Sail of Stone

13

He came back with trembling hands.

He prayed.

Jesus!

Outside, a child biked by. He went to the window. There was a wind from the sea. The wind tugged at the child’s hair, which was black. There were no blond children here. He had thought about that. No blue eyes, no blond hair. Not like on the other side. Why was it like that? It was the same sky, the same sea.

The other place was only a night and a day away, in navigable weather. Maybe it went even faster now. No minefields.

He could see a ferry now and then, when the hard winds forced the vessels closer to land. They were too far north, sometimes too far south. He didn’t know where they were going, and he didn’t care.

He was finished with the sea.

He lived next to it, but never on it, or off it, never again.

He had been on board when the trawler went under. He carried what had happened with him. What he himself had done. His guilt. The thing that could never be forgiven. He had been there. He knew more than anyone else.

There was no one else left.

Jesus had not been able to forgive him.

But ’tis strange:

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s

In deepest consequence.

He felt the sea in his face as he walked across the breakwater. He had salt in his face that would never leave his skin. What hit his face now didn’t stick, but it wasn’t because he washed it away. The wind took it.

He had sores all over his body.

The eczema from the oilcloth had dried and turned into scars all over his body, like patterns.

Like a map of his life at sea. Yes.

He sometimes rubbed his hand across his shoulders and legs. It was in the dark, as if he were blind and could follow his life on his body with his finger. His memories were scars. The scars were soft and smooth under his fingers, and he could imagine that all these scars were the only soft parts of his body. But there were many. His body was more soft than it was hard, but for the wrong reasons. He had a young man’s body, but for the wrong reason.

It shouldn’t be him. Not him, living an old man’s life.

Jesus, Jesus!

He stayed standing there and waited for the sun to go down, and it did as the child biked by again; a boy, he lived in the house by the steps and there were always clothes hanging from the line, and he could see a young woman come out and hang the wash, or take it down, and her hair was black, like the boy’s, and there was a transparent pallor to her face, which was the sea’s fault. The sea marked these people, shaped their forms. Farther up, all the way up in the north, in Thurso, Wick, people were bent like dwarf birches on a mountain, black, pale, blown to pieces, blown through.

He turned in toward the room at the same time as the sun disappeared over to other continents. The room was exactly as dark as he wanted it. He went to one of the easy chairs and sat down and drank again from the whisky that waited in the glass. It was one of the cheap kinds.

He looked around with the liquor still in his mouth. He swallowed.

No. I won’t leave this.

It was the last time.

I will stay here.

Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical…

He ran his hand over his right arm; his finger slid across the smooth skin that had been dead for so many years now. There was no life in most of his skin, only a surface that was silky and at the same time, when he pressed a little harder, completely hard, hard as stone.

He reached for his weapon.

He took care of it.

She had said that his violence hadn’t changed. Hadn’t lessened.

At the Three Kings the windows bulged from the wind, which was coming in from the northwest now. He felt the draft where he was sitting at the bar. He might have said something to the woman who was standing there as though petrified, but she didn’t answer, didn’t hear.

Sometimes she heard. He had waited to tell her things. He knew that he would need her later.

The door opened. The woman stirred. He heard a voice. Someone sat down beside him.

“Whisky, please.”

“Blended or malt?”

“Just give me whatever-”

He heard the stranger interrupt himself.

“-whatever you fancy.”

“Well, I don’t fancy whisky.”

“Give me a… Highland Park,” said the stranger, nodding toward the shelves of bottles.

The woman turned around and took down a wide-bottomed bottle and poured it into a glass and put it in front of the stranger. She spoke her dialect, which some people considered to be a miserable gibberish:

“This’s from Orkney, do y’know?” she said.

“No.”

“I thought y’knew,” she said.

The stranger drank. The woman had stiffened again. The stranger took the glass from his mouth and turned to him and lifted it an inch or so. The stranger seemed to gaze out the window. There was nothing outside. Now the stranger moved his gaze. He could see this from the corner of his eye.

Someone was watching him.

He turned his head toward the man who was sitting there. He nodded without saying anything.

The stranger was younger than he was, but he wasn’t a young man. There was a peculiar look in his eyes. There were lines on his face. The glass in his hand shook. He set it down and hastily wiped his mouth.

The woman had walked away from the bar.

I will have to stop coming here, he thought. Why do I come here?

I know why.

“Are you from around here?” asked the stranger.