Tidewater

The boat came in with the morning tide, bumping against the pilings at the end of the dock. No engine. No oars. Just a wooden hull, badly patched, with a length of frayed rope trailing from the bow. Somchai saw it first. He was ten and up before anyone because the dogs woke him, and the dogs woke because the fishing boats were going out, and the fishing boats went out at four. He stood on the dock in his school shorts and looked at the boat and decided, with the absolute certainty available only to children, that it was his. His mother disagreed. His uncle, who actually owned a boat, laughed. But nobody else claimed it, and after two weeks of it knocking against the dock and collecting rainwater, even his mother stopped arguing. Somchai bailed it out with a cut-off plastic bottle. He replaced the frayed rope. He did not try to sail it because it had no sail, and he did not try to row it because it had no oars, and he did not try to motor it because he was ten and did not have a motor. He sat in it. That was enough. The boat became his office, his kingdom, his hiding place during the rainy season when the house felt too small and too loud. He brought a tarp to keep the rain off. He brought cushions. He brought homework, which he did not do, and comics, which he read until the pages swelled with humidity. His uncle watched this with the expression of a man who recognizes something. One Saturday he showed up at the dock with a pair of oars he'd made from scrap lumber. They were ugly. They worked. Somchai rowed the boat out past the dock, into the estuary where the river met the sea. The water was brown and warm and smelled of mud and diesel and the jasmine that grew along the banks. He rowed in circles because the boat pulled to the left no matter what he did. He didn't care. He was on the water. The village looked different from out here. Smaller, and at the same time more complete. By the time he was twelve, he could row to the sandbar and back. By thirteen, he'd patched the hull himself and painted it blue with leftover house paint. By fourteen, his uncle let him help with the nets on weekends. This was not generosity. Somchai was good at it. The boat never got a name. People called it Somchai's boat, which was name enough. It was slow and ugly and it still pulled left. On calm mornings, when the water was flat and the sky was the same grey as the sea, he could row out far enough that the village disappeared behind the mangroves, and there was nothing but water and the sound of his oars and the occasional heron lifting off from the shallows. He is twenty-three now, and he has a real boat, a fibreglass one with an outboard that starts on the second pull. He makes his living on the water, like his uncle, like most people here. The wooden boat is still tied to the dock. The paint has faded and the patches have patches. He does not use it. He will not get rid of it. Some mornings, before the dogs wake, he walks to the end of the dock and puts his hand on its gunwale. The wood is rough and warm, even in the dark. He stands there for a minute. Then he goes to work.