The view is excellent. You can see the wide horizon and all the faces of the sea from the windows, and so the members sit, with their backs to the town, watching the boats sail by, for every day is the Saturday of regatta week. The conversation that moves about the club is respectable, though sometimes it turns boastful, taking on the kind of swaggering tone a man employs when his wife is not there to contradict him in front of company.
“No, no!” say some of the men, their feathers ruffling at the sight of Silas on their porch, the others echoing their sentiments with emphatic nods. “We’ll have none of your kind here! No, none of that rubbish you’re peddling, we’re staying right where we are!”
“Okay,” says Silas, confused. “That’s okay with me, really! I’m not peddling anything—”
“Oh, he says that now,” scoffs one, “but just wait, he’ll be just like the father with his ‘time for home,’ and ‘get ye gones’! Well, we’re not having any of it, young man! So you can turn yourself right around. This is private property.”
“Wait! You know my father? Have you seen him?”
“Your father is NOT a member of this club. I assure you!”
Feeling a little offended, Silas says, “I’m not here to tell you what to do. I have no intention of telling you to go anywhere. Stay here as long as you like, if that’s what you want.”
“Just so. Thank you. And, if you don’t mind,” says one of the men more quietly, in his captain’s cap with too much gold braid stitched to its brim, “no need to mention to the wives what’s become of us, righty-o?”
“Um—right,” says Silas, “but may I ask, what are you hiding from?”
“Hiding!” hollers the captain, his sotto voce gone, “we prefer ‘weathering over’! So much quieter here than home. Less chatter, too. More civilized. We spent so many excellent weekends here, some of us just thought we’d stay on, you know, man the helm. A man wants to be the captain of his own ship, and, well, no man can be that at home. So”—orders the captain, mustering his zeal—“you can just move along, Undertaker! We’re not leaving.”
Silas makes an obligatory scan of the ranks of club members, but sees no familiar faces, nor do any of the ghosts speak up to claim him as kin. It is clear that while nearly everyone knows of his father, no one here knows anything of his whereabouts.
Already resigned to going home, and caring little one way or the other what the men of the club do with their afterlives, Silas raises his hands in mock defeat and hangs his head as he turns to go. But as he begins to unwind the cord from the death watch, he looks once more on the men of the Yacht Club, who have all turned suddenly and very reverently to the east. The men have moved to stand on the rocks of the breakwater in front of the club, each on his own little island, and they now look out toward Lichport’s deep-bottomed harbor. There, Silas can just make out the misty outlines of a ship risen up from the water, its pale, hell-shredded sails billowing in a storm that blows for it alone.
The men of the Yacht Club raise their drinks in somber reverence to the ship of mists, then drink down the contents of their glasses and throw them to shatter on the rocks, and without another word to the Undertaker, they march back into their club, closing and locking the doors behind them.
As he turned the corner from Coral Street onto Coach, Silas felt, just for an instant, strangely comforted by not finding his father in the shadowlands he’d visited. For one thing, it might mean that his dad was still alive, though that raised many more questions than it answered. Most of those questions circled about his uncle’s name like black birds about a copse of trees. And Silas wondered how would it have felt to find his dad just sitting there on a stool in the tavern. Just sitting, glass in his hand, not looking for him, not trying to get home. Just lost like the rest of the ghosts, drunk on their own little miseries, waiting down the years, sharing their stories with strangers, their families so far away it was as though they never were.
Alive or dead, his father was still somewhere, waiting to be found.
The night was clear and fine, and the fixed stars burned with cold light across the sky above Silas as he made his way home to his father’s house. Above him, something flashed. He stopped in the middle of the street and saw a star fall, trailing behind it a thin ribbon of fire that faded almost as soon as it flared. Just another traveler, he thought. Just another soul fallen from its sphere. A thing nearly burned out.
Still looking up, Silas felt drawn upward into the pitch of the sky, his stomach turning, because he was standing in the middle of nothing. With every passing moment, the configurations of the constellations were fading. There were no more connections he could see, or remember, or make. He felt his father’s face drawing away from him into the dark, his features becoming lost among the invisible lines between the now patternless stars. Where Amos once stood in Silas’s mind, now there was only space. Nausea rose up in him, and he felt sure now that there were only two places in town where his father might reside. First, his house, which was full, floor to ceiling, with associations—notes, letters, clothes, books. Objects and reminders that would every day bring him closer to knowing his dad, though not necessarily bring him any closer to finding him. Then there was the other place. His uncle’s house, where, Silas increasingly feared, something more of his dad than merely memories lay waiting for him. He started walking quickly up Coach Street, keeping his head down, his eyes only on the road.
AS HE RETURNED HOME from his wandering