Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

I slung my arm over her shoulder. “A boat,” I said.

It had required more than 750 bottles and a dozen rolls of tape. The pitch of the deck was steadied by a keel of oversize jugs.

“We did it, Hans.”

“I guess we did, Paulie.”

“We,” she said. “You and I.”

That evening, when Dad emerged from the shed, he watched us lift it into the shallows. We carried it across the muddy bank and set it gingerly down on the surface, where of course it floated. High on its beam. Dad went back to the house and returned with his camera, then snapped pictures of the two of us as we held our arms together across the bow. He walked up to the cabin again and came down with the garden hose. I took it from his hands and filled the jugs in the keel. As the last one reached its brim, the whole craft sighed and settled into its draft.

Now my mother came down from the porch. She walked up the dock like the Princess of Wales and lifted her skirt elegantly over the transom. “Splendid,” she said. “Splendid, splendid, splendid.”

On the deck, she kicked off her sandals and shook her hips. The craft, which was the size of our Country Squire but which — with the keel jugs empty, anyway — weighed no more than Bernie, stood firm. Bernie, as though to acknowledge the equivalence, lowered himself off the dock and pushed on it with his paws. The rails hardly dipped. Even the minnows came out of the shadows to look.

“What are we calling it?” said Paulie.

“How about the Victory ?” said my mother in her British accent. She glanced slyly around.

“The victory over what?” said Dad.

“Over nothing,” said Paulie.

“The Victory was Nelson’s command ship,” said Mom. “It was fleet command at Trafalgar.”

“And this is our Trafalgar,” said my father.

My mother laughed. “Our what?”

He laughed, too. He didn’t laugh that often, but when he did it was almost a bellow. The sound filled the cove. My mother watched him.

“Do you perhaps mean our Waterloo ?”

“Oh,” he said. Then, “Perhaps I do.”

Paulette said, “We can build a Royal Sovereign, too.”

“Good, Paulie,” said my mother.

“The Royal Sovereign was Nelson’s second-in-command,” said Paulie.

“I know that, Smallette.”

“No, you don’t, Hans.”

Mom turned to the deep. “I pronounce you, then”—here she gestured grandly over the bow—“the HMS Victory . Congratulations to the entire family of Andrets, boatbuilders and scholars.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

My father stood with his camera on the dock, shaking his head distantly, laughing more softly now and smiling queerly down at all of us, like a man I’d never seen before.

—

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Paulie and I started on the Royal Sovereign. Paulie was the one who insisted. She wanted to refight the great Battle of Trafalgar.

I carried down the bags of bottles to the beach. She’d just come out from a swim and was pulling off her wet bikini top by extracting it from her sweatshirt. (As a younger boy, I’d been fascinated by this trick, which I’d first seen at the public pool in Tapington. But by elementary school, I knew enough topology to trivialize it: in the topological world, size was utterly irrelevant, and things stretched or shrank at will. If you imagined my sister in her bikini top, wearing a sweatshirt that grew continuously (or if you imagined my sister shrinking continuously) until the sweatshirt was miles away from even touching her, it was obvious that she could change whatever wet clothes she wanted, without removing the dry clothes that covered them.) She pulled the dripping top out of the armhole of her sweatshirt, as though it were a ferret that had crawled up her sleeve, and hung it on a branch.

“The great Battle of Trafalgar?” I said. “They were both Nelson’s ships.”

“Correct.”

“That means they’re both on the same side, Paulie. How can we reenact a battle with one side’s navy? Answer that one.”

“It would be a metaphor.”

I looked at her.

“For our family, Hans.”

By the time Dad came out of the cabin and walked past us to his shed, we were at work. By the end of the next afternoon, all the sections were complete; and by the end of the one after that, we were running the strapping around the deck. “You know,” Paulie said as we set the last jug into the keel. “We just have to stick together now.”

“Who does?”

“You and I, Hans.”

I loved my sister — I’d realized it again that week, working at her side in the shade of the cedars while the adrenalized generosity of even my diminished dose misted through me. I loved her, even if we would always be in battle. “That’s a little dramatic,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“It’s intended to be.”

“He’s busy, Paulie. He can’t play around with a couple of kids.”

“He’s not that busy. And we’re a couple of his kids. He gets this little fantasy going, then he leaves it to us to finish.” She measured out a length of tape and in an even voice said, “He’s unreliable. That’s what it is.”

“So?”

“So, I never know if he’s going to come out here with some idea like this or just sulk around like an asshole inside that shed.”

I whistled.

“Shut up. It’s the truth.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s no better word.”

“Which word, Paulie? Asshole ? Or shed ?”

“Unreliable.”

“Oh, come on.” I touched her elbow. “Things could be worse.”

She looked at me as though I’d slapped her. “Not really. There aren’t many things that could be worse. Not for a girl, anyway. There’s not much worse than having an asshole for a father.”

I held a length of tape against the gunwale, and she pushed it sullenly into place. I drew out another, and we attached this one across the bow. But when I handed the roll to her for the other side, she wouldn’t take it. Her eyes were damp.

“You don’t understand, Hans. It’s like quicksand . I keep trying to push myself up, but the ground keeps sinking. That’s him. He’s the quicksand I grew up on.”

—

WHEN I ENTERED, Dad was at his desk, using a screwdriver to scrape the rust off of something. Mom had sent me out to the shed with a sandwich.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Humanity,” he answered. He set down the screwdriver. “Humanity trying to defeat its limitations. Otherwise known as a dynamo. This one powers a lantern.”

“Okay.”

“But it’s just another example of man against God.” He blew rust from the desk blotter. “Which, if anyone asks, happens to be the purpose of life. Look at this.” He held up what looked like a flashlight crossed with a pistol, set onto a stool from a dollhouse. When he squeezed the handle, a metal gear turned, and after a few pulls a bulb on the end began to flicker.

“God appears to be winning.”

He laughed. “For the moment perhaps. It’s still pretty rusty.” He bent forward and began digging at the teeth again.

“Can I ask you a question, Dad?”

“You already did.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, back. What’s the question?”

“Are you happy?”

“Nope. Nobody is.”

He hadn’t even stopped to think about it.

“What about when you’re working?”

“Working?”

“On mathematics.”

He set down the dynamo and looked straight ahead, so that I saw his face in profile. In the corner of the shed I could see that there were a few other rusty gadgets, too, along with some old tools. “Do I look like I’m working?”