I Can Still Hear Her

The boy, who is now nearing the age of twenty, has been talking of this place on the map, where many sailors like to drink and spend their time, but I have never heard nor seen it. And if this place is true, as he says, they spend time giving in to their lust and dark ways, I think. No one honorable hides along the coast. But a new place? How could that be? I know this coastline better than most and it hides few secrets from me. But now I am old and hurt and compromise when I should say no. I can’t fight anymore and a new place for an old man like me is no place to be. However, the boy persists. My seafaring days are mild now and the adventures I participate in are only in the tales I tell. These days I like what is familiar to me: the sea. Her sounds have filled my ears every night as I’ve gone to bed, and I’ll die with her whispering in them. And so, I assume the rabble is held up there. Any place I hadn’t been or heard of contained criminals. But I was cold tonight, even with my long jacket with a matted raccoon hide for a collar. The jacket has served me well in most weather, but tonight was especially frigid, and if derelicts are held up at this ‘new’ place we are headed, so be it. Amen, as the pastor says. And even if I demanded we not go to the island, the sea would claim us if we continued up the coast and braved the winds. A storm was passing through. So, this place of derelicts is where we are headed. Nothing in my mind says this place is innocent, but my mind is aging. It could be I’ve been here. I would have remembered, though. I’m sure of it. Although, it seems every day I have conversations with people who have passed away many decades ago, and the boy wonders who I am speaking to. He told me once that he had been here, but I don’t believe him. Whose boat was he on, anyway? I think. And I said to him, “You’ve not been here, boy.” And he says, “Yes, sir, I have—as a small boy. I have some recollection of it.” And he says this very cheery and certain of himself, a quality which I detest in him being as young as he is, but which means there is some truth to it. Damn. But how could he have gotten there? I think. But then I forget that people walk and live on land, while I have been living on this boat forever, alone or with company. The boy and the dog are company, now. We’ve named the new mutt, River, because his coat, mangy as it is, is blue-hued and squirms when I watch him move around the boat. He reminds me of a tributary that shoots off from the sea, or some would say dumps into the sea, but I look at the sea first and the land as a place for dumping things.

The closer we came to the cove, the more eager I am to moor the boat for the night and head to the nearest inn, where warm beds were, fireplaces and ale. As we approached the cove, nowhere in sight could activity be spotted, which was concerning. "They must be inside for the night," said the boy. His name was Lentz. I called him that from the moment I heard his last name. His first name was maybe Christopher, but I no longer recall. It isn't necessary anyway. I only need a word I can shout at him to get his attention. And Lentz was easy to yell. His mother and father were Germans and had moved to New England only a generation ago, and maybe one would think living in a homestead in Connecticut with German parents his only company, would produce in him a German accent, but this was not the case. Lentz spoke perfect English; In fact, better English than I could speak. But I spoke well enough to be understood and was much louder. He says his aunt and uncle lived in a thatched cottage in a town a few miles from this place and that his uncle took him here once and fried fish along the shore. But he was too young to remember, and so it might as well be his first time, anyway.

We debated mooring there, could be bad folk there, I say. But we decided it was for the best. The night was getting cold. The temperature was dropping and will kill us if we don’t find refuge from it. And the world's color seemed to disappear. Everything was dark-colored, even the sun. But of course, the sun had dipped down past the horizon. And when it shone in the morning, with its tawny fall radiance, it still did not bring much color. And the once white froth of the waves was a dull gray. The seagulls seemed to enjoy it; those nasty birds. I can see them even now, off in the distance pecking about with their thin reeded legs along the shoreline, the thieves, and some circling above the boat, squawking, as they often did. Sometimes they come down with a great commotion, flapping in hysterics, in pursuit of whatever scraps I threw onto the deck for the dog. But although the storm was coming up the coast, and I was bitter cold, a feeling came over me. An intuition that spoke to me and said: Stay. Sleep on the sea, tonight. But was I senile, as they say? Nothing seemed vibrant to me anymore. Not the taste of anything. But the sea still roared in my ears. Her sounds never atrophied. But when the weather was bitter cold, as it is now, the sea life below the waves took the upper hand. Their spirits remained as strong as ever. No weather seemed to bother them, being as close as they were to the Earth’s core. The boy says that makes no difference, whether they are closer to it or not. He says the world’s axis tilt is to blame for the cold. He is always correcting me on my science. What has science ever done for man? I think. It made him more comfortable and stifled his mind’s eye, as some alchemist I’ve heard of, said. No longer is he free to cast his mind’s stories on the land without prescriptions. The man’s mind is a textbook, now. And all textbooks are ever good for is crushing bugs. Humanity, as the pastor said, has gone from generation to generation just fine without scientific prescriptions to follow. But that brace did fix my sister’s back, I thought. But man is always looking for one extreme to cast all his thoughts in, instead of the other, when it isn’t fashionable. Man’s mind is capable of great abstraction, says the pastor, but nonetheless finds one solution for it to live in, anyhow. No different than animals, I say. A bird pecks and squawks. A dog barks and licks itself. A man does whatever is fashionable. No more fun yarns to talk about. So much for the serpent who wraps itself around the world’s seas, Jörmungandr. Those tales are now for small children and insolent old men. Men of the sea used to know little when I first started sailing, making up yarns of their own. But fear begets pragmatism. And rationality has a way to tame the sea. Superstition is old man’s folly in the boy’s world. The boy is obstinate in his views and won’t entertain my yarns, anyhow. But I was once young and bullheaded.

We were now nearing the harbor and growing closer to the dock along its shoreline. Great hulking ships had been left high and dry on the beach, dressed in sand and made home to mollusks. They were anchored close together. “Careful now, Lentz! Give a wide berth!” I shouted. Lentz was a fine navigator, but an old man likes to bark and exclaim his authority. But then in came a great windfall, which lifted the waves high beneath the boat. “Ho! Ho!” I exclaimed. “Ho! Lentz!” I thought we would be flung into the beach, but the wave past and the great hulking boats went listless in the night air once more. Everything went still and the foul weather passed on and the sea was innocuous seeming, as if it had only burped. River stood beside me, accustomed to such disturbances, but alert. “A good dog,” I said. “Well behaved, indeed.” As we pulled alongside the dock, I noticed shipworms had taken to it, although it appeared intact. The nasty bugs clung onto one another; a gang of aphids feasting on the wood. I slung a rope from the bow onto the dock and with grace stepped out onto it. River leaped onto the dock along with me and took to immediately sniffing. This was foreign soil to my eyes and her nose. I lured the boat in and fastened the boat down, then Lentz cast out the anchor and it stuck well. It was a small boat, with some value after all. Enough for an old man, a dog and a boy. I looked around, the beach was overgrown with grass, and over a great mound of sand was the town Lentz had spoken of. I could see no light. No life seemed to be here, aside from us.

Lentz leapt onto the dock, barefoot.

“Aren’t you cold, boy?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

I, too, was an idiot when I was young, but I would never dare go barefoot on such a cold night.

We continued walking along the dock, behind me followed Lentz, and leading us was River, who took a cursory sniff at everything in sight and stopped every so often for a long sniff. The whole nature of the place was surreal to the eye. A lost place, naked for the most part and overgrown along the coastline. There were lodgings, but they felt unaccompanied. And down away could be intimated what used to be a road, but the sand had covered it heavily. We walked up the beach and onto higher ground, and I could see better the whole terrain. No more than ten or twenty yards in front of us had fallen a large tree into one of the lodgings. I began walking again, and I swore I could hear voices. “Lentz,” I said. “Do you hear those voices?” We came along a small cottage home. It was dark inside and to my eye, abandoned. I climbed the front step, watching my footing as I did, and opened the door. It creaked open on its hinge, and I could see almost nothing inside. And then I began to experience a fierce pain. A new pain that was unlike any of my daily aches. A sensation that felt as if a knife had entered me, and then, again and again, it came, in more or less the same area. Then the pain raced up my backside and into my neck, and as I moved my head, the whole world seemed to move faster than my vision could comprehend. I looked down at my boots and squeezed my eyes shut. “Lentz,” I said. “Something is very wrong with me.” And then I began to leak, somehow within. I had gone only moments ago off the side of the boat, I thought. But as I looked up, I met the gaze of several men who bore smiles on their faces; each with a conniving countenance more sinister than the next. Their faces were covered with Earth. Their beards and hair long and unkempt, and the whole lot reeked of brew. My body then went cold and a chill took hold of me. The men were quiet and studied me, but their intentions no longer mattered to me, as I could hear the sea. She had always been there to console me. “Lentz,” I said. “I am not well.” I turned to my left and as I did, I could feel a hand touching something in my lower backside, where the pain started. I could see only Lentz over my shoulder with what vision I had left. He stood calm with his boyish eyes looking at me and with no sense of urgency. “Lentz,” I said. “I am not well.” But then Lentz disappeared, and I stood helpless, listening to the waves of the sea as I always had. I looked down and saw River, who watched me with a pitiful expression. “You foolish old man,” I thought. “A place you have never heard nor seen and you trust a boy and his yarns.” But I too was once young and earnest.