Off Season - Jack Ketchum [87]
Shipbuilding in the state had pretty much dried up by then as the great forests had died from overharvesting and underplanning but there was a time when our tall white pine produced hundreds of masts and spars, our oak produced ribs, our ash, fastenings, our yellow pine, planking. During World War II Maine built submarines and destroyers at the rate of one a month.
My father had become fascinated with ships as a boy growing up in Plymouth and built models of them in his spare time, a lifelong hobby. I’d help him now and then. Or try to. He was good at it, meticulous and patient, and I reaped the rewards. My bedroom was full of his finished pieces. I had longships, galleys, clippers, paddlewheels. There was a model of Fulton’s famous Clermont and White Star’s Oceanic.
My mother used to talk about sailing away on that one.
I could stare at those shelves for hours, imagining ships at full sail or riding out the storms. And if my mother never got to sail away on one, I did, plenty of times.
But you could see there was no joy in that for him either now. He used to love to talk to me when he worked, about how one piece fitted into another just so, about how he was adapting ply to do the work of yellow pine, about joints and fittings. He’d joke about the clumsiness of his hands. His hands were far from clumsy. But now he worked in silence. His ships were at the service of some infinitely sadder impulse, far more solitary than before.
Most of the time I didn’t even come around anymore.
I know that by January I was already worried about him, in the way that kids are apt to worry. I reacted badly. Insecurity made me frustrated. Frustration got me angry. I gave him a hell of a hard time. I was scared.
My father was supposed to be open, steady, easy. A rock. Not silent and withdrawn like he was now. I started sleeping badly. There was always something in the closet when I went to bed. I remember creeping up on it one night with a model Spanish galleon in my hand to impale or smash whatever was in there, then flinging the door open to stare relieved and bewildered at my usual everyday clutter.
And then in February we had the biggest blow we’d seen in years. The snow was over my head in the flatlands and over his head where it drifted by the sides of the house and the barn in bright crystal waves. It was soft and powdery so that if you tried to walk you got buried in the stuff. School was closed indefinitely. Getting to work over the roads was impossible. So my father stayed home all that week spending most of his time on a three-foot model of the battleship Monitor, which had defeated the Confederate Merrimack during the Civil War, the first successful ironclad in the U. S. Navy. Even our bitch hound Betty wouldn’t go out in all that snow and normally she was game for any kind of weather. Though she was pregnant at the time, so maybe that also had something to do with it too.
It was beautiful, so much snow, and at first it made you happy just to look at it. All the familiar shapes softened, recast in white, sparkling in the sun or gleaming beneath the stars.
It was beautiful—and then it was confining.
It shrunk our world to five small rooms and a barn and a shovelled path between them. While the cold kept it from melting. And every night it would start again, to trap us further.
By the third day I think I’d gone a little crazy. I brooded and stomped around. As far as I was concerned the Monitor was garbage and my father was a fool for bothering with it. To me it looked like a boring flat cigar with a turret on top. I barely spoke to him. I barely touched my dinner. And just before bed I caught him glance up at me