Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

that people found them satisfying.

    The Ross Point pier was a long-unused, broken-down pier which disappeared almost entirely at high tide and at low tide slipped into the ocean at its far end. Mr. Lougheed coming around the bend in the sea walk—he had had to come after all, he had been too restless to stay away—half expected to see no one there, to discover that he had imagined the whole thing, or, more likely, that it had been an elaborate hoax concocted by others. But this was not so; people had gathered. There were no steps here—there were steps a quarter of a mile back and a little way ahead, past Ross Point—but Mr. Lougheed got himself down the bank, hanging onto broom bushes, and not thinking of the risk of broken bones until later. He hurried along the beach.
    The first people he recognized were running along the pier and jumping from one of its broken concrete chunks to another. Rex and Calla and Rover and a number of their indistinguishable friends. Calla was wrapped in what looked like—what was—an old chenille bedspread, half the pink and brown tufts worn away. They cavorted, they splashed barefoot in the water. One boy on the shore was playing a flute, or the thing like a flute, the same thing Eugene had—a recorder. He played well, though monotonously. The two old sisters were there, the blind one with her white cane lifted while she talked, pointed at the water. She remindedyou of Moses at the Red Sea. The other one talked to her, explaining. Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey and a few other old men, judicious, chatting, had stationed themselves not too close by. Altogether there were maybe three dozen people, all over sixty or under thirty. Eugene was sitting rather far out on the pier, by himself. Mr. Lougheed had thought he might put on some special outfit for the occasion, some rough robe, or loincloth, if he could locate such a thing, but he was wearing his usual jeans and white T-shirt.
    One of the old men took a watch out of his pocket and called straight ahead, as if addressing nobody in particular, “I see here it’s ten o’clock.”
    “Ten o’clock, Eugene!” called Rex who had jumped into the water and was naked from the waist up, wet to the thighs.
    Eugene’s back was to them all, his knees were bent, his head was on his knees.
    “Holy, holy, holy,” intoned Rex, throwing back his bushy head, spreading his arms wide.
    “We should sing,” a girl said.
    At the same time two ladies wearing hats, in front of Mr. Lougheed, spoke to each other.
    “I didn’t expect so many of them would be here.”
    “I didn’t come to listen to sacreligion.”
    The girl began to sing by herself, in competition with the recorder player. She whirled unsteadily around on the shore, singing without words, a scarf of many soft colors flying out from her throat. After a bit of this the two ladies in front of Mr. Lougheed looked at each other, cleared their throats, nodded, and started up in shaky sweet voices, modestly determined.
    We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing
,
    He chastens, and hastens, His will to make known.…
    “Let’s get the show on the road!” called out Mr. Morey rambunctiously.
    “What’s happening?” said the blind sister. “Is he on it yet?”
    Eugene got up and walked farther out on the pier. He walked without hesitation into the water which lapped around his ankles, then his knees, then his thighs.
    “He’s in it more than he’s on it,” said Mr. Morey. “Say a prayer, boy!”
    Rover squatted down on the stones and began to say loudly, “Om, om, om, om—”
    “What, what?” said the blind sister, and the girl who was singing paused long enough in her song to call, “Oh, Eugene! Eugene!” in a voice of loving hopelessness, renunciation.
    “So from the beginning, the fight we were winning.…
    Eugene walked to his waist, to his chest, and Mr. Lougheed roared in a voice he thought he had lost, “Eugene, come out of that water!”
    “Weightlessness!” Mr. Morey shouted at the same time. “Turn your weightlessness on!”
    Eugene bowed his head and went under.
    The singing girl gave a joyful scream.
    Mr. Lougheed had gone down to the pier and a little way out on it. He said to Calla, wrapped in her bedspread like a Biblical woman, “Do you know if he can swim?”
    “Swim, swim!” cried Rex, that buffoon, and fell upon the water, while the not-blind sister was spinning around calling, “Somebody, somebody! Don’t let him drown!”
    Eugene