A calming spell of defeat overtook him as he lay on his back looking up at the sail as it passed the stars. Though he recognized them all, he was somewhat absorbed as they flowed in one side of the sail and out the other with a purpose — though not his, of course; he had no purpose. He was not purpose, he was pulp. He cast about for consolation, grimly congratulating himself for being childless. But he remembered that his mestizos trusted him. Of course, they were grateful to anyone who learned their language in this coldhearted nation. But more. He worked beside them, made sure they were paid, while the cracker often inclined to contrive withholdings. The mestizos knew Errol was not so devious, and a working alcoholic appealed to their sense of shared desperation and defensible self-destruction. Indeed, they shook their heads in sympathy when he came to the groves sick, picked things up when he dropped them, carried his ladder. In the depths of his misery, this was all Errol could find, but under the circumstances it seemed quite a lot. Perhaps he was beginning to turn the corner, but first there was more vomiting to be done and the last of the flying fish went over the side. Miguel, Delfin, Juan, Machado, Estevez, Antonio, were their names. Good men.
He slept, but lacked the humanity to dream.
The yawl sailed on into day without his attendance. For hours the decks shone bright with dew and then dried as the sun arose. The telltale streamed from the masthead in the freshening breeze and the water was no longer purple as she had crossed the stream; now she pulled her thin seam of wake across the blue water of a new sea, one that grew steadily paler until the yawl’s own speeding shadow on the bottom preceded her, then rose to meet her when she ran aground.
Unavailing curses poured from the companionway as Errol emerged to view his misfortune. The jib, the main, and the mizzen displayed their same wind-filled curves and emphasized the sheer peculiarity of the boat’s lack of motion. Looking in every direction, he could see only more bars and the dark shapes of coral heads, any one of which would have sunk the boat. Noon was rapidly approaching, and he dug out his sextant to take a sight of the sun, though he mirthlessly noted the irony of having two pieces of information, latitude and the proximity of the bottom.
The sight reduction from his battered book of tables gave him to conclude that he was somewhere in the western Bahamas. He should pride himself on his effortless crossing of the stream, he thought sardonically. Once he’d accepted that he was immobile, he felt an unexpected wave of security at the calm translucent waters around him, the coral gardens that were pretty shadows beneath them, and he marveled at having sailed so far into this gallery before going aground on forgiving sand. The full moon was a few days away. If he was not too surely embedded on this bar, he had an excellent chance of floating free on a spring tide. He had enough food and seemed to exult in this absence of choices; he explored the idea that he was content to be stuck.
The days began to pass, each more peaceful than the last. He had begun to think of his boat as an island, and in fact he could walk all around it or swim among the coral heads where clouds of pretty reef fish rose and fell with him in the gentle wash. He caught lobsters and boiled them in salt water while Radio Havana played from the cabin. He stretched out in the cockpit and read Frantz Fanon, experiencing pleasant indignation. After the first night, he had dragged a mattress from atop the quarter berth into the cockpit, and he slept there, watching expectantly as the moon grew full to bring the big tides that would float him off. Then, for better or worse, his life would resume. The boat had begun to float tentatively, lifting slightly at the bow only to ground again when the tide fell, but release would come soon.
The last day Errol knew that at high tide, a few hours from now, the yawl would float, free to sail away. He took the opportunity to give the bottom a good scrubbing, breaking down the new barnacles with the back of his brush and then sweeping them off. Down tide, hundreds of tiny fish gathered in a silver cloud to eat the particles of barnacle. With the full moon, the weather changed and dark clouds gathered against the western sky. He would have to look for shelter as soon as he was under way, or at least find enough seaway to heave to. A storm was coming.
He waited in the cockpit into the afternoon, and around three, with a light grinding sound, the yawl lifted off and turned into the wind. The anchor line, which had hung slack when he’d walked the anchor out into the shallows, rose and grew taut. If this were a safe anchorage, he would wait out the storm, but the anchor wouldn’t have to slip much under the force of the wind to put him atop the coral. He reduced the mainsail before ever departing, taking the sail down at the second reef to a cleat on the mast. The line leading to a cringle on the leech he wrapped onto the reefing winch and drew that down until the main was little more than a storm trysail. He brought the anchor aboard, hand over hand, the rode dropping into the anchor locker until the anchor was at the stemhead, streaming turtle grass and small snapping creatures; there he secured it and returned to the mast to raise sail before the yawl could make much sternway.
Once sail was up, the yawl began to move obediently. Errol stood at the tiller, carefully conning his way through the dark coral heads in their white circles of sand. The shadow of the boat scurried alongside him on the rippled bottom. Gradually the shadow shrank, then vanished, as he found blue water. With a rising thrill, Errol set sail for the unknown. He knew that any piece of land at all was on the trail to hell, and that this ocean road put a good face on oblivion. A bad storm was coming; he meant to embrace it. The first passage would be fear, but the other side — if he could get there — was what interested him as being the country of death or freedom, unless it turned out they were the same thing.
It was the season of equinoctial storms, and the halo around the sun made Errol see in this something of a larger plan for him. Still, the little yawl was indifferent to such things, a thought whose absurdity he recognized without quite believing. Like most sailors, he did not regard his ship as inanimate and extended his senses out to all her parts the better to understand the whims of the sea. This impulse came of a great desire to survive that he was not sure he owned. Nevertheless, he believed his ship wished to live, and perhaps he would defer to her out of respect for the adage that a good ship is one which, when her master can no longer take care of her, takes care of her master.
Her purposeful obedience let Errol work his way through the coral heads to the dark blue of deeper water. Once she had way on, she never hesitated in stays — unless the man at the tiller was entirely lacking in skill — and moved from tack to tack like one of the domino players at the Cuban-American Hall in Key West. She’d been built forty years ago by a tidal creek in St. Michaels, Maryland, with a bottom of yellow pine from a church made by slaves, the marks of whose axes could still be found inside a hull so thick and hard that screws had to be drilled first; the topsides were single-length planks of Atlantic white cedar, the deck of native pine and canvas, Sitka spruce spars that had come on a train from Oregon a long time ago. When he reviewed her various attributes, as he often did, Errol began to feel responsible for her, and he recognized its absurdity without believing it. Whatever juju he believed her to possess was not mitigated by the fact that her previous owner was shot in a card game and she had sunk into desuetude at Garrison Bight until Errol rescued her for past-due dock fees and a modest bribe to the city council. He’d never find another boat with the marks of slaves’ axes in her timbers. She went up on jack stands at Stock Island, neglected sculpture among the shrimp boats, slowly returned to life by Errol and friends until launching day, when in an alcoholic crisis he sailed her away to the Dry Tortugas, anchoring in Mooney Harbor under the shadow of Fort Jefferson, to await a new day. His gratitude toward his little ship was evident in his belief that she had treated him like a cherished dependent and hung on her anchor, keeping a fresh breeze across his bunk until such time as he could return to the tiller like a man. When that day came, he sailed right past Key West and all his previous sins, and fetched up at Cortez, his current berth, where he met the cracker at a party on the latter’s sixty-foot Hatteras; and there he began his apprenticeship in the orange groves, where his command of Spanish was put to service exploiting the cracker’s laborers. Errol suffered no more than most over the plight of his fellow man, yet this was a bit of a problem. Some of the men were refugees from violence, and their children, though occasionally visited by well-meaning social workers from the State of Florida, clearly expected massacres at any time and so avoided anyone who was not obviously a mestizo peasant. One way or another, the oranges continued to head for the juice plant at Arcadia, and Errol came to be trusted by these lost souls, who forgave his being a perro infermo or perhaps even liked him because of it.