The Sea is a Thief (6 page)

The cedar hull had not been painted, but allowed to weather to a soft grey that would blend into the landscape.  Ten narrow planks ran the length of the flat bottom.  Clearly it had suffered a collision; six or seven of the planks were bent or shattered near the bow, sharp splinters protruding from their surfaces.  Two wider planks, no more than a foot deep, formed the sides: one plank on the starboard side, one on the port.  They were bent to form a graceful curve from the pointed bow to the narrow transom.  The plank on the starboard side had been driven backwards, its clean arc now misshapen.  The stem had been broken, or split. Sam marveled at the boat's shallow draft. You could run it through water that wouldn't come over the tops of your boots.  And it must be light as well.  
What had it struck it to cause such damage?
  He crouched underneath the horses to examine the topside.  

This was no common fishing boat. The little craft was almost completely covered by a deck, save for a rectangular opening in the center, large enough for one man, maybe two.  The oarlocks, rusty with disuse, sat astride this opening.  A low coaming, an inch or two at most, shielded it on all four sides.  Three shallow boards surrounded the deck at the stern, forming a place to stow cargo.  The twisting of the boat had loosened some of deck planks, which now hung free in midair. Underneath, on the dirt floor, sat an oversized wood-framed lantern, glassed all around.  A metal smokestack and a wire handle protruded from the top.  The thing was meant to be carried—but it was two feet high at least.  What on earth was it for?  Whoever built the lantern and the boat had a particular purpose in mind.

A shadow fell on the cedar hull.  Sam turned to find Anna, a plate of biscuits in her hand.  “I saw the door to Father's workshop open…” she began.  

“I'm sorry, I was looking for lumber, and…”

She interrupted him gently. “No need to apologize, Mr. Dreher.  Are you hungry?”  

“A sailor is always hungry,” he replied.  She set the plate on the workbench.  

“For you, then.”  He took a biscuit.  It was still hot, and smelled of fresh butter.  

“Bless you, Miss Daisey,” he said, devouring it quickly.  Anna laughed.  

“The United States Navy doesn't feed its carpenters?”

“Not like this, Miss Daisey.”   Anna brought an empty cask from underneath the workbench and then pulled out the wooden stool.  

“Sit down,” she said.  They sat in silence. It was warm in the little building, and for Sam, warmer now.  

“This was your father's workshop, then?” he asked.  

“It was.”

“And this boat?”

“Also his.”

“What work did he do, Miss Daisey?”

Silence again.  He was afraid that the question was a poor one.

“What did Reverend Carter tell you about my father, Mr. Dreher?”

“He told me very little, Miss Daisey; only that you lost him some time ago,” he replied. “I am sorry.”  She looked him straight in the eyes, measuring the sincerity of his words.  Her gaze shifted slowly to the boat.  She stood, resting her hands on the dusty hull.  Her fingers, long and slim like her mother's, moved to the gap left by the shattered planks.  The cuff of white eyelet at her sleeve caught on a splinter, and she shook it loose.  

“Father was a market gunner,” she told him.  His face told her that the words held no meaning for him.   “He hunted ducks and geese for the market.”  She indicated the decoys in the rafters. “These were the things he used.”  Sam began to make sense of it: Mary Daisey, a young widow; this broken small boat; the market gunner.  Anna's father had been killed suddenly, then—an accident.  

“Please show me,” he asked.  

“Wait here,” she said, leaving him.

Anna returned with an oilcloth pouch tucked under her arm.  Carefully, she laid it on the workbench, untying the cord and opening the oilcloth to reveal a stack of drawings, each a different size.  

“This was my father,” she said.  She brought out a pencil drawing of a young man with a mustache.  He recognized it as a copy of the photograph in Mary Daisey's workroom.  It was remarkably well done.  

“Did you draw this, Miss Daisey?'  She nodded.  He was astonished.  No one he knew could make drawings such as this.  She placed the sketch carefully behind the others in the bundle, revealing a scene of a man with a knife in his hand, carving a smooth, oval block of wood.  The man in this sketch resembled the other picture above the mantel, older and more somber.
 
 

“
He carved the decoys he used,” she explained.  “Here in the workshop, in good weather, or in the kitchen, where my brother works now. All the market gunners do, but his were more beautiful.”  

She stood and stepped onto the cask, reaching into a familiar nook of the rafters for a particular decoy and handing it to Sam.  It was a canvasback drake.  Its russet-red head had been shaped to a soft peak by a practiced hand.  The bill with its delicate nostrils seemed ready to open; its perfect eyes were set in low relief.  Sam turned the carving in his hands, wiping the dust from the smooth body.

“
Your father was an artist before you.”  

“Look how he did his feathers, with one stroke of the brush,” said Anna, her voice rising with excitement.  The trailing edges of the wing arced towards the tail in delicate curlicues of inky black, now faded.  She traced them with her fingertips.  

Briefly, quite by accident, their hands met.  For a moment, neither moved away.

Anna set the decoy on the bench.
 
“My brother Beau may be even better in time,” she said.  “He's very young for a carver.  The ones inside our house are all his.  He makes what pleases him, of whatever wood catches his eye, with no concern for its usefulness.”  She reached for one of the canvas-wrapped bundles on the high shelves.  Laying it gently on the counter, she unwrapped the leather thongs that held it closed.  Inside was a well-worn shotgun, a very big gauge, its massive barrel and lockwork burnished by time.  Its stock displayed the scars of many outings.  “This was his favorite gun,” she said, Sam's eyes never leaving it.  “It built our house, he told us.”  She indicated the other bundles lying on the shelves, their canvas shrouds concealing their identities
.
“He used several, but this was his favorite.”  

“You keep them all here?” Sam asked, surprised.  

“All his things are still here, just as they always were.  For Mother.”  

“Won't someone slip in by night and take them?”  

“No one would.  Everyone knows his guns by sight.”  
People live differently on an island,
he thought.

Turning to her sketches, she selected one and brought it to the top.  A slender man stood in a small boat on the marsh, surrounded by tall grass, his gun raised tightly to his shoulder.  His eyes were locked on his target, out of sight above the horizon.  

“Show me more of them, please,” he asked.  She turned the sheets slowly.  Here was a Canada goose, head tucked beneath its wing, floating in shallow water.  There was her father again, this time rowing the little skiff that now lay overturned in front of them.  In its stern was a mountain of ducks.  

“Days such as that made him smile,” said Anna.  

“What was his name?” Sam asked, finally.

“William Daisey.  He was called Sweet William.  Sweet William, the name of the flower.”  She found another drawing, a very small one, of a pale lavender wildflower.  She handed it to Sam.  

Sweet William.  

“You went with him when he hunted, then?”

“Not often.  Never at night, or during rough weather, but when the sea was calm, and the day not too cold, he would wrap me in a blanket and take me with him in the skiff towards Assateague.  The roar of the gun was fearsome, but I became accustomed to it, and I would stay as long as I could.  When I grew older. I would draw. He would take me to Assateague just to draw, and to ride.

“I fear that I ruined his hunting some days.  He always set out his decoys just so, and kept to certain places on the marsh where the rafts of ducks would gather.  I had to be very quiet and still.  No doubt he took fewer ducks when I was with him, but I would beg him to go again, and when the day was right I would follow him to the creek and he would carry me into the skiff and row away with me.  He would tell Mother just as we were leaving so that she had less chance to make an argument.  Then we would row away.”  She laid both hands flat on the hull of the skiff.   She closed her eyes, and tears rolled down her cheeks.

“I am so very sorry, Mr. Dreher,” she said, very quietly. “This is not your burden to carry.”  

He covered her hands with his.  “Please do not be sorry, Miss Daisey.”  Their eyes met again, and there was silence; for both of them, the light fell away from all things but the other's face, and each speck of dust hung motionless in the air.  

Sam broke the quiet. “I should finish repairing your shutters, Miss Daisey.”

“Yes,” she assented. “It is a great comfort to my mother.”

“Would there be a few planks here?”  

She showed him a stack of oars and paddles along the wall.  Several pine boards stood among them.  They would do.

“Afterwards,” he asked, “I would be grateful to know more about your father's boat.”   

The growl of Sam's handsaw and the report of his hammer soon filled the air.  Anna remained as she was, by the skiff.  The tools of her father's trade surrounded her, undisturbed.  Wooden crates, stacked high in the corners, were full of canvas bags that he filled with corn to bait the ducks.  Larger bags lay folded with them, awaiting a successful day's hunting.  Pegs along the wall held an oilskin coat and hat, creased and darkened by time and hard use.  How peculiar the oilskin smelled; to Anna, it was the smell of autumn on the marsh, the good weather fading, the cold not far off.

His loading supplies were there, too: cans of lead shot, tins of grainy black gunpowder, long wooden rods and brass-bristled brushes for cleaning the bores of the shotguns.  So was a tiny notebook he had kept to record the prices he had received at market:  
Canvasbacks and bluebills, 50c the pair; Geese, 75c.
Edmund Bagwell bought them, and shipped them north in barrels to grace the tables of fine restaurants and households.  The rich, dark meat brought a good price there; Bagwell thrived, and the Daisey house made a living.  

A market gunner had to make his money quickly. The season was all too short.  To be sure, there was oystering and fishing in other seasons.  Sweet William worked at both from time to time as he needed to, but he had no stomach for either.  A gunner who knew the marsh and made the most of his powder and shot could out-earn the watermen who dragged heavy nets all day in the sun.  He lived by his keen eye, his weatherproof hide, and his readiness to stake his life on his knowledge of every twist in the shoreline.  A map of the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague was etched into his mind in perfect detail.  It led him to his ducks.  He hunted at night by preference, using the large wooden gunning light.  Such lights had been illegal in Virginia as long as anyone could remember.  Sweet William understood why; set in the bow of the skiff, the glow of their lanterns attracted and confused the ducks, making an effective shot easy.  The brief season and the cost of ammunition left men like him with little regard for the fine points of the law.  His light always accompanied him on his boat.  His favorite hunting spots were well-guarded secrets.  Cloaked by the blackness of the nighttime marsh, they were not easily discovered by rivals.  

When bad weather moved in, the water showed a different face.  Fog could descend like a phantom, making all points of the compass look the same in the pale mist.  Fast-rising wind and powerful tides could pull a skiff out to sea, or send it spinning defenselessly towards an unfamiliar shore.  After a day or a night on the water, the deep cold seeped into a hunter's bones.  The arms that brought him out onto the marsh turned stiff and disobedient, refusing to bring him back home.  Ice was the most feared enemy, and the least predictable.  As winter deepened its grip, it formed in huge glassy sheets.  Wind and waves could send a huge frozen plate adrift without warning, slamming it into a boat, shattering its hull or trapping it on the water.  No gunning skiff could break though any but the thinnest of ice.  If more than a quarter of an inch formed, a boat was penned in.  The hunter could not row; the ice was too thick.  Neither could he walk to safety, for the ice was too thin.   If the boat took on water, there was no escape.  Swimming for the distant shore in the cold water, dragged down by leaden clothing, offered only a slim chance.  

A certain sort of man was called to that lonely and risky life, on the fringes of the law, away from the comfortable embrace of the land and the watchful eye of his fellow islanders.  The independence the hunters prized could turn to helplessness when they found themselves caught alone in the midst of a storm. They guarded the locations of their best spots jealously, but when the sun rose and they had not returned to their homes, no one knew where to look for them.

Rivalries flared among them.  Only so many ducks flew in.  When money needed to be made, there were no friends on the marsh.  Now and then talk of foul play made the rounds of the town. Gunners were not generally churchgoing family men, and more than one were genuine recluses, living at the far end of the island in Deep Hole or out in the wilds of Assateague.  Sweet William was the most kind-hearted among them, earning him his nickname.  His toughness was never in doubt.  He was the first man to set his decoys out and the last to bring them in.  He was known to drink whiskey.  He didn't hesitate to use his fists to settle a dispute.  Above all, though, he was known for his love for Mary and his children.