I was born again and I came out crying — a lot of us did, they say. There never was such a race as the seals for mawking and moping. Out into a driving rain I was brought, part bound tight and part bursting from the lambskin Mam had made for me. All sounds hurt my ears, the rain-hiss on the rocks and the men’s voices: ‘Daniel Mallett! Welcome home, boy!’
‘Mallett? That’s the boy that worked up Wholeman’s, no? That stole the coat-room key the night they left? We should throw that one back, and without his skin, too.’
‘Shall you take the skin to Dominic Mallett, then, Clift, and tell him his son fell over the side?’
‘Hush you both! The lad has ears, you know.’
‘Oh, paff. They lose their language under there; you’ve heard them.’
‘Don’t mind him, lad. Your dad will be right glad to see you.’
They cut and cleared the skin off me. The weight of me fell out, onto a sloping rock that was wet with blood; it had run and run, right off the edge down there and into the sea. Legs rose all around me and faraway faces leered; here, closer, the man with the knife crouched, and slapped my face, and beamed, and wiped his eyes. Behind them one of the Skittles rocks towered, and I mistook it for a huger person yet, all shoulders and no face; I tried to bring my arms up to protect myself, but I had no strength in them; I had forgotten how to use them.
Amid the brute noise then and the confusion, I recognised the blurred uppers of a fishing-boat. They carried me onto it, and laid me raw-skinned and bony-shouldered on the deck. Some man put a rope-coil under my head, which pressed into me painfully. I was trying to accustom myself to my man-eyes and what they showed me through the air. All the bulk had gone off me; how was it that I felt so much heavier? And everything was heavier around me, glued to the deck; the men shuffled stuck there to the boards; none of them could fly, and neither could I any more.
Around me the air racketed; every movement was quick and startling, every contact sudden and loud, throwing out more noise. To no rhythm, the land-men moved and swore and fumbled, the men of my town, of my land-life, and the sea-birds stuttered in the sky. And I was crushed flat to these remnants of my coat, pressed to the damp wood by this sea-grass blanket, that held in what little warmth I had. The only thing the wind could do was push the damp hair back and forth on my brow; it could not lift and return me to the water; it could not lift even this knotted knitted thing off me.
It was an ill-making dream, and the men came by, smiling and patting and consoling me, all the way home.
‘Nobody holds what you did against you, Daniel, don’t you worry.’
‘Well, only men like Clift, and their good opinion’s not one you need hanker after.’
‘A lad that loves his mother above all, well, didn’t we love them above all too?’
They required nothing of me; they did not expect me to speak with this strangely packed mouth, out of this flat face with its new framework of jaw, using this new voice all strings and hollows. The sky lingered, never to be veiled by seawater as I took my breath and dived with it below. The illness went on, and through it, the men’s mutter-and-crooning slipped together, interlocked into items of sense. (‘Didn’t we want them happy, in the end?’ ‘Only none of us could put ourselves aside enough, and our own convenience.’ ‘It’s true, the lads only did what we should have done ourselves.’) They welcomed me; they were welcoming me back. They spoke of their gladness, and of the preciousness and rarity of sons. I was one among their sons, it seemed. These were changed men from the ones I was beginning, just beginning, to remember.
‘You’ll be heavy to yourself awhile,’ said one, over the grinding of the boatside into the jetty, over the hard explosions of sound in my back and skull. He lifted the weed-blanket off me, and I waited to fly up into the air. But I did not. I lay helpless.
They hooked my arms over two men’s necks and tried to teach me walking on my new, long legs, across the deck cluttered with box and bolt and reel; when I was steady enough they took me across the frail plank that was all that kept me from dropping into a dirty corner of water, some ignored, avoided corner of my home below. They walk-lifted me to the land, which had no give or movement; the jetty stood firm as the water slapped and fought it below. My feet dragged and my legs tried to rescue them — how was I to support myself and balance, on these two stalkish things? The men had put a shirt on me and trousers, but still the foreign knees swung and braced below my blurring eyes, my heavy head. I knew that they belonged to me, but I could not see how ever I was to control them.
My father was brought down the street to me, but I did not see him, only heard clomping boots and men saying, ‘See, Dominic? There he is!’ And then a voice spoke out of years ago, out of my bones, saying, ‘Is that him? Is that my Daniel? Are you sure?’
A space opened before me. I heaved up my head. Some boots swam there and his familiar belt-buckle, and then the rest of him leaped into view, sharp-edged and astounding, his big hands out wide at me and in between them his awakening face.
‘Daniel,’ he said, and ‘Dad,’ I managed to say; even words were heavy here, all burdened with the years and the mess of my new voice. My head sagged again with the weight of everything, and I saw nothing but wet greeny-black-blue cobbles ringed by boot-toes and the legs of marvelling men.
‘Here, let me take him,’ said my dad to the man at my right, and they un-hooked and re-hooked me and I seemed to walk worse than ever, leaning onto my dad with my head swung fast into his shoulder.
‘You will be fine, my boy,’ he said. ‘Fine and good.’ And he held me up and walked me. A splash appeared a brighter blue on his shirt; I had not known it was raining, or that he was crying. I tried to speak, to tell him that I knew him, that I was surprised, that I was sorry, that I had found my way somehow into this strange, long, wrong-grown body. But all I could manage for the moment was cries very like a seal’s, that said nothing, that had to say everything, to the man beside me.
‘I remember the day the boy came among us again,’ says my dad by the fire. ‘It was a whole new weather and season, bright and blowy. Suddenly there was colour in the sky and flowers on the hills. I opened my curtains and there he was walking up the town good as gold, long and limber like a proper man — just as you do, Daniel, only of course I’d not seen you then. Had no surety of ever seeing you, always I reminded myself. I remember he lifted his face — not to see me, not to see anyone, but to look at the town, at walls, and maybe at hill and sky above — and the sight of him, of all our boys and our wives and our selves rolled into the one face, it near split me down the middle. The last five years along at Wholeman’s every word any of you had ever spoken we had turned over and wet with our tears and polished with our examinations and memories.
‘And Canker out ahead — he did not need to sing, just his face was singing, the joy of it. They say it is a sin, envy. You must not covet, they say. Well, your old man, Daniel, he’s a sinner. I hope you don’t mind. I was cloven by envy, hating Joel Canker for having what I had not. Not yet, anyway, and who knew I was to get it?’
He beams around his pipe, takes the thing from between his teeth with one hand, reaches out the other and bats my cheek softly.
Then a thought scoops his smile away. ‘Of course, there’s many that only ever got that envy and no more. Corris Snow, bless his soul, and the Green brothers — none o’ theirs came back.’ He feasts on the sight of me, and guilts about it.
Some of the lads could not bear it on Rollrock, not with the mams gone and half the dads still mourning sons as well. Several fled to the mainland in search of cheer and distraction, and many more talked of going, but never got up the courage to take the boat.
Those who stayed were put to fishing. Gratefully the older boatmen passed us their places on the boats, while the not-so-old found some fire in themselves to command and instruct us.
It was good work for us, better than sitting on land with the sadder dads. It felt fitting to be on the sea, halfway between our t
wo homes, and much of the time we were too well occupied with the work to think ourselves miserable. There were times when the difference between a fine catch in the hold and our memories of a fine school of fish under-sea was hard to endure; sometimes some creature would come up squirming in the net that had once moved with grace or speed or fascination in the water, and to see it flop and struggle on the deck was like my own heart removing from me, and expiring before my eyes for want of the larger system that sustained it. But these were moments only in long days of earning our keep; the best feature of this work was that it properly wore us out — we grew stronger by day with it, and we slept better by night.
Still some boys stayed distressed, particularly those whose fathers had not welcomed them home, or had not ever known how to treat them, or had found them to be strangers since their time in the sea. The worst distressed paced the shoreline certain nights of the moon at Forward Head or Crescent or Six-Mile, raging and seal-calling fit to break everyone’s hearts. And the unhappiest of these swam out, calling offshore. My friend from childhood, James, was one of these; he went out one night with a measure of drink inside him, and rolled up whitened on Forward Beach next morning. His dad anguished with the idea of wrapping and weighting him and delivering him to the sea again, but in the end he could not bear to, and had him buried in the churchyard, so as to know his son’s whereabouts forever.
I came home early from helping at Fisher’s store. The smell was all through the house: wild salt sweat of mams, caverns of ocean. It turned the air blue-green to me, with bars of sunlight shifting in it; I walked in with my arms spread, and it all but swirled about them.
In the kitchen, at the heart of the smell, at the heart of the home, Dad sat at the table with his white plate and spoon. He tried to seem every-day, but ‘What brings you so early?’ he accused me.
‘Done all I had to do.’
His chin was tilted up, his eyes were obstinate, and a flush was travelling up his face. And then there was the sea-heart on the plate — hairy, lined with rubbery orange, a bead of orange curd on its lip. The spoon hovered.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘There’s another.’ He pointed with his thumb to the pot on the stove. As if this were an ordinary dinner.
I tried for both our sakes to pretend it was. I crossed and lifted the pot lid.
‘But were you wanting both of these?’
‘I thought I was,’ he said throat-clearingly. ‘But I’m discovering that one of them is…quite enough.’
I pulled the sea-heart out by a hank of its grown-on weed and put it in a bowl, fetched a spoon, sat to table. I took Dad’s orange-smeared knife and cut the top off with my big capable hands. I tried the remark in my head, but did not say it aloud: The last time I ate one of these, Mam had to open it for me, that tough skin.
The steam flooded up and the smell: bodies, wet hair, boiled shellfish, sour seawater, the cosiest of winter nights, her clear pale skin with a hint of green; her hair like a stilled flow of black water.
I spooned up a bit of the curd, and now I held my whole childhood in my mouth, warm and free of worry. The mams laughed together; Mam and Dad laughed, too, looking to each other, leaning arm to arm. I would do things to stop them; I would perform; I would stand on my hands against the wall so that they would look at me again, include me with them. That was always my aim when Dad was there, to return Mam’s eyes and mind to me.
Well, I succeeded, did I not? The curd cooled on my tongue; it slid down my throat, soaking my head with the sweet-saltness. Up sprang tears, but not so far as to fall.
I raised my eyes and found Dad’s fixed on me, a spoonful of curd in his hand. ‘How is she, then, my Neme?’ he said. ‘How was she, the last you saw of her?’ He ate the curd, but he did not move his eyes, did not free me from answering.
‘I don’t know,’ I realised. ‘She was there. She was well. It is different there; it is not like here.’ I was embarrassed, the obviousness of this, but Dad did not laugh at me, or look impatient. He moved the curd in his mouth, as if by careful tasting and careful watching of me he might have knowledge of that place, of those five and more years that he lost of us.
‘That was not even her name, Neme,’ I said with a helpless shrug.
‘What was her name, then? What was she properly called?’
I tried to say it, but it was as slippery as water in my mouth, as a piece of wind, and it had a high part that my man-voice would not reach, and a croaking that came out crude in a human room, came out animal only, carried not half its proper meaning. Seal-language, seal-song, were fading from my memory. If only I submerged myself, went down to the sea and put my head under, it might all come back to me, but while I stayed above, I could not keep hold of it.
I tried again. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it is more like this.’
He listened to me try several times; he did not laugh.
‘It sounds like nothing,’ I said. ‘It sounds nothing like — But perhaps more shrill at the end, more trailing ... ’
He copied my next attempt; it was a good effort, and yet ... I shook my head.
‘Nothing like that?’ he said sadly.
‘Oh, something like it.’ I scraped the curd out of the bottom of the sea-heart rind. ‘But only a very little.’
He made the sounds again, his only-human approximation. ‘What does it mean, then? How does it describe her, or set her apart from all the other ... all the others down there?’
Again I thought, If only I were under there, if only I had a moment’s swimming. With the taste of curd in my mouth, I pressed my eyes closed with the heels of my hands and tried to imagine. A twitch of seal-muscle, a tail I no longer had. ‘I think it is about ... how fine it is to move. How wonderful is smooth swimming, high in the sea, where there is light. I think it — ’ I dropped my hands. Here I was in this man-box with another man, both of us with our gangly, long-limbed bodies that never could do such swimming. ‘I think that is it,’ I apologised. I licked the spoon clean of curd and laid it on my plate beside the hairy heart.
‘That’s good!’ he said. ‘That’s better than no idea at all.’ He dug with his spoon in the corners of his own sea-heart. ‘And strangely like the name I gave her, which is brightness, and shiningness. I would like to think I knew that.’ He sent me a bashful smile, and spooned up the last.
I smiled back at him, but he was already serious again. ‘How did she seem, under there?’ he asked. ‘Was she glad to be rid of me? Did she even remember me, Daniel?’ He covered his mouth, then, to stop any further fears pouring forth.
I could not speak to those begging eyes. I turned side-on in my chair, made as if to take my plate from the table, slumped there, trying to recall. ‘Oh, Dad, who can say? They don’t feel the same things. Or think the way we think up here. Or talk the way — the way we do now.’ I could not look at him; he would be so crestfallen. ‘You want me to say she missed you. But do you want me to lie? I did not see it. But did that mean she didn’t grieve after you?’
His face confused my thoughts, and I hunted for something more consoling to tell him. ‘But as for how was she? She was her own self in the sea, that’s all,’ I tried to find a way to explain it. ‘She was not in pain, you know, from her feet, and she could move, so well and so easily, not like under the blankets here, all weighed down — ’
‘She was happy, then,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘Not even that. But she was freed of … she didn’t have the sadness that she carried around up here. So I suppose, yes, she was happy. But, no — ’
‘It’s all right, Daniel — it’s good that she’s free of her misery.’ He smiled me a painful smile. ‘I’d like to be remembered fondly, but I don’t want just a new misery to take over from the old. Otherwise, it would make no sense, what you did.’
‘Does it make sense?’ I looked to the window, as if the answer might fly in there.
‘Oh yes, a perfect sense. It needed to be done, and none of us charmed men would ever have done it.’
/> I shook my head again, not in agreement or otherwise at what he said, but only at how, whosoever’s pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else.
‘What of you, then, lad?’ he said softly.
‘Me?’ I seemed, to myself, to be nothing, beside Mam’s being gone.
‘What of you — and the other lads, if you know, if you’ve spoken together? Now that you have been there, lived under that sea, are you always yearning, as your mams were, to go back?’
‘I don’t know.’ I lifted my shoulder to fend him off.
‘Come, now — if you had the chance, if you had the right-sized suit made, and the magic?’
I all but hid behind the table. I put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands and suffered there awhile. ‘Yes, but only because… Down there, you see, I did not care and I did not feel. Whereas here — ’ I laid my head on my arms; he would only have been able to see the rounded-over back of me beyond the table now. ‘Here it is all feeling and caring, and it makes me so tired,’ I said muffledly into my lap.
His chair scraped back. He came around to me, crouched at my head, rubbed my hair. He did not trouble me with more words, only rubbed and scratched my head as you would a cat’s awhile, and then he kissed it, and carried our plates away to the scullery.
When the wind was a particular strength of nor’-easter, Toddy and I would run up towards Windaway Peak. There was a blade of land there, up which funnelled all the airs from Gambrel Wood to Oaten Share, and we stood on it with our toes curled over the rock like eagle-claws, and spread our arms and were held up by the wind. It would push and sluice around us, and overbalance us back down towards the path, or desert us so that we fell forward into a shallow little tumble-room on the south side, and make us laugh. Toddy was a long string-bean like me; neither of us took much holding up. He was not glad to have been brought back to land, for he and his dad never got on, but he had emptied one of Wholeman’s junk-rooms and installed himself there, earning it with the kind of work I used to do.