pieces is floating away. He pulls it in with a grappling hood, then manages to hook the other as it too loosens. He’s smiling. Finally, I understand what’s happening. Now there’s no longer the pressure of water onto the boat holding the boards against the hull, so it means the leak is effectively stopped – more or less, that is.
We smile all around, a bottle of wine is brought out from the back of the truck and they somehow manage to open it with a bent nail. I don’t know what to do next. M. Teurnier takes his slug at the bottle and passes it on.
He pulls me along with him to the boat just next to mine, downriver. He rings a bell hanging on the door, till somebody comes. It’s a very dignified-looking Frenchman. M. Teurnier rattles away in his Breton French. The man looks at me and speaks in French-accented, but clear, English.
‘I always knew that boat would sink someday, wooden bottom and no one taking care of it. You must remember, monsieur, you have bought a boat with a house on it, not a house with a boat under it. There is a big difference.’
So I’m not ready for more lectures. M. Teurnier explains the problem, I can see from his pantomime. He does it even when he’s speaking French to another Frenchman. He looks at me. The man, whose name is M. Le Clerc, looks at me. He shrugs and then concentrates.
‘I do not belive any chantier, I mean slip, around here would take a noncommercial ship with a wooden coque for repairs. You could have a sabot, a metal shoe, made and slipped under your boat, but that would be very expensive. I do not really know, monsieur. Perhaps it is best to accept the loss and have the boat destroyed. It will be nothing but souci, trouble, otherwise.’
His wife comes out with some cold white wine and frosted glasses on a tray with white napkins. She offers the tray around. I think of the bottle of red we’ve just slurped down, each wiping his lips on mud-encrusted sleeves of ‘blues’, after drinking. Contrast, the punctuation of life.
When we finish, M. Le Clerc gives us a slight bow of dismissal, his lovely tall wife smiles and we leave. His boat is really a masterpiece of how one can live in style on the Seine. I look back. It lies low in the water, and the upper floor has amber translucent windowpanes all along its length. I find out later it was once a chapel. River people who worked on the Seine used to thank the river gods or whatever gods they could count on for help there.
I pay M. Teurnier the two thousand francs, counting them out until there are only two bills left in my hand. He pulls a pencil from his ‘blues’ pocket and writes his name, address and phone number. With his thumb, he points to the boat, then with his finger points to his chest. I get the message: If I need help, call. They drive off. I hope one of them is the designated driver, but that doesn’t sound very French.
An Impossible Task
I spend two days checking everything to see if the boat’s still leaking. It seems OK. I hose down and clean out the interior, checking to see where the leaks were, and to a small degree, still are. Meanwhile, I’m cleaning all my furniture off in the river, trying to wash off the worst of the mud. Then, after I’ve dragged all the dried-out and falling-apart furniture, along with the mostly dry mattresses, sheets and so forth back on the boat, I remount all the floating doors. I’m ready to leave. My raggedy skin has mostly peeled off, and I’m dead weary, sick and tired, with the boat, with myself.
I stop by at the Le Clercs’ and ask if they’ll keep an eye on my péniche for me. They aren’t too happy about the idea, but agree to phone the farmhouse near the mill if anything goes wrong. I give them the number. They’re both worried about voleurs, that is, robbers. I hate to tell them, but at this point I’d be glad if somebody would come along and steal the entire shebang. I’ve investigated, and it would cost a minimum of fifteen hundred francs to have the boat towed away and burned. That’s what they do with witches and witchcraft anyway, isn’t it?
I sleep two days when I’m back with the family. The stone tent seems incredibly luxurious. I carefully try recouping my tan. When I arrived, my wife said I looked like a giant fetus, or a very premature baby. I feel damned premature.
I decide the only thing, against all advice, is to try stopping the leak from inside the boat. What else? I ask my older boy, Matt, who’s in high school, if he will help me with it on weekends. It doesn’t seem to scare him. Ah, youth, good spirits and enthusiasm; we’ll lick those devils and witches yet.
When we come back up to the boat from the mill, the hull has water in it, too much water for comfort, but it isn’t listing. We bail one whole day. After much asking around, we find a product guaranteed to be waterproof. Happily, Matt speaks excellent French. He has lived most of his life in France. He went to French schools for the first seven years of his education. Rosemary, my wife, speaks excellent ‘Ma Perkins’ French, as do most French teachers in American high schools, but I have virtually no skills in language. I can bumble about in French, German, Italian and Spanish, but can’t speak much of any of them. The happy part is that I understand much better than I speak, not always, especially in a complex area such as the resuscitation of our boat, unhappily.
We buy fifty-liter canisters and wind up with twenty huge containers of this black, gooey, smelly stuff. We pull up all the regular flooring in the boat and pour this goop into the hold, smearing it with broad spatulas into every nook and cranny. On top of this, we jam in panels of plywood smeared with it, then work in more of this black gunk over them, again everywhere we can reach. It seems as if it should work. Foolish optimism strikes again.
We came home black as minstrels. The only thing we find that takes this goo off is turpentine. We give each other turpentine rub-downs with old towels. But around our eyes and in our cuticles and nails, including toe cuticles, we’re black as coal miners. Matt’s wonderful about it, going to school each Monday looking as if he’s just come up from some Texas oil well-drilling operation. By Friday evening, just when we’re starting to look normal, we go back at it again. I can’t coax the girls, or my wife, near this messy operation. I don’t want to, it seems so futile. Some things are too much; this project comes in the ‘too much’ category.
I manage to buy a small, used electric water pump. We attach an automatic float to turn it on, just in case water starts seeping in again. I have a length of plastic tubing to carry the water out the window and into the Seine, where it belongs. This allows me to sleep somewhat easier nights, but the jinxed boat continues to leak, not ‘sink-leak’, but there’s persistent, consistent dripping, a small puddle of water floating on our ‘impermeable’ black coating each day. And we can not find from where it’s seeping. The whole affair is maddening.
Then, one day, as we’re scraping and shoveling out mud from everything, checking our pump regularly, our summer renter of the boat arrives. She’s not drowned, she’s fresh in a pair of toreador pants and a flowered shirt. I scramble up the bank to find out how the boat sank, what happened; is she all right. She smiles. She explains in her delightfully accented French English.
‘Well, I woke late and went across the street for some croissants and a cup of coffee. I didn’t need to be at the foire until one. When I came back, the boat was on the bottom, oop la! I didn’t know what to do, and I was already late to work. So, I plucked one of the most beautiful roses from the bank and threw it onto the top of the boat. It was sort of like a Viking funeral, you see.’
I don’t see! It’s like ‘you know’. People keep saying ‘you know’ at the end of just about every sentence, and most of the time I don’t know, but they’re really not interested in whether I do or not.
‘But couldn’t you have called to tell me what had happened? It seems the least you could do.’
‘I had
