Glimmering

After some minutes he got up, still clasping the sextant to his breast, and went into the room with the boy. Martin watched him breathe, Trip’s chest rising and falling, his yellow hair spreading over the pillow like pollen; his face half-turned so that Martin could see his mouth parted like a child’s. Restless light played across his cheeks, indigo and orange, touched the cross on his breast so that it glowed. The topography of desire. His gaze shifted to the flickering square of window, the Wendameen upon its scaffold.

New York, Trip had said. I think that’s where she is. That’s where I met her. New York. Slowly Martin drew the sextant upward to his face, until he held it cupped beneath his chin. His stare remained fixed on the Wendameen.

The next day he began work on the boat. First clambering up the ladder and climbing down into the cockpit and then the companionway, to check the seams between planking. Looking for spots where the boards had shrunk and the light came through, replacing cotton caulking and running seam compound into the gaps. The boat had been up on jack stands for over two years now, but it had not dried out as badly as he had feared. He worked by the light of one of the Wendameen’s kerosene lanterns. There, belowdecks, with the familiar smells of kerosene and salt and Callahan’s Wax and the warm golden glow of varnished wood, all was just as it had always been, as it should be. It was exhausting, but it enlivened him, too, because he could lose himself, lose the world around him. After three days he was sorry to turn to other work, but by then it had all come back to him, the hours and days of labor needed to keep a boat alive, and the cries of gulls above the bay.

He moved the ladder, climbed down, and walked around beneath, so that he could see to the hull and begin the task of repainting the entire boat. The Wendameen had a copper-sheathed bottom, which protected it from worms and rot; but it all still had to be scraped and sanded and primed. He spent hours in Mars Hill’s old boathouse, scavenging half-empty cans of primer, scraping rust from tools and cleaning brushes with the turpentine he used for his paintings. Then came days of scraping, hands and fingers aching inside heavy suede gloves, paint scales covering the ground beneath like gull droppings. Prising out a rotten plank and replacing it, the slow process of planing, honey-colored curls of wood and the smell of shellac in the salt air. Then fitting the new boards between the old, like setting a falsely bright new tooth. Then sanding it all, again and again, by hand, the wood beneath his palm growing smoother and smoother still, until it was like milk, like silk, like skin. There is a love of wood as of other things that do not answer to our touch; entranced and exhausted, heedless of the fever that had begun to tear at him, Martin shaped the Wendameen into a boy.

When it came time to paint the exterior, Trip came down to help.

“I can do that,” he said, cocking his head. “I used to help my uncle.” A few yards away high tide lapped at the gravel. Trip bent and picked up a flat stone, expertly skipped it across a wave.

“Can you.” Martin looked down from the ladder and smiled through his exhaustion. It was the first time the boy had spoken, without prompting, of something in his past. An uncle, then, and a boat. “Well, there’s another ladder in the boathouse. Do you think you can get it by yourself? If you need help, just holler.”

Trip dragged the ladder out. He looked a little better these last few weeks, not so thin, his hair growing out. Not great, but better, like someone fighting a long illness; like Martin himself. Though the odd translucence of Trip’s skin remained; in the endless sunset he was sometimes hard to see, another trick of the light. He hauled up the rusted cans of paint and more ratty brushes and set to. Martin explained the color scheme: white hull and topside, magenta boot stripe, bulwark two shades of grey, like the breast and wings of a shearwater. Trip listened distractedly. He ran his finger along a seam and frowned, gently freed a pine needle that had gotten mired in damp paint. Martin watched him, heart so full he felt dizzy; Trip with the intense scowl of a child laboring at paint, brushes, wood.