He came from the North, so his words were few
But his voice was kind and his heart was true
And I knew by his eyes that no guile had he
So I lay with my man from the North Country
He repeated the verse several times, his voice a cradle-song, and then we went below. I slept in the cabin proper. Uncle settled down in the forepeak, coiled like heavy line. He talked in Gaelic in his sleep."
"Is that it?" I said.
"And in the morning we headed back in gray drizzle and far out upon the line of the ocean I watched the fog-bank building and rolling, a low brownish menace of a thing, and I waited in vain for Uncle to offer some note of reassurance. But he talked of everything but fog. He talked, yes, as if only some test, some hungry clap of danger, could blow away the mists in his soul. There were few boats out but those he saw inspired him to crisp elocutions of category and trait. Gaff-rigged. Or eating out to windward. Or beamy. Or port tack. Or watch her luff now. Or blue yawl from Darkharbor. Damned schoolmastering roundhead. We sailed all day through slow drizzle, a chill beginning to work deep into my bones and into the very rigging and floorboards of the sloop. And that shoulder of fog hunching toward us. And with it the yet unanswered questions, and unasked. This, David, as you will come to see, is basically a ghost story. Why had he asked me to join him on this pointless cruise? Did he know I had come to Maine with knowledge of the land? And my father. My pink soft pipe-smoking pint of a dad. What tiny delicacies had he neglected to serve from his final bed? Silence in the Tower of London. Silence on the village greens. Northern eye of wind. River of northern bloods devastating the starving dark south. In the name of the Christ of the dogs of war. Reiver fanning out to plunder lands and deities. Truly, England and the Church of God hath had a great favor from the Lord in this great victory given unto us; this is none other but the hand of God, and to Him alone belongs the glory. Matchlock and leather doublets. Pikemen in the center, musketeers on the flanks. And how ends it, this prayer from Marston Moor? Cromwell's axed head blinking on a pike at Tyburn gallows. And was Uncle then with his halloween tartan of Scot and Puritan and Ulster merely seeking to return to some sacred north? The land above Lochcarron. To wallow in the terrible gleaming mudhole of God and country. Black Knife, sitting wide as a stump on a moonlit night high in the Dakotas, had been the answering echo of my deepest hates. And the final question yet to be pondered as Mount Desert Island hove into view and Uncle ceased his chatter and made for the mouth of Somes Sound, an authentic fjord, a seven-mile gash in the high bluffs of the island. Had he thought to find refuge here, or greater danger for greater glory? The hills stood above us on both sides and we were about two miles into the sound when I turned and saw it coming, only yards away now, and then we were in it, and silence had met its darkness. Nordic fog it was, cold, wet and dark, the northernmost point, and he had come to the edge of the mystery, and sailed her deeper into the fjord, eyes leaking fog and fire, riding that boat like a man in a fury of religious heat riding the loins of a woman, and I was terrified, David, scared out of my Irish wits, terrified of the fog, of himself, of the final question which now, and not until now, began to answer itself. For they had met again, I recalled, father and uncle, long after the latter's renunciation of all held holy in the apostolic breast; had met shortly after my dad married my lovely frail lily of a mother; had come together in Deny, New Hampshire-where Uncle had then been living, a solid Ulster town-in a futile attempt to restore harmony. And some parts of this my mother had told me years before her death, that their simmerings and rages had nearly set the house ablaze, and something pale in her recollections, some loose end, could bring me now to my father's deathbed-are you with me?-and his own tactical omissions and could bring me also to Uncle's mention of a will and his word that the land, his own deathbed, would be rightly administered. And then a blade of silver struck across the darkness, viking sword on anvil, and we began to see faintly a trace of shoreline. Uncle's passion had been truly heaven-directed, or hell, and we appeared in no danger of running aground. Again I waited for a word from him. Suddenly the winds came and the boom began to lift and swing-winds from all directions it seemed, skirling about us in a noise like pipes of battle, truly fearsome, lifting the fog a bit but manhandling our small boat until I was sure we would capsize at any moment. Wind blowing down off the bluffs. Wind coming straight over the water from the mouth of the sound and the sea far beyond. Wind from all directions pitching us dangerously to starboard, then to port, mast straining, boom swinging, a batten flying out of the mainsail past my head as I tried to level the boom.