maybe you did. Or she could have fallen overboard. Look, I’m the captain of this boat and what happens on it, everything that happens on it, is my responsibility. Somebody’s going to ask questions.”
“Of course there’ll be an inquest. We stand before a judge, tell him what happened, and that’s that. No big deal other than keeping you around for a few more days.”
“An inquest? Damn it Ernie, that mean the Coast Guard gets involved!”
“Maybe, maybe not. I’ve never been in this situation before. But on land, when someone dies, the court usually likes to know why. In this case, it’s a ninety-two year old in ill health. They’ll understand.”
“Understand! You know what the Coast Guard will understand? They’ll want to know how I allowed a sick old woman to get on my boat in the first place. They’ll inspect the vessel, examine my ships papers, question my judgment, and now that they’re a part of Homeland Security, probably lay a charge of espionage on me.”
Ernie was as cool as could be. He placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Take it easy, Charlie. Look, I’ve been taking care of Doris for fifty years. Her chart will show that her days were numbered. The lady’s vitals were battling each other for any milliliter of oxygen they could get. You name it and it was in failure: kidneys, liver, heart, lungs. Something had to give.”
“So what about family? I guess they’ll just thank us for taking sick old Mom out for a nice sail so she could die at sea. Are you nuts?”
“Charlie, calm down. There is no family. No friends. No church. I’m it. I’m the executor of the estate. Everything goes to the Claremont Elementary School. There’s nothing to worry about here.”
“You knew this, didn’t you? That Doris was going to kick the bucket on this trip and you didn’t tell me. Maybe you did a Kevorkian. Jesus, Ernie, you put my whole world right between a rock and a hard place. There are things that you don’t know.”
“Care to explain?”
We sat down in the cockpit facing each other. For the next half hour, I told Ernie about escaping Sunset, leasing the yacht. Being tracked by an investigator. That any inquiry was going to sink my plans like a stone in water. That I wished to God almighty that my anchor never found bottom in West Harbor. That he was an unmitigated prick that used me.
“Let me think,” Ernie said, not buffeted at all by my tirade. He stood and left the cockpit to go forward. I watched him saunter along the darkened deck. None of this was any good. When people die, it’s all about inquests, post mortems, wakes, funerals, caskets, burials, flowers, processions. When people died at Sunset, more people went to the funeral than ever came to the home to visit. The vessel of death overflows with guilt. When Lori died, people came out of the woodwork. Some I never met before. Where were they when she needed them? I was convinced that coming back without Doris would raise a storm of accusations. My days of sailing bliss were in great jeopardy.
That Good Night sliced through the dark, leaving a hissing sound in its wake. The chart plotter’s updated ETA had us arriving at the Atlantic Canyon at 0338 hours, an hour and a half to go. Ernie came back to the cockpit. “You want some coffee?” he asked. I nodded. He went below and soon returned with two steaming mugs.
“Sorry about all this,” he said. “I promise that I didn’t plan Doris’s demise. I guess I should have left her back in town.”
“Yeah, that would have been good,” I said.
“But Charlie, what would have happened to her? I mean, let’s get real here. She’d have been like those folks in the nursing home you left behind. I’ve known these two for a lot of years and to tell you the truth, while I’m sorry about all the crap this lays on your shoulders, I’m glad she’ll be joining Ivan. They had been married for sixty-three years. Except for Ivan’s wartime service, they were apart for maybe ten minutes. Joined at the hip is an apt description. They ran a candy shop in West Harbor where they lived above the store. No children, no family, no relatives. They shut down the store only after Ivan could no longer make it down the steps to open up. You know what Doris’s last words were?”
I shook my head.
“She asked me if she could kiss Ivan goodnight. To put your mind at ease, Doris just died. I didn’t do anything to hasten it and I didn’t get in the way. She just died.”
The depth meter stopped registering after five-hundred feet. We had reached the Atlantic Canyon. Thankfully, with the exception of a gentle swell, the sea was calm. Doris couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. We wrapped a bed sheet around her clothed body then spiral bound the sheet with a good length of line. I on one end and Ernie on the other, we struggled getting Doris up the companionway steps. Still pliable, she was nearly bent in half by the time we got her to the cockpit. From there, it was a matter of dragging the poor woman up onto the aft deck. It was my job to jump down onto the swim platform where Ivan was secured. We slid Doris off the aft deck, plopping her down next to Ivan.
“How about some weight, otherwise won’t she just float?” I asked.
“Good point” Ernie responded. “Have any old chain on board?”
“No, I do not. I do have about forty feet of chain on my lunch hook. Never been used.”
“That’ll have to do,” Ernie said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No choice, Ernie. It’s just chain.”
After busying ourselves for a half hour unshackling the chain from the small anchor and wrapping it tightly around Doris, she was ready to join Ivan for burial.
Bowing our heads, Ernie mumbled something under his breath that I couldn’t understand except for the words commit and deep. With that we rolled both bodies off the platform into the sea where they disappeared forever.
The sail back to West Harbor was quiet and uneventful. On watch, I sat thinking about how death visits us all. When you’re young, it’s weddings and baptisms and birthday parties, anniversaries and celebrating the Red Sox or whatever team strikes your fancy. With age, it’s wakes, funerals, and burials. Before Lori died, we had been to quite a few. Same old, same old: little kids darting around with death so remote that they couldn’t care less. Grieving family members sniffling, wiping tears. Old people thinking about how it’s going to be for them. Lori and I had planned our funerals down to the last detail. We laughed at how similar it was to planning our wedding. What to wear, selecting the pallbearers, the words to engrave on the tombstone, whether cremation was an option. Sometime during our sixties, we bought a double plot in Quiet Hills Cemetery, plopping down a good bit of money for perpetual care. Isn’t that foolish? Making sure that our grave site would have its grass manicured, flowers on Memorial Day. We also paid a good chunk of money for a hunk of granite engraved by some machine. Crazy, huh? Lori didn’t think so and God bless her soul, there she is today, resting peacefully in a dark box six feet underground. Her particulars are engraved on the left side of the stone: birth and death dates, as if what happened between those years were as common as dust. Is it that everyone in our overloaded cemeteries has essentially lived the same life over and over again? On my and Lori’s stone, the right side has my name, my birth date and an empty space for the death date. So, what do I do with that? Maybe have them engrave lost at sea. I think not. Perhaps went off to sea. Maybe mention that I liked Bach or was a nut about baking the perfect molasses cookie. I’m sure as hell not going to make my way back to Northern New York to die. And I can’t just die alone drifting around the Atlantic on a ghost ship, Ernie’s right about that. A bit of a quandary.
As Ernie had suggested, the inquest was five minutes of reaffirming the death certificate, accepting Ernie as the executor. Case closed. The Coast Guard never entered the picture.
Leaving the courthouse, I asked Ernie “Why the Claremont Elementary School?”
“That’s where they met,” he answered. “Ivan and Doris fell in love in the fifth grade.”