~ ~ ~
It feels like I’m losing a fight with a pair of pants.
I manage to get into the khakis Mom had laid out for me this morning, but they’re too tight and too short by nearly an inch. Pulling on the stiff dress shoes, clip-on tie and too-tight blazer, I look at myself in the mirror. I look ridiculous. I shift and pull, trying to see if I can get the pants to come down at least to my ankles. I can barely move my arms in the jacket, and eventually I give up. On the dresser in front of me sits the kelpwood compass Inés had given me. I grab it, feeling the warmth of it in my palm, and slip it into my pants pocket. It seems to spread through me, and I calm down.
Downstairs, Mom is at the front door, talking quietly with a man in a dark suit from the funeral home. She’s wearing a simple black dress. I think it may be the same one she’d worn to Dad’s funeral. She glances up as I come down, takes in the pants and the sleeves, and sighs. “A little short,” she says, “but they’ll have to do.” Then she reaches up and brushes a curl out of my eyes, the way she always does, and her hand stays on my cheek a second longer than usual. “Thank you for being here, my love,” she says quietly. “I don’t think I could do this without you.”
While I’ve been getting dressed, the men from the funeral home have set up the casket in the living room. It takes over the centre of the room. The lid is open, and there, lying still, is my grandfather. Except he doesn’t look like my grandfather. His skin is paler, and his always unruly dark hair, flecked with grey, has been brushed straight.
I can’t bear looking at this stranger in my grandfather’s casket any longer, so I move over to the kitchen. A few older women from the church are setting out snacks and casseroles, and a tall man with thinning grey hair has his head in one of the cupboards. He pulls it out as Mom comes in behind me.
“Ah, Maeve, my love. Is there any liquor in the house?”
“I was going to hide it,” Mom says, reaching into the cupboard over the fridge and handing him a bottle. “But if the minister’s already going through the cupboards, I don’t stand a chance against the Legion.”
The Reverend laughs, and Mom heads back to the living room.
The man turns to me. “You must be Mateo,” he says. “I’m Reverend Hiscock. You wouldn’t remember me, my son, but I baptized you. Your sister’s out back. I don’t think she wanted to be in the room with the body either.”
“It doesn’t look like him,” I say.
“They never do, my son,” the Reverend says. “But it’s how you remembers him that counts.”
A knock at the door announces the first of the guests. Before she opens it, Mom glances at me in the kitchen. “Mateo, can you get your sister? She has to be here when people arrive, but then she can go upstairs to play if she wants.”
Nora is outside, skipping idly around the grassy yard in a dark dress, not proper black but close enough. “Mom wants us to come in and greet people,” I say.
“I don’t want to. I don’t like it in there,” Nora protests.
“I know, it’s weird with the casket, right? After you say hi, you can go upstairs and play, or come back outside.”
“Okay, but you have to promise you won’t leave me in the room with the coffin by myself.”
“I promise,” I tell her, and together we head in.
The guests arrive quickly: first the older people who had known Grandfather since he’d come to Greywater Arm, then Mom and Dad’s old friends, and last of all his three drinking buddies from the Legion. They look like they’ve already had a few. The short one with the bright red face grabs my hand and pumps it. “Wince Gillam. I was your grandfather’s oldest friend, my son.” Then the three of them make straight for the kitchen and the bottle.
I think about what Mom had shouted at Inés on the wharf: I don’t care if you were Esteban’s oldest friend. If Inés really had sailed with my grandfather before he’d ever come here, Wince wouldn’t even be close. But he says it like there’s no question. Maybe the stories are just stories, and Inés is just a crazy old lady.
Before long the house is so full I’m surprised it can hold everyone. I’ve been jostled and bumped into the living room, where Wince is raising a glass of some kind of dark spirit.
“To Esteban Delmar!” he says. “The greatest sailor never to set foot in a boat!”
“Hear, hear!” goes up around the room.
“Still and all, he was the best kind,” one of the other Legion men says, too loudly. “He’d give you the shirt off his back if he never had another one.”
“He would, too,” says a younger man by the doorway, one of Dad’s old friends. “I was ten, maybe eleven. I’d done something, can’t even tell you what now, but I knew Dad was home waiting on me with the belt. So I comes up here instead. Esteban never asked me one question. Sat me down in that kitchen, gave me a feed of fish and brewis, and dealt me in on cards till dark. Then he walks me out to the end of the road and says, ‘Go on home now, my son. You can take a licking on a full belly.’”
The room laughs. “And did you?” someone calls out.
“Oh, I got it, all right,” the man says, raising his glass. “But I was full.”
Mom raises a small glass. “The people of Greywater Arm have been so good to me and my family. You all know Esteban came from away, but he found a home here, and so did I. To Esteban: to his love for this place, the sea, and all of you. Cheers!”
After the toasts, people go back to their own hushed conversations. All around me I hear whispered fragments of stories and soft laughter. It’s getting hot, and my jacket feels like it’s shrinking by the minute. I squeeze through the crowd and find Nora hanging by the back door, as far from the living room as she can get without going outside. She’s holding two partridgeberry squares, one in each hand.
“One’s for you,” she says, holding one up. I haven’t had one since we lived here.
I take the square and motion for the door, and we both step outside.
The night air is a wonderful respite from the heat in the house. There are a few wooden chairs here, circling a small table. I sit down and take a look at the sky. It’s already gotten dark, and there are ominous clouds in the west that seem to indicate a storm is coming. Nora takes another chair and starts eating her square. “Are you okay?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I had a weird dream last night.”
I look at her. “A nightmare?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No. I was swimming, but not like the way other kids swim – it was like I was flying through the water, way out past the boats. The water was dark but it felt so warm, like a blanket.” She licks the crumbs off her thumb. “I didn’t want to wake up.”
The kitchen door opens and two boys come out. They look like they’re close in age to Nora, maybe a year older.
“Want to play tag?” one of them asks.
“Yeah!” Nora’s answer is immediate, and she springs to her feet. Before I can say anything, she taps me on the head and says, “You’re it!” and tears off with the two boys to the back of the yard.
Quickly I stuff what’s left of the square in my mouth and jump to my feet.
“You want to play tag? Better get ready!” I say, taunting Nora and the boys.
I make a grimace and flex my arms, imagining my blazer tearing off like Hulk Hogan’s shirt. The blazer refuses to so much as pop a button, so I resort to the much less dignified approach of wrestling myself out of the jacket. I drop the tie, untuck my shirt and go to take a step. The shoes are stiff and slippery. I pull them off and stuff my dress socks into them. I eye the kids in the yard and take off at a sprint.
The boys scatter, but it’s Nora I’m after. She makes for the side of the house, and I cut her off. She doubles back, and I slip on the grass, still wet from the morning’s fog. By the time I’m up, I just catch sight of her going around to the side yard. I turn and go the other way, thinking I’ll head her off.
I circle the house. She’s not in the front, not on the side, and now that I’m in the backyard again, I don’t see her or the two boys anywhere.
“Nora?” No answer. “Nora!” It comes out louder than I mean it to. Then I hear a giggle, muffled, from somewhere I can’t place. They’re hiding. Of course they’re hiding.
I think the giggle may have come from around the side of the house, so I head back to the corner, but before I can go around, I hear voices coming out the back door.
“…three days after, Hooper hauls his nets and what’s in ‘em? Esteban’s fishing rod!”
It’s Grandfather’s friends from the Legion and Reverend Hiscock. I stop. I’m almost around the corner, and in the darkness they don’t see me.
“No fish, mind you.” That’s Wince. His words are slurred.
They laugh. Then it goes quiet, and when Wince speaks again, his voice is different.
“Forty years I knew him,” he says. “He was always a bit odd, sure. Never set foot in a boat. All his foolish stories. But it got worse after she come along.”
“Wince,” one of the others says.
I hold my breath and listen carefully. Who are they talking about?
“No, b’y, I’ll say it. She come in here out of nowhere. Fifteen years old, no mother, no father, nobody to say who she belonged to. First spring the boats goes out to the ice, she’s down on that wharf with a sign, roarin’ at the men about the seals. I was out on the ice that spring. And there’s her, bawlin’ over the whitecoats like they was her own youngsters. And Esteban takes her side, against the whole harbour.”
Reverend Hiscock speaks up. “She was sixteen, Wince.”
“Then Andrés marries her, and the both of them goes strange.”
I realize that it’s my mom they’re talking about.
Wince keeps going. “Esteban sittin’ up nights with his pirate stories. Andrés up all hours with his maps and his notebooks, starin’ out at the water like he’d lost his mind. And then Andrés is gone, out in a storm no one with sense would go out in.”
His voice cracks. “And what does she do? Takes them youngsters off to the prairies, far from the water as she can get ‘em. Took everything he had left. He kept that room upstairs made up for ‘em, seven years, and they never come. Sat in that chair night after night with nobody.” He sniffs, hard. “That one’s bad luck. Always was. And mark me, next it’ll be the boy –“
I think about all those summers in Ashburn. There had always been some reason we couldn’t make it back to visit.
“That’s enough!” Again it’s Reverend Hiscock. “She’s an odd one, all right, but have the decency not to speak ill of her in her own home.”
“‘Twon’t be her home for long,” Wince goes on. “Part with it as quick as she parted with the Arm after Andrés died, I reckon.”
“HEY, MATEO, COME TAG ME!” a voice calls out loudly. It’s one of the boys. He’s come out from hiding to taunt me.
Reverend Hiscock looks up at the voice, and even in the dark his eyes land right on me. “Mateo,” he says, a tone of worry in his voice.
I don’t care anymore. I run off. The boy, thinking I’m going after him, starts to run away, but I’m headed in a different direction, to the front of the house and then down the dirt road. The rocks sting my bare feet, and I stop for a second.
I can feel the warmth of the kelpwood compass in my pocket. Reaching in, I pull it out and pop it open. The needle swings for a moment and then points squarely at the harbour.
“Mateo, my son!” Reverend Hiscock calls out as he rounds the house at a half jog, his voice gentle, like he’s trying to calm me down. I take one look at him, turn and run down the road. I don’t care about the rocks now. I just want to get away.
I can hear the gravel crunch under the Reverend’s shoes as he tries to catch me, but he’s old and I’m faster. After a minute, he either gives up or I’m too far ahead to hear him.
The centre of town is quiet. It seems Esteban’s wake is the hot ticket tonight. Near the sailors’ monument I stop to look behind me. The road is empty; no one is following me. I check the bottoms of my feet. They’re sore but not cut up. “Next time you run away, make sure to bring good shoes,” I say to no one in particular.
“Running away, my son?” The old voice startles me. I spin around, and it takes a second for me to see her: Inés, standing on the wharf near where her boat is docked, dressed in dark clothes with a black shawl draped over her shoulders.
“Maybe. I’m not really sure,” I say.
Inés gestures to me. “Come aboard, my dear, and have a cup of tea.”
I glance back one more time. No one is there, so I cross to the wharf and climb aboard The Sea Witch.
In the cabin, Inés has the lights on low. She’s got an electric kettle going already, and she motions for me to sit while she fetches a mug from her mismatched collection.
As she pours the tea, I pull the compass from my pocket and pop it open. The needle swings to point out to sea.
“Ah, adventure,” Inés says, turning back and seeing the compass in my hand.
“You said we could cross and find my father?” I ask her.
She nods a little. “We can try, b’y,” she says. “Getting across is no easy thing, and the 8th Sea is some big place once you’re there. And if your father don’t want to be found…”
“I need to try,” I say.
“Now. What happened up to the house tonight?” Inés asks.
I think about all the things Inés had told me, and the things the men had said.
“Is it real?” I ask.
Inés looks confused. “Is the 8th Sea real?” I ask.
She nods her head. “‘Tis all real,” she says, “and dangerous, and full of adventure. You ready for that, my son?”
“Yes.” I say it with as much confidence as I can muster. If it is all real, if Dad is really alive, then all of those things the men had said, all of the things people had said about me behind my back, they’d all be wrong.
“Well, then.” Inés throws back her tea and shrugs off her shawl, looking me straight in the eyes. “Cast off that line, and we’ll get the mainsail up. There’s a storm coming, and it won’t wait on us.”
I sit still for a moment before she says again, “Go on, now! Get at that line!”
I realize what she’s asking and jump to my feet. I take one look at the full mug of tea and decide to leave it behind as I climb out the cabin door and onto the deck.
The night is pitch black now, but the dim navigation lights from the sailboat cast enough light for me to see by. Inés removes the mooring line from the stern, grabs a winch handle and starts to raise the mainsail.
At the bow of the boat, I’m trying to work out how exactly I’m supposed to untie us. Back home, after I’d read all the pirate adventures the library had, I’d turned to technical sailing manuals. I should know how to do this, but the rope is heavy and feels unfamiliar in my hands. Suddenly another hand, strong and slender, grabs the rope from me and with a casual flick unties it from the wharf. I look up to see Inés drop the rope neatly into a pile and then move, with a speed I didn’t know she possessed, to the back of the boat, taking the wheel as our mainsail catches the wind, and we’re off.
I take one last look behind me. Up on the cliff is the little house, its warm lights still glowing.
~ ~ ~