HE SLEPT LATE, luxuriating in his father’s stateroom, which he’d appropriated, now that he was acting captain. Harbor water lapped the hull; through the open porthole came the raucous cries of seagulls arguing over which one had feeding rights to a crab or mussel. Wonderful sounds to wake up to—water, gulls, the creak of anchor cable swinging with the tide—and he missed them terribly when he was at Andover and jangled awake by his Westclox alarm. The biology teacher who affirmed the rightness of Darwin’s theory, he remembered, had also told the class that the salinity of human blood was identical to seawater’s. Nathaniel liked to think that the atoms in every man’s veins yearned to rejoin those in the sea, that all men were orphans separated from what Dad, in one of his rare flights into poetic imagery, called “our great blue mother.” Maybe the yearning was stronger in his, Nathaniel’s, blood than in most others’. He suffered when he was too far from the sea—and to a degree directly proportional to the distance. Each year at Andover, almost a full day’s ride from the coast, he grew restless and then morose after the novelty of a new term wore off. By December, his interior sky matched the one outdoors, and there was no medicine or liquor that could blow the clouds away like the scent of saltmarsh at low tide, or a bell buoy’s peal, or the sight of a three-master sailing full and by. Three years ago, while walking him to the trolley stop, the recruiting sergeant told him about fighting Apaches out in Arizona. He spoke longingly of the West and urged Nathaniel to head that way when he was old enough. The frontier was a thing of the past, but there was still room among the red deserts and dun plains and shining mountains two miles high for a man to grow or roam in, as he saw fit. Was there as much room as on the ocean? Nathaniel had asked, and the sergeant answered, No, not as much room as that; if it was ocean he sought, he would have to go all the way west, to the coasts of California, Oregon, Washington. Okay, then it would be California or Oregon or Washington, if it was to be west at all, for he could not conceive of living hundreds of miles inland, never to look upon or touch the great blue mother’s breast. It would be like an exile to an alien country, and if ever he was to find himself stuck in such a place with no chance of escape, well, he reckoned he would just have to shoot himself.

He got up, padded down the passageway to the head, lifted the wooden seat, and pissed into the lead drainpipe fitted through the planking.