Patriot

CHAPTER 5

The bright blue waters of Penobscot Bay beckoned. Cam Hooker, buttoning up a light blue and freshly laundered Brooks Brothers shirt, paused to throw open his dressing room window. Glorious morning, all right. Sunlight sparkled on the bay, white seabirds flashed and dove above. He leaned out the window, took a deep breath of pine-scented Maine air, and assessed the morning’s weather.

Fresh breeze out of the east, and a moderate chop, fifteen knots sustained, maybe gusting to thirty. Barometer falling, increased cloudiness, possible thunderheads moving in from the west by midmorning. Chance of rain showers later on, oh, sixty to seventy percent, give or take.

Perfect.

Certainly nothing an old salt like Cameron Hooker couldn’t handle.

It was Sunday, praise the Lord, his favorite day of the week. The day he got to take himself, his New York Times, and whatever tattered paperback spy novel he was currently headlong into reading for the third time (an old Alastair MacLean) out on his boat for a few tranquil hours of peace and quiet and bliss.

Hooker had sailed her, his black ketch Maracaya, every single Sunday morning of his life, for nigh on forty years now, rain or shine, sleet, hail or snow.

Man alone. A singleton. Solitary.

It was high summer again, and summer meant grandchildren by the dozen. Toddlers, rug rats, and various ragamuffins running roughshod throughout his rambling old seaside cottage on North Haven Island. Haven? Hah! Up and down the back stairs they rumbled, tearing roughshod through the rose gardens, dashing inside and out, darting through his vegetable patches and into his library, all the while shouting at peak decibels some mysterious new battle cry, “Huzzah! Huzzah!” picked up God knows where.

It was the victory cheer accorded to General George Washington, he knew that, but this intellectually impoverished gizmo generation had not a clue who George Washington was! Of that much, at least, he was certain.

You knew you were down in the deep severe when not a single young soul in your entire family had the remotest clue who the hell the Father of Our Country was!

In his day, portraits of the great man beamed benevolence down on students from every wall of every classroom. He was our Father, the Father of our country. Your country! Why, if someone had told young Cam back then that in just one or two generations, the general himself would have been scrubbed clean from our — why, he would have—

“What are you thinking about, dear?” his wife, Gillian, said, interrupting Cam’s dark reverie at the breakfast table later that morning. She was perusing what he’d always referred to as the “Women’s Sports Section.” Also sometimes known as the bridal pages in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Apparently, the definitive weekly “Who’s Who” of who’d married whom last week. For all those out there who, like his wife of sixty years, were still keeping score, he supposed.

“You’re frowning, dear,” she said.

“Hmm.”

He scratched his grizzled chin and sighed, gazing out at the tall forests of green trees marching down to the bright harbor. Even now, a mud-caked munchkin wielding a blue Frisbee bat advanced stealthily up the hill, stalking Cam’s old chocolate Lab, Captain, sleeping in the foreground.

“Will you look at that?” he mused.

Gillian put the paper down and peered at him over the toaster.

“What is it, dear?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s July, you know,” he said, rapping sharply on the window to alert his dog and scare the munchkin away.

“July? What about it?”

“It is the cruelest month,” he said, not looking up from the Book Review. “Not April. July. That’s all.”

“Oh, good heavens,” she said, and snatched away her section of the paper.

Dismissed, he stood and leaned across the table to kiss his wife’s proffered cheek.

“It’s your own damn fault, Cam Hooker,” she said, stroking his rosy cheek. “If you’d relent for once in your life, if you’d only let them have a television to watch, just one! That black-and-white set gathering dust up in the attic would do, the one you watched the Watergate thing on. Or even one of those handheld computer thingies, whatever they’re called; silence would reign supreme in this house once more. But no. Not you.”

“A television? In this house?” he said. “Oh, no. Not in this house. Never! I’ll buy more books if I have to!”

“There’s no room for more books, Cam!”

Grabbing his newspapers, book, and canvas sail bag and swinging out into the backyard, slamming the screen door behind him, he headed down the sloping green lawn to his dock. The old Hooker property, some fifteen acres of it, was right at the tip of Crabtree Point, with magnificent views of the Fox Islands Thorofare inlet and the Camden Hills to the west. Cameron was the fifth-generation Hooker to summer on this island, not that anyone cared a whit about such things anymore. Traditions, history, common sense, and common courtesy, things like that, all gone to hell or by the wayside. Hell, they were trying to get rid of Christmas! Some goddamn school district in Ohio had banned the singing of “Silent Night.” “Silent Night”?

Next thing you knew they’d be banning Old Glory in the goddamn schools.

He could see the old girl out there at the far end of the dock when he crested the hill. Just the sight of her never failed to move him. His heart skipped a beat, literally, every time she hove into view.

Maracaya.

She was an old Alden-design ketch, and he’d owned her for longer than time. Forty feet on the waterline, wooden hull, gleaming black Awlgrip, with a gold cove stripe running along her flank beneath the gunwales. Her decks were teak, her spars were Sitka spruce, and she was about as yar as any damn boat currently plying the waters of coastal Maine, in his not-so-humble, humble opinion.

Making his way down the hill to the sun-dappled water, Cam couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She’d never looked better.

He had a young kid this summer, sophomore at Yale, living down here in the boathouse. The boy helped him keep Maracaya in proper Bristol fashion. She was a looker, all right, but she was a goer, too. He’d won the Block Island Race on her back in ’87, and then the Nantucket Opera Cup the year after that. Now, barely memories, just dusty trophies on the mantel in some peoples’ goddamn not-so-humble opinion.

“Morning, Skipper,” the crew-cut blond kid said, popping his head up from the companionway. “Coffee’s on below, sir. You’re good to go.”

“Thanks, Ben, good on ya, mate.”

“Good day for it, sir,” the boy said, looking up at the big blue sky with his big white smile. He was a good kid, this Ben Sparhawk. Sixth-generation North Haven — his dad and granddad were both hardworking lobstermen. Came from solid Maine stock too. Men from another time, men who could toil at being a fisherman, a farmer, a sailor, a lumberman, a shipwright, and a quarryman, all rolled into one. And master of all.

Ben was a history major at New Haven, on a full scholarship. He had a head on his shoulders, he did, and he used it. He came up from the galley below and quickly moved to the port-side bow, freeing the forward, spring, and aft mooring lines before leaping easily from the deck down onto the dock.

“Prettiest boat in the harbor, sir,” Ben said, looking at her gleaming mahogany topsides with some pride.

“Absofuckinlutely, son,” Cam said, laughing out loud at his good fortune, another golden day awaiting him out there on the water. He was one of the lucky ones and he knew it. A man in good health, of sound mind, and looking forward to the precious balance of his time here on earth, specifically in the great state of Maine.