CARVED FROM SAND

  A SAILING ROMANCE STORY

  M. L. BUCHMAN

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  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Local Gloucester artist Morgan Henry built a career carving sand. Upon the arrival of a magnificent racing yacht off the beach, he alters his latest contest entry to match. Little does he know that his past skippers the boat.

  Mary Elizabeth sailed away from Gloucester and made her name on the ocean racing circuit. She never once looked back. Yet for reasons beyond her understanding, she returns.

  On the beach, in a sand sculpture conceived by a boy but carved by a man, she discovers that her past and her future are more connected than she could possibly imagine.

  1

  Morgan flicked the kill switch and the pounding stopped. His arms were buzzing from manhandling the gas-powered jumping jack tamper for much of the morning. Thank God he was done with that phase of the build. The early phases of building a competition-level sand castle required much more than a plastic shovel—a stage he’d never truly enjoyed. He had his sand prepped. Now the fun began.

  Shoving back the earmuffs, he was assaulted by the clatter and engine roar of others near him. Three of the other fifteen competitors were still compacting their sand. The rest were shoveling more sand into their next layer of frames prior to more compaction.

  Only Romero had already shed the topmost layer of forms and begun shaping. Nobody sculpted sand as fast as Romero. It was a pity he didn’t like Romero’s work. He had a whole Mexican Day of the Dead macabre vibe. He also colored his sand with clays and food coloring, which was technically acceptable, but felt wrong to Morgan.

  He was a traditionalist down to the soles of his callused feet and believed that the coloring hid the actual artistry of the carving itself.

  Fifteen feet up in the air atop his sculpture offered an exceptional view. This was his home sand, Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester, Mass. He’d grown up less than two miles away and had spent much of his youth riding his bike here. Half a mile of smooth beach sand, hard-packed by the tides, backed by dunes and with the whole sweep of the Atlantic straight ahead. Interrupted only by tiny Salt Island to the north, which connected to the shore by a rocky sandbar at dead low tides.

  They had four days to build their sculptures, and it was already the morning of the second day. But the weather was perfect, a light overcast and only a vague breeze. The sand wouldn’t dry too fast.

  He knelt down and poked his fingers into the topmost compacted layer. Almost no give at all—just perfect.

  The organizers had done a good job, trucking in rougher glacial sand for better holding ability. Beach sand was typically too smooth, all of its sharp, holding edges worn off by the pounding of the sea. Exceptional sand, one percent water, and hard compaction. He liked the feeling of this one.

  He glanced down the line. Sure enough, the pinnacle of Romero’s sculpture was taking on the shape of a battered top hat. So predictable. Morgan’s theory was to stay fresh by constantly changing and growing his artistic style.

  The long beach was busy for a weekday. Of course, it always was in the summer. He spotted a cluster of bicycles up by the wooden walking bridge from Eastern Point that arced over the salt marsh drainage channel. How many times as a kid had he parked his own bike there?

  Mom had always told him to get a life. Dad had been a professional surfer in his youth and understood Morgan’s need to be at the beach. But with them gone, Morgan knew he was straining the limits of what his career could be. It had taken a decade to build up to going pro. Sponsors now paid his way to competitions all over the East Coast—the visiting master sculptor. More money on the side for teaching classes. He’d even done a couple of West Coast competitions on his own dime but almost always ended up in the money. First prize could net him ten grand for a week’s work. Too bad there weren’t competitions like this one every week. Of course that way lay travel burnout and severe sand rash.

  He was at some tipping point. Balanced as lightly as one dry sand grain atop another. Morgan had no idea what lay to either side. After this week, nothing remained to tie him to Gloucester except memories.

  Focus on the here and now.

  This beach was a good one without being a zoo like Coney Island or Hampton Beach up in New Hampshire. The latter was thoroughly epitomized by a hundred kitsch shops packed tighter than wet sand, including seventeen t-shirt shops in the main mile (he’d lost count after that and hadn’t bothered to check out the back streets), at least as many overpriced restaurants, and even a deep-fried Oreo stand of all madness. Not his kind of scene.

  Here at Good Harbor there was the hot dog and ice cream concessions stand, and nothing else. Rolling grass dunes, tidal marsh, and an incredible stretch of beauty. It was a foolish investment for the parks department, any income draw from the spectacle of the competition should be shared over a range of merchants. But this beach was well isolated from the rest of the retail in the area. Not his bother.

  As he looked out to sea, a big sloop eased up toward the beach. Its lone mast seemed to etch the sky. The dark red hull and long lines made it look incredibly fast even as it came up into the wind and dropped an anchor. The rattle of the chain dropping overboard reached the beach during a chance pause of the various power tampers around him. He noticed that his wasn’t the only pair of eyes that appreciated the boat. Growing up around Gloucester Harbor, he knew a purebred ocean racer when he saw one.

  He looked down at the sand below his feet.

  Morgan had initially planned to do Venus on the half-shell. Part Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and part the Philip José Farmer spoof novel of Kurt Vonnegut’s character Kilgore Trout.

  Now?

  Again he eyed the lovely boat offshore.

  There wasn’t time to break down the forms and restack the sand.

  But…

  If he heeled the boat over to shift the mast to the side, he could carve that beauty out of what he already had.

  Almost.

  One more bucket. He’d need one perfect bucket of sand atop his current structure for the masthead. He glanced over at Romero working feverishly on his hat brim. One bucket would also make his own sculpture taller than Romero’s by several inches, making it the tallest on the beach. Yes, he was good with that.

  There was a lot of excess sand in the lower layers that he’d built with a different design in mind, but he’d think about that when he’d carved down far enough.

  One more good look at the boat, just in case it left before he was done. Once it was firmly fixed in his mind, he clambered down the tiers hauling the jumping jack tamper with him. Mixing the perfect bucket of sand was second nature. Hauling the sixty-five-pound bucket fifteen feet in the air was as well.

  A glance at the boat, he doublechecked the bucket’s position for the new design in his mind’s eye, and flipped it into place. As he worked to ease it free, he saw in his memory that a single figure had been diving off the side of the big ocean racer.

  2

  Mary came ashore on the warm haven of sand and wanted to simply lie there hugging it.

  At the end of her trans-Atlantic race, she’d never actually gone ashore in New York. She’d meant to. After placing second in the solo race from Calais, France to the Brooklyn Bridge, she’d definitely planned to. There would have been good parties after the crossing. And she hadn’t placed second in any mere women’s division; she’d placed second overall to Thierry Montagne who was a masterful skipper. Masterful enough to beat her by thirty-seven minutes after the long crossing.

  He had stepped over onto her boat on arrival, offered her a hug, and held her hand up to the cheering crowd that had packed the Brooklyn waterfront park. It had been kind, and he was always kind, except between the starting gun and the finish line when he was a ferocious and highly skilled competitor.

  But then potential sponsors had come aboard. And newscasters. And boat geeks who began poking through everything that was hers. And women telling her that she was the perfect symbol of the modern powerful woman. And—

  She’d shooed them all away, let slip the lines, and sailed toward home before the third-place finisher had passed the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. It was stupid, she knew. The sponsors alone were a key means to continuing to do the one thing she understood and loved.

  But she wasn’t anybody’s symbol of anything. She was…herself.

  Once here, not possessing enough patience to unship the dinghy, she had dived over the side and swum ashore.

  In the shallow water, she now sat as she often had as a child, chest deep in the water, the low waves only occasionally splashing against her chin. There was something different about the water here. It simply felt right.

  Straight ahead lay nothing until the Azores and the bulge of Africa. At her back lay her home town. She hadn’t been back to Gloucester in a long time.

  Mary tried to imagine why she was back at all. Her parents were gone. Her friends were other sailors, not the now total strangers from Gloucester. Even Vincenzo her first sailing instructor had died of old age, slipping beneath the waves of sleep and never reemerging, to give him his sailorly metaphor. His daughter had sent Mary the scrap album he’d kept of all of her races. All of them, even ones she hadn’t recalled right ba ck to her days ruling the Mass Bay Sailing Junior Championships.

  She’d visited him only the month before he’d died, but hadn’t been back in the decade since.

  So why now?

  For an overpriced hot dog and a pre-packaged ice cream cone?

  Could be.

  She climbed to her feet and did her best to squeeze the water out of her hair. Really facing the land for the first time, it was as if nothing had changed. The wide beach, low salt-grass dunes behind. She knew that beyond that was the most expensive parking lot for a long way around. But the city pumped some of that money back into the beach; the sand was perfectly groomed except for a thin line of seaweed at the high tide line.

  And inland…

  She cocked her head and heard her neck joints crack.

  Great wooden structures were lined up along the beach. Some over a story high, all roughly pyramidal in form. She saw someone had carved what looked like a black, actually black, battered top hat; his body blocking what he was working on below that.

  Some were still shoveling sand, a few were breaking open the upper layers of their structures. She hit the concession stand, where the hot dogs looked so All-American that she ordered two, which would give her indigestion later but she didn’t care. With one slathered in mustard and relish, and the other in ketchup—because only the grossly crass mixed all three—she went back to sit on the dune edge and watch the sand sculptors.

  These were serious folks. Nobody was scooping together a bucket of wet sand and scraping a hole in it, about her level of sandcastle mastery.

  Up close, she could see that Mr. Top Hat was shaping a grinning gray-white skull. At least she hoped it would be grinning when he reached that far.

  A woman down the row cursed when she accidentally batted her prepared sand tower with the framing board she’d just removed, and created a small cascade of sand off the exposed face. After careful inspection of a drawing, she wiped her brow and proceeded to remove the other three sides. Damage fixable.

  Near to where she’d landed, a long, rangy man with dirty blond hair to his shoulders trapped by a red bandana worked on the tallest of the piles. He had a beard just thick enough to not be a scruffy Captain Jack Sparrow pirate. Standing high in the air, he kept looking out to sea.

  Looking toward her boat, the Niles P. She’d named it for the pond on the East Gloucester peninsula where she’d swum so often as a kid.

  He wore no shirt, showing off his good muscles. Then he reached into his toolbelt—Captain Jack with a toolbelt was a nice combo—pulled out a palette knife and began carving. With quick confidant strokes he began cutting away at the cylinder of sand that topped his structure. It didn’t take a genius to see her mast top emerging from the sand.

  Except with far more detail than would be visible from this far away. The head block pulleys appeared rapidly from the sand. With a different tool, a wooden school ruler wielded like a saw, he made tiny marks along the exposed edges that would be the wire stays. That was a crazy level of detail, especially considering the huge amounts of sand trapped inside the lower plywood tiers.

  He was almost frantic as he broke off the first layer of forms and tossed them down, nearly landing them on her toes.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, but kept working without really turning.

  It seemed that he was shedding an immense amount of sand. Mr. Top Hot and Creepy Skull was carving away small layers, but Captain Jack was shedding whole slabs, like the calving glaciers she’d seen in Greenland. Mr. THCS had been well ahead of the Captain when she’d arrived. But every time he paused to check his art against his drawing with level and tape measure, the man copying her sailboat in sand never hesitated. He was soon farther along despite all of the extra carving.

  Perhaps he’d changed his mind when he saw her boat. Her boat certainly hadn’t been there when he’d been piling the sand up.

  Partway down the sail, just even with the spreaders, he froze. “Dammit! What was the number?” He glared offshore at her boat as if he could read the number on the furled sail.

  “Thirty-four,” she called up to him.

  “Thirty-four what?” he turned around looking for the voice that had spoken to him, except he was scanning the sky around him at his level, not looking down at the people below. She was not the only one come to watch the carving, even at this early stage.

  “Thirty-four is the number on my sail.”

  “Your sail?” He finally looked down at her. “Madonna Mother of God.” His jaw went slack. And that’s how she knew the boy now grown into the pirate.

  “You haven’t called me that since grade school, Mr. Morgan Henry the Backward Pirate.” Which had been her nickname for him. He’d taken great pride in almost being Sir Henry Morgan, the real pirate’s namesake. It fit; he’d grown up to look rather piratical. Calling him the backward pirate had helped keep him in his place as a boy. Not really—unlike her, he’d been irrepressible—but she’d liked to think of it that way back then.

  “Mary Elizabeth Thomas,” he breathed it like a prayer. He’d always liked that her first and middle name had matched Sir Henry Morgan’s wife.

  It had led to a great excuse to tease each other mercilessly as they were growing up. Of course, Sir Henry had married his first cousin, also a Morgan, but what did they know about genetics back then.

  “Wait!” He swung an arm to point out to sea and almost knocked the top off the sail he’d been carving. “Your boat?”

  She nodded, and bit into her hot dog. Mary wasn’t quite sure where the first one had gone, but this second one tasted damn good. Summers spent here as a little girl flooded back. She’d never belonged, but being with others even though she rarely spoke had been better than the achingly empty Niles Beach backed by the eight or ten mansions that owned its length.

  He looked like a string puppet. First staring down at her, then twisting to look out at her boat, then back to her, and finally down at the vast pile of sand he stood on.

  The backward pirate wasn’t the gawky kid she remembered. He’d been bullied plenty in school for his light build and sharp mind. She’d been a jock, already winning sailboat races by the time she was eight. A misfit, but winning for the school had been her protective shield. He’d had nothing except his artistic flair, which had always attracted the worst attention. Their mutual teasing was the closest either of them probably had to a friendship growing up.

  Until her parents had shipped her off to Milton Academy starting in seventh grade. They hadn’t wanted a kid underfoot and Milton had the best sailing program of any prep school up to her parents’ hoity-toity standards. Losing her one semi-ally, her only protection at Milton had been to be the best. She’d never been a straight-A student, but nobody beat her on the water—ever.

  She hadn’t thought of the backward pirate much since, having done her best to block Gloucester out of her mind.

  This time when he stared at her once more, she saw no sign of the gawky kid. He was studying her, not as a surprising piece of his past fetched up like a battered bit of driftwood but as if he was trying to memorize her.

  “Could you drop your right shoulder a bit?”

  She raised it as if she was the Hunchback of Notre Dame and he laughed.

  “You always were a contrarian. Just drop it, please.”

  “Well, because you said please,” she dropped it all the way until she was slouching against the sand like a melted Dali clock.

  He laughed then called down, “Hold that for a sec.”

  Mary was tempted to move simply to annoy him, but he was no longer looking at her. Instead he was intently studying the sand below his feet.

  At a loud curse from two sculptures down, Mary jolted upright.

  Morgan didn’t react at all except to mutter softly, “Saw that coming.”

  The woman who had smacked the top layer of her sand tower with the board was staring at the cascading collapse of the exposed layer as whole sections of sand sloughed off and spilled over the lower tiers to land on the beach below.

 

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