To Sea
To Sea
By Michael LoCurto
NEW YORK : SMITH POINT PRESS
ISBN-13: ISBN-10:
978-1475078947 1475078943
TEXT COPYRIGHT 2012 BY M. I. LOCURTO
ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT 2012 BY SEAN HUDSON
FIRST EDITION
FIRST PRINTING
2013
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN SET IN CAMBRIA TYPEFACE
For my Mother.
Smith Point Press, 001.
CHAPTER 1
When the oaks were leafless atop the hamlet of East Marion, when the winter’s frost hushed close across the taupe lawns and when the light air rustled only the needles on the peaks of the tallest pines, Jon Brand rocked the porch swing slow one morning as he stared out to sea. The swing creaked. Between the crash of waves and the whisper of a chilled breeze running off the water. A breeze ran through the man’s beard, up over his small, rimless glasses, making his gray eyes ache.
The swing creaked. Then bells of the neighboring church chimed in, echoing for miles between the low-lying clouds and the solemnly still, frost-bitten land.
“That damned church.” Jon ripped his glasses from his face, lifted the hem of his shirt and smudged sea-misted specks across the lenses. He glanced over at the blurred steeple. “To hell with it,” he mumbled. Jon placed the glasses back on his high nose. Then he took long hard blinks to refocus his eyes back into sight.
It had been four decades since he’d broken that stained glass window with that blue rubber ball. Jon’s hands clenched hard enough to show the whites of his knuckles.
“It’s not even my god-damned God. Damned by a false prophet. Not even my Son of Man.” He loosened his grip on the air. He could feel the blood circulating back into his long fingers. “His face deserved to shatter all those years ago.”
Jon pushed the porch swing slower, which allowed the creaks to resonate along with the distant clapper as it swung around the lip of the bell.
“And damned be that Robert Gully.”
The name had not come to him in some years. His mind froze on the image of him…Robert Gully…who appeared on the rocky shore where white caps of murmuring sound seeped between the stones. Robert looked exactly as Jon had last remembered him. Short and stout and wearing short black hair waved up to the left.
Jon closed his eyes and he watched the whole ordeal play out. There was young Jon fiddling with the blue ball—hurling the rubber off the concrete steps and then catching it. Silently mouthing off the recorded number of consecutive catches until the ball slipped from between his fingers—and then it was Robert’s turn. Jon would wait, seated on a patch of grass, and he would watch the blue rubber bounce high and then low and then through Robert’s fingers. The ball dribbled away, across the street into the dunes. Back to Jon’s turn. And then the crash. Jon’s misstep. His falling arm guided the ball up, right through the Greek Jesus’ head. Shattered to pieces. The faceless Christ.
“Not even a real faith,” Jon moaned as he grabbed at the reigns of the swinging porch, silencing the creaky thing. He’d had to paint that whole church that summer. “If it wasn’t for that damned Gully.”
Jon looked out at the billowing waves that caught the grainy sand. The water crashed atop the land, then dragged the tan shore back into the mouth of the sea. The images of that gloomy summer drew themselves in each gray wave. The scuffed blue ball. The shattered stained glass Greek Jesus. The pink hue of whitewash and blood mixed on Jon’s dry, skinned knees. And Robert Gully. Tugging on the pastor’s black cloak. The little boy whispering heresy into the priest’s ear.
“Damned be that Gully. And damned be that Greek Orthodox Church.” Jon blinked hard and the images cleared. Robert Gully. The blue ball. The pinkish knees. The pastor’s black cloak. All faded on the gray horizon.
It had been four decades since all that had happened. Four decades since the sea’s last blight. Four decades and only Jon and his neighbor, the church, remained. The pastor had died some twenty years back. Robert’s father had owned the farm next door. A farm that yielded corn and cabbage ‘til he’d sold the land off given the fishing industry’s first crash. When the town first unsettled. Four decades back. Robert’s father had moved the Gullys up north. “To sell insurance,” he could hear old man Gully’s rough voice. “To live the dream.” The farm was now yielding three-story McMansions that had sprouted up the way the corn harvest once had. One of the giant houses casts a dense shadow over the Brand’s cottage every morning ‘til the sun eclipses noon in the sky. From there on out, the sun shines vivid rays through the living room and kitchen until the light sinks into the sea. But only to rise again, drawing a thick Garage-Mahal outline over the Brand’s place the next morning.
The bell had stopped ringing some time before, but Jon had not seemed to notice nor had seemed to care. His face hung low and his ears now focused on the hiss of cars that skipped over concrete slabs of highway far off in the distance. The bare trees tried to muffle the mechanical sounds of rubbed rubber over rock, but were too weak to catch the distant whispers in the static and still winter.
He heard the sound of his neighbor’s four-wheeler ignite and slip out of the drive. “Must be time for work,” Jon thought. “Mindless man drives back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. For what? To work in the big city and raise a family out in the rustic rural? Driving countless hours to pay for his oversized house. All for the dream,” he sighed. “I miss the days when you worked where you lived. You lived where you worked.”
“What are you mumbling about out there, Jon?” A voice called from the other side of the screen door. “Breakfast is almost done.” It was Elea. His wife of twenty-five years. She spoke to the scrambled eggs, but loud enough for Jon to hear. “Stop it with your nonsense and come inside. Barry will be in any second. Sit down, already.”
Jon shifted his feet over the worn wood of the back porch. He placed his hand on the door’s aluminum latch and he shook off his thoughts about the neighbors. Jon turned towards the sea, giving it a long stare as he sniffed at the air’s salt. A flock of gulls flew along the shore, crying for a morning’s breakfast as they passed. Jon released his grip and he kicked the door. He licked the salt caught on his lips and he scowled, “I miss the feel of water beneath my feet.” The sea moaned softly with small waves crashing to the sand, the rippling water sparkled gold—gold like the sun that shined the backs of the gray clouds. “I miss the sunrise over the sea.” His heavy boots traced the grains in the dry deck with precision. “There is no peace with the land. My feet are still here.” He looked up behind the house and he watched the sun shine through a break in the clouds—as those clouds drew a dark shadow of his neighbor’s house covering the land, out to sea. He clicked the steel-tips of his boots on the deck. “You cannot be barren. I miss the taste of matured bluefish. I miss the feel of a full net of fat-bodied tuna.” Jon’s head fell forward. “But so dry. So long.” His voice trailed off into the somber echo of crying waves and crying gulls. He gave the porch swing one last good push. He finger-combed the mist’s sea-salt droplets out of his bearded curls.
And he headed to sea.
CHAPTER 2