Sail of Stone

5

He stood at the summit. The church lay below him. He had prayed there sometimes, in earlier years, prayed to Jesus for his soul. The church was the only thing from the really old days that was still there in Newtown.

When Lord and Lady moved the village in 1836, the church was allowed to remain where it was. It was from the 1300s, after all. That sounded like before all time, before the great sailing voyages. The great discoveries.

Still, what a brutal story it was! Lord and Lady moved the village. They didn’t want it next to the castle.

They didn’t want the railroad next to the castle.

He could see the viaducts down there, clanging in the air from the bite of the wheels. They had to be built down there, far away from Lord and Lady. A superhuman act, but possible.

Lord and Lady were gone now, like so much else here. The sea remained, but even that seemed to pull away, little by little each year. The trawlers ended up farther away during ebb, their shining bellies like jaws in the twilight, as though a school of killer whales had started to attack the city but had gotten stuck in the ebb.

He stood above the docks. There was sulfur in the air. In the air, he thought: What seemed to be physical floated away in the wind.

His hips hurt, more each day. He shouldn’t have walked, but he did. It was his body, after all. This was nothing. He knew what was something. He knew.

When he came there for the first time, the city was the primary harbor for fishing fleets along this part of the coast, south of Moray Firth.

Bigger than Keith, Huntly; even bigger than Buckie.

The Buckie boys are back in town.

He didn’t stay long that time. It was when he still didn’t know who he was or where he was. That’s how it had been. Like a blindness. He knew now that he had walked and stood and talked then, but he hadn’t been aware of it.

It could make him scream at night. He could be awoken by his own screams and discover that he was sitting straight up in bed in the ice-cold room with his own breath like a white cone before him. The scream was caught in that breath. It was a dreadful feeling, dreadful. His whole throat felt mangled, as though it had been squeezed in an iron grip. What had he screamed? Who had heard him? He had gone out into the street but hadn’t seen any movement behind the black windows in the house on the other side.

No one had heard him.

He had seen the light from the city above, only a few lights.

He had thought of her then, briefly.

He had seen the telephone booth that shone in the fog. It never rang.

He would ask her.

She would do it.

She had done as he’d asked.

Now he was no longer certain.

She had looked at him last time with an expression he didn’t recognize.

He hadn’t asked.

He left the harbor behind him and walked through Seatown. The houses clung to one another, squatting under the viaducts. He walked toward his house through the streets that didn’t have names. This is where the streets have no names, he thought. He often thought in English, almost always.

Sometimes there might be a fragment of the old language, but it was only when he was very upset. There were only two other places where the streets had no names, and those were heaven and hell.

He had been to both places. Now he was traveling between them.

The houses had numbers, apparently without any order. Number seven stood beside number twenty-five, six beside thirty-eight. He lived in the black house, at the southern gables. It was number fourteen. That meant that the house had been the fourteenth one built in Seatown. That was the system here. His was the only black house.