You are a miracle.
For you to be here, every one of us had to live long enough to have a child, and keep that child alive long enough to have another. This chain of your ancestors goes far back, past the times when things were written down. One illness in the wrong year, one bad wave anywhere along that chain, and you would not be here now.
You will never hear about most of us. But we are in your body, your bones, your blood anyway. A few of us are near you now and some of you can sense that.
We came from villages that grew to have more people than work. When some of us had to leave, we cut down the old trees around the family house, which had fed many generations, and made them into boats for people who hadn’t been born yet.
We set out for the island in the old stories. You might call it the Island of Prosperity: the place no rogue wave could reach, where rowing was something you did for fun in an afternoon. What we wanted was a few good nights’ sleep without a bailing bucket in reach.
We had no nails then, so we tied the planks with rope we twisted ourselves. On bad nights we lashed the boats to one another, because a few small boats tied side by side can ride out a sea that would roll any one of them. We had little, and we packed extra anyway: planks, rope, dried fish. We never wrote down who it was for. It was for whoever needed it.
We could not turn back for every boat on the sea. Nobody could. But for the boats we were tied to, we came about: a sister, a cousin, a friend who had helped build our hull, someone who had cared for us when we were small. The circle wasn’t many, and it was different for each of us. The only rule was that you could not pretend it was one way at the party and another way in the dark. Oh the parties! We’ll talk about those in a bit.
We knew what surplus was, because we had so little. Your own boat, sound and dry. A good life aboard it. Plenty in the holds for hard years and terrible storms. A few drag boats with supplies towed behind. The same again for your children. Whatever was left after that was surplus.
We weren’t saints. Some of us cheated at cards. Some of us carried grudges the whole way across. One sister didn’t speak to her brother for years, over something neither of them could have explained by the end, and in those years she came about for him twice, handed across what he needed without a word, and went back to not speaking to him.
That was the village. Nobody had much, and what there was got shared, because the sea and the seasons left us no choice. You did not have to like someone to come about for them.
Not all of us finished the crossing. Our boats went to our children, and theirs to theirs, and the sea did what the sea does.
Some of you became fine sailors. You replaced our planks with better wood, then with steel. You traded extra fish for bolts, then metal hulls, then engines, and before long some of you had yachts, with helpers aboard in white shirts and docks on the island to tie up to. Some of our wood remained aboard.
Some of you were born on the Island of Prosperity and tell the story of the crossing as though you remember it. Some of you made the crossing yourselves, the hard way, and earned what you have. We watched, and we were proud. And every one of you was thrown a rope somewhere: a loan, a job, a name to mention, a winter in somebody’s harbor, a current you did nothing to deserve. You remember every stroke of the rowing. Most of you remember the ropes, too. They appear less often in the telling. Rowing was never the whole difference. Countless others rowed as hard, and many much harder.
Some of the yachts grew so full they towed their extra behind them in drag boats, and then in dozens of drag boats, filled to the rails: rope, planks, metal for hulls, spare engines, things you would not miss, or feel, if a whole boat of them sank. Boats with no one in them. That is what surplus looks like from the water. Somewhere under all of it is the extra we packed. At first everyone knew who it was for. Then it was spares. Then reserves. Then simply yours. We can’t tell you the year.
Now and then one of the yachts opens its doors, and the whole old fleet comes aboard.
At one of those parties there were lamps across the upper deck and the old songs and stories on the lower one. There was the dish every one of you could name, made the way it was made in the old houses, carried out by helpers who had come from rowboats themselves. Everyone was asked what their children were doing now, and everyone had an answer ready. Our photographs hung in the salon. The host gave a toast to the ones who came before. “Every one of us a miracle,” he said, and his eyes were wet, and he meant it.
One guest had brought his son. He and the host had left the old dock in the same era, in boats lashed together on the bad nights, and had bailed each other’s boats more than once before either of them had a deck to stand on. The host called him brother at every party. He was not the only one the host called that. Every hour or so the guest went down the ladder to where his boat was tied alongside and came back smiling, with his sleeves wet to the elbow. “Washing up,” he said, and everyone laughed. A few others slipped down their own ladders the same way. No one asked them either.
At dinner the host said it had been a tight year. The guest agreed. Only one of them had spent the past week bailing.
Then the guest laid his hand flat on the table and went still. He knew that grain. His whole boat was made of it.
“You recognized it,” the host said, delighted. “From the first boats. Come, I’ll show you the rest.”
They went below.
“Still taking on water?” the host asked on the stairs.
“A little more each year,” the guest said.
They passed a steel door with a small window in it, and through the window, in the dark, the guest saw gold stacked the way we used to stack firewood. The host walked past it as if it were a wall. He had learned early that people come for it, and he was never quite done being afraid of losing it. So he spoke of tight years and kept the door shut.
The old planks lay along the far wall, oiled against the damp. “There’s enough here to build a whole fleet,” the host said.
Eight of them would have ended the guest’s bailing. He had known the number for years. When it was one plank he was too proud to ask. Now it was eight, and he was ashamed.
The guest had watched a single loan do to a family what thirty years of distance never could.
The host had decided long ago, for good reasons, to keep money out of friendship, and had never needed to decide again.
They stood a long time with their hands on the old wood, both of them thinking of us. We did not cut those planks to be admired.
The guest didn’t ask. The host didn’t offer. We have thought about it for a long time, and we believe both of them were being kind.
The guest left early. The host walked him to the ladder, pressed a pot of food into his hands, enough for a week, and held him by the shoulders. “You look exhausted. You have to take better care of yourself.” Then he cast off the guest’s line himself, coiled it neatly, and handed it down. The guest thanked him for it. The host’s daughter was watching.
After they’d gone, a few of you stayed up on the top deck with the last of the drinks.
“I feel bad for them, going back out in those boats.”
“I started in a rowboat,” said one of you, and it was true.
“Give them a plank and they’ll be back for another.” Some of this was true.
“They need to row harder,” said some.
“And swim faster if they fall off,” said another, and everyone laughed, and someone said, “That’s terrible,” still laughing.
We laughed too. Some of us swam the last stretch once.
“And where does it stop? We can’t tow everyone.”
“And if they know of our holds they’ll be filled with jealousy,” said another. That helped keep the guilt down.
Behind the yacht, on their lines, dozens of drag boats rode low in the dark.
“I built this boat myself,” the host said. There was some truth to that, and that settled it.
“In the end, we have to think of our own.”
We agree. Out past the lamps, a small boat was still in sight, with a boy asleep in its dry end. He is one of your own. You said so, at the toast.
The guest rowed home and bailed until the lamps went out on the big boat, and then he bailed in the dark. Once his son woke and asked if they could go back next year. His father said everyone there loved him, and it was true.
The host and the guest both used the word brother. They did not mean the same thing by it.
The host died old, warm and dry, with his children around him. We were glad. He was ours too. His children inherited the yacht, the drag boats, the door and our photographs. Sometimes they wondered why there were old planks in the hold at all. They decided we must have been sentimental.
The guest bailed for the rest of his life. Then his son inherited the boat, and the bailing bucket. The host’s daughter still invites him now and then, and coils his line as neatly as her father did. She learned it watching.
The host is with us now, and so is the guest. They sit together.
There is less time than you think. A few dozen years when you and the people you call your own are on the water in your world, together. We spent much of ours coming about.
Out there a brother is bailing tonight, within sight of your lamps. Everything his father needed is still in your hold, along the far wall, oiled against the damp.
We cut it ourselves. We watch, and we wonder: who did you think it was for?