It was time to go topsides once again. He didn’t realize how peaceful the cabin had been until he was in the cockpit. The hove-to yawl seemed to follow a cycle. At the bottom of the troughs there was a kind of peace. This created a leeward eddy that moderated some of the more fearsome violence. At the same time, the troughs were so deep they actually protected him from the wind. Once the yawl rose to the crests again, the full force of the wind and its attendant shrieks could be felt.
It was with welcome detachment that he observed the behavior of his boat and concluded that there was no more he could do for her; she had managed thus far, and to be ready to cope with any great change in conditions he would have to sleep. He hoped that the cooler sea temperatures outside the stream would restrain the storm, but there was as yet no sign of that. He went below once again and secured himself in his bunk, feeling, as he fastened the weather cloths that kept him from rolling out, an odd coziness that he guessed came from his now-rapt gaze upon his Madonna. It was not that he possessed a single religious conviction, but knowing millions worshiped her was consoling. He wished now to be among the millions, and this was a start. If he lived till daybreak, he would address his gratitude to Allah as well as Our Lady, and to their millions of worshipers, his fellow humans.
First, he asked Her forgiveness for not helping Raymond back into the boat. True, he had not pushed Raymond overboard. The ocean had done that: the jib boom had come adrift and was beating a hole in the deck; Raymond had gone forward without his lifeline; the bow buried in a green sea and when it came up, in a white cloud of spindrift, Raymond was no longer there. He floundered alongside the passing hull, reaching toward Errol. The split second of ambivalence — as though Raymond were being swept to New Orleans with Caroline — was all it took, and Raymond was gone. Caroline had had her fling with pirates and was careful the next time to latch on to someone with a future and an office.
He asked to be forgiven. Caroline was raising beautiful children in the Garden District, driving them to their swimming lessons from her home on Audubon Street, and Raymond, who had not known home ownership, was at the bottom of the sea. Errol understood that he was being shriven by the same sea and held the statuette in his fist, praying for forgiveness. Expecting his boat to crack open at any time and release him to his fate, he believed his request was legitimate. Certainly he’d never felt anything quite like it before. Such sobbing pleas were something he’d never heard from himself, as though he were being disemboweled by his own voice. His grief was possession and infancy, far more urgent than the storm and something of a deafening joyride. At one odd moment, he burst into laughter.
He wished to live. He stared into the face of the little statue, absorbed by her high Latin coloring and carmine lips; she was devouring him with her eyes. He felt himself sink further into his bunk supinely awaiting her kiss. “You gorgeous bitch,” he murmured.
If he could tell by the weight in his limbs, he had awakened from a long sleep. He moved his eyes and took in his surroundings warily. It required some time for him to understand what had changed so completely: the boat was still. As the cabin was sealed against breaking seas, he could not see outside, and the air within had become sultry and fetid. He untied the weather cloths and swung his feet out onto the sole, glancing at the gimbaled lamps that had swung so violently in the night. They were motionless, though their oil was splashed around underneath him, indicating to his relief that he had not imagined the storm. He reached a hand gratefully to the cedar planks of the hull, still cool, still fragrant, perhaps still trees. Pines and oaks and cedars had carried him safely.
He was always given one more chance: it was frightening. The sight of the Madonna, moreover, gave him a queasy feeling. It reminded him of awakening in the bed of a woman who clearly didn’t remember meeting him. But the Madonna didn’t say a word. He got to his feet, startled that he was wearing no clothes; he looked around and discovered them tossed on the opposite bunk. He pulled on his shorts and went topsides.
“The Dawn of Creation,” he thought, with a giddy impresario’s flourish: the sea, ultramarine and pierced by sunlight, was still in every direction, no birds, no fish, no clouds, just the blue of heaven as it awaited completion. It crossed Errol’s mind that by existing he intruded upon all this vacant magnificence. He preferred this more solemn view of so heroic and empty a vista. He considered his pill-gobbling episode in Key West with shame as trivializing the question posed by this empty sea, where eternity had stored the materials for a fresh start.
Errol went below and directed his optimism toward feeding himself. He had a beautiful round Macintosh apple, which he sliced carefully on the galley sideboard, and a piece of Canadian cheddar. He disguised the staleness of a hunk of Cuban bread by toasting it over the alcohol flame of his stove and basting it with tinned butter. The coffee soon bubbled in the percolator and filled the cabin with its wonderful smell. As he pictured Raymond sweeping past the hull, he could nearly imagine forgiving himself. But when he speculated on how many miles astern Raymond might have been before he drowned, he failed to add relief or prospects for forgiveness to his detachment.
His mood didn’t last as he discovered how wide-ranging his hunger was. He gazed about at his breakfast and inventoried the other things he might eat. The tea cake, in the cabinet under the sink, excited him, as did the small tinned ham whose container he vowed to respect as long as necessary. The cornucopia of food that he had stowed here and there — even the pineapples under the floorboards! — unconsidered during the storm began to reform in his mind.
Admiring Caroline as she hung her bathing suit on the line behind the house on Petronia, Raymond had said, in a reflective tone, “I love ’em with that hunted look, don’t you?”
After a moment, Errol had said, “No.”
It came to him now: here resided one of the roots of hesitation as Raymond swept past the ketch. A boat that weighed almost fifty thousand pounds would not stop on a dime; there was that. Or turn in fewer than several of its own lengths. Even luffing up, the ketch would forereach farther than a man could swim in those seas. That knowledge could have been embedded too— couldn’t it? — the sort that produces indecision, and indecision produces hesitation, and hesitation produces unfortunate accidents as opposed to murder.
At noon, he took a perfect sight of the sun. The boat was un-moving and the horizon a hard clean line. With the sextant to his eye, he measured the elevation and then went below to try for a signal on the radio direction finder. Haitian Baptist Radio was in its customary spot, and by combining its direction from the boat with the noon sight of the sun, he knew for the first time where he was. The information was sickening.
When Raymond was lost over the side, Errol reported the accident to the coast guard and gave them his position. Was it not right here? He went back to the cockpit and looked around the yawl at the stillness of the sea and its plum blue depths under a quiet sky as though he would recognize the scene of many years ago. This, he knew, was absurd. Surely he had simply superimposed the two pieces of information in an unreliable mind. He pounced on the idea that the accident had happened in the stream, and clearly this was not the stream. He had the celestial fact that the stream lay to the east of his current position, information that should have protected him from the sense that he had been directed to revisit the site of the misfortune. But the Gulf Stream moves like a great blue snake and there were times when this spot on the planet was indeed in its trail. Still, he didn’t believe it.