Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

Ashore, his father showed him how to fillet the salmon they’d caught the day before, which made him squeamish but also, as he put one gloved hand on the body of the fish and with his other made his first cut, exhilarated. As he felt for the spine with the knife, he remembered how his father had brought the club down on the fish’s head, three whacks, until it stopped flipping around and lay in the cockpit, stunned at its own suffocation, its gills clapping open and shut. Robert had never seen his father hit anything, and watching this he’d felt his own weight to be less than the fish’s. He had caught it. He had hooked and reeled it in. His father had been at his shoulder, excitedly shouting instructions about line tension and angle, finally grabbing the fish with one hand while the other reached for the club. The wet blows sounded like a cabinet shutting. “That’s your fish!” his father had said, holding it up for appraisal before dropping it on the deck. Robert had smiled, but then had felt ashamed. He wanted to throw it back, or at least part of him did, but the blood was dark, and its scales, like small mirrors in the sun, had flecked off onto his shoe. It could not be undone.

After they’d collected enough wood for a fire, Robert walked on the beach below the tide line, picking up sand dollars and skipping them back into the water so they wouldn’t dry in the sun. He flipped rocks and watched tiny crabs scuttle over one another in the sand. He delicately carried a crab in the basin of his shirt to a tide pool, crouched down, and dropped the crab into a sea anemone, which closed itself around the crab. It looked to him like a hug; a greeting. He didn’t know whether or not anemones ate crabs, but eventually the crab stopped moving, and the anemone opened itself again.

They cooked and ate the salmon ashore, and after dinner they sat facing the water as the sun went down. As the light flattened, they saw an eagle, and watched it dive and swoop just beyond Pamier . Soon it was dark. When Robert began to get sleepy, he and his father stood and peed on the fire side by side and then his father kicked sand over the remaining embers. On board, they slept in the main cabin, together. It had been this way since his mother and sister had left, the two of them bunking up, and it was a comfort to Robert. He would not have admitted it, would not have said it aloud, but he was unable to sleep in the unfamiliar boat, with its stays and halyards constantly adjusting in the wind, knocking into the mast, without knowing his father was two feet away from him, in a matching and old-smelling sleeping bag.

The storm had come up suddenly, and had been more severe than the man on the weather channel had predicted. When the wind picked up, his father jokingly announced it was time to batten the hatches and get out the board games. “I don’t think this is funny, Joshua,” his mother had said. His father looked at her and shrugged. He went topsides to check the anchor and returned below to say there was nothing to worry about. Robert’s sister was two years younger and scared of the wind. When they were in their sleeping bags in the bow cabin that first night, the cabin the two of them had decided to call “the cave,” he’d let her sleep on his bunk between him and the hull.

The next morning a front rolled in, bringing with it a gale-force warning. His parents discussed trying to make it to Ucluelet, but by the time they’d decided to leave, the wind had already arrived, and his father said it was too late. It would be safer to stern-tie to shore and hunker down than to attempt an open-water crossing.

“There are no other boats here,” his mother said.

“We’ll be fine,” his father said.

“You think, or you know ?”

His father didn’t answer but turned to Robert and told him to put on his foul weather gear.

“You must be joking,” his mother said. Robert had never seen her so angry. “He’s not going out there with you.” Outside, through the hatch, it was dark.

“I need someone to help with the stern-tie.”

“Well, not him.”

Robert already had his slicker, but his mother told him to put it away. “How could you do this to us?” she said to his father, almost under her breath.

“What do you want me to say? I’m sorry.”

“You knew it was late in the season to be out here. You told me.” She opened the closet near the galley and pulled out a pair of rain pants and slammed the door shut. “You might have grown up sailing, but no one else here did. You understand? This might not be scary to you. But I’m telling you. This isn’t fun for the rest of us.”

His father watched her stomp rain boots on. When she stood, he was still watching her.

She turned to Robert and his sister and told them not to worry, and then she climbed topsides after her husband.

The two of them watched the storm and their parents’ progress through the oval-shaped cabin windows. The trees onshore whipped and swayed. The rain was coming down sideways and in sheets, and looked at times to be billowing in the wind. He could hear his parents shouting, but it sounded like a combination of directional advice and nonsense.

“What if they don’t come back?” his sister said. She was nine and shorter than he was by a foot, with her mother’s brown hair.

“That’s stupid.”

“What if?”

After a while they heard their parents scrambling back aboard and Robert turned to his sister, who was crying, and said, “See?”

That night his sister whimpered until their mother brought her sleeping bag into the forward cabin and slept with the two of them. In the morning the storm seemed to have passed over them at least partially, but the voice on the radio said that in the north, hurricane winds were being reported and an all-craft advisory was issued. They spent the day in the cabin playing cards and board games. When the wind kicked up again, Robert’s father went topsides to check the anchor and returned wet and angry. “We’re dragging,” he said.

“What can we do?” his mother said. It was the first time they’d spoken to each other all day.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Robert’s sister began crying again. “That helps,” his father said. “The crying helps.”

At some point, Robert fell asleep, and when he woke up he was surprised at how quiet it was in the main cabin. The storm had stopped. Morning light was streaming in through the hatches, which were now open. His father sat at the chart table with the radio on low volume.

“We’re taking your mother and sister to Ucluelet,” he said. “They’ll catch a bus and then a ferry home.”

“What about me?”

“I need you,” he said. “The boat has to come down. I can’t do it by myself. The storm’s over. It’ll be fun.” He stood and stretched. “We can poke around the islands for a few days before heading down. Me and you. It’ll be fun. I promise.”

It took six hours under power to get to Ucluelet. As they pulled past the breakwater, his sister pointed to the shore abutting the marina, where a number of the boats that had been free anchored were stacked almost on top of each other, as if they’d been swept into a corner by a large broom.

Robert hugged his mother and said good-bye to his sister at the bus station. His sister was crying for no reason. She gave him a drawing of a tree, and he thanked her for it. They waited for the bus to pull out, and then he and his father returned to Pamier .

Later, they talked about Robert’s mother. “She thinks I put us in danger,” his father said. Robert nodded. “I don’t know what she told you and your sister. But I want to tell you I didn’t do that. She’s wrong about that. I was maybe not as careful as I could’ve been. But look, I got us out of it, right?” Robert nodded again. “No one’s hurt.” They were playing Rummy-Block on the foldout table in the main cabin. The wick on the kerosene lamp was low, and the light was soft.