The Voyage by Philip Caputo

Author:Philip Caputo [Caputo, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56103-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

16

IN THE MORNING, after Frenchy Geslin told them it would be a few days before the new sail was finished, they returned to Snead’s Landing by way of the Beaufort River and discovered that the carpenter had yet to put a saw to the pine sawlog. After some prodding, Sykes cut it to the desired lengths; prodded some more the next day, he began to mill and plane the spars to the desired roundness and smoothness, but with such slow movements that he appeared to be working against a resistance, like a submerged diver.

The muggy heat made the boys feel that they were indeed living undersea, and the sandflies were an added torment, the plague of insects aggravated by a plague of visitors—the townsfolk who found Double Eagle and her crew of young northerners an irresistible novelty. The gaunt worn women, the men wearing bib overalls or trousers held up with ropes in place of belts were a taciturn lot who boarded the schooner without asking permission, some to poke around her with the perfunctory inquisitiveness of detectives seeking evidence to support a conviction already decided upon, others to sit mutely on the afterdeck and watch the boys’ every move with looks suspicious and curious at the same time. The greatest strain was not knowing what to say to the uninvited guests or what to do with them. Like Kincaid, the people had an air of touchy pride that might be offended with a wrong word or a wrong move, and that gave Snead’s Landing the atmosphere of some foreign court, governed by social rules strangers were not permitted to know.

Will suffered under an additional burden: Every time he and the Braithwaites went ashore to check on Sykes’s progress at the sawmill, poor Clara would appear and shadow Will, gazing with her usual trancelike expression. On their fifth day in Snead’s Landing, after the carpenter promised to finish the spars tomorrow, Clara’s manner changed. She approached Will, making gestures and guttural sounds whose meaning made no sense at first. Then, realizing she was asking him to kiss her or for permission to kiss him, he fled down the main street (the only street in fact, the others being but paths and dirt lanes between the shanties), the Braithwaites behind him, laughing at his distress (though even as he laughed, Eliot could not help but feel pity for the speechless girl).

Late that afternoon, they were called on by a man and a boy in a flat-bottom skiff, with a pile of dead birds between its thwarts and two shotguns propped in its bow. The boy, who was about fifteen, with slanted, slitty eyes and blond hair shorn to bristles, stood and held up three braces of marsh hens while his father, a broad-chested man with a hard, intransigent face, asked if they wanted the birds for supper. Nathaniel asked how much; the man replied by shaking his head, which was interpreted to mean that they were a gift. Nathaniel accepted and invited the hunters aboard for marsh-hen stew.

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