I HAVE A DARKNESS IN ME. ALSO A DEATH. ALSO A PIN-PRICK OF LIGHT.

 

           

Fall, 1980:

I am called to the docks when my shift is done at 7:00 a.m.  The fisherman of Glory have netted a seabird and there it lies, wings spread, on its back - a great white cross - the Royal Southern Albatross, dumped on the deck among the morning's first catch, the only unmoving thing among the lesser finny creatures still gill-gasping and thrashing in the wretched blue air of the morning.  For forty minutes it has lain thus, dead-center of the catch, circled by the crew who, in fear, refuse to touch it or anything else that's come up in the net.

Roberto, who sent for me, is furiously crossing himself - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -  as he crossed himself at his mother's bedside when she lay dying in the hospital where I was her night-nurse. Roberto tells me he wants me to "take care of it" - and, by this, he means dispose of it - so they do not touch it and curse themselves, or their boat, or the sea-sturdy net by which it came to them.

But what do I know of the sea and its birds, or the superstitions of men, or why the tragic dead appear to us, as they do, under the bluest sky, on the most ordinary day of our lives?

Maybe it is the way of a net that it does not discriminate between the good and the wronged, that when we cast it into the sea in hopes of a good catch, it brings us both the day's food and the fallen, places it all at our feet like this, leaves the gore - and the glory of it - to men. Maybe this bird is a test or a sign of some kind, far north of its home waters in South America. Maybe the dead bird just is, no reason for it at all, no sense or nonsense in it.  Maybe nothing more than hunger drove him here.

Some petty thing in me wants to snap at Roberto this morning. Maybe because I am just weary after working all night among the sick and infirm and dying.  Maybe because he summoned me with an urgency that I believed meant life-or-death. I want to tell him to "take care of it" himself, to lift it, to hold it against his heart, to accept it for what it is, then to surrender it again to the sea.  But what are the odds he could manage this after he could not lift his dying mother, not once, refusing even to take her hand in his or to kiss her brow, preferring instead to send her - body and soul - unblemished to God after the priest had administered Last Rites?

But this would be cruel of me, and the men are clearly troubled.  So I squint up at the sun and the unyielding blue of the sky overhead.  I hear the sea slapping against the hull of Glory and I hear the cries of gulls, searching for food.  I hear the early-morning business talk of fishermen on the docks.  I feel a shiver rising in me in the morning chill and the damp briny air.

When there is no longer a way to avoid it, I kneel to the deck among the fallen scales and the fins and gills and the other still-troubled things of the sea.  I try not to think of their struggles, these fish, of how to be in air when what they know is the sea.  I lift the great creature of the air as I sometimes lift my sleeping son: staggering under the sudden weight of him, murmuring to the head slumped against my collar bone, Shhh.  It's all right now.  Back to sleep. . . . 

I bless the bird for the long sea-journey he is about to take, the slow sinking, the sea-change by which he will be utterly undone, and I tip him backwards into the sea. And while he drifts away, his great wings sinking last, I bless the waves that carry the broken cross of his body away, bless too all the creatures of the sea and the day's dying catch on the deck.  I bless the blank blue face of the sky and the knotted net that brought the bird up again from the deep.  And for good measure, before I go, I bless this boat and the men who stand here, heads down, grateful and ashamed, unable to look up at me, though my white dress glitters and sparkles from the bright cast-off scales as I stand here before them, spangled with sun, on the splintered deck of Glory.

 

photo courtesy of Judy Ledbetter 

 

 

Comments

[Lisa Scerbak]

wow. just had a chance to read this, anne, and aaaaaah. splintered deck of glory. gill-gasping...words escape me. your writing is so transporting.
thank you....

[Anne Caston]

Hi Lisa,

It is I who should thank you, not the other way around. Your kindness in responses keeps me humble and eager to move forward with the next writing, and the next.

Bless you,
Anne