“He’s no help to me at all. And no comfort,” he father continued.
“I wanted him! You agreed!”
Again his father grunted.
“‘Twas a mistake, then.”
“No!”
Now anger was creeping up into his father’s voice, mingled with frustration.
“You should have seen him out there today, Ellie! Useless! Sat unhelpful the entire time. Like a pile of wet stones. Couldn’t bait his own hook, or carry his weight. He’s little better around the house, here. Nothing more than a burden to me.”
His mother was weeping now, and suddenly his father’s tone softened.
“Now, Ellie, don’t be like that. You know our bargain was a fair one. For your sake I met it. And now it’s time…”
“I won’t let you! I won’t! He’s all I have!”
“What of me?” his father shot back. “Do you forget that it was I who took you to myself? The boy should never have come in the bargain.” Again his voice softened. “It’s my own fault for not doing better by you from the beginning. In the future, I promise I will. I know now how lonely you must have been. Nearly as lonely as I was here before I had you. I promise that when things are like they were in the beginning—”
“I won’t hear of it!”
“My mind is set, woman.”
“No!”
There was a sharp, quick sound, hand against face, and then Davy’s mother began to weep.
His father said, his voice strained: “You’ll see it clearer when it’s over.” He tried to soften his voice again, but it only sounded harder. “When it’s over.”
~ * ~
After an hour of silence from the outer room, the door to Davy’s bedroom opened. He tried to hide within the quilts and covers.
“Get up, boy,” his father said sharply. “We have business to attend to.”
Through an opening in the folds of material, Davy watched his father, outlined by orange light, approach the bed.
“I said rise, boy.”
The quilts were pulled back. Davy looked up into the pained but hard face of his father. He smelled sweet alcohol, a warmth of the breath.
His father’s rough hand poked at him. “Rise up and get your slicker on.”
Without another word, his father turned and walked out.
As Davy dressed, he watched his father, stoney-eyed, shrug on his own oilcloth coat, and take a final drink, emptying the bottle which sat on the dinner table.
~ * ~
Salt and rain lashed the island, the night.
The storm had risen high, driving sheets of water across the rock path to the pier. Overhead, angry banks of low, spitting clouds drove one another on. Out on the water, walls of water seemed to have risen out of the chopping waves, forming a bridge between cloud and ocean.
The rowboat rocked furiously against its mooring, roughly tapping at the dinghy beside it. His father battled with the rope, undid its knot, then fought to keep the boat steady while Davy climbed in. Davy thought he felt his father shudder when they were thrown together for a moment in passing.
His father climbed in after Davy, and cast off. He rowed furiously from the outset. Davy sat in the bow seat, ahead of the oarlocks, staring unspeaking back at his father, who concentrated on fighting the waves. Behind them, the dock pulled away into the finger of rocks and then, abruptly, the ocean surrounded them.
Davy felt his lately eaten supper began to churn in his stomach.
Far distant, the foghorn bleated, hidden and muffled by the roar of rain and wind. Water pelted them in sheets. Off, in the direction of the foghorn, a single bolt of silver-yellow lightning struck at the wet horizon.
“Bail, boy!” his father shouted, pausing in his rowing to indicate the bottom of the boat filling with water. His father pointed a sharp finger at the bailing bucket next to Davy, who made no move toward it. “Bah!” his father cried, suddenly stopping his rowing and moving in a crab’s crouch to lean over Davy and pick up the anchor.
Their eyes met for a moment, and Davy saw the fear in his father’s face. Then his father looked away and dropped the anchor over the side.
It made a splash, dropped, and the line played out nearly to its length before it found purchase.
“It’s done, then!” his father said, seemingly to himself.
Behind them, off through the sheeted rain, the slapping waves and roar of the storm, came a sound from the finger of rocks: the wailing cry of his mother calling to them.
Davy’s father stood, squinting back into the storm.
Now Davy could see the tiny yet growing image of the dinghy, his mother’s tiny form huddled within, rowing.
“Damn her,” his father spat, then turned to look down at Davy.
“I said ‘twas done.” His father loomed over him, lashed by rain. He seemed diminished as a man. He seemed to have shrunk into his oil cloth, hands dropped limply at his side. Davy looked into his face. There was anger and fury and determination in his eyes, but defeat, shame, and, that bolt of fear, too.
“Go ahead, father,” Davy said. “I’m not afraid anymore.”
“This should never have happened to begin with,” the old man said, his words leaden, and then he grasped Davy in his two hands, tightening his grip, and lifted him up unresisting and threw him into the water.
At that moment, off through the rain, Davy heard his mother call out to him.
The ice-cold hands of the sea enclosed Davy for a moment before he rose. As his head broke the surface, he saw his father straining at the oarlocks, turning the boat around toward shore. His father’s eyes stared down into the boat, then up quickly at the dinghy, which approached through the lashing rain and rising waves.
“What have you done!” Davy’s mother demanded.
Davy cried out once before the sea took him down again.
The world became as seen through green glass. His body, head to toe, was cold and wet.
He looked down; below him, long slow shapes moved deep in the water, blacker against cold darkness, moving one over another, making and unmaking shapes. Davy’s numb hands felt suddenly oiled. And now, beneath his clothes, he felt his body bump and squirm, as if alive in its parts. His bones moved painfully against their sockets; it was as if his arms would yank free from his shoulders, legs from his thighs. His neck felt slick and alive.
The squirming shapes pulled up closer.
With a sudden kick and spasm of unmouthed protest, Davy fought against his sinking, and began to claw and drive his way back up to the surface.
“No!”
He broke free into the roiling waves. The rain felt oddly warm against his face.
He gulped, spit water, focused his moist eyes on the twin boats twenty yards away, bobbing together as if wedded. His struggling father was trying to climb from the rowboat into the dinghy.
His mother’s defiant form stood straight in the smaller boat, her eyes blazing with hatred.
“Then you’ll lose me, too!”
“Ellie! No!” his father beseeched, his hand seeking to reach Davy’s mother.
Davy tried to call out. He raised his hand but it went unseen as the sea began to weight him down. His limbs became cold lead, his mouth filled with water, his grasping hands now found only water.
He sank. He went inexorably down. Off through the darkening cold, he saw the roped straight line of the anchor on his father’s boat. It made a line linking heaven and earth, disappearing into the depths below.
Davy looked down. The roiling black shapes were growing closer.
Beneath his clothes, he slowly began to break free.
His arms became black oily things, squirming like wet thick ropes. Up under his armpits the pulp of their live flesh thumped against his arm sockets in little pulses, even as his torso lengthened, pulling his head and face into a thick, snakelike shape.