Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Please yourself,” Doi said. “Just don’t get in trouble before you finish bringing me my fish.” The way things were these days, most people were happier to get paid in food than in cash. As supplies got tighter, mere money bought less and less. Nimble as a mongoose, Doi hopped up onto the wharf. “Good luck,” he told Jiro, and bowed. The fisherman returned it.

Half a beat slower than they should have, so did his sons. No, they aren’t properly Japanese at all, Jiro thought with yet another mental sigh. Eizo Doi was polite enough to pretend he hadn’t noticed they were slow. He ambled off towards another sampan. Jiro wondered if he was doing anything these days besides putting masts and sails on boats that couldn’t use their engines any more.

Jiro stepped down into the Oshima Maru. Hiroshi and Kenzo followed a little more slowly. They couldn’t act as if they knew it all here, because they damn well didn’t. “Okay, Father. What do we do?” Hiroshi asked. The first word was English, but Jiro got it.

“Here-you go to the rudder for now. You know what to do with that, neh?” Jiro said, and his elder son nodded. Jiro turned to Kenzo. “All right, you come with me.”

“I’m here,” Kenzo said.

“Good. First we find which way the wind is blowing,” Jiro said. For the moment, that was easy: it came off the hills in back of Honolulu, and would waft the Oshima Maru out to sea. Once the sampan sailed out onto the Pacific, though, things would get more complicated. “Next thing to remember is, mind the booms. They can swing and knock you right into the water.”

“ Hai,” Kenzo said. Jiro looked back toward the stern. Yes, Hiroshi was listening. Good. He would need to know, too.

Jiro went on, “We set the foresail to one side of the mast and the jib on the other.” He did that, then tied the booms to the belaying pins Doi had mounted on the rail. “Now we cast off, and we’re ready to go.” He brought in the rope that bound the Oshima Maru to the wharf.

Light as a feather, the sampan glided out of Kewalo Basin. Hiroshi steered well enough-he did know how to do that. Even so, a look of surprise and delight spread over his face. “She feels so different!” he exclaimed.

And she did. Before, with the motor pushing her forward, she’d been a creature of straight lines. If the small waves were moving at an angle to her path, she’d just chopped through them. Not any more. Kenzo noted another essential difference: “She’s so quiet, too!”

Jiro had got used to the relentless pounding and throbbing of the diesel. Without it, the Oshima Maru might have been a ghost of her former self. All he heard were the waves and the distant squawks of sea birds and the breeze thrumming in the lines and bellying out the sails. The sampan also felt different underfoot. He’d always got the engine’s vibration through the soles of his feet. They’d told him as much about how it was running as his ears did. Now all he felt was the boat’s pure motion. He smiled. He couldn’t help himself. “I’m younger than you are,” he told his sons. “I’m with my father on the Inland Sea.”

Kenzo and Hiroshi looked at each other. They probably thought he was crazy. They often did. He didn’t care. He could see the rising sun on those crowded waters, the headlands that looked so different from the jungled slopes of Oahu, sometimes a flight of long-necked cranes overhead… He hadn’t thought about cranes in years, or realized how much he missed them.

He ran straight before the wind for a while, and talked his sons through adjusting the sails to compensate as it shifted slightly. He showed them how, if you wanted to swing to port, you had to swing the mainsail to starboard. It seemed backward, but they soon saw it was what needed doing.

“There’s a lot more to think about now,” Hiroshi said.

“Oh, yes,” Jiro agreed. “Of course, you are thinking about it now, and that makes it seem harder. After you’ve done it for a while, you won’t need to wonder what to do. You’ll just do it.” He wasn’t doing things automatically himself-no, not even close. Part of him might have been that fourteen-year-old out on the Inland Sea with his father. The rest was a middle-aged man trying to remember what went where, and why. His father’s boat had been rigged differently. He knew the principles here, but none of the details were the same. He didn’t want his sons seeing that.

Kenzo asked, “If the wind is still off the mountains when we come back to the basin, how do we get there?”

“We tack,” Jiro answered. “It means we slide in at an angle. You can’t sail straight against the wind, but you can go against it. I’ll show you.”

“All right.” Kenzo’s voice was uncommonly subdued. Jiro almost laughed in his son’s face. Yes, the old man still knew a few things the young one hadn’t imagined. That always came as a painful surprise to the younger generation.

A tern soared down and perched at the very tip of the mast. It stared at the Takahashis out of big black eyes that seemed all the bigger because the rest of it was so perfectly white. “That never would have happened when we had the diesel,” Hiroshi said.

“Of course not. There wouldn’t have been any place for it to land then,” Jiro said. Hiroshi stirred as if that wasn’t exactly what he’d meant, but he didn’t try to explain himself. As far as Jiro was concerned, that was fine.

Jiro had his sons practice setting the sails with the wind astern and at either quarter. They got the hang of it pretty fast. They knew the Oshima Maru and how she had handled; that helped them now. What Jiro didn’t let on was that he was learning almost as much as they were. No, he hadn’t handled sails in a lot of years himself.

But he did remember enough to send the sampan on two long, gliding reaches into the wind. “You see how we beat back toward the shore?” he said. Hiroshi and Kenzo both nodded. They seemed impressed. Jiro was impressed that he’d remembered enough to manage to do that, too. He had more sense than to show it, though.

However serene the sampan was under sail, she wasn’t swift. Jiro had come to take the noisy, smelly diesel for granted. It got him where he needed to go, and got him there pretty quick. Now she took a lot longer to reach likely fishing grounds. “We’ll probably have to spend the night in the boat,” Hiroshi said.

“Well, so what?” Kenzo answered. “It’s not like we’ve got anything much to come home to.” Jiro and Hiroshi both grimaced, not because he was wrong but because he was right.

They spilled minnows into the Pacific. They had fewer than usual. The boats that had caught the nehus were diesel-powered, too. All three Takahashis had netted these themselves, using chopped-up bits of rice from their own rations as bait. Then the fishing lines with their big, silvery hooks went into the sea. Jiro hoped for a good catch, to make up for the rice they’d lost.

“One more problem with the new sail,” Kenzo said. “People can see us for a long way.”

He was also right about that. Like most sampans, the Oshima Maru was painted a blue somewhere between sea and sky, not least because the color made it hard for competitors to find her. But what good did the camouflage do when the mast and sail stuck up there like a Christmas tree? It did work both ways. If three or four other boats could spy the sampan, Jiro could see them, too.

What he wanted to see was what he’d caught. He felt like shouting when the first few hooks yielded aku and ahi both. He and his sons worked like men inhabited by demons. They gutted fish and chucked them into storage one after another. Jiro noted that Hiroshi and Kenzo set aside a prime ahi, as he did. When they’d finished the lines, they all gorged on strip after strip of flavorful tuna. It was always delicious, and all the more so after days of the horrible slop the soup kitchens served.