CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THE NEXT DAY
I am standing on the edge of the old pier to the west of Sea Cliff. The pier itself, and the rocky path I just climbed down to reach it, belong to Whitlock, my neighbor, but I can't imagine him protesting my trespass seeing as how he flees from even our most mundane interactions. Therefore this pier is mine while I am standing on it. Whitlock can do what he likes.
Beneath me the pillars are so densely crusted with barnacles they look as though they're built of broken pottery. I crouch down. To my astonishment I see that the point of each barnacle is open, and as I watch, a tiny bird's-beak wobbles around within each, emitting minuscule fringed flowers which are whipped around like fans and then pulled back inside.
What I've first understood as clumps of dead shell are actually a city of licking, floral tongues, I realize. Everything here is alive. It strikes me nothing so much as a sort of bizarre underwater garden in which plant and animal are fused. I am reminded, again, and with irony, that nothing in nature is ordinary if one looks close enough.
Down below the barnacles, deep in the green murk, I can see the shadows of long fronds moving like vines, or perhaps snakes. Eels? I lean back a little from the edge.
This is Seamus' world, not mine. And just as I experience the forest differently than any man could, so must he experience the sea not as the sailors beside him do, but as the sky of a garden which is exclusively his. No wonder, then, that he took so adeptly to the plants of the earth, and with such an absorbed curiosity. What I think of next, what I cannot help but think of, is the way his callused hands were gentle in the dirt, mounding soil around the seedlings, pushing and coaxing. And that same hand on my knee giving that same gentle, patient, coaxing touch.
I don't believe I've cried since boyhood. Of course, crying is the purpose of this visit. I've prepared myself for a long struggle while I muster it up, have been worrying how I'll manage if I can't make myself do it, and am therefore allowing myself memories such as this, his hand on my knee. Most of my energy in the prior weeks has gone to pushing them away, and that work is an angry one.
I find now that the act of recalling them is equally angry. Below me the dark reflection of my face scowls at me out of the ice-green swirl, in the moments between the waves. I pull out another garden memory, one I'd forgotten: he's standing back up from walking on his hands, face flushed, pulling his shirt down, laughing in the sunlight, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes bunching together. His breathless laughter. I grit my teeth. I do not enjoy this.
Then out of the murk rises a quashed memory, far older, which I hook and pull into the light: Jepson scrubbing blood from my hands with his shirttail, cursing. We are in the greenhouse where he's caught me; it's only my second month in the house, I am in trouble nearly every day. Today's trouble is that I've caught a rat and couldn't help myself. The night previous I'd spent in the cellar and it was hard, so hard; I fought the change back, but when it finally, inevitably, took effect, it was somehow incomplete. Something had not gone back, or rather, something had stayed. And now I wanted the half-chewed rat which Jepson was pulling from my hands, in the way that I had previously only wanted acceptable things. I remember the disgust in his eyes as he kneeled before me, his thumb rubbing the gore from my chin.
You can't do this, I remember him saying. You can't do this, ever again. Folks'll run away from you. No one will let you near them. You'll always be alone. You don't want that, do you, boy?
I don't want that, I say to him.
The thumb scraping against my lip. Bad boy, Jepson's muttering, scolding me. Bad, bad.
Then Seamus taunting me in the greenhouse, the day before the hunt: Suppose you can't help yourself. That old shame washing over me: Bad, bad.
I don't want to be alone, I am telling Jepson in my memory. I let go of the rat and I am sobbing, his angry hand scraping across my face.
And then- and then- this is the hardest one; I am in the meadow, and Seamus' dirty foot is swinging lazily over my head, and from inside the hammock where I cannot see comes his voice, soft now and sleepy, telling me I don't mind you anyway, Henry.
Just that, clear and plain, I know what you are and I do not mind, he's telling me, clear as day, it's all right, it will be all right, he's telling me, and fool that I was, I did not even hear these simple words, did not even bother to answer him.
The seventh tear is already falling nearly before I can count it, and I have to cup my hand beneath my chin to catch the rest.
.
Nothing happens. I didn't believe it would. The green world below me contracts and surges. I've done what I came for, this idiotic spell, these seven droplets in the ocean, but my body can't stop itself now that I have allowed it to begin. I sit on the end of the pier and let it happen, aware that I am a grown man, curled head on knees like a child, ridiculous. Then I fall completely into my own grief, my awareness of myself recedes; time passes, I am crumpled and shaking, a mass of spit and snot, I cry until I choke, I cry until I'm sick.
After a while I can nearly breathe again. My chest fills with shuddering relief. The gulls have found something on the rocks of the beach behind me and they're celebrating, shrieking and flapping. In my blurred vision the western coastline beside me is a slice of jagged grey; rock beach, then a smear of froth, and then pearl jade-green coming out to meet me. Desolate, I think. Then my eyes adjust, and I see it for what it really is. Same as the wilderness that I myself need, that I myself can never get enough of: the medieval forest that encloses Harthome. This harsh coast must be to him what the moonlit heath is to me. Probably he can hear the tides coming in no matter where he is.
To call your lover home from the sea, the notes in my breast pocket say, drop seven tears into the water; they shall be carried by seven waves. He is not my lover, of course. Nor is he really my friend. I don't know a word for the relationship between us; possibly there isn't one. What I do know is that, of the two options I copied down, this is the one I can bear.
.
My sweater, the front soaked through, hangs clammy from my shoulders. All around me dragonflies knock into one another in the dusk. As I'm hiking back up Whitlock's craggy path, slow over the black rocks, I wonder if what I've just done is wrong. If it is an imposition. If I might have harmed him, in some way, by allowing myself this harmless spell. I hope not. In certainty what I've done is waste an afternoon and look foolish in front of the gulls that are still fighting on the sand below.
I rub my eyes. They're hot and sore. Animals don't cry and men are never supposed to. But I would be lying if I said I don't, now, feel a comforting, lightheaded relief.
It's late when I make it home. But I don't want dinner, or to answer any questions, or to feel Agnes' eyes pecking worriedly at my swollen face, so I turn my key slow and quiet in the French doors' lock, then take off my boots to hurry up the stairs.
.
In the dark, in my bed, I imagine where Seamus is now, something I try constantly to keep myself from doing. I imagine him aboard ship, stretched out in his hammock, his hands resting on his chest, asleep alongside all the other hammocks in the dark, swinging with the waves, the sounds and stinks of the men in the cold cramped dark. I imagine him dreaming. His brow smooth, his face calm as it was in the pond. Lips slightly parted where the scar is.
And outside the ship I imagine the ocean spray throwing my seven tears against the hull, battering it with them, over and over again, endlessly, just a part of the storm, unnoticed.
.
I imagine him dreaming in the swaying dark, and I do not say, Tell me you regret leaving. I do not say, Look at me and see how sorry I am. I do not ask him, What would make you come back? I do not tell him, I would give anything for the chance to take back what I have done.
Instead I force myself to breathe deeply in my bed; I lie my palms flat beside me and with all of my heart, focus on my wishes for him: good weather, good luck, good fortune; I wish smooth seas and peace and safety for him, whatever it is that he does, wherever it is that he goes, for all the rest of his life.