Happy 2017 peoples!
I'm running a serial on A WineDark Sea over the next month or two. The Seal Wife is a previously unpublished novella that I wrote a few years ago. I love this story, and it has not found a home and perhaps it belongs here anyway. The Seal Wife story lives in four sections: Transmutation, Autopilot, Pearl and Finn, and The Seal Wife, and is set in a place a bit like Waychinicup. Freely read, or if you are feeling generous, a donation linky thing is at the bottom of each episode (thanks Alex, for this idea) and you can find episodes by clicking on The Seal Wife in WineDark Tales on the sidebar.
The Seal Wife *1
Transmutation
Gun smoke and blood and that silence
of Silas dying ... straight through the neck. He never uttered a word. The
stink of seal skins and abandoned carcasses blended with sulphurous smoke.
Julian stood with the shattered stock in his stinging hands and watched the
blood spill out of his brother’s smashed throat and leach into the sand that
was white as the home country snow.
Julian was clearing Boss’s gun, some relic
from the wars; a dirty, rusted thing with a jammed ball. Nobody could get the
thing out and Boss was getting cranky. So Julian had a go to break from pegging
out the skins on craggy, mulga wood racks. Silas lurked behind the skin racks
like a maid in rows of white sheets. Julian didn’t even see his shadow, his fur
clad feet squeaking in the fine beach sand.
Boss took the shattered rifle out of
his grip and made him sit on the crunchy, dried kelp. “You’re on parole, aren’t
yer mate?”
“So to speak.” Blowing up the
Chinaman’s toilet should have been a mere prank but was near fatal for Ah Kit,
who was sitting on it at the time.
“Your brother’s dead. You’ll swing
for this.”
Julian stared at him. “It’s your gun,
Boss. You ast me to clear it.”
“They’ll call it manslaughter,
prob’ly. We’ll take the boy into town for yer. Take the dinghy.”
Amidst the mutterings of the sea and
night time bird alarms, Boss pushed the little boat lurching into the surf and
stood watching the young man leave. A swollen moon hung over the sea, leaving
ladders and rippling pools of light.
Julian rowed past the breakers. Boss’s figure his hands on his hips was
silhouetted against the shore.
Their older brother Andrew expected
to take the helm from their father. Andrew grew into the role with the natural
arrogance of one whom inheriting land and cattle is a given. Julian worked
hard. He bossed his little brother and in moments of unbearable hierarchy he
beat up on him. Silas – every mother’s favourite. Julian thought he needed
toughening. Julian saw life as an entity that hurled injustice at him. He
received the back of the hand but no land at the end of it. Conversations at
the family table passed over and around him. The oldest and the youngest sons
were like points of reference in a sky full of stars and he was nothing, just
black space. His first moment of being the sun and the moon was when he brought
home a wife. Frannie, who heaved her candy striped breast once or twice and
then produced two bonny sons, needed a home to put them in. So away sealing he
went. Anything to make some money.
Julian rowed and drifted and wept for
his brother, not his brother, his mother and then for himself as he thought of
her greater love for Silas and how Boss had dumped him as carrion. He slept,
his head jammed into the bow against his oilskin. And so, for two days, the
little boat bore the wretched man and all the possessions that Boss had thought
well enough to deposit; the fiddle, an axe, the water flask, a sharp knife,
some biscuit and the weight of having slaughtered his brother and fled.
He hauled against the oars and vowed to
keep rowing until he found somewhere that was nowhere. He kept to the smooth
line of water where the outgoing tide met the incoming one. A brindle mountain
rose into the sky, tipped with streaked granite the shape of a woman’s perfect
breast, the nipple proud and pointing west. Stones the size of grand beasts
peppered the hillside, exposed by the blackened patches of the hunting fires.
They would come looking for him. He
knew that. Men on horseback, with the trackers who rubbed foul fish oil into
their skin to keep themselves warm.
That has to be worth a beer of anyone's money. Thanks, Sarah.
ReplyDeleteAhh you are awesome Tom, thank you for being first in x
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