Charles Williams - The Sailcloth Shroud

He was silent for a few minutes. Then he asked, “What kind of boat is the Orion?”

“Fifty-foot schooner. Gaff-rigged on the fore and jib-headed on the main, and carries a fore-tops’l, stays’l, and working jib. She accommodates a party of six besides the two of us in the crew.”

“Is she very old?”

“Yes. Over twenty years now. But sound.”

“Upkeep gets to be a problem, though,” he said thoughtfully. “I mean, as they get progressively older. What is your basic charter price?”

“Five hundred a week, plus expenses.”

“I see,” he said. “It seems to me, though, you could do better with something a little larger. Say a good shallow-draft ketch or yawl, about sixty feet. With the right interior layout, it would probably handle more people, so you could raise your charter price. Wouldn’t take any larger crew, and if it were still fairly new your maintenance costs might be less.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ve been on the lookout for something like that for a long time, but I’ve never been able to swing it. It’d take fifteen thousand to twenty thousand more than I could get for the Orion.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “it would be pretty expensive.”

We fell silent. He sat up to get another cigarette from the pocket of his robe. I thought I heard him say something, and glanced up from the compass card. “I beg your pardon?”

He made no reply. He was turned slightly away from me, facing forward, so I saw only the back of his head. He had the lighter in his hand as if he’d started to light the cigarette and then had forgotten it. He tilted his head back, stretching his neck, and put a hand up to the base of his throat.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

It was almost a full minute before he answered. I glanced at the compass card, and brought the wheel up a spoke. “Oh,” he said quietly. “No. Just a touch of indigestion.”

I grinned. “That’s not much of a recommendation for Blackie’s sandwiches.” Then I thought uneasily of the refrigerator; food poisoning could be a very dangerous thing at sea. But the corned beef was canned; it couldn’t have been spoiled. And the milk had tasted all right.

“It was the onions,” he said. “I should never eat them.”

“There’s some bicarbonate in one of the lockers above the sink,” I told him.

“I have something here,” he said. He carefully dropped the lighter back in the pocket of his robe and took out a small bottle of pills. He shook one out and put it in his mouth.

“Hold the wheel,” I said, “and I’ll get you some water.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

He lay back with his head pillowed on the robe and his eyes closed. Once or twice he shifted a little and drew his knees up as if he were uncomfortable, but he said nothing further about it except to reply with a brief “Yes” when I asked if he felt better. After a while he groped for the bottle and took another of the pills, and then lay quietly for a half hour, apparently asleep. His face and body were shiny with sweat as the sun beat down on him, and I began to be afraid he’d get a bad burn. I touched him on the shoulder to wake him up.

“Don’t overdo it the first day,” I said.

He wasn’t asleep, however. “Yes, I expect you’re right,” he replied. “I think I’ll turn in.” He got up a little unsteadily and made his way down the companion ladder. After he was gone I noticed he’d forgotten to take the robe. I rolled it tightly and wedged it in back of a cushion so it wouldn’t blow overboard.

A school of porpoises picked us up and escorted us for a while, leaping playfully about the bow. I watched them, enjoying their company as I always did at sea. In about a half hour Keefer came up from below carrying a mug of coffee. He sat down in the cockpit.

“You want a cup?” he asked.

I looked at my watch. It was three now. “No, thanks. I’ll get one after Baxter takes over.”

“We ought to have our tails kicked,” he said, “for not thinking to buy a fish line. At this speed we could pick up a dolphin or barracuda.”

“I intended to,” I said, “but forgot it.”

We talked for a while about trolling. Nowadays, when practically all ships made sixteen knots or better, it was out of the question, but when he’d first started going to sea just before the Second World War he’d been on a few of the old eight- and ten-knot tankers on the coastwise run from Texas to the East Coast, and sometimes in the Stream they’d rig a trolling line of heavy sashcord with an inner tube for a snubber. Usually the fish tore off or straightened the hook, but occasionally they’d manage to land one.

He stood up and stretched. “Well, I think I’ll flake out again.”

He started below. Just as his shoulders were disappearing down the companion hatch my eyes fell on Baxter’s robe, which was getting wet with spray. “Here,” I called out, “take this down, will you?”

I rolled it tightly and tossed it. The distance wasn’t more than eight feet, but just before it reached his outstretched hand a freakish gust of wind found an opening and it ballooned suddenly and was snatched to leeward. I sprang from the wheel and lunged for it, but it sailed under the mizzen boom, landed in the water a good ten feet away, and began to fall astern. I looked out at it and cursed myself for an idiot.

“Stand by the backstay!” I called out to Keefer. “We’ll go about and pick it up.”

Then I remembered we hadn’t tacked once since our departure from Cristobal. By the time I’d explained to him about casting off the weather backstay and setting it up on the other side as we came about, the robe was a good hundred and fifty yards astern. “Hard a-lee!” I shouted, and put the helm down. We came up into the wind with the sails slatting. I cast off the port jib sheet and trimmed the starboard one. They ran aft through fairleads to winches at the forward end of the cockpit. Blackie set up the runner. We filled away, and I put the wheel hard over to bring her back across our wake. I steadied her up just to leeward of it.

“Can you see it?” I yelled to Keefer.

“Dead ahead, about a hundred yards,” he called back. “But it’s beginning to sink.”

“Take the wheel!” I ordered. I slid a boathook from under its lashing atop the doghouse and ran forward. I could see it. It was about fifty yards ahead, but only a small part of it still showed above the surface. “Left just a little!” I sang out. “Steady, right there!”

It disappeared. I marked the spot, and as we bore down on it I knelt at the rail just forward of the mainmast and peered down with the boathook poised. We came over the spot. Then I saw it directly below me, three or four feet under the surface now, a white shape drifting slowly downward through the translucent blue of the water. . . .

“Look!” Flowers cried out.

12

They crowded around the table, staring down at the instrument and the sudden, spasmodic jerking of its styli.

I gripped the arms of the chair as it all began falling into place—the nameless fear, and what had actually caused it, and the apparently insignificant thing that had lodged in my subconscious mind on an afternoon sixteen years ago aboard another boat, a chartered sport fisherman off Miami Beach. I had killed Baxter. Or at least I was responsible for his death.

Bonner growled, and swung around to grab me by the shirt. “You’re lying! So now let’s hear what really happened—”

I tried to swing at his face, but Slidell grabbed my arm before I could pull the instrument off the table by its connecting wires. “Shut up!” I roared. “Get off my back, you stupid ape! I’m trying to understand it myself!”