Our Beautiful Pea-Green Boat

As I climbed the stairs I could hear the familiar, warbling soar of a bow against string. The notes never slurred when he whittled a tune from the time-worn belly of his violin. They held their spirit, lucent and clean like polished glass.

He played on when he noticed me hovering in the doorway and pivoted his salt-stubbled jaw in the violin’s chinrest to signal my welcome. As I entered, I became his complete and utter audience. He straightened the elderly form of his back and slowly turned to follow my path across the room, bragging a glad sonata in animated strokes. I sat quietly on well-seasoned tan leather; the old armchair of enduring sermons and delightful stories, a dwelling of many years and tears, of growing up words, unfurled pains and coiled, cat-like comforts. He used to call it my beautiful pea-green boat, and of course I believed it was.

Those walls knew us. That room, bolstered with book spines and pied assemblies of photographs and paintings, odd hooks looped with old keys and broken bows and bottom-heavy mystery bags. There were wads of wildly stacked papers and hectic manuscripts scattered on a wide, mahogany desk that eclipsed an ocean heirloom rug; the silent understudy to it all.

On the wall behind the desk was the crown curiosity, his most favoured and my most feared: a carved wooden hanging of an owl in flight, wings outstretched and talons clenched in a crucifix of feathered livery. He caught me glaring at it once and I finally announced that I didn’t know why he had to have a scary owl like that, all stuck flying with claws out, forever. Couldn’t it have been a cute, hoot-eyed one?

He told me his clever uncle had made it for him, modelled on a lovely old barn owl that had taught him to fly as a young boy.

I laughed and he didn’t. He stretched his arms out until his buttons nearly blinked. “I really can fly you know. You’ve heard me flying a thousand times.”

I screwed up my nose, ready to counter, but of course he never gave me the chance and instead made a baritone leap into the theatrics of our pet poem.

“The owl flew up to the stars above and sang to a small violin, not a silly old guitar,” he bellowed.

To which, as always, I replied, “You elegant fowl, how charmingly sour, not sweet you sing.

Sometimes we went to a very strange sea in that boat.

The room’s large bay window had remained mostly shut since my mother died, only partially disclosed by a gap in the heavy curtains. The room knew her too, but mostly from the doorway where she’d lean, head relaxed against the frame, smiling, studying, not wanting to interrupt our reverie of strings and secrets.

It was hard to watch him play that day, silhouetted against the morning; stage-lit between those drapes. He in his pilled cardigan and trackpants, straining to poise like the tall and tuxed soloist he once was.

He nodded deeply as the last note slipped under the rug, then rested on the silence before his typically odd greeting. “How then? What not, my love?” he asked, offering a genuine, short-lived smile while limping forward to sit at his desk. He placed the violin and bow in a space between his slipping tide of papers and council of empty tea cups.

“Well, I’m checking up on you,” I said. He squinted in reply. “I’m also wondering if you’ve thought about the thing we need to talk about?”

He leant back in his chair and sighed, then looked up at the ceiling to examine a resident cobweb. “Hmmm, the thing… the thing,” he said, pretending to think about it. “Well here’s a thing,” he soon said. “Have I ever told you that my favourite painting is a Rembrandt? It’s called Two Old Men Disputing. Yes indeed, they were. A wonderful thing. Very cranky. Oils on wood.”

“No, you never told me.” I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Soon we’d set sail.

“Do you want to know why it’s my favourite?” he asked with a cocked brow. “Well, I’ll tell you—it’s because they never had to finish the bloody argument.” He splayed his fingers out in front—a sort of mime of the wings on the wall behind—then he clenched both into tight fists. “Immortalised in the midst of a fight without ever having to settle the bet,” he said. “They just keep disputing, it’s the bit they love. Nobody loses.”

He dropped his palms flat to the desk. “There’s your answer, my dear."

I lowered my focus to scan the wreathed border of the rug like I had always done when trying decipher his rhetoric. But I knew. I knew.

He huffed and reached for his violin to sweep a defiant B major across the strings—a low and familiar foe—then he returned it to the desk and went to peer through the window. The mote-speckled air stirred in the light with his passing.

“I’d like a painting done,” he announced to the world outside. “One Old Man Refusing. It’s of my bow and I having an argument with a Stradivarius. I think I’d have a clear shot if that was the battle.”

He laughed, but I kind of didn’t.

“Wish it was that simple,” I said. “The doctors were pretty clear, Dad. The treatment is it.”

He nudged the curtain with his knuckle, then returned to the desk. “Well, there’s a box waiting for everyone, Cat, and I’d rather keep playing to the last breath, mid-Vivaldi. Right up until they cut my strings and shut the lid.”

He shook a pointed finger at the cobwebs above. “I shall not die before I’m dead!”

And that was that, the two of us on yet another strange sea. But it was one I now mournfully understood. We knew, that owl and I, in softly landing lyrics, that he’d always be dancing by the light of the moon,

mid-sonata,

mid-flight,

by the moon, the moon.

We knew that he'd forever play by the light of the moon.