Sail of Stone

33

He was home again. This was the only place he called home now. He was walking on the beach. The protruding rock formation in front of him, to the west, was called the Three Kings. Everyone here had always called the rocks that. It had to do with the sea. Ruling the sea, being the master out there.

In a different time this had been a city of life, a royal burgh for the future. No more.

No trawlers went out for herring, none came back. Haddock wasn’t smoked here anymore; there was no haddock and therefore no smoke that stung your nose. Once there had been three smokehouses. Now the smoke smelled like garbage when it came up out of the houses where the poor souls tried to get warm. The smoke hit the sky and it too was petrified.

He turned around. It was a blue day. He could see. The sky was cracked as though from some cursed strikes of a hammer, and it had collapsed at the edges and was wide open, and he could see across Seatown and the viaducts and the city above and the hills above the city and the blue sky above the hills. That was what he wanted to see. It was why he had walked here, wandered down Castle Terrace and climbed over the Burn. He could still climb. He could do a lot, still.

Jesus!

He closed his eyes and saw the water and the quarterdeck and the storm that still hadn’t come, not the storm, and the faces and the eyes and the movements and… and… Frans’s eyes. Just afterward. When he knew. The hand that Frans tried to reach out.

Egon’s scream.

Jesus. Save me, Jesus!

He stumbled and nearly lost his balance. There was a sharp pain in his hip.

Why couldn’t he forget?

Where are they? Gone? Let this pernicious hour

Stand aye accursed in the calendar!

Some became old and forgot everything. They managed to get sick. There was nothing left for them; it was washed away like the offal on a deck, all that crap was gone, overboard with that, the deck lay shining in the sun, or the moon, washed clean. No memories left. No traces. They could move on, free from memories, go to Jesus with consciences washed clean.

He limped as he went back across the sand. A dead whiting lay at the edge of the beach. The fish came willingly in to land to die when no one here went out after them. He heard the waves strike against the kings behind him. He covered his ears for a brief moment. Someone screamed inside him. He kept the scream inside with his hands over his ears, and then he let it out.

A man he recognized was sitting there when he stepped into the Three Kings. Another one. He debated turning around, but the man hadn’t reacted when he stepped in. He had only looked from stranger to stranger with a cold gaze and then looked out at North Castle Street, where the shadows were sharp under the viaduct. The houses on the other side had a thorny pattern, as though they were covered in graffiti. In an hour the sun would have moved so much that the shadows would be gone, replaced by the smooth stone. There was no graffiti here. The young people who would have made it fled west and east as soon as they could fly, to Inverness, Aberdeen. This was exactly in between them; presumably they fled farther than that, to Edinburgh, Glasgow. Some all the way down to London.

He ordered his pint and his whisky. A woman he didn’t recognize was standing behind the bar. She wasn’t young and not old either, on her way from nothing to nowhere. She spilled foam on the bar and sighed and got a rag. He could smell the rag. His ale smelled the same as he drank. He washed it down with whisky. He who wanted to hold his liquor must follow that order. Beer on whisky, mighty risky. Whisky on beer, never fear.

He took another sip of ale. The man over by the window got up and walked toward the door. Suddenly he turned around and said, “Good-bye,” and he nodded in answer. The woman behind the bar nodded too, but he had felt that the farewell was meant for him. He didn’t like it. He drank quickly and took the whisky glass and stepped off his stool. There was a sudden pain in his hip again. He saw the man closing the door of a car across the street, and the car started and drove out onto Bayview Road and disappeared. He didn’t know the man, had never seen him. Why had the man said good-bye to him? He finished his whisky and placed it on the table where the stranger’s beer glass was still standing.

He walked south on North Castle, took a left onto Grant Street, and came to the square. An empty bus stood on the square. The passengers and the driver were presumably eating lunch in the Seafield Hotel, on their way to Aberdeen since that was the name on the sign on the front of the bus.

The Seafield was not for him, not now and not ever.

He hadn’t even gone to a place like that in Aberdeen.

But they’d been at the Saltoun Arms Hotel in Fraserburgh.

They had washed up in a restroom that had been shining clean like the sun on the sea on a day without clouds.

That was two nights before.

Was there anyone who knew? Who had guided them there? Only two days before…

They’d eaten dinner in a room where there were big green plants, and everything had smelled nice. The food had been warm and tasted good. They had eaten a pudding afterward; it had been sweet and red. It had quivered like the belly of a deep-sea fish.

He hadn’t been there since.

People came out of the hotel. They got onto the bus. It drove toward Aberdeen.

They had docked out at Abercromby Jetty and then in Tidal Harbour. He had walked ten thousand steps on Albert Quay.

Across Victoria Bridge. Down to Timber Yards.

Up again to Commercial Quay.

He had sat at the Schooner and seen the dusk over Guild Street.

They wouldn’t let him get away.

He had known that. He had thought.

They waited. Someone waited.

Outside, he had climbed up the steep steps to Crown Street. Would he be able to get up there today? Maybe. Well, not today with that hip, but another day.

He had walked north on Crown and then along Union. The war was all around, in the shop windows, in people’s everyday clothes, in the soldiers’ uniforms. Everything was as dark as it could be, blacked out. The dark ages. Those were the dark ages.

He had written letters. He had written to his family.

He remembered the light in the mess, how it flickered in the wind as he wrote.

He asked about Axel.

He had thought of the letters in his loneliness all these years.

He had never wanted to see any of the letters again. It was someone else who had written them.

He walked south on Seafield Street, away from the sea, past the hotel, town hall, the police station where no one cared about him; he didn’t think any of the younger ones knew who he was, or that he existed, and all the older ones were gone, everyone was gone.

He continued eastward, across Albert Terrace, Victoria Place, back toward the cemetery, where he didn’t know where he would lie. No one knew.

There was a darkness over the sea when he returned, walking down the stairs to Seatown. He met someone on the stairs, but he was invisible again. He could move in and out of it. He could reach out a hand, no one would see him.

The children’s clothes on the line next to the nearest house moved in the evening breeze. The black windows, covered by shutters.

The red paint of the telephone booth glowed. It was as though it were fluorescent. He had stood in there, he had been forced to use it. He never would have believed it. At first he hadn’t understood what to do, but he could read. His hands had shaken so hard that he had to try several times before it worked. Then he had asked her.

As he walked past it rang!

He gave another start and felt his hip. He kept walking and didn’t look around. It rang and rang.

At home he lit the fireplace. The humidity had increased while he was away. He kept his coat on as he readied the fire. It flamed up from the newspaper and then began to lick at the sticks in the middle. He warmed his hands.

He looked into the blaze, which was growing now, pulled up by the air, which was a spiral through the flue. The fire was like iron that burned and turned to glowing rust. Rust. Yes. Everything was stone and rust around here now. There wasn’t anyone with hammers anymore.

They had gone into the old capital, the one for the fishing fleet. Back then it had been like a teeming square next to an open harbor.

He had gone there, and he had felt the message that burned in his coat pocket. It was like sharp flames inside him. He had driven by the shipyard and two rusty ships lay as though frozen in the red sludge. There was only silence, no blows.

He had seen the monument again. He remembered; he had been there.

He had sent his message over the sea. He knew that Hanstholm was a second home harbor now for boats from his old harbor. The auction. The bunkering.

The few boats from home.

Before the war there had been forty fishing boats on the island.

They had gone twenty hours west, two hundred nautical miles. Mondays.

They set the trawl. They fastened well. To pipe was an art. It was gone now.

They dragged the trawl. It ran one hundred fathoms deep.

He had missed that. He had always missed it.

They pulled up the trawl by hand. He missed that too. In rough seas it could wash over. Missed it. Speed set at three knots. The last pull, the last time they lifted the trawl for the night. They cast the anchor and were still. Lit the stern lights.

On Fridays they went to the fishing harbor with the boxes. Two hundred boxes. He knew how to shovel ice.

Bertil had stood in the cabin. Egon had run the machinery. Arne had taken care of the tools.

He and Frans had done all the other scut work. They were the youngest. They had rushed back and forth across the deck, slipping, hauling, lifting, undoing knots, and watching the fish run down into the bin. They had cleaned. Their hands had been red and cold.

They had had to prepare food. The youngest prepared the food on board.

They had gone to sleep too late and been woken too early.

Trawl haul!

Their work continued.

Later he would be at the helm himself.

They fished in the dark.

They fished all night.

They continued westward.

God!

He had sung in the Mission congregation.

Almost half the people on the island had been members of the congregation.

There was always a Bible on board.

It had been good to have someone to turn to out there.

His own father had said that no matter what happens, good things will come to a man who loves God.