“What are you going to do, practically?”
“Go some place and write a good straight novel as well as I can write it.”
“Why don’t you stay here and write? You can stay on here after the boys are gone. It’s too hot to write in your place.”
“I wouldn’t bother you too much?”
“No, Roge. I get lonely, too, you know. You can’t just run away from everything all the time. This sounds like a speech. I’ll cut it out.”
“No. Go on. I need it.”
“If you are going to start to work, start here.”
“You don’t think out West would be better?”
“Any place is good. The thing is not to run from it.”
“No. Any place isn’t good,” Roger objected. “I know that. They’re good and then they go bad.”
“Sure. But this is a good place now. Maybe it won’t always be. But it’s fine now. You’d have company when you quit work and so would I. We wouldn’t interfere with each other and you could really bite on the nail.”
“Do you truly think I could write a novel that would be any good?”
“You never will if you don’t try. You told me a hell of a good novel tonight if you wanted to write it. Just start with the canoe.”
“And end it how?”
“Make it up after the canoe.”
“Hell,” Roger said. “I’m so corrupted that if I put in a canoe it would have a beautiful Indian girl in it that young Jones, who is on his way to warn the settlers that Cecil B. de Mille is coming, would drop into, hanging by one hand to a tangle of vines that covers the river while he holds his trusty flintlock, ‘Old Betsy,’ in the other hand, and the beautiful Indian girl says, ‘Jones, it ees you. Now we can make love as our frail craft moves toward the falls that some day weel be Niagara.’ ”
“No,” said Thomas Hudson. “You could just make the canoe and the cold lake and your kid brother—”
“David Davis. Eleven.”
“And afterwards. And then make up from there to the end.”
“I don’t like the end,” Roger said.
“I don’t think any of us do, really,” Thomas Hudson said. “But there’s always an end.”
“Maybe we better knock off talking,” Roger said. “I’m liable to start thinking about the novel. Tommy, why is it fun to paint well and hell to write well? I never painted well. But it was fun even the way I painted.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas Hudson said. “Maybe in painting the tradition and the line are clearer and there are more people helping you. Even when you break from the straight line of great painting, it is always there to help you.”
“I think another thing is that better people do it,” Roger said. “If I were a good enough guy maybe I could have been a good painter. Maybe I’m just enough of a son of a bitch to be a good writer.”
“That’s the worst oversimplification I’ve ever heard.”
“I always oversimplify,” Roger maintained. “That’s one reason I’m no damn good.”
“Let’s go to bed.”
“I’ll stay up and read a while,” Roger said.
They slept well and Thomas Hudson did not wake when Roger came out to the sleeping porch late in the night. After breakfast the wind was light and there were no clouds in the sky and they organized for a day of underwater fishing.
“You’re coming, aren’t you, Mr. Davis?” Andrew asked.
“I most certainly am.”
“That’s good,” said Andrew. “I’m glad.”
“How do you feel, Andy?” Thomas Hudson asked.
“Scared,” said Andrew. “Like always. But I’m not so scared with Mr. Davis going.”
“Never be scared, Andy,” Roger said. “It’s worthless. Your father told me.”
“They tell you,” Andrew said. “They always tell you. But David’s the only young boy I ever knew with any brains that isn’t scared.”
“Shut up,” David said. “You’re just a creature of your imagination.”
“Mr. Davis and I are always scared,” Andrew said. “It’s possibly our superior intelligence.”
“You’re going to be careful, Davy, aren’t you?” Thomas Hudson said.
“Naturally.”
Andrew looked at Roger and shrugged his shoulders.
VII
DOWN ALONG THE REEF where they went for underwater fishing on that day, there was the old iron wreck of a steamer that had broken up and at high tide the rusty iron of her boilers still showed above the sea. Today the wind was in the south and Thomas Hudson anchored in the lee of a patch of reef, not too close in, and Roger and the boys got their masks and spears ready. The spears were very primitive, and of all sorts, and these spears were made according to Thomas Hudson’s and the boy’s individual ideas.
Joseph had come along to scull the dinghy. He took Andrew in with him and they started for the reef while the others slipped over the side to swim.
“Aren’t you coming, papa?” David called up to his father on the flying bridge of his fishing boat. The circle of glass over his eyes, nose, and forehead, with the rubber frame pressed under his nose, into his cheeks, and tight against his forehead, held tight into the flesh by a rubber strap around the back of his head, made him look like one of the characters in those pseudoscientific comic strips. “I’ll come over later on.”
“Don’t wait too long until everything gets spooked.”
“There’s plenty of reef. You won’t work it all over.”
“But I know two holes out beyond the boilers that are wonderful. I found them the day we came alone. They were so untouched and full of fish I left them for when we would all be here.”
“I remember. I’ll come over in about an hour.”
“I’ll save them for when you come,” David said and started to swim after the others, his right hand holding the six-foot ironwood shaft with the hand-forged, twin-pronged fish grains fitted to the end and made fast with a length of heavy fishing line. His face was down in the water and he was studying the bottom through the glass of his mask as he swam. He was an undersea boy and now that he was so brown and that he was swimming with only the wet back of his head showing he reminded Thomas Hudson more than ever of an otter.
He watched him swim along, using his left arm and kicking with his long legs and feet in a slow steady drive and occasionally, and each time much, much longer than you thought it would be, lifting his face a little to one side to breathe. Roger and his oldest boy had swum out with their masks up on their foreheads and were a long way ahead. Andrew and Joseph were over the reef in the dinghy but Andrew had not gone overboard yet. There was only a light wind and the water over the reef looked light and creaming, with the reef showing brown and the dark blue water beyond.
Thomas Hudson went below to the galley where Eddy was peeling potatoes over a bucket held between his knees. He was looking out the porthole of the galley toward the reef.
“Boys oughtn’t to scatter,” he said. “Ought to keep close to the dinghy.”
“Do you think anything would come in over the reef?”
“Tide’s pretty well up. These are spring tides.”
“Water’s awfully clear,” Thomas Hudson said.
“Bad things in the ocean,” Eddy said. “This is a tough ocean around here if they get to smell that fish.”
“They haven’t got any fish yet.”
“They’ll get them soon. They want to get those fish right into that dinghy before any fish smell or any blood smell trails on that tide.”
“I’ll swim out.”
“No. You holler at them to stay close together and keep the fish in the dinghy.”
Thomas Hudson went up on deck and shouted what Eddy had said to Roger. He held up his spear and waved that he had understood.
Eddy came up into the cockpit with the pot full of potatoes in one hand and his knife in the other.
“You take that good rifle, the little good one, and get up on the topside, Mr. Tom,” he said. “I just don’t like it. I don’t like boys out there on this tide. We’re too close to the real ocean.”
“Let’s get them in.”
“No. Chances are I just get nervous. Bad night last night anyway. I’m fond of them like they’re my boys and I worry the hell about them.” He put the pot of potatoes down. “Tell you what let’s do. Start her up and I’ll get the anchor up and we’ll run in closer to the reef and anchor. She’ll swing clear with this tide and the wind. Let’s put her right in.”
Thomas Hudson started the big motor and went up to the flying bridge and the topside controls. Ahead, as Eddy got the anchor up, he could see them all in the water now and, as he watched, David came up from underwater with a fish flopping on his spear that he held high in the air and Thomas Hudson heard him shout for the dinghy.
“Put her nose right against the reef,” Eddy called from the bow where he was holding the anchor.
Thomas Hudson came up slowly to almost touch the reef, seeing the big brown coral heads, the black sea urchins on the sand, and the purple sea fans swaying toward him with the tide. Eddy heaved the anchor and Thomas Hudson came astern on the engine. The boat swung off and the reef slid away. Eddy paid out line until the rope came taut and Thomas Hudson cut the motor and they swung there.
“Now we can keep an eye on them,” Eddy said, standing in the bow. “I can’t stand worrying about those kids. Ruins my
