The Lost Boat

A tale of the Drownings, in the Light: being a boat grown into the reeds that nobody will own, a small girl who wanted it, and how the whole village gave away a thing that was never theirs.

Out beyond the last of the stilt-houses, where the reed beds close in and the water goes brown and quiet, there is a boat that has grown into the reeds.

It has been there longer than anyone can say. The reeds have come up through its seams and its thwarts and its broken bottom boards, so that it floats in them rather than in the water, cradled, leaning a little, grey as driftwood, with a line of old blue paint still just visible along the gunwale. Children row out to look at it and are called back. Grown folk pole past it and do not look. Somebody long ago nailed a board to a post beside it, and the board says, in weathered letters, that was not found, and under that, in another hand, no one admits it was theirs.

That is all anyone in the Drownings will say about the Lost Boat. Whose it was. Who went out in it. Why it was left. There are a dozen stories and nobody tells any of them, because in a stilt-village every family has lost somebody to the water, and a boat nobody owns might be anybody's grief.

Dab Skeel wanted it.

Dab is the smallest Skeel. She poled a boat before she could walk, and in the spring of her eighth year she outgrew the little tub she shares with her brother Dib — outgrew it the way you outgrow a coat, all at once, one morning, so that her knees came up past the gunwale and the tub sat so low in the water that the ducks looked in. There was no other boat for her. The Skeels have the big boat, and the working boat, and the tub, and in the Drownings a boat is a house's hands and feet and nobody has one spare.

So Dab poled the tub out past the last stilts, with the water slopping in over her knees, and tied off at the Lost Boat, and sat looking at it for a whole morning. And then she poled home and went to Clem Wherry's boat-shed and stood in the door until he noticed her, which with Clem Wherry can take some time.

"I want the Lost Boat," said Dab.

Clem Wherry is the boatwright of the Drownings, and therefore its house-builder, its stilt-mender, its floor-raiser and its undertaker, and he does not frighten easily. He put down his adze.

"It's not yours to want," he said. "It's not mine to give. It's not anybody's."

"Then nobody'll mind."

"Everybody'll mind," said Clem. "That's the trouble with a thing that's nobody's, Dab. You don't bill a house for its grief. And you don't break up a boat that somebody might be missing."

Dab thought about that. "Is anybody missing it?"

"Nobody says."

"Then how do you know?"

And Clem Wherry, who has made more coffins than boats in his time and knows a great deal about what people don't say, found he had no answer, and sent her home.

But he could not stop thinking about it. That evening he poled out past the stilts himself and tied off by the Lost Boat and looked at it properly, for the first time in years, with a boatwright's eye. It was old, and it was rotten where the reeds had come through. But the keel was good. The keel was elm, and elm under water outlasts a man; and the stem-post was sound, and three of the planks along the top strakes were sound, and a boatwright could build a small new boat — a girl's boat — round that keel and that stem, if he had leave.

If he had leave. From whom?

Clem Wherry sat in his boat in the dusk and thought for a long time. And then he did the only thing you can do in a village where the thing is nobody's: he went round the Drownings, house by house, and asked everybody.

He did not ask is it yours. You can't ask that. He poled up to each landing and stood off and said, "I've a mind to take the keel out of the Lost Boat, for Dab Skeel, who's outgrown her tub. I thought I'd say."

And then he waited.

At the Drench house, old Wilf Drench — who has complained about every boat, stilt and weather in the Drownings for seventy years, and is the finest complainer in the realm — came to the landing and stood a while looking out toward the reed beds, and for once did not complain. "It weren't ours, Clem," he said. And then, after a moment, very low: "But if it had been — which it weren't — I'd want it on the water again. Not rotting in the reeds. I'd want a child in it." And went in.

At the Stilt & Reed, Tobit Beake said, "Nothing to do with us," quick and sharp, and shut the door. And opened it again a minute later, and came out with a coil of good tarred line, and put it in his boat, and said, "For the child. Nothing to do with the boat," and shut it again.

Nobby Sculls said, "Never saw that boat in my life," and then told Clem, without being asked, exactly how the stem-post had been fixed to the keel, and with what, and that there'd been a little carved fish on the inside of the bow under the paint, and to be careful of it. And then stood at his landing looking at the water with his hat in his hands, and did not say anything else at all.

At every landing in the Drownings it was the same. Nobody owned the Lost Boat. Nobody had ever owned it. And house after house, not owning it, gave leave — and something with it: a pot of pitch, an old oar cut down small, a scrap of blue paint in a jar; and at the Skeel house itself, Grandfer Skeel, who has never in sixty years let anybody finish a sentence about the water, heard Clem out in perfect silence, and said only, "Build it good."

Clem Wherry built Dab Skeel's boat that spring. He took the elm keel and the stem-post out of the Lost Boat as gently as you lift a sleeping child, and three sound planks off the top strake, and built round them a small, bright, sweet-sitting boat, just right for a girl of eight to pole. Dab worked beside him every day, and learned to caulk, and learned to steam a plank and bend it, and cut her hands and said nothing about it; which is how the Drownings takes an apprentice, though nobody calls it that.

And under the new paint, on the inside of the bow, he kept the little carved fish.

He put the rest of the Lost Boat back in the reeds where it had been, and left the board on its post: that was not found. no one admits it was theirs. Some things you don't mend.

Dab Skeel's boat went on the water at the first calm of the Long. It is painted blue along the gunwale, because that was the paint she was given. And on the morning she first poled it out past the last stilt-houses, every landing in the Drownings happened to have somebody standing on it, not watching, mending something, looking the other way — and more than one of them, as the little blue boat went by, put a hand up to their eyes against the light, which was bright that morning, very bright, off the water.