.jpg)
This section of the novel is narrated by a young boat builder named Jason Sanderling. He has come to the shores of Lake Champlain during the War of 1812, engaged to help build the American fleet.
I doubt that we finished the sloop that
day, though it seems that we might have. That might be too perfect a
fulfillment before all went so badly wrong. I do remember that it was a hot,
heavy day on the shore to begin with, still air, silent water, shirts sticking
to our skins even in the shade of the pines, even in the morning; wood shavings
and dust from the saw-pits adhering to our sweaty necks and backs as we worked
through the day.
By afternoon, white-gray thunderclouds rose
above the lines of mountains to the west across the water. They gathered,
departed, gathered again, towering higher into the reaches of sky than any
clouds I’d ever before seen.
A welcome breeze arrived, a surprise, in
mid afternoon. And then those towering clouds moved in from the opposite shore.
They covered the sun, and the sky darkened. I remember shivering–and shivering
hard–when, of a sudden, the temperature dropped.
And there she was again out there, dark
tattered sail on the water, that small battered sloop pushed hard by the
fearsome winds on the broad lake. The sky growing even darker. The little
vessel seeming to fly toward us, but a rough, tumbling sort of flight, rising
on wave, falling into trough, rising, falling again, all this distant and in
the eerie daytime darkness of the gathering, oncoming storm.
“God. It will be a miracle if she makes
the shore…” Peaslee said quietly to me, just before the rain reached across the
shoreline and found us.
That rain fell of a sudden now, in gray
sheets, making a sound that was between hissing and roaring. The wall of gray
soon obscured that bobbing, twisting boat out there, her rising and falling
mast and sails. I said a private prayer for the deliverance of those poor souls
on the water, at the mercy of that big lake and the fearsome power of summer
storm. Someone called out and pointed across the water toward the curve of
shore past the headland–the Cedar Cove lighthouse had been lit. I caught but
one quick glimpse of that pale beacon before it, too, was swallowed in thick
gray gloom. Now the rain turned to falling ice, hail the size of grapeshot.
Battered by it as we ran to the sheds, holding our hats tight against the
onslaught, we sought, at last, our safety. Safe inside, we were to watch and
listen as, for some two hours, hail and hard rain continued to beat upon the
skin of the dark, churning water, thunder rocked the sky and mountains,
lightning flashed in the firmament, and the strong wind soughed in the moving
treetops.
It was a young fellow from
Bennington--his name I never knew-- who first noticed, then spoke, the fact
that Cowper was not among our company, and that he had perhaps been somehow
caught in the storm.
By early evening the fierce weather had
abated, and a copper-colored calm took over the air. I walked with Butler
It was keen-eyed Butler
We walked together toward these
storm-tossed objects, and in that calm, yellowed atmosphere, something huge
broke the water’s skin–the humped back
of a giant lake sturgeon, the big fish as huge and ponderous, I thought to
myself, as the passage of time itself, but somehow graceful, moving in its
familiar watery element.
The fish disappeared beneath the water. Butler
Against the rocks at the end of our small
peninsula, at the edge of the creek’s mouth, sat a shape, a larger darkness
than the rocks along the shore. Broken up as it was, it took a moment to
recognize the vessel.
“Oh, Jesus” I said, “It’s that negro
sloop. She’s in pieces.”
I remember the horrible moment when we
came close, when we first saw that fallen mast, the tangled lines, the twisted,
tortured sail laid like a dark blanket over the motionless bodies, and reaching
from beneath that heavy, dirty canvas, a hand, frozen at the moment of grasping.
from THE LAKE OF LIVING WATER, by Kevin Macneil Brown.
Available in paperback and Kindle editions:
