Free The Night Swimmer by Matt Bondurant Page A

isn’t much for the boat, Bill said. Not these days. Gets a bit seasick.
    Open one of those bottles, Fred said, clambering over the safety rails with coils of rope over his shoulder. The sauvignon blanc. There are some plastic cups in there.
    It’s ten in the morning, I said.
    Fred grinned and shrugged. It was a disarming gesture that made me want to squeeze him with both arms and bite his earlobe.
    Rules of the sea, he said.
    *  *  *
    As we motored out of the harbor Bill laid a map out on top of the hatch and showed me our route. Because the wind was strong from the north, we would beat upwind until we could turn and go downwind to Fastnet, and get a close look at the lighthouse.
    A marvel of engineering, Bill said. The blocks are Cornish granite, locked together like a puzzle. The old Irish call it Carraig Aonair,the Lone Rock.
    The upwind leg was the usual slapping, jerking affair, the boom hissing overhead and the sails cracking as they filled with each tack. Bill steered and worked the mainsheets while Fred struggled with the jib lines and winches. I huddled down on the stern benches, trying to stay clear of the lines. Fred had trouble getting the sheets coiled properly on the winches and Bill barked out directions that made little sense to me.
    Three loops, he yelled. Three loops! There, now crank it. Crank it! Fred, you’re going the wrong direction for god’s sake. Now. That’s it. Good!
    Fred hurled himself around the boat cinching lines, pulling winch handles, going forward to free the jib from the safety lines. When we made the north side of Hare Island, we turned west and the beating eased into a comfortable long tack, Bill steering with his foot.
    Hare Island, he said, or in Irish, Inishodriscol.
    It was a low, flat island with sandy beaches and a few houses emerging from glades of stunted trees. Bill said that maybe a dozenpeople lived there, but he didn’t know much else about it. The wind was strong and steady, and we ate sandwiches as the boat surged along in the green-black water. Bill explained that the Corrigans had been the dominant clan in this corner of Ireland since antiquity, and their descent from St. Kieran, the first saint of Ireland, gave them some kind of sacred right to rule.
    It’s the story of Ireland, Bill said, the same story over and over. That unflinching Irish obedience to the strong man.
    Feudalism, Fred said. One of the reasons why I love this part of the world. The past is never really past.
    We cruised on our starboard tack for a couple miles, passing north of three long islands, working our way west and out of Roaringwater Bay. We were now nearly abreast of the hulking black-green mass of Cape Clear. Fred was doing sketches of the islands in his notebook with a pencil stub, annotated with the nautical and geographical data that Bill pointed out to us. I never doubted Fred’s single-minded zeal. His projects were often multiple and scattered, but he worked with such great intensity that he nearly always succeeded in his goals. The first time we met, at a small graduate student gathering in a pizza joint, Fred ranted about the postmodern genius of Martin Amis and Schopenhauer’s veil of understanding. He wore a flannel shirt and came from a rural background, the star linebacker on his high school football team, and in certain moments, clouded in cheap pitchers of beer and the blueing fog of cigarette smoke, Fred seemed to me like the distillation of the working-class hero and the intellectual dreamer all compact. We were all drawn to Fred. He created the life he wanted for himself, carved out his own space, something most of us never do.
    Those are the Calf Islands, Bill said. There’s no one out there anymore. Just some cattle and a few summer homes.
    Each island was perhaps a half mile across, pocked with small sandy spits of beach. In one cove a large three-masted sailboat lay at anchor. An American flag snapped from the stern, and