"Row your boat. Row, row your...Boat down the stream." the children tried singing instead of primal noises of terror: shrieks and howls. Their words formed in the air like some kind of passive epitaph. A hollow memory of gentle sounds amid the tumultous roar of the sea's raw fury.
"Keep singing!" Mike hollered over more resounding clapping in the bedlam of overhead thunder. He knew Death's drownings waited, the rowboat was half full of salty coldness already. All around them tall waves marched by, each more capable than the last of sinking them in a heartbeat. What was Death waiting on, the chorus?
"Lord!" Mike screamed in horror, although it was the only prayer he had ever said before. Was this true fear? Or was it a kind of faith?
The children were bailing the water with their tiny, cupped hands and the sea was mocking them by refilling it just as quickly as they could throw water.
They sang in rhythm with their bailing; song, prayer and splashing all one dedication.
Another blast of lightning crackled brightly without mercy and arched across the sky over them. Then another such bolt came back the same direction as if it had noticed them. Perhaps the wrath of the static was returning to finish off the survivors of the split and burning timber that had sank with little resemblance to a ship.
A third brilliance, much brighter and hotter than sunlight, lanced towards the little boat as if an aimed deathblow from the gods of the storm. It struck a buoy with nova violence and the metal peeled, glowed and ignited. The buoy was on fire, pointing the way to shore.
"Dear God and Jesus!" Mike heard his atheist voice swear in defiance of the miracle. He started rowing again, rowing with all his strength. Somehow the sinking boat started moving a little bit with each stroke, against resistant waves that rolled under the prow, conveying the vessel back out to sea as the man struggled.
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It was a battle and the sea was winning, wave after wave. At best, Mike could keep the boat moving enough to almost stay in place, but the scorched buoy's glow was receding in the wrong direction. Doom grinned malevolently upon them.
The children were still singing something but he couldn't hear them anymore. The icy wind sliced into his ears and the salt cut his eyes. Mike just pulled and pulled until his left arm stopped responding. He gripped the oars and started yanking with his back until his spine felt like it would burst free of his ribs. His lungs wouldn't take the air he was gulping, still it was better than seawater.
"Merrily, merrily..." It was Ruth that was still singing.
"Row!" Mike ordered himself, almost a song, but more of a battle-cry.
Maybe there was no shore to row to. Surely there was no way to survive. The storm responded with a wave that threw the boat onto its side. Something dragged it backwards as the children and Mike fell out of it.
A monstrous wave had flung them and whatever they struck, be it the black embrace of the ocean's finest particles, or Death itself, could not in such a moment be realized. Their boat was taken far away and flung separately upon its own destruction.
Many pieces of the wreckage from the rowboat flew in every direction and plopped one by one into the bloodthirsty sea. There they bobbed and floated and drifted apart. Each fragment was a testimony, a syllable of courage and prayer sang without true fear. Instead the fear was temporal and wasted.
A kind of faith had done something else. With effort and focus: the bailing of the boat had been enough. Mike's efforts had been enough.
They all lay upon the freezing sands of a wet beach that was strewn with every manner of pulverized sea life and man-made debris. Four children were still breathing, although unconscious and shivering, their strong bodies endured in torpor. The man did not survive.
Moments after one of the children's eyes fluttered awake she saw him draw his final breath and sigh it back out with relief. It sounded like he said "Hallelujah".
The sun started to rise as the storm went to fresh new places to ravage with its awesome rage. An old man and his old wife arrived to comb the storm-decorated beach, as they always did this time of year and found all four of the survivors there.
They awoke in safety and warmth. The old couple adopted the four children, who remembered Mike and their doomed voyage to this world, as in a dream anyway. They were alive, their dreams living on, waking again and again from the dark turmoil.
Life is, after all, but a dream.