The last tale of norah b.., p.27
The Last Tale of Norah Bow, page 27
What Bob didn’t know was there was another rumrunner’s car behind the first one and he never saw that big boat of a car before it clipped him in the hindquarters and spun him sideways. I woke then, knowing in my gut something was terribly wrong and so I ran from my bedroom with almost nothing on and found Bob all broken up and gasping. Later that day, I carried him a good ways out onto a bramble spit and buried him behind a dune. If you know “Cry Me a River,” written some twenty years later for Ella Fitzgerald, then you know the kind of mournful tune I brought for Bob. Since he was a pup, Bob and I had craved each other’s company and reassurance and not a day passed when we didn’t take heart from each other’s being all in for the other. You could offer me my own private island on Lake Erie or one more day with Bob and my choice would not even be close. What I’m trying to say is, Prohibition just about did me in. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t do anything but listen to my heart caught between a hush and a hammer. So what came next was like a key busting me out of jail.
Just a few days before my high school graduation I got a postcard from Victoria, British Columbia, that read simply, Seventy foot schooner leaving for Marquesas in July. Thought you might like the cut of the jib. Meet me at the Bent Mast Bar, R.
That postcard from Ruby arrived in Rye Beach some eighty years ago. I thought I had lost the picture of two flower baskets hanging from a wrought-iron lamp post until a big wind rattled the front window glass and the postcard, tucked behind another picture, slipped from its pocket and landed at my feet, which is what made me think I had to get this story out in the open. I had no choice in the matter. This story had been looking for me for a long time.
Now, after eight decades—or is it nine?—I ask myself how much of what happened was true down to the bone or have I only rearranged events to suit my conclusions? Such is the deviation of memory. Not to be trusted, not ever, and yet our remembrances are all we can carry with us until they too are unremembered and untended by anyone.
That said, I’d like to tell you I know a great many things with certainty but I don’t, but I do know this. The world runs on secrets buried in the ocean of the blood. Each vantage point on the compass depicts one degree of truth, so we may all lay claim that our chosen reading of the past is correct. But nobody tells the whole story. Nobody grasps the whole truth cloaked by time and distance, both fickle in their loyalties. And nobody gets to map the bottom of this ocean except when they are scattered there.
What’s more, I wish I could say I pegged most everything right about Daddy, but chances are I got just as many things wrong, and I never saw the man as he saw himself. Lick of smoke, molecule of hunger and longing, burst of rose in the shade of an oak, my days are more like his than not, only so many breaths counting down to an unmoored signature. It’s probably fair to say Daddy wasn’t keen on the vaporous nature of our fate and so he tried, with all motor oil he could stash away, to escape it. No such luck, Vital Bow. No one gets to outrun the feet of smoke we are born with, not even Ruby.
No, I won’t give my last word to smoke.
Everything breaks open eventually—the sky, the Great Lake beneath it, the four-chambered pump stuck in the chest, even the earth itself troubled by its own chain of internal fires. I used to think all these broken places were the source of my sadness and the world’s, but that’s only where the story starts.
The hard part is knowing where to go after the disappointment has blown you down. Do you stay and rebuild from scratch or do you leave? I’ll wager the only ones who eke out any measure of happiness are those who wrestle or pray all night for answers, then in the morning they settle for more questions. When you get a sign, even a faint electrical pulse of how to proceed, you don’t hesitate to act because weak signals from the horizon may be the most explicit orders you’ll ever receive.
That blast of air, that swept my long-ago postcard from behind a picture, was the leading edge of a low-pressure system that swept down the North Carolina coast and rattled my windows. Maybe the big wind aimed to wash out Topsail Beach in North Carolina where I live alone, but my cottage stood up to this storm. There are many times when I thought I’ve had enough difficulty here, more than enough, but now I can’t seem to die.
Every moment I can’t seem to die is coupled with every other moment and all of this coupling is less understood than the dark blue veins on the back of my hands. My veins tell me I am losing volume as my blood pressure spikes. Sooner than later and maybe in just a few hours, these bulging rivers will join the one great river, so what more must I tell you about the river of time my father and I made with our moments?
I never knew the origin of his unhappiness or if the broken in him was given away at birth and he had no say in the matter. I do know it’s always been a scandal to say, I love you. How can we fix this? Please forgive me. I never heard him say those words, so now I say those words for him, thinking maybe he still needs help in this department and anyway, I’m the only one left on earth who knows his name. I’m the only one who can say, let’s go out on the water Vital Bow and hoist sail and see if we can sort out those parts of ourselves we never understood.
And, yes, Ruby and I island-hopped across the South Pacific before we parted company again in Fiji where sailboats from all over the globe are abandoned because the enormity of the Pacific suddenly comes into view from there and even the most intrepid skippers think, What more must I prove to the gods of adventure? Others arrive looking for a bargain, for a cook, for a last-minute savior, for weather-tested crew. Ruby left on a boat called the Yellow Jacket with an Italian skipper who promised a grove of olive trees and a hilltop villa. Maybe she stayed with him. Maybe not. Either way, I’m sure she held tight to the lightning bolt of her life song. That’s what a ruby can do.
I caught another boat to New Zealand, but no matter where I went, no matter how many Panamas, Argentinas, and Tristan da Cunhas I reached, the cottage on Rye Beach was how my heart could always lay down a new heading. Rye Beach, within spitting distance of a tempting arc of Lake Erie islands, home of the untamable wisteria keen on prying apart any window with its vines, and Bob, the best beach hound in the world who never failed to make me laugh. Rye Beach, gathered for Sunday dinner where I trust the fat, jade crickets still bivouac in the swale beside Johnny’s penny candy store. Rye Beach, where my barefoot mother in a yellow sundress waits on the break wall with open arms. Rye Beach, a summer cottage place not far from a whiskey river that caused so much pain and pushed me toward the many sweet things I claimed for myself after the pain was gone.
Acknowledgements:
I want to thank my fearless readers who weighed in on this novel as it evolved over many years. I asked so much of you and you all gave even more: Ann Ryan, screenwriters and story consultants Allan Katz and Joe Gilford, Bill Tremblay, Pat Francisco, Sally King, Mary Logue, and most of all, Lynne Armstrong who read multiple versions of this story without reservation. I also want to thank my father who told me stories of his days at Rye Beach, Ohio, where he first learned to build sailboats from scraps of lumber that washed up on shore.
J.P. White, The Last Tale of Norah Bow
