Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 2)

The following is an excerpt from the second chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

As we drove, I learned that my cabbie, Berihun, had lived in Tortola nearly all of his 40-odd years, the British diacritic a result of his birth and rearing in South Africa. His father had served as a police officer on this, the largest of the islands, after bringing Berihun and his mother to the BVI in the late ‘60s. He proved to be a treasure trove of knowledge of the islands, and by a serendipitous stroke of dumb luck, he was my initial guide to paradise.

Leaving the airport behind, we crossed a small two-lane bridge connecting Beef Island to the primary mass of Tortola. According to Berihun, the new bridge had been dubbed Queen Elizabeth Bridge during the British Monarch’s visit to Tortola in 1967, the same year Berihun’s family arrived. So the legend goes, prior to the bridge, people crossed from Beef Island via a small wooden raft, just large enough for one car, that operators pulled back and forth between the two islands. A cross-breeze gusted through the windows of the makeshift taxi and I silently thanked Queen Elizabeth and Terrance B. Lettsome for replacing the raft-and-pulley system with this concrete causeway, which, although not nearly as romantic (at least in the Hemingway sense of the word) as its ancestor, felt far safer and imminently more reliable.

I glanced down at my watch, surprised that there wasn’t much traffic for just after 11:00 am on a Thursday. Then, remembering my pledge outside the hotel in San Juan, I slid the watch off my wrist and stuffed in it my small backpack with my cell phone. I made myself a small promise that I’d take them back out when I landed in JFK on the return flight (and not a second before). Berihun narrated as he drove, pointing and gesturing out the window with his left hand as we passed Buck Island, a tiny glob of greenery a few hundred feet offshore. Apparently Buck is a private island, and when its former owner began building a bridge connecting it to Tortola proper, he discovered that under BVI law, the bridge would’ve legally enabled the public to use the island’s beaches, so he abandoned the project.

“Some people very territorial here,” Berihun mused. “Most everybody very friendly, but some folks just don’t want to see nobody. They build big houses on the hills…” he waved his right hand at the foliage outside the passenger side windows, creeping straight up in a wall that towered high over the two-lane road. “They isolate themselves from the world.”

“I can understand that,” I replied.

“You one of those?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s no way for a man to live. People need other people. You listen to Simon and Garfunkel?”

“Sure.” I was practically raised on Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor and John Prine. My parents had a ton of vinyl, but my dad only had half a dozen cassettes in his car, and when we’d go on road trips, he’d listen to the same tape over and over and over, never caring that he’d just heard the same songs 40 minutes before, and 40 minutes before that.

“You know that song, ‘I am a Rock’?” Berihun asked into my memories.

“Yeah,” I answered, pretty sure I knew where my guide was taking this line of questioning. “A rock feels no pain and an island never cries,” I sang poorly. Berihun laughed out loud, but I took no offense. I knew I was a terrible singer, and my blurting out the lyrics was more for his value than mine.

“You got it,” he said, honking the horn as he rolled the cab to a gentle stop behind a beat-up pickup truck idling in our lane. “It’s actually John Donne,” he added, without looking back at me. I didn’t hear him clearly, so I asked him to repeat what he’d just said. Instead, Berihun leaned his head out his window to see what was holding us up and nearly had it taken off by a car speeding past in the opposite direction. He hooted and ducked back inside quickly, returning to our discussion as if he hadn’t just nearly been decapitated.

“John Donne. 17th century English metaphysical poet. He wrote ‘No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ Nobody is an island. You, me, we’re no islands; we’re part of the main. You’re not an island, are you?”

“I guess not.”

“You a rock?”

“That depends,” I said. “Sometimes being a rock is a good thing.”

“Like when?”

“What about Saint Peter? Christ told Peter that he was his rock. Upon Peter he’d build his church. That’s a ringing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.”

“That’s true,” Berihun agreed, laying on the horn until the pickup finally lurched into motion, hiccupping its way up the winding flora-bordered road. “I suppose it can be a good thing. You know what I’m saying though, right?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I assented. Berihun rounded a bend, and as the tall trees parted, I caught a glimpse of the sandy reef, the three long rows of docks, and the big red-roofed buildings. I had arrived.

“Hodges Creek Marina,” my driver announced as he flicked his left turn signal and swung into the small parking lot. “Home of Sunsail.” I swallowed heavily and with some difficulty. Here I was, after a couple days on the go I already felt like I’d been gone a week or more. Leaving Santa Barbara was a distant memory already, and I still had another week ahead of me. Berihun shifted into park and retrieved my bag from the rear hatch. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t move; I just sat there, staring through the front windshield at the front (or back, I wasn’t quite sure) of the building before me. This was far and away the most impulsive thing I’d ever done, and even a few fated feet from the door, I still wasn’t sure I had the courage to go through with it.

“Hey, Saint Peter!” Berihun rapped on the roof with his knuckles.

“Thomas,” I replied, shaking myself out of my daze.

“No sir. Saint Thomas about 20 miles west.” He pointed off in the distance, towards what I had to believe was the west. “You are in the land of the turtle dove, named by Christopher Columbus himself.”

“Sorry,” I said as I climbed out of the back seat. “That’s my name: Thomas.” I paused for moment—hearing my full Christian name out loud for the first time since my mother passed, standing at the threshold of a great adventure (or an epic disaster), my head was swimming.

“Tom,” I corrected.

“Well, Tom, it has been a pleasure serving you.” He stuck out his hand and I reached for my wallet, not realizing what his gesture truly meant.

“No, my friend,” Berihun said again. “Handshake first. Pay later.”

I palmed my wallet with my left hand, meeting my right hand in his with a firm, gracious shake and a smile. Upon release, I paid my new friend and thanked him for his help. (I hadn’t bothered to ask how he knew so much about 17th century English metaphysical poets.) As I walked gingerly toward the main building, he climbed back into the cab and rapped on the roof again.

I turned and he pointed at me. “Remember,” he said, “no man is an island, including you.”

I tried to squeak out a “thank you,” but could only wave as Berihun pulled out onto the highway, the little car’s horn bleating plaintively as he drove away.

Through the Night and Wind excerpt (Chapter 1)

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my forthcoming novel, Through the Night and Wind (available this fall).

My mother died last month.

I know for a fact that it was exactly one month ago: Monday, May 15th—a week after Mother’s Day. I got a phone call from my father: “Tom, it’s dad. She’s gone.”

Grace Elizabeth Algir had been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer nearly two years earlier, right after I moved from Illinois to California. I had been out of college for two years, during which time I’d worked briefly at a magazine in Chicago, then gone back to grad school to get my teaching certificate. It felt like some ridiculously absurd joke that she got sick as soon as I left; for a while, I even blamed myself, but she never once made me feel guilty for leaving. “Follow your dreams,” she constantly told my brother and me as we grew up, so I did. The only problem is that my dreams took me approximately 2,078 miles away from my dying mother.

I don’t know the exact scientific name of her disease other than that it was lung cancer and it was terminal. (At first my dad didn’t tell me about the terminal part.) I’m sure the doctor told me at some point, but I was so spaced out most of the time I visited the hospital that I’d be hard pressed to remember. I didn’t really want to know then and I’m still not 100% sure I want to know now; it’s probably some kind of defense mechanism—denial, surely—that allowed me to keep her disease at arm’s length. My father and I genuinely thought she could fight it and win (I especially believed this, given that he’d neglected to tell me that she was, without question, going to die). When the diagnosis was eventually revealed, her cancer had already spread beyond cure. Her fight was to live as long as possible, which wound up being nearly 20 months.

You could tell she knew, though. During the last few months the spark that was my mother’s once indomitable spirit had been extinguished, like someone had licked his fingertips and pinched it, her smile and the gleam in her eye the lingering smoke that slowly drifted out of the room, leaving nothing but a charred wick, the shell of a vital, effervescent woman. So out went the candle, leaving us darkling. Incredibly kind and compassionate, insightful and observant, loyal and devoted—my mother was more than I can put into words, and now she’s gone.

For 28 years she taught kindergarten in my hometown of Naperville, Illinois, a now-bustling suburb about 30 miles southwest of Chicago. Grace was a fervent reader, and devoured just about anything—novels, magazines, newspapers, poems, short stories, biographies, essays, criticism… you name it, she read it. Her passion for the written word no doubt sparked my own, and toward the end, when her body was confined to a hospital bed, she wrote dozens upon dozens of letters to just about everyone she knew. I received the lion’s share of these, and they’re stashed away under my bed with one of my most prized possessions: a leather-bound of copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that she gave me the day I left for California. I haven’t been able to bring myself to reread any of the letters since she died, although in the past few weeks I’ve once or twice dug out the New Balance shoebox in which I keep them. I’ll lift up the sheet that overhangs the edge of the bed and slide the box along the carpet; I’ll even begin lifting the lid, but I don’t have the courage to open it. The gaping hole in my heart has yet to heal, and reading those letters would be like pouring salt into that wound.

In the month that followed the funeral, my father and I spoke on the phone far more frequently than we ever had before, but in truth we said very little. My girlfriend Bridget and I flew home for the funeral, of course, but my dad and I didn’t say much to each other during those few days I was home. It wasn’t that we were angry or upset with each other; we just didn’t really have anything to say (even though there were hundreds of things we should have said). Sure, we discussed sports as usual—standings, box scores, draft picks, managerial blunders—it was the first thing that we’d bonded over when my brother Jude and I were young and was still often the first topic broached. But we didn’t talk about anything; it was more like we talked around everything, artfully dancing around the subject of my mother as if we were careening through Tchaikovsky.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You want to know about the boat, right? I’m getting to it.

In the month after mom passed, my dad sold the house I grew up in and his and my mother’s cars, unloaded their mutual funds, IRAs, and anything else that had any sort of attachment or connection to her—furniture, clothing, even family photos and heirlooms—and boarded a plane at O’Hare, flew to Miami, connected in San Juan and finally Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, where he took possession of a 49-foot, six-inch long Beneteau sailboat that displaced nearly 14 tons in the water.

My father, a 55-year-old retiree and widower named Ken Algir, was now the proud owner of an ocean-going sailboat, and was determined to sail the ocean. The ocean comprised of salty, salty water.

And lo and behold, I was going to join him.