The Last Sailor Read online

  When the tide reached the high-water mark twice a day, the island was separated from the rest of the town, and this, too, gave him comfort. Since he’d first moved out here, a new life had taken shape inside him. Each day passed in the same simple way—hearing the birds squawk, waking at sunrise, fishing and eating, then sleeping alone. His body became a gauge for weather—rain from the northeast, a southwesterly wind, clear skies and the ocean flat calm. He would row into the harbor and lose himself in fishing, and one day would follow after another.

  Inside the shack, he blinked against the wafting dark. He reached for a shirt on the back of a chair and pulled it on over his bare skin. There was a daguerreotype of their mother in a small wooden frame nailed to the wall by the door. She’d died giving birth to Jacob. Nathaniel gently touched the picture with two fingers whenever he left the shack. Jacob’s captain’s hat hung on a peg by the door. He was seven years old when Nathaniel gave him the blue hat with a black leather visor and gold trim. The boy had refused to take it off, and from where he rode in the front of the rowboat, he had looked like a little figurehead leading them toward the bay.

  Jacob wore his hat on the boat, at dinner, to church, where he was forced to hold it in his lap during services. He took it off to sleep and kept it on the table by his bed so that he could put it on first thing in the morning. Nathaniel knew that Jacob loved the hat because Nathaniel gave it to him and because the hat meant he was a captain, and he felt seen as more than a little boy. When Jacob stopped wearing the hat as he got older, Nathaniel had felt a pang of sadness.

  Jacob would have loved the shack—helping his brother lay the foundation, hammering boards into walls. More than that, he would have loved sleeping within those walls, far from their father’s house in an imagined wilderness, for that was how it was. Over two miles across the marsh could feel like a world away.

  Nathaniel pumped some water into a tin cup and drank it down, then went inside and cast about for something to eat. The bread, hard from sitting on the table, filled his mouth with a feeling like salt caked to his tongue. The money he stuffed in a jar on the shelf. He couldn’t afford to pay for much beyond the necessities he needed to survive. Like the salt beef he reached for on top of the cabinet. He unwrapped the piece of cloth and shaved a slice of meat straight into his mouth as he watched the last streaks of light across the floor. He let his weight fall back on the bed, his mind lost to the dark and the quiet of the day. Fish leapt in his dreams until Nathaniel also was in the water, and there was young Jacob drifting just beyond his reach, the fish glistening while Nathaniel kicked hard toward his brother. But for all his kicking, he didn’t move an inch, and Jacob drifted farther away, and the fish, they didn’t notice a thing.

  2

  At dawn, the birds complained about the morning as if they were the ones having bad dreams. Nathaniel rolled out of bed and thought about his father, how every time they spoke, his father tried to convince him to come in off the marsh, move into the family home, and find something to do with himself besides row on the bay. It was a useless conversation, and Nathaniel was tired of it. He pulled on a shirt, drank a cup of water, and glanced around the shack for anything he might need, but his needs came from a place inside himself that he didn’t want to acknowledge. He followed the path off the island, passing over the miles of open marsh, then through cattails that grew taller than him near the road.

  When he heard wagon wheels, a horse’s steady clomp, and whistling out of tune, he knew it was Max Ballard. Max slowed his wagon in a clatter of boards knocking, and Nathaniel swung himself up and rode in the back of the wagon toward the harbor, the morning making itself known with a pale light that would turn hot within the hour.

  They rode the half mile to the village, past the shops and fish shacks, to O’Shea’s Restaurant, where Nathaniel slid off the wagon. “Get something to eat, would ya? You look like a rail.” Max handed Nathaniel a nickel, but Nathaniel shoved his hands down into his pockets.

  “Go ahead,” Max said. “I had a good week at the farm.” Nathaniel turned his back and started to walk away, then Max said, “Fine, you can bring me a nice big bass when you have one.”

  Nathaniel reached for the coin.

  • • •

  The restaurant’s name had been written with rope and tacked onto a weathered board. On the front porch, two half barrels that had once been planted with herbs were now used as spittoons. The smell of grease pulled Nathaniel inside. He entered like a ghost, walking along the front window, away from the gatherings of fishermen talking about the tide and their catches. Nobody looked at him, and this was how he liked it. The people in town had learned to leave him alone. Years ago, they had looked at him with compassion—the young man who’d lost his brother—but now they looked away, accustomed to his silence and his life on the edge of the town.

  There were old buoys hanging from the beams, quarter boards on the walls with names like Marie Celeste, Zephyr, and Silas Fish. A wooden oar hung over the doorway. Behind the counter hung a likeness of Ephram O’Shea. The picture was as much as Mrs. O’Shea would see of her husband again, but she carried on uncomplainingly without him, as did several of the wives in town who’d lost their husbands to the sea.

  Nathaniel turned his gaze to the front window, where three little boys ran past carrying a minnow trap. Their scrawny arms and legs, their dirty feet—Nathaniel thought of his brothers, then tried not to. The boys pushed and shoved each other, fighting over the trap. The oldest boy spread the two younger ones apart until they stopped arguing. Then he let the smallest boy take the trap and run with it.

  Not a lot of children came down to the harbor. Boys sometimes came on their own, but girls only came with their mothers to buy fish or visit their fathers on the schooners. There was a noted lack of women on the pier, especially at this early hour. Nathaniel thought of his own mother, how she’d let him and Finn stay down at the harbor until dinnertime. “I don’t know what you boys get up to down there, but if it’s trouble, I’ll hear about it.”

  Once he gave the waitress his order, Nathaniel watched the sails go up along the docks so that the boats looked like birds, ready for flight. The Spritefly shoved off, the sails rounding out with wind and pulling the schooner along. He wanted to shake loose the knot that tightened his stomach. He was anxious about seeing his father and anxious about their trip. Well, he decided, he could get the visit to his father over with first; then he wouldn’t have to dread it all the way to Boston and back across the bay. When the waitress slid a plate in front of him, he waited for her to leave, poked at the eggs for a few minutes, then left a good tip before he disappeared out the door.

  • • •

  Nathaniel walked up the steep slant of the driveway from the harbor road. At the top of the hill, the house rose like an apparition. Two stories of white-shingled success. He kept his head down as he walked toward it, trying to think of what to say. The drive wound along the hillside and up to the house. Nathaniel took his time going around back to get a look at the bay from up high. He’d rather be down in it than up on this hill. His father acted as if he’d created the view himself, when all he’d done was build a house high enough to see the wide expanse of water.

  When his father called from the office window, his baritone voice pulled Nathaniel from the comfort of his own thoughts.

  “Come in and talk to your old man.”

  Nathaniel stepped into the kitchen through the side door and leaned against the counter where he’d made eggs and toast as a boy. It was like stepping back into his boyhood, his brothers’ voices mumbled and distant, contained in the air that had once smelled of their mother’s soap, her shortbread cookies, and mint from the garden. He felt that time stretched to hold this moment and all the moments that had come before, the moments spent with his brothers fighting over the crispiest piece of toast or the biggest piece of chicken.

  “Hungry?” his father asked. Since Nathaniel had last seen his father six months ago, the man had gained a round paunch. His neck was thicker, his chin doubled. He’d always been an active man, and Nathaniel wondered at the unfamiliar shape of him, but he shifted his attention to the table where he’d eaten with his brothers. It looked the same, watermarked from sweating glasses and hot mugs. He knew every swirl of grain and each crack in the curly maple, and it existed like a captured moment. This was where they had eaten dinner the night before the accident.

  He followed his father into the front parlor where he’d pulled a reading chair up to an open window, the Yarmouth Reporter folded on a side table.

  “Come on, sit.” His father waved a hand toward the settee, the polished leather cast with sunlight that streamed through the tall windows. Nathaniel didn’t like being in the house. “It’s like pulling teeth getting you here, Son.”

  The smell of oiled leather and pipe tobacco made Nathaniel claustrophobic, as did the mahogany furniture and blue upholstery with floral stitching, the high bookcases filled with books whose bindings remained uncreased. There was no place for Nathaniel here, not since Jacob died. He couldn’t recall his brother’s face or the sound of his voice, only the feeling of being with him. The portrait of him on the far wall didn’t conjure his presence the way his bedroom—unchanged since the accident—did, or standing in the hallway between their rooms, remembering their excited voices the night before the trip.

  Nathaniel sat on the settee, but he was restless, and his eyes cast about the room.

  “It does a man good to see his sons. Your brother never comes up here unless he wants something.”

  “He has responsibilities—the shop and the children.”

  “Yes, I know,” Nathaniel Boyd Sr. said, but his eyes said, Still. I’m his father.

  “So why did you ask me here, Father?”

  “I know you’re not one for small talk, so I’ll get right to the point. It’s time for you to come into business with me. You’re my oldest son. It’s your birthright.” His father paused to make sure that Nathaniel was hearing him. “I’ll give you five acres. You’ll first learn to manage the rental business. We have those twenty-three parcels of land that I rent out.”

  “I know about them, Father. What does that have to do with me?”

  “I want you to work with the tenants, find a way to help them improve their farming so that I can increase their rent. I think you’d be good at it, Son. You’ll learn to survey the wooded lots and calculate the value of the timber as well.”

  The fact that his father thought he would come to work for him made Nathaniel feel completely unseen. Unable to contain the volley of his anger, he crossed the room and leaned over his father’s collection of surveyor’s tools. Each one was a precision instrument used to calculate his land, land that held him captive like the sea captivated his boys.

  Nathaniel turned to his father and looked into the man’s face, at the creases in the corner of his eyes and the wrinkles in his forehead. “What makes you think I want to work for you when I have a life somewhere else?”

  “A life?”

  “What about Finn?” Nathaniel said. “He’s proven himself, and he wants it.”

  “Finn’s ambition is impulsive. He wants too much, too soon. And he’s not interested in the land business anymore.”

  But Nathaniel knew his father’s reasons were deeper than that. Even as a boy, the more Finn tried to please him, the harder Nathaniel Sr. pushed him away, as if there was something inherently wrong in his middle son, something he couldn’t tolerate and wouldn’t foster.

  With his sturdy shoulders and formidable paunch, his father stood as if to fortify his argument. He walked to the window where he surveyed the harbor and the extent of his land. “It’s been ten years. You’ve had enough time to put the accident behind you. Your brother’s built a business and given me grandchildren. I want to give you the opportunity to do the same.”

  He tried to look Nathaniel in the eye, but his gaze shifted around the room and landed somewhere out the window over Nathaniel’s right shoulder. Nathaniel knew that his father was deeply ashamed of him. He hid it under the guise of wanting to take care of Nathaniel, but he really wanted to take care of his own reputation. Here he was, a prominent landowner, connected with the most successful men on Cape Cod—politicians, judges, officers of the law, doctors—men who made the laws as well as enforced them, men who drove the biggest business deals and earned the most money, and his own son couldn’t pick himself up and face the world.

  “You’re ashamed,” Nathaniel said.

  “You would be, too.”

  Nathaniel stared into his father’s eyes, into the brown glassy glow of them, then turned to go.

  3

  Nathaniel didn’t pack a bag. Not a wallet or a satchel. He carried nothing on his way to the train this morning but the weight of his father’s request, a weight he wanted to leave in Yarmouth Port. He watched for Finn, then spied him pacing by the ticket counter of the tiny train station, waving two tickets in his hand. Nathaniel picked up his pace to meet his brother.

  “I knew you’d be late,” Finn said. “The five thirty train’s already boarding.”

  Nathaniel followed his brother onto the car closest to them, and they walked down the aisle until two seats were available near the back of the car. Nathaniel felt the tug of motion as the train started out of the station. He listened to the sound of the whistle that he often heard from down at the harbor. As they pulled out of Yarmouth Port and traveled toward Barnstable, his mind relaxed, and he turned to his brother. “I went to see Father,” he said.

  “I need to work.” Finn scratched at his ledger with a sharp pencil. He bent over the book that he believed contained the answer to his future. Nathaniel had always known that Finn struggled with his numbers, and he watched him go up and down the columns of his ledger over and over again as they made their way off the Cape.

  “Why do you bring that? What if it gets wet on the boat?”

  “It’s only a copy.”

  Nathaniel nodded, and they rode in silence until they reached Plymouth. Finn looked up from the ledger and tapped his pencil against the paper. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I told you. I went to see Father.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Finn said. “Whatever happened is between you and him.” Finn’s eyes drifted back to the ledger, but Nathaniel persisted.

  He glanced out the window at the wind-bent scrub pines that lined the railroad tracks. He watched the backs of houses, a woman hanging clothes on a line, a boy gliding high in the air on a swing, couples walking the path by the water’s edge. When he felt himself thinking about Meredith’s skirts blowing in the wind as she walked toward the water, he looked at his brother, who was lost in his own thoughts. “Whenever he calls me up to the house, he has some scheme for getting me in off the marsh. I’m tired of having to stick up for myself. He needs to accept my life the way it is.”

  Now Finn faced him full on. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “You’re taking his side?”

  “Nathaniel, you live in the marsh, one meal to the next. This trip will bring you the most money you’ve made in your life, and you probably won’t spend it.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You’ve been out there since Jacob died.” Finn put his pencil down and gave Nathaniel his full attention. “When are you going to give it up, come in from there and try to make a life?”

  “I don’t want a life like yours, Finn. Kids and a wife, working all day in the shop. That’s not for me. Even if Jacob hadn’t died. Even if that accident had never happened, I’d live differently than you do.”

  Finn said, “I’m not going to be in that fish shop forever. You know that I’m saving money to buy a fleet of fishing boats, and I’m going to ask Father to invest in my business plan.”

  “I don’t know which is worse, me expecting Father to accept my life or you thinking he’ll invest money in your fleet.”

  “There’s a chance—”

  “Not really,” Nathaniel said. “You know how he is about money.”

  “I’ve got a good plan for turning a profit. He’ll want to invest once he sees the numbers.” Finn went back to running his finger up and down columns of numbers in the book spread across his lap. Nathaniel had always known that Finn wanted to build a fishing fleet—he loved the sea and had spent years fishing as a young man. He hadn’t wanted to open the fish shop, but his father wouldn’t invest in a fleet until Finn had proven himself. That was why Finn constantly worked on his business proposal, with columns of numbers, expenses, projected profits. He reviewed the numbers over and over until he was sure that his plans added up. Finn hadn’t needed their father to help him with the fish shop. He’d used his savings to pay rent and purchase stock from the fishermen to sell to the townsfolk who didn’t want to get dirty negotiating with the fishermen on the docks.

  Nathaniel wished their father would help Finn, buy him a single schooner to get him started, or at least support Finn’s ideas, but their father had never been one to offer support beyond what he wanted his sons to do.

  When Finn looked up from his ledgers, he reached below his seat for the satchel his wife had packed with lunch. Finn shared the sandwiches. Knowing that Nathaniel wouldn’t bring anything for himself to eat, Elizabeth had made four turkey sandwiches with cheese and butter.