The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay (19 page)

“You be ready to raise the jib as much as you can,” Clay yelled to the man. “When I give the word. And keep her tight on your port side. It'll help blow her over.”

The man started to work his way forward.

“Everyone to port with all your weight,” Clay shouted. “This
tow'll pull her from the top of the mast, bringing her over. The keel should loosen, come up out of the sand sideways. The boat will be heaved over on her side, and you put her in gear then and grind her out of there, Brigman. You got it?”

Brigman nodded.

Clay wasn't sure. “You're in five feet of water,” he screamed. “We got to get that keel up by bringing her over onto her side. She'll want to fall back, but if the mast holds, I'll keep her over. Then you go. Got it?”

Brigman shouted yes.

“Watch the mast. If she starts to bend, get the hell out of the way. I'll pick you off.” Clay wiped the rain from his face. “Ready?” he hollered. He didn't wait. “Get the jib up!” Clay screamed. He began to work away from the yacht. He knew the slack line was most dangerous as it came taut: the bateau's momentum, combined with a surging wave, might overtighten the tow and snap the mast. He edged away from the yacht, watching the line whip in the wind and begin to tighten. The whitecaps came over the line, burying it in the foam, and then it was up again, almost tight. He needed enough throttle to stay perpendicular to the sailboat. He felt the line like a fisherman feeling his rod for the subtle pull. He eased up, went into neutral as a wave carried him forward, felt the line tighten, started to fall back but instantly was into gear with a quick rev, felt it tight again, the strain a matter of feel, more strain, the groan of the sailboat, more throttle, steadily more, a crunching sound increasing in intensity to a wail against the wind. She was going to crack, he feared, and then he felt the gradual give and he had her over, he felt this and saw this, she was pulled onto her side, wallowing against the forces about her, and then she was moving, tentatively, like a wounded mammal, and he, keeping the line taut, turned to move with her. He saw them hanging on to the side, Amanda holding on with both arms to a stanchion, half over the deck, two others with their arms around the halyards and braced
against the lifelines. The rain streamed down over his eyes, and he wiped them with his sleeve. He felt for the tension, for the speed and spread, and he stayed with them, slow going, inching their way across the bar, his left hand on the tiller, his right on the throttle and gear, faster now, he felt, one wave at a time, and he kept with them, perfect motion, timing, perfect pull on the line, he knew the waves, he had measured the distance, and his confidence grew and he knew he had it, and he felt it and kept them over, a bit farther, another wave or two, until the place he had marked approached, and then he was sure they were over, and he moved toward them and saw the boat right herself, and she was up and she was free.

Clay steered in close, the line falling slack behind him into the water, and then, setting his tiller, he pulled in the tow line until he could free the halyard. As he did this, the two boats moved side by side out to the open, thrashing river. Clay finished and looked up at the ragged group standing stunned in the cockpit, ashen faced and ripped by the storm.

“You stay in the channel,” he shouted at Brigman. “There's plenty of time for you to get to Pecks.” Brigman nodded. “If he can't pull you, there's a black-painted buoy up the cove just past Pecks, off the starboard side of the channel. You with me?” Brigman nodded again. Clay continued shouting: “It's a mooring chained to an old engine block my father sunk years ago, and it won't budge. Tie two strong bowlines to the chain on the buoy, and give her room to swing.”

Brigman didn't seem to move. He didn't say anything. He nodded almost imperceptibly. The other man shouted a thank-you.

“You all right? You can make it?” Clay shouted again.

Brigman this time raised his hand.

Clay looked at them watching him. Then he turned the bateau away, easterly, pointing the bow to head across the mouth of the river. The rain began stinging his face, and he shivered and felt the cold for the first time. He slid down into a trough and the spiking
crests were over his head, the spindrift streaking dense and white across the waves. He thought of his pots and knew better than to head out again. The Tred Avon was starting to rage. The open Choptank would be impassable.

Inside the cabin, he turned on the radio again. He heard no more calls for help, and the news of the storm was steady. The eye was coming up the gullet of the Bay.

Clay traversed the mouth of the Tred Avon, the rain now ripping across in horizontal fusillades from the northeast. Visibility was minimal, holding at twenty yards or less. He passed near the lighthouse and heard her bell but could not see her. He took dead aim in his mind for Bachelor Point, across the way, and held a steady course, as the water was deep to the shore. He plowed ahead, running the hurtling waves, and when he sensed he was close, he angled to starboard until he found the point and worked his way down the shore to the mouth of Island Creek, the water boiling off the northern shoal marking the entrance. He ran up the creek slowly, the waves slamming his bow, the water sloshing over the floorboards of the bateau. Hugging the bank, he searched through the blinding rain and thought he saw a light, and then he saw it again, and he said a prayer, for it seemed to be a safety beacon reaching toward him, and then he knew it was the dock lights at the end of the Lawlors' wharf, and he thought it was a miracle that they were on. The storm was lashing at the dock, the flood tide pouring over the boards like ocean waves, and the wind whipped the rain laterally across the pilings, blurring the lights. He gave safe distance to the dock, slowly working his way around it, his bow pitching violently, to where he could approach the shore and then see where the creek cut out a half-moon bay. Moving in toward shore, he saw the narrow cut that opened into the pond on the Lawlor property. He slid into the neck, lined on either side with reed grass that was blown back as though trampled down. The waves rushed to his stern, the wind whined above him,
and the rain was relentless, but inside the cut, the water calmed as he glided through, into a deep water pocket, protected on all sides by banked woods except for the narrow channel that opened to the river. There were no other boats. Clay set to work in the stripping rain.

Pappy had once taught him the three-anchor mooring, bridled 120 degrees apart. “For a hurricane,” he remembered being told, “or a permanent mooring where there is none.” And so he set it out, one anchor out front with a double-long rode, the other two nearly midships on either side. Hurricane winds can come from opposite directions, first from the counterclockwise direction of the storm's cyclonic circle, and then, as the center passes by, from the opposite course. Clay thought of this as he worked, that with this anchorage, regardless of how the wind shifts, the bateau would swing in a very small circle, and there would always be one or two anchors to windward. The greater the load, he thought, the deeper the Danforths will bury. He worked with the storm about him, and the same thoughts cursed through his effort—that half his pots were still out there, half his business busting in the storm. Using the extra lines he had brought, he lashed closed the cabin doors and tied the hatches tight. He rechecked the anchors and anchor lines. He removed the foul-weather slicker he had on, stashed it in the engine box, and clamped down the lid. He looked at everything he owned. Then he swung himself over the side, swam about thirty yards, until he could stand in the sand, and waded ashore. On the riverbank he looked back and studied the
Miss Sarah,
certain that it would take a tidal wave to move her. Then he turned and started walking through the woods and up the hill toward the Lawlor house, seeing in his mind the buoys he had left bobbing in the furious storm.

When Clay reached the top of the hill and emerged from the woods, he saw a man he made out to be Jim Lawlor running from the front door of his house to his Jeep Wagoneer. Stumbling down to the edge of the driveway, Clay managed to place himself in the beams of its headlights as the Jeep started to swing around the drive toward the lane. Lawlor's eyes widened in disbelief. He opened the door and Clay climbed in.

“My God, son, you look like a drowned ghost. How the hell'd you get here, and what the hell are you doing out in this?”

“Trying to save my pots, sir. And my boat.”

“Your boat! Jesus! You were out there?”

“Yes, sir. I got delayed some. Figured you got one of the best hurricane holes around.”

Jim Lawlor owned several farms in the county, and acres of riverfront property. He had been a hunting partner of Pappy's. He told Clay that he had already moved his family into his cousin's house in town and was heading there himself. “Just in case,” he explained. He asked Clay about his boat and how he had secured it and nodded thoughtfully on hearing the explanation. He asked
about the river and kept shaking his head as Clay described it. “Of course I will take you home with me,” he insisted. “You need some dry clothes, son. Don't say a word. Don't try to argue. Don't even mention it.”

The brunt of Agnes hit that night. Winds in Easton were clocked at near a hundred miles per hour, shredding foliage and knocking over trees, but it was the rain that was like never before, flying laterally in sheets for hours in the howling dark, battering the Lawlors' frame house, pounding the windows, and sending flash floods cascading down the street. Clay, having showered and changed into some clothes the Lawlors had found for him, sat in the kitchen drinking coffee, watching the windows, and listening to the sounds of the storm for most of the night. The phones were down, so he couldn't call Bertha or Byron. Jim Lawlor had made a bed for him on the sofa, but it wasn't until first light that he lay down and fell asleep.

As Clay slept, Hurricane Agnes continued to rampage across the Mid-Atlantic seaboard before veering northeast, pouring more rain into the Susquehanna and the other tributaries of the Bay than ever before in recorded history, and causing the worst flooding in its huge watershed in two centuries. Some five inches of rain fell over the watershed in just four hours, the news reported. The Bay's saline levels would become inverted. South of the raging Susquehanna, the floodwaters, of the Sassafras, the Gunpowder, the Patapsco, the Chester, the West, the South, the Severn, the Choptank, the Patuxent, and the Potomac had begun their carnage, carrying mud, silt, topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides, and debris from the Blue Ridge to the Bay and wreaking environmental havoc throughout the huge estuary.

Clay didn't wake up until late Friday morning. By then the storm had tapered off to a steady rain, but the flood crests were still building. Clay mostly paced until the phone
service was restored. He talked to Bertha first and made sure she was safe and then called Byron and told him where he was. Byron was pale and shaking when he came to pick Clay up. He stammered that he had looked for Clay everywhere, riding back and forth between Pecks and the house. The one person he had not spoken to was Jed Sparks, who had been more than preoccupied.

Clay told Byron what happened and to forget it. It was he, Clay, who had left for the river early. Byron was upset and then sullen. He cursed the
Mood Indigo
.

They drove down to Island Creek. On the way, Byron mentioned that Matty had called from Richmond. He and Kate had been worried. They had driven to Richmond to be safe. “Matty said to tell you that they talked about the wharf idea to his father,” Byron continued. “Said he'd agreed to look at the papers. You know, the numbers. If we could get 'em from the bank.”

Along Oxford Road there were trees down and debris everywhere. The lane to the Lawlors' was under several inches of water, and the culverts on either side were like rushing creeks. Proceeding slowly, the pickup worked its way down the lane to the house. From the Lawlors' yard, Island Creek was unrecognizable. The south bank had disappeared under water, which lay over much of the southern landscape. The rising tide had covered the Lawlors' dock, and the high brown water had flooded half the yard. A low, slate-colored cloud ceiling seethed overhead, though the air in the dissipating drizzle felt balmy and strangely calm. After moving carefully through the woods and sliding down the bank, they emerged at the pond's edge and saw the bateau, riding low and fouled with water but steady on her lines and unharmed. The pond water was muddied with thick sediment. They spent the morning bailing out the
Miss Sarah
and cleaning her, till she rode fair and light on the high and rising tide. At Boone's Landing they found the pots Clay had lashed to the trees. They untied and
loaded the pots into the back of the pickup. Once home, they stacked them behind the garage.

After warm showers and a change of clothes, Byron and Clay pulled their hip waders on, put some tools in the truck, and started for Pecks Wharf. They had to park and walk down the drive. The water was nearly a foot deep over the lane and deeper over the ground. The first boats they saw were in the woods several hundred yards from the dock, twisted among the broken trees.

Those that had been hydraulically lifted before the storm and secured were untouched, and those properly moored with a safe swing were undamaged and floating in the harbor. Looking up the cove, Clay saw that
Mood Indigo
was one of these, swinging on Pappy's black-painted buoy. But dock lines tied too tight had snapped on some, and anchor lines, on others. There were dozens of boats washed up on their sides in the yard, and too many to count half submerged along the wooded shore. A small cabin cruiser had been lifted and smashed into the side of the picking shack. The yard was a confusion of destruction. Clay and Byron found Jed talking on the phone. They offered their services, and Jed put them to work.