Tales of the Peculiar (illustrated)

The Boy Who Could Hold Back the Sea

here was once a peculiar young man named Fergus who could harness the power of the currents and tides. This was in Ireland during its terrible famine. He might have used his talent to catch fish to eat, but he lived in a landlocked place far from the sea, and his power was of no use in rivers or lakes. He might have set off for the coast—he’d been there once as a young boy; that’s how he knew what he could do—but his mother was too weak to travel, and Fergus couldn’t leave her alone; he was all the family she had left. Fergus gave her every bit of food he could scrounge while he survived on sawdust and boiled shoe leather. But it was sickness that finally got her, not hunger, and in the end there was nothing to be done.

As she lay dying, his mother made him promise to leave for the coast as soon as she was in the ground. “With your talent, you’ll be the best fisherman who ever lived, and you’ll never have to go hungry again. But never tell anyone what you can do, son, or people will make your life hell.” He promised he would do as she said, and the next day she died. Fergus buried her in the churchyard, threw his few possessions into a sack, and began his long walk to the sea. He walked for six days with one shoe and no food. He was starving, and all the people in the towns he passed along the way were starving, too. Some towns had been abandoned altogether, the farmers gone to seek better fortunes and fuller stomachs in America.

Finally, he reached the seaside, and a little town called Skelligeen where none of the houses looked empty and none of the people looked hungry. This he took as a sign that he’d come to the right place: if the people of Skelligeen were still around and well-fed, the fishing must be very good. Which was a lucky thing, because he didn’t think he could go much longer without eating. He asked a man where he might find a fishing pole or a net, but the man told him he wouldn’t find any such thing in Skelligeen. “We don’t fish here,” the man said. He seemed oddly proud of it, as if being a fisherman were something shameful.

“If you don’t fish,” Fergus said, “then how do you live?” Fergus hadn’t noticed any signs of industry in his ramble around the town: no pens of livestock, no crops other than the same rotting potatoes he saw everywhere in Ireland.

“Our business is salvage,” the man replied, and did not elaborate.

Fergus asked the man if he had anything to eat. “I’ll work for it,” he offered.

“What work could you possibly do?” the man said, looking the boy up and down. “I could use someone who can lift heavy boxes, but you’re scrawny as a bird. I’ll bet you don’t weigh seventy pounds!”

“I may not be able to lift heavy boxes, but I can do something no one else can.”

“And what’s that?” said the man.

Fergus was about to tell him when he remembered the promise he’d made to his mother, and he muttered something vague and scurried away.

He decided to make a fishing line from the lace of his shoe and try to catch something. He stopped a plump-looking lady and asked her where he might find a good fishing spot.

“You needn’t bother,” the lady said. “All you’ll catch from shore are poisonous puffer fish.”

Fergus tried anyway, using a bit of stale bread for bait. He fished all day, but caught nothing—not even a poisonous puffer fish. Desperate, his stomach in terrible pain, he asked a man walking along the beach if someone might have a boat he could borrow.

“Then I could go a bit farther out to sea,” said Fergus, “where perhaps the fish are more plentiful.”

“You’ll never make it,” the man said. “The current will dash you to bits on the rocks!”

“Not me,” Fergus said.

The man looked at him skeptically, about to turn his back. Fergus really didn’t want to break his promise, but it was beginning to look like he’d starve to death unless he told someone about his talent. So he said, “I can control the current.”

“Ha!” the man replied. “I’ve heard some whoppers in my time, but that tops them all.”

“If I can prove it, will you give me something to eat?”

“Sure,” the man said, amused. “I’ll throw you a banquet!”

So the man and Fergus went down to the shoreline, where the tide was going out for the day. Fergus huffed and grunted and gritted his teeth, and with a great deal of effort he was able to bring the tide back in, the water rising from their ankles up to their knees in just a few minutes. The man was astounded, and very excited by what he’d seen. He brought Fergus back to his house and threw him a lavish banquet, just as he’d promised. He invited all his neighbors, and while Fergus stuffed himself, his host told the townspeople how Fergus had brought in the tide.

They were very excited. Strangely excited. Almost too excited.

They began to crowd around him.

“Show us your tide-pulling trick!” a woman shouted at him.

“The boy needs his strength,” the host said. “Let him eat first!”

When Fergus couldn’t force himself to take another bite, he looked up from his plate and around the room. Stacked in every corner were crates and boxes, each filled to the top with different things: bottles of wine in one box, dried spices in another, rolls of fabric in another. To one side of Fergus’s chair was a crate spilling over with dozens and dozens of hammers.

“Excuse me, but why do you need so many hammers?” Fergus asked.

“I’m in the salvage business,” the man explained. “I found them washed up on the beach one morning.”

“And the wine and rolls of fabric and dried spices?” Fergus said.

“Those too,” the man replied. “Guess I’m just lucky!”

The other guests found this funny for some reason, and laughed. Fergus began to feel uncomfortable and, thanking his host for the fine meal, excused himself to go.

“But he can’t leave without showing us his trick!” said one of the guests.

“It’s late, he must be tired,” said the host. “Let the boy sleep first!”

Fergus was tired, and the offer of a bed was more than he could resist. The man showed him to a cozy bedroom, and the moment Fergus’s head hit the pillow he fell into a deep sleep.

In the middle of the night, he snapped suddenly awake to find people in his room. They crowded around the bed and tore his blankets off. “You’ve slept enough!” they said. “It’s time to do your trick!”

Fergus realized he’d made a mistake, and he should have snuck out the bedroom window and run away—or better yet, never revealed his talent in the first place. But it was too late for that now. The crowd dragged him out of bed and down to the shore, where they demanded he pull in the tide again. Fergus didn’t like being forced to do things, but the more he resisted, the angrier they got. They weren’t going to let him go until he did what they asked, and so, resolving to run away at the first opportunity, he pulled in the tide.

Water came rushing in. The people jumped and cheered. A bell began tolling out to sea. A bank of fog cleared, revealing the lights of a passing ship, which was being dragged toward land by the quickly shifting tide. When Fergus realized what was happening, he tried to push the tide back out again, but it was too late, and he watched in horror as the ship smashed to pieces against a cape of jagged rocks.

Dawn began to break. The ship’s cargo washed ashore in crates and boxes, along with the bodies of the drowned crew. The townspeople divided the crates among them and started carrying them off. This is what they’d meant by “salvage”—they were wreckers, and drew passing ships toward the rocks with false lights and signals. They were thieves and murderers, and they had tricked Fergus into doing their evil work for them.^{22}

Fergus broke free from them and tried to run, but a crowd blocked his escape.

“You’re not going anywhere!” they said. “There’s another merchant ship passing tonight, and you’re going to help us wreck that one, too!”

“I’d rather die!” Fergus shouted, and then he ran in a direction none of them had expected—toward the water. He splashed into the surf, grabbed a splintered plank from the wreckage, and began to paddle. The wreckers tried to catch him, but Fergus used his talent to make a wave that rolled in reverse, pushing him away from shore rather than toward it, and soon he was far beyond their grasp.

“Idiot!” they shouted after him. “You’ll drown!”

But he didn’t drown. He hung on to the plank for dear life, the wave carrying him past the rocks and far out to sea, into the deep, cold water where ships passed.

He waited, bobbing and shivering for hours, until a ship appeared on the horizon. Then he made another wave and rode it toward the ship, and when he got close he began to shout. The ship was very tall and he was afraid no one would notice him, but finally someone did. A rope was lowered, and Fergus was brought up onto the deck.

The ship was called the Hannah, and it was filled with people who were emigrating to America to escape Ireland’s famine. They had sold everything they owned to buy their passage, and now they had nothing but their lives and the clothes on their backs. The captain was a cruel, greedy man named Shaw, and no sooner had Fergus been pulled from the ocean than Captain Shaw wanted to throw him back again.^{23}

“We don’t allow stowaways on this ship,” he said. “Paying passengers only!”

“But I’m not a stowaway,” Fergus pleaded. “I’m a rescue!”

“I say who’s what around here,” the captain growled, “and all I know is you haven’t paid for a ticket.”

“I’ll work for my passage!” Fergus pleaded. “Please don’t throw me back!”

“Work!” the captain said, laughing. “You’ve got arms like noodles and little chicken legs. What work could you possibly do?”

Though Fergus knew his facility with tides and currents could be of great help to a ship captain, he had learned his lesson back in Skelligeen, and kept his mouth shut about it. Instead he said, “I can work harder than any man here, and you’ll never hear me complain, no matter what you make me do!”

“Is that so?” said the captain. “We’ll see about that. Someone fetch the boy a scrub brush!”

The captain turned Fergus into his personal slave. Every day Fergus was forced to clean the captain’s quarters, iron his clothes, shine his shoes, and bring him his meals, and when he was done with those things, he scrubbed the decks and emptied latrine buckets, which were heavy and sloshed onto his feet as he dumped them overboard. Fergus did more work than anyone else on the ship, but, true to his word, he never complained.

The work didn’t bother him, but the problem of the ship’s food supply did. The captain had taken on too many passengers and not enough provisions, and though Captain Shaw and his crew ate like kings, Fergus and the passengers were forced to subsist on crusts of stale bread and cups of broth that contained more mouse droppings than meat. Even those nearly inedible rations were in short supply; however fast the Hannah sailed, there was hardly enough to last the voyage.

The weather grew unseasonably cold. One morning it began to snow, even though it was late spring. One of the passengers pointed out that the sun was not where it should be for a voyage headed west, toward America; instead, they seemed to be sailing north.

A group of passengers confronted the captain. “Where are we?” they said. “Is this really the way to America?”

“It’s a shortcut,” the captain assured them. “We’ll be there in no time.”

That afternoon Fergus saw icebergs floating in the distance. He was beginning to suspect they’d been duped, so that evening he listened outside the captain’s door while pretending to scrub the hallway.

“Just another day or two and we should reach Pelt Island,” he heard the captain say to his first mate. “We’ll pick up a cargo of furs, deliver it to New York, and that alone should double our profits for the voyage!”

Fergus was furious. They weren’t taking a shortcut to America at all! They were purposely veering off course, making the journey longer and almost guaranteeing the passengers would starve before they reached port!

Before Fergus could slip away, the captain’s door flew open. He was caught.

“He’s been spying!” the captain cried. “What did you hear?”

“Every last word!” Fergus said. “And when I tell the passengers what you’ve done, they’re going to throw you overboard!”

The captain and first mate drew their cutlasses. But just as they were closing in on him, there was a terrible crash and what felt like an earthquake, and they were all thrown to the floor.

The captain and the first mate picked themselves up and rushed from the room, Fergus and his threat forgotten. The Hannah had struck an iceberg, and it was sinking fast. There was only one lifeboat, and before the passengers knew what was happening, Captain Shaw and his cowardly men had commandeered it for themselves. Desperate mothers cried out for the captain to take their children aboard, but, pistols in hand, his men threatened anyone who came near their lifeboat. And then the captain and his men were gone, and there were no more lifeboats, and Fergus and the passengers were alone on a sinking ship in the middle of an icy sea.^{24}

The moon was high and bright, and in its light Fergus could see the iceberg they had hit. It wasn’t far away, and it looked wide and flat enough to stand on. The ship was listing badly to one side but hadn’t yet sunk, so Fergus summoned a current and pushed the broken Hannah until its side bumped against the iceberg’s edge. The passengers helped one another onto the ice, the last of them leaving the ship just before it sank beneath the waves. They cheered and rejoiced, but their voices were drowned out as a wintry wind began to howl. It seemed they had traded a quick death by drowning for a protracted one by cold and starvation. They spent the night shivering on the ice, huddled together for a little warmth.

In the morning they woke to find a polar bear lurking close by. It was thin and wretched-looking. The people and the bear watched one another nervously, and then, after a few hours, the bear stood up and walked to the edge of the iceberg. He seemed to have heard something, and when Fergus followed him at a careful distance, he saw a big school of fish churning the water a few hundred yards away. There were thousands of them—more than enough to feed everyone, if only they could be reached!

The bear flopped into the water and swam out toward the fish. He was too weak to reach it, though, and soon clambered back onto the iceberg, miserable and exhausted.

Fergus knew what he had to do, even if it meant breaking the promise he’d made to his mother yet again. He raised his arms, clenched his fists, and made a current that directed the fish right toward their iceberg. Soon, fish by the hundreds were banging against it and flopping up onto the ice. The bear roared with excitement, vacuumed several into his mouth, then scooped up a pawload and ran off.

The people were overjoyed. Though they didn’t care for the taste of raw fish, it was better than starving. Fergus had saved them! They lifted him above their heads, chanting his name, then ate until they could eat no more.

As it turned out, Fergus hadn’t quite saved them. Though they now had enough fish to last them weeks, that afternoon the temperature dropped and a blizzard blew in. As they huddled together for warmth, full but freezing, they realized that without blankets they would not live to see the morning. It was just turning dark when they heard a growl from outside their circle. The bear had returned.

“What do you want?” Fergus said, leaping up to confront it. “You’ve got all the fish you can eat, so leave us alone!”

But the bear’s attitude had changed. He didn’t seem desperate or dangerous now, as he had when he was starving. In fact, he seemed grateful, and he seemed to understand that Fergus and the others were in trouble.

The bear padded forward, lay down next to them, and went to sleep. The people exchanged tentative looks. Fergus tiptoed to the bear, sat down, and leaned carefully against him. The bear’s fur was luxuriously soft, and his body radiated heat. He didn’t seem to mind Fergus leaning against him at all.

One by one, the people approached. The children and the elderly snuggled right against the bear, the women nestled next to them, and ringing the outside were the men. Miraculously, though some were toastier than others, everyone survived the night.

The next day, the bear and the people were eating fish when another iceberg came floating past. There were three polar bears on it, and when the people’s bear saw them, he stood up and roared.

Hey, fellows! he seemed to say. There’s a boy here who can get us as many fish as we like. Come on over!

The three bears dove into the water and swam right over.

“Oh, great,” one of the men said. “Now there are four bears on our iceberg.”

“Don’t worry,” Fergus replied. “There’s plenty of fish for everyone. They won’t bother us.”

The bears spent the day feasting on fish, and when darkness fell, they slept together in a big pile, the people nestled among them. That night everyone was warm as could be—men, women, and children.

The following day, another three bears swam over from a passing iceberg, and the day after that, four more came. The people were starting to get nervous.

“Eleven bears are a lot of bears,” a woman said to Fergus. “What happens when they run out of fish to eat?”

“I’ll catch more,” Fergus replied.

He spent all that day and the next one staring out to sea, watching for another school of fish to appear, but he didn’t see any. Their supply of fish was nearly gone. Now even Fergus was starting to worry.

“We should have killed that bear when there was only the one,” an old man grumbled. “Instead, that peculiar boy brought us ten more—and now look at the mess we’re in!”

Fergus could feel the people beginning to turn on him. He wondered what would happen when the fish ran out. Perhaps they would feed him to the bears! That night they went to sleep in a contented and furry pile, but in the morning the people awoke to find eleven polar bears staring at them hungrily, having finished every last fish on the iceberg.

Fergus ran to the end of the iceberg and cast his gaze desperately out to sea. What he saw made his heart leap for joy—but it wasn’t a school of fish. It was land! In the distance was a snowy island. Better still, Fergus could see smoke rising from it, which meant it was inhabited. There would be people there, and food. Forgetting the danger of the bears for a moment, Fergus ran back to tell everyone the news.

They were unimpressed. “What good is land if we get eaten before we can reach it?” a man said, and then a bear approached him, picked him up by one leg, and shook him, as if hoping a fish might fall out of his pockets. The man screamed, but before the frustrated bear could take a bite of him, a gunshot rang out.

Everyone turned to see a man in white furs holding a rifle. He fired a second time, right over the bear’s head, and the bear dropped the dangling man and ran away. Then the rest of the bears ran away, too.

The man in furs had seen them through a spyglass from the island, he explained, and had come to rescue them. He gestured for the crowd to follow him, and brought them to a hidden cove in the iceberg where a flotilla of small, sturdy rowboats was waiting. The crowd wept with gratitude as they were ushered onto the boats and rowed to safety.

Fergus was thankful, too, but as they crossed the water he grew nervous that someone would tell the rescuer about his talent. It was bad enough that so many people already knew what he could do. But no one said a word about him—or to him. In fact, most of the people wouldn’t even meet his eyes, and those who did gave him nasty looks, as if they blamed him for all their misfortunes.

His mother had been right, Fergus thought bitterly. Sharing his secret had only ever caused him trouble. It made people see him as an object, a tool to be used when it suited them and then tossed away when he was no longer needed, and he resolved never, ever to share his talent again, no matter what.

The boats docked at a small harbor ringed by timber houses. Smoke rose from their chimneys and the smell of cooking food hung in the air. The promise of a hot meal by a warm hearth seemed tantalizingly close. The man in furs tied his boat and stepped out onto the dock. “Welcome to Pelt Island,” he said.

With a sudden chill, Fergus realized where he’d heard that name before: it was the fur-trading island Captain Shaw had been trying to reach when they were wrecked on the iceberg. Before he’d quite wrapped his mind around this, he saw something on the dock that astounded him even more: a weather-beaten lifeboat with the word Hannah on the side.

The captain and his men had reached the island after all. They were here.

A moment later, someone else noticed the lifeboat. Word spread quickly through the crowd, and soon a mob of angry people was demanding to know where Captain Shaw and his men were.

“They left us to die!” a woman shouted.

“They threatened us with pistols when we tried to save our children!” a man cried.

“They made us eat mouse-dropping soup!” said a scrawny young boy.

The man dressed in furs tried to calm them down, but the people were bent on revenge. They snatched his rifle, stormed into town, and discovered Captain Shaw and his men in the tavern, drunk as skunks.

A savage fight erupted. The crowd fought the captain and his men with anything they could find: rocks, pieces of furniture, even flaming logs pulled from the hearth. They were outgunned but the captain and his men were badly outnumbered, and finally, beaten and decimated, they fled into the snowy hills above the town.

The passengers had won. Several of them had been killed, but they had settled the score with evil Captain Shaw, and they’d reached dry land and civilization in the bargain. There was much to celebrate—but their cries of victory were soon interrupted by cries for help.

A fire had broken out.

The man in furs came running. “You idiots set our town on fire!” he shouted at the crowd.

“Well, put it out, then!” replied an exhausted fighter.

“We can’t!” the man said. “It’s the fire station that’s burning!”

They tried to help the fur traders fight the fire with buckets of seawater from the harbor, but there weren’t enough buckets and the flames were spreading fast. In desperation, the crowd turned to Fergus for help.

“Can’t you do something about this?” they begged him.

He tried to say no. He’d promised himself he would refuse. But when their pleas turned to threats, Fergus found himself in an impossible situation.

“Fine then,” he said angrily. “Stand back.”

Once everyone had retreated to high ground, Fergus used all his strength and power to summon a giant wave from the ocean. It crashed into the town and put out all the fires, but as the great surge of water retreated again, it lifted the houses from their foundations and took them along with it. The crowd watched in horror as the whole town was swept into the sea.

Fergus ran for his life. The crowd, furious, chased him through the streets and up into the hills, where he was finally able to evade them by hiding in a snowbank. When they had gone, he got out, frozen to the bone, and stumbled through the wilderness.

After a few hours, Fergus happened upon some men in the woods. It was the captain and his first mate. The captain leaned against the base of a tree, his shirt soaked with blood. He was dying.

Shaw laughed when he saw Fergus. “So they turned on you, too. I suppose that makes us brothers-in-arms.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Fergus said. “I’m not like you. You’re a monster.”

“I’m just a man,” the captain said. “It’s you they consider a monster. And what people think of you is all that really matters.”

“But all I’ve ever tried to do is help people!” said Fergus.

After he’d said it, though, he wondered if it was really true. The ungrateful crowd had been threatening him when he summoned a wave to douse the fires. Had he, in his anger, created a larger wave than was needed? Had a small, dark part of him destroyed the town on purpose?

Maybe he was a monster.

He decided the only thing to do was to seek a life of permanent solitude. Fergus left the captain to die and walked down the hills toward the town. Night was falling as he slipped through the ruined streets, and no one saw him. He looked for a boat at the docks that he might use, but they had all been unmoored and scattered out to sea by the great wave.

He jumped in the water and swam out to something that appeared in the darkness to be a large, flipped-over boat, but it turned out to be one of the town’s wooden houses, floating on its side. He crawled in through the front door, summoned a wave to right the house, and rode it out to sea, due south.

For days he pushed his houseboat farther and farther south, eating fish that flopped through the front door. After a week, he stopped seeing icebergs. After two the weather began to warm. After three weeks, the frost cleared from his windows, the seas grew calm, and a tropical breeze began to blow through the windows.

The house still had much of its furniture. During the day he sat in an easy chair and read books. When he wanted to sunbathe, he climbed out the window and lay on the roof. At night he got into bed and was lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking of the waves. He drifted for weeks, perfectly content with his new life of solitude.

Then one day he saw a ship on the horizon. He had no interest in meeting anyone new and tried to steer the house away from it, but the ship turned in his direction, sails billowing, and quickly overtook him.

It was a formidable-looking schooner with three masts, and it towered over the house. A rope ladder was tossed over the side. It seemed the ship wasn’t going to leave him alone, and Fergus decided he may as well climb aboard, tell the crew he didn’t need rescuing, and send them on their way. But when he topped the ladder and clambered onto the deck, he was surprised to find the deck empty save one person—a girl about his age. She had dark hair and brown skin, and she was giving Fergus a very hard look.

“What are you doing in a house in the middle of the ocean?” she asked him.

“Escaping from an island in the icy north,” Fergus replied.

“And how did you keep the house afloat?” she asked suspiciously. “And get all this way without a sail?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Fergus said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said the girl. “Tell me the truth.”

“I’m sorry,” Fergus said, “but my mother told me never to talk about it.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at him, as if considering whether or not to throw him overboard.

Fergus avoided her gaze and glanced nervously over her shoulder. “Where’s the captain?” he asked.

“You’re looking at her,” the girl replied.

“Oh,” said Fergus, unable to hide his surprise. “Well, where’s your crew?”

“You’re looking at them,” she said.

Fergus could hardly believe it. “You mean to tell me you sailed this huge ship all the way from—”

“Cabo Verde,” the girl said.

“—all the way from Cabo Verde—by yourself?”

“Yes, I did,” the girl said.

“How?!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but my mother told me never to talk about it.” And then she turned her back on him and raised her arms, and a great wind blew up and billowed the sails.

She was smiling when she turned around again. “My name’s Cesaria,” she said, and put out her hand.

Fergus was stunned. He’d never met anyone like himself before. “N-nice to meet you,” he stuttered, and shook her hand. “I’m Fergus.”

“Hey, Fergus, your house is floating away!”

Fergus spun around to see the house drifting away from the ship. Then a rather large wave hit the house, and it tipped over and began to sink.

Fergus didn’t mind. He’d already decided he didn’t need the house anymore. In fact, it just might have been Fergus himself who made the wave that sunk the house.

“Well, I guess I’m stuck here,” he said, and shrugged.

“That’s okay with me,” Cesaria said, and grinned.

“Excellent,” Fergus said, and grinned back.

And the two peculiar children stood grinning at each other a long time, because they knew they had finally found someone to share their secrets with.