Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

He turns to look. The moonlight shines on her long nose, round face, and frizzy red hair as she lumbers down to the dock, waddling from the weight of a fifth small plastic barrel. She stops a few feet from them.

Holy fuck.

“She’s a kid, ” he says.

“You need someone fae the island,” she says, avoiding his eyes in the same way she used to in the shop. “You need someone to represent Iona.”

“Katie isn’t regular crew,” Rufus says. “She’s our escort, a set of hands should someone need a break or have an accident, and she knows how to handle a steering oar. It’s brilliant she’s offered to join us.”

He’s spent five weeks minimizing contact with this underage girl, and now he’ll spend at least five days trapped on a boat face-to-face with her. If he weren’t half asleep, he’d fall down laughing. As though this trip weren’t fucked enough already. He looks in Ghislaine’s direction, but she’s busy with the boat. Where is Georgina when he needs her — she’d die laughing. Well, Eamon can’t be more than twenty. Maybe the girl will fix her attention on him. As for how the boat refitter can let his daughter go on such a journey or how Rufus can be ready to accept the responsibility, it’s not his problem. He’s not responsible for her. He’s not responsible for anyone on this journey. As Rufus said, he’s just a body . As far as he’s concerned, his guitar’s the only thing on the voyage he has to look out for.

Still, she’s a kid. He has a red-haired little sister somewhere. Sissy is a lot older now than this girl is, of course, but it’s hard for him to think of her as more than eleven or twelve — her age when he last saw her. There aren’t many ways to keep track of people, people like little sisters, without being seen.

“We’ll take care of her,” he says to the boat refitter, because it feels as though someone should.

“Oh, she’s Rufus’s now. He can do what he wants with her,” the refitter says, stroking the side of the boat. “Though I’m lookin’ forward to hearin’ how the new paint works out. It was Rufus what told me to try it. He read they were trying the bitumen on roofs in England.”

“If it can handle the weather in England, it can handle the sea,” Rufus says.

It sounds like a jingle, in a way that bothers him. “I meant your daughter,” he tells the refitter. “Not the boat.”

“Who, me?” Katie helps Eamon lift their water supply into the boat, then turns to stare him down, as though he’s a crab nipping at her rubber boots. This time she looks right at him. “I know the sea here like I was born right in it. Take care of you is more like it.”

* * *

At 3:00 a.m., Rufus takes one last look at his watch and compass, and they set out. Ghislaine, Eamon, Rufus, and he, with their backs toward the open sea and their hands, in fingerless gloves, gripping the boat’s long, slender oars. Fifteen-year-old Katie on the bench at the back of the boat facing them and the great expanse of the Atlantic ahead. Her expression holds the sternness of an ancient grandmother.

Eight long pale oars, their tips painted red, dip into the black sea like drunken, uncoordinated spider legs. The boat swivels over the sea’s calm surface in an ungainly fashion, spinning slightly east, then west.

“Francis,” Rufus says, “the trick to rowing a currach is to go deep into the water, as much as five feet. You saw how the oars have almost no paddle? That’s because the currach is designed for rough seas, and in rough seas a large paddle can get tripped up on the waves. The trade is that you need to get further down in the water.”

He doesn’t need anyone to tell him he is the problem. He’s off stroke from the others and can’t seem to find their rhythm. It feels like the story of his life. He’s sleepy and a little cold and would be glad to be still in his bed. He doesn’t particularly appreciate hearing that the boat is designed for rough seas, either.

The impulse to get up and walk away comes over him like a terrible itch, but the deep, dark Atlantic surrounds them. He is stuck in this damned boat.

Georgina used to say, Love, you got a song going through your veins instead of blood. He sets up a tune in his head to the rhythm of the oars and lets it take over his body, digging into the sea with each stroke until he can find unison with the others.

“That’s my man,” Rufus says. “We’ll make a sailor of you yet.”

“Rufus,” he says. “In the interest of peace, I shall not knock you into the sea.”

Within little time, Iona is swallowed up by the darkness. All that is left is the light of the lamp hanging over the dock. After a while, that, too, disappears. Occasionally, to the east — on his right — he can make out a flicker of light or shadow of shore. The coastline of Mull.

“This will be our longest day,” Rufus says. “Our longest crossing.”

“We’re heading straight for Colonsay? We’re not going to hug Mull?” Katie asks. They are seated single file, Ghislaine directly face-to-face with Katie, he behind Ghislaine, then Eamon behind him. Rufus claimed the bench after Eamon, in the front of the boat but behind all the other rowers, undoubtedly to keep an eye on and be heard by all of them. Rufus is just the sort of assertive nut whom people either adore or run from.

Born into a different family, a different circumstance, Eugene might have been like that. Wiry-haired, wiry-bodied Eugene in his silver-rimmed glasses, waiting in grade school to be picked by the boys, then waiting in high school to be picked by the girls. In the end, being picked by Uncle Sam.

He digs his oars into the water. He pulls. He circles. A seabird flies overhead, its underside huge and white; probably a gannet awakened by their passage.

“We can stop somewhere among the Torran Rocks, catch our breath while we’re still warming up,” Rufus says, “if we need to.”

Katie clicks her tongue. “You cannae do that.”

“Can’t do what? Tie up along the Rocks?”

“You don’t know the Rocks.”

“It’ll be day by then. We’ll see anything in our way.”

The frizzy red tendrils of hair around Katie’s round face shake. “There are smaller rocks,” she says, “stickin’ up the surface o’ the water, like the stones on a dragon’s tail. One minute they’re there, and another they are under water. Meanwhile, the sea churns up around them like a washin’ machine. Haven’t you ever read Kidnapped, man?”

His body tilts forward and back, forward and back, forward and back. He wants to ask Katie what Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel has to do with her argument, but he can’t bring himself to address her directly. Wasn’t there a shipwreck in Kidnapped ? He should have read the stupid book back in school instead of relying on Eugene.

“Try tae keep starboard,” Katie says. “Just pass ’em by.”

“Look,” Rufus says. “The sun is rising.”

To the east, the island of Mull is a blackened but discernible silhouette. Dark, waterbound rocks lie like flat, benign sleepers. To the west, dusky orange glows in an ever-growing band where the deep violet sky plunges into the sea. Pulling hard on her oars, Ghislaine glances over her left shoulder, and he follows suit. A landmass, not large enough to be inhabited but large enough to be called an island, has materialized in the distance ahead.

“Are those the Torran Rocks?” Ghislaine asks. “It seems calm enough.”

“We’re not halfway to the Rocks yet,” Katie says. “That’s Soa. My da sometimes takes lobsters from there. The Rocks are more like chips. Not the tattie kind. You’ll see. You’ll be sorry if you don’t listen to me, Rufus. We’ll all be sorry.”