The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,9
would have considered it a legitimate emergency. And just to come plowing in unauthorized, with no bill of health or anything, carrying the body of a man who’d died at sea of some unspecified ailment—we’d have been slapped in quarantine and tied up in red tape till we had beards down to our knees. Besides being fined. The only thing to do was go back.”
“And you had nothing but bad luck, right from the beginning?”
“Look,” I said hotly, “we tried. We tried till we couldn’t stand it any longer. Believe me, I didn’t want the responsibility of burying him at sea. In the first place, it wasn’t going to be pleasant facing his family. And if we couldn’t bring the body ashore for an autopsy, there’d have to be a hearing of some kind to find out what he died of. There’s nothing new about burial at sea, of course, especially in the old days when ships were a lot slower than they are now, but a merchant or naval vessel with thirty to several hundred people aboard is—well, a form of community itself, with somebody in authority and dozens of witnesses. Three men alone in a small boat would be something else. When only two come back, you’re going to have to have a little better explanation than just saying Bill dropped dead and we threw him overboard. That’s the reason for all that detailed report on the symptoms of the attack. I wrote it out as soon as I saw we were probably going to have to do it.”
Soames nodded. “It’s quite thorough. Apparently the doctor who reviewed it had no difficulty in diagnosing the seizure as definitely some form of heart attack, and probably a coronary thrombosis. I wonder if you’d fill me in just briefly on what happened after you started back?”
“To begin with,” I said, “we tore the mains’l all to hell. The weather had turned unsettled that morning, even before Baxter had the attack. Just before dusk I could see a squall making up to the eastward. It looked a little dirty, but I didn’t want to shorten down any more than we had to considering the circumstances. So we left everything on and just turned in a couple of reefs in the main and mizzen. Or started to. We were finishing the main when it began to kick up a little and the rain hit us. I ran back to the wheel to keep her into the wind, while Keefer tied in the last few points and started to raise sail again. I suppose it’s my fault for not checking, but I’d glanced off toward the squall line and when I looked back at the mains’l it was too late. He had the halyard taut and was throwing it on the winch. I yelled for him to slack off, but with all the rain he didn’t hear me. What had happened was that he’d mixed up a pair of reef points—tied one from the second row to another on the opposite side in the third set. That pulls the sail out of shape and puts all the strain in one place. It was just a miracle it hadn’t let go already. I screamed at him again, and he finally heard me this time and looked around, but all he did was shake his head that he couldn’t understand what I was saying. Just as I jumped from behind the wheel and started to run forward he slipped the handle into the winch and took a turn, and that was the ball game. It split all the way across.
We didn’t have another one aboard. The previous owners had pretty well butched up the sail inventory on the way down to the Canal—blew out a mains’l and lost the genoa overboard. I managed to patch up this one after a fashion, using material out of an old stays’l, but it took two days. Maybe it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, because the weather went completely sour—dead calm about half the time, with occasional light airs that hauled all around the compass. But with just that handkerchief of a mizzen, and stays’l and working jib, we might as well have been trying to row her to the Canal. We ran on the auxiliary till we used up all the gasoline aboard, and then when there was no wind we just drifted. Keefer kept moaning and griping for us to get rid of him; said he