It was late afternoon when I arrived. As I opened the door and climbed from my truck—gingerly, so as not to pull the fresh, fragile scabs from my skin—a wind off the water ruffled my hair, just as it ruffled and sang through the fronds of the palms.
The lawn had been recently mowed; close to the shore, the clipped grass gave way to tall sea oats, their slender stalks widely spaced in the pale gray sand. A fresh line of flotsam from a recent storm surge—pine straw and palm fronds and grass stalks—marked the boundary between lawn and shore, between the cultivated realm and the natural world. Turning back toward the house, I noticed a high-water mark that rose halfway to the window sills: a souvenir of Hurricane Floyd, Vickery had told me. Floyd had flooded the Sea Sausage with knee-high water, but in the arbitrary, offhand way of nature, it had utterly demolished an identical house next door.
The dock looked newer than the house, though the decking was sun-blasted and weathering, and the ends of some of the boards were beginning to curl upward and pull free of the joists. As I stepped onto the dock, I shucked off my shoes, then my socks, and let the soles of my feet settle onto the roughness of the gray, grainy boards. I had scarcely stepped away from my shoes when I saw a pair of small fiddler crabs scuttle over the sides and into the toes.
The far end of the dock widened into a platform ten or twelve feet square, with a broad, sturdy railing all around. Leaning over a corner, leaning into the breeze, I watched the shards of afternoon sun dance across the shimmering, undulant water. The bay’s surface was smooth and glossy, but not uniform or even flat: there were gradations of sheen, pools and pockets and whorls. As I studied a long string of whorls, I realized they were spooling downriver toward the bridge and toward the Gulf, against the flow of the incoming tide. I looked closer, and one of the whorls seemed to gather mass, coalesce, and mound itself slightly above the surrounding water. I heard a huffing sound and the mounded whorl receded, and I imagined that I had imagined the sight and sound—fallen prey to some trick of light and tide and tiredness—until it happened again, in two places, then three, and then I glimpsed the soft bulk of manatees. I watched them—a herd of six, I decided by counting the subtle eddies they created, these momentous things swirling around me in the current, sensed but not fully seen, just below the surface.
I scanned the neighboring docks and nearby waters; the manatees and I had the entire bay to ourselves. I shucked off my shirt, eased down my pants, and began climbing down the wooden ladder. On the last step, I hesitated—the water looked brown, muddier than I’d have expected from the undeveloped forest and marshland bordering the bay—but I decided to trust Vickery’s assurance that the salt would be good for my wounds. As my feet and legs descended into the water, I saw that the water was not muddy at all; rather, it was clean but deeply tinted by tannin. It was the rich color of strong tea. Step by step, deeper and deeper, I immersed myself in the briny, bracing, healing water. As I did, my pale and wounded skin took on an orange glow, then a deep coppery hue that rendered me unrecognizable to myself.
As I took a breath and sank beneath the surface in the company of manatees, it looked and felt as if my immersion in these Florida waters, my baptism in the Ochlockonee, was transforming me into someone else, something else. Something wilder and more exotic than I had been before.
I feared that transformation—almost as much as I longed for it.
I stayed beneath the water for what seemed an eternity, then rose toward the coppery light and breached, huffing like a manatee and drinking deep drafts of the briny, bracing, resurrecting air.
Author’s Note: Fact and Fiction
Novelist Michael Chabon has described his fiction as occurring in a parallel universe, one that resembles the “real” universe closely, though not exactly. That description seems fitting for this book. TheBone Yard is a novel, a work of fiction . . . but it’s fiction that is deeply rooted in the soil of grim realities. Some of those realities have been adapted, expanded, and dramatized here; others appear in these pages without alteration.