Castle of Water: A Novel(43)
28
Sophie’s refined canoe design began exactly as all of her designs had: with a sketch. Only rather than moleskin and a Parker pen, as she had preferred at her architecture studio on rue des Vinaigriers, she worked with damp sand and a thin stick of driftwood. Barry watched as she carved out the plan on the beach beneath them, listening and nodding when she explained the tapered ends, the carved oarlocks, and the angled mast for the lateen sail. There was plenty of nylon rope left over from the dismembered hammock to lash together the outrigger, and the extra plastic tarpaulin, if folded into a triangle and stitched together with fishing line, could readily provide some makeshift sailcloth.
Which left Barry with one relatively crucial question.
“So what are we going to make the outrigger and mast out of? There aren’t any palms that thin, and we don’t really have the tools to cut it down to lumber.”
Sophie, back in her element after more than a year marooned, grinned with a maestro’s mischievousness and licked her sun-chapped lips. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”
Twirling the driftwood stick in her hands like a drum majorette’s baton, she led Barry into the palm grove and past the freshwater pools, to a secluded spot behind a dense pocket of banana trees—where Barry noticed for the first time a bristling stand of what appeared to be bamboo. It was in fact ‘ohe, a close relative of the Asian species that their Polynesian predecessors had spread throughout the islands of the South Pacific alongside their various other canoe plants, but neither Sophie nor Barry had any knowledge of this fact. All they knew—or rather, Sophie knew—was that it appeared just light, buoyant, and sturdy enough to serve their maritime needs.
“So this is it?”
Sophie nodded, running her hand along a segmented stalk. “I noticed them when I was searching for bananas after the storm. I thought maybe I could use the bamboo to make a bed someday. At first I wasn’t sure if it could support our weight, but it’s actually quite strong.”
“Our weight?”
“Just shut up and listen,” she retorted, feigning annoyance but inwardly smiling.
“Okay. Go on.”
“I think it could be perfect for the canoe. We can use the thinner stalks to make the—what do you call the central part, again?”
“The mast?”
“Yes. We can use them to make the mast and the two parts of the outrigger that stick out from the side. And we can use this one,” she remarked, tapping the thickest of the stalks with the ball of her foot, “to make the part of the outrigger that floats in the water.”
“You think that’ll work?”
Sophie nodded, as confidently and nonchalantly as she once had to skeptical engineers and surly contractors. “Oui. ?a va marcher. It’s the perfect material for it.”
Barry clapped his hands and took a deep breath. “All right, then. Let’s get to work.”
And together, they began choosing the choicest of the stalks and yanking them up from the earth.
29
It took almost a month. With Sophie as project manager, what had been a hurried and haphazard affair took on the flavor of a genuine architectural project. She planned and measured everything meticulously, using either charcoal on rock or a sharp stick and sand to diagram her blueprints and a length of fishing line as a makeshift tape measure. The extra work at first struck Barry as persnickety and unnecessary, but the evolving fruits of their labor slowly began to convince him otherwise. Initially, he had complained about all the sanding and trimming, but as the hull grew elegant and narrow, the gripes tapered off along with it. And while the additional time spent calculating the ideal length of the bamboo seemed misspent in the preparatory stages, when the outrigger was lashed and slid seamlessly into the waiting gunwales, he finally understood the value of her scrupulous nature. Barry had to admit, he was in awe of her abilities, and at night, after she went to bed, he would sometimes stroll to the other side of the island, to run his hand along the canoe’s smooth body and admire its progress by moonlight. He was shocked by the almost womanly curves the craft had assumed; he understood why mariners preferred christening their ships with feminine names. It took very little imagination to envision how sleekly she might cut through the water. He had asked Sophie on multiple occasions if they could take it for an early test spin, but she had steadfastly refused. You wait until it’s ready, she told him, and then you do it right. So he waited.
And waited. Through the deliriously long afternoons spent fashioning the bow deck, the endless nights devoted to stitching the tarpaulin sailcloth, the multiple dawns given to the thwarts and the removable tiller. Through all of it, he waited. And on the morning of his thirty-sixth birthday (she remembered it, he did not), Sophie poked her head into their shelter and told him it was time.
Barry, still half-asleep, groaned and flopped onto his stomach. “What did you say?”
“I said bon anniversaire. I just put the finishing touches on the boat.”
“It’s my birthday?”
“The fifteenth of July, no?”
Barry nodded. Crap. “It is indeed.”
“Well, get up and get ready, you’re going to try it first.”
“Wait, you mean it’s totally finished?”
Sophie nodded, trying and failing to conceal her excitement. “Consider it your birthday present.”