Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“The ullage. The part of the bottle that’s empty, under the cap.”

“Forget the ullage.”

“Yeah, Smallette, forget the ullage.”

“Okay,” she said. She walked to the end of the table and stood in front of his chair. His body had long ago returned to normal. His belly was flat, his skin was tan, and his hair had been carefully combed. His eyes darted around intelligently, the way they had when I was younger. He looked, I remember noticing, exactly like my father.

“One sixty?” she said cautiously.

“ What, Smallette!” I nodded sagely. “ I weigh one sixty . Try one eighty. How about one seventy-five, at the very least?”

“One fifty-eight,” he answered.

“I told you! 36 bottles for neutral buoyancy in fresh water. And another for the weight of the plastic. That’s 37.”

“35.83, Smallette. Plus.93 for the extra. That’s 36.76.”

“Try putting the cap on 76 hundredths of a bottle, Clever One.”

“This is math, Smallette, not boatbuilding.”

“No, it’s not,” said Dad. “It’s boatbuilding.”

He turned to my sister.

“Thirty-five in salt water,” she said triumphantly. “Plus another for the bottles. Thirty-six.”

“And for two-thirds freeboard, Paulie?” he asked.

“What’s freeboard?”

“The part above the waterline,” I snapped. “A hundred and eleven in fresh! A hundred and eight in salt!”

“That was trivial, Hans!”

“We don’t need to buy any boat, kids!” Dad stood up, pulling my mother into a quick hug. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said, releasing her and pointing out the window. “Sailors!” he boomed. “To the task!”

—

IF YOU WERE standing on the shore of our cove the next morning as the sun burned the last mist from the shallows, you would have seen three skinny figures hunched in a line along the bank, fastening together something long and low and shiny from a pile of strangely shaped objects that was heaped beside them. A big, hairy dog was ambling in their midst. It’s possible that all four beings would have appeared content, possibly even joyful. At the very least, the three who were working were doing so with singular concentration.

This, I now understand, is what a mathematician would call happiness.

Paulette and I were assembling one end while Dad assembled the other. From our wrists hung thick rolls of duct tape. We unspooled it meticulously, trying to prevent the lengths from adhering to themselves. (This aspect was particularly gratifying: I’d taken my usual dose, of course, and in my hands the eager ribbons bent toward their sticky sides with what I understood to be the molecular equivalent of affection.) Paulette held everything in place as I taped. Then we switched, and I held the pieces for her. My father preferred to work alone — as he always did — by clamping the bottles between his knees. Bernie panted faithfully, shuffling back and forth among us. A few of the containers had bits of soda in them still and we spilled these onto the bank, where a line of ants was filing in from the woods, their feelers trembling. Bernie sniffed at them.

They, too, were concentrating.

Up on the porch sat my mother, happily reading. She was another ant, I understood then, trembling with her own intention. My sister was pausing now and then to glance up at her.

Before the sun reached its peak, the main hull had grown to length. We stood back to admire it. When I whistled — my father whistling in return — my mother looked up, then set down her book and clapped. The main deck was twelve feet long by then — exactly the length of my sister and me head to toe, with one of my high-top sneakers laid between us — and six feet wide. A dozen courses in length, a dozen and a half in width, and two in height. Four hundred thirty-two hollow, truncated biconics of DuPont polyethylene terephthalate, corrugated at their bottoms, lashed with duct tape to exclude a volume exceeding the water-equivalent mass of any combination of Andret family who might wish to brave an expedition. The whole thing rested like a gray iceberg on the sand.

We broke for lunch.

—

AFTER WE FINISHED eating, Paulie and I walked down to the shore again by ourselves. I began taping a course for a side rail, but Paulie just sat down on the sand. “Go ahead and relax,” I said.

“I am.”

I looked out at the lake. A mass of bottom weeds had been torn loose by the wind the night before, and now the waves were edging them toward us. “No, really,” I said. “No problem. I’ll do the rest myself.”

“I heard you, Hans.”

“Good. Because I was just wondering.” I pulled out a length of tape. “Because if you really did hear me, then maybe you want to help.”

She watched me with a disdainful smile. Then she said, morosely, “You’d do anything, you know?”

“Excuse me?”

“You think you’re a rebel, but you’re the worst kind of conformist. You’d do absolutely anything he thinks of.” She nodded toward his shed, where through the window we could see the top of his head.

“You’re full of it, Smallette.”

“If he asked you to stab yourself in the chest, you’d say, ‘Should I put the knife back in the drawer when I’m done?’ ”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t you see how futile it is?”

“What do you mean, futile? We just built a boat together.”

“Half of one. What about the sides?”

“I’m working on them by myself.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Well, then what do you mean? We could finish it today if you helped.”

“I’m talking about him, Hans. He doesn’t give a damn. Don’t you see that? He only cares about one thing.” She pointed toward the shed.

“He helped us all morning, Paulie.”

She laughed. “Well,” she said, “let’s see if he helps us tomorrow.”

—

EVEN AT THE age I was that summer, I was precocious enough that I could have discussed with my father whatever mathematical endeavor he’d embarked upon. But I never even asked him about it.

That kind of curiosity — a curiosity about the man beyond the effects he had on my own life — wouldn’t arrive for years.

Paulette was right: he never did help us again with the boat. The next morning, while my mother made breakfast for the two of us, we heard the porch door slap shut and a moment later watched him make his way out to the shed.

My mother glanced over at Paulie. “I’m sorry,” she said, slipping more eggs onto her plate. “But if it makes you feel any better, what he’s working on right now could be of major significance.”

My sister didn’t even look up.

It took Paulie and me the whole day to build the transom. Then another day for the bow and the side rails and then an entire weekend to lash all the parts together. We matched up the deck and the rails, then wedged the necks of the deck bottles through the diamond-shaped gaps in the sides. The whole thing had been my father’s idea, and it had been the prospect of working with him that had driven both of us to the task. But we finished alone.

Paulie was right: I did want to please him.

But something else was happening, too: every day now, I found myself ingesting a smaller dose. By the end of that week, I wasn’t sure whether I was even rolling anymore or whether the magnitude of the task Paulie and I were doing had simply produced in me a state of meditation that was no different from the drug’s.

Late on a Sunday afternoon, we made the final assembly on a patch of beach near the waterline. When we’d taped together the straps between the gunwale and the transom, Paulie stood back and rested her hands on her hips. “Look,” she said quietly.