The Handsome Family

Kinda daggy and seriously bloody cool all at once.

The Seal Wife *4

 Transmutation

Eight years earlier, still a surly middle child and not yet a husband, he saw the barque whaler Erica dock in town. He had wanted to go to sea even then and he waited to see the men and the Captain. But they were foul smelling, exhausted vagabonds whose wretched eyes were seared by salt and held the darkness of men who’d been dropped off the edge of the world. Terrible noises floated out the hatch from the bowels of the ship. Two men stood on the jetty and swayed, their bodies expecting the jetty timbers to rise and fall like the sea. “He’s gettin’ his tooth pulled,” one of them said of the howling. But it was a woman’s voice and someone went below. He heard dull thumps and the wailing stopped. They spoke with accents, Americans. They stank of rancid whale fat. Even the ropes, thick as a man’s wrist, were soaked in the stuff and the deck was black with slime and oil.

Money exchanged hands. The crew looked up from the jetty to the public bars and saloons that lined the seagoing side of town, with desirous, pleading eyes. The Captain laughed and told them to load the stores so they could be gone from this “godforsaken place where the whales are naught and the women are fucking ugly.” Someone said they had been gone from their home country for two and a half years.

Months later news came through of the Erica going down along the coast east. A sealing expedition discovered the wreck but found no bodies and people muttered that the big sharks that dogged the smoky trails of whale oil through the open seas had eaten them.

Julian stared at the name board for a long time. Then he dragged plank after plank to a reedy clearing nestled in the tall trees, just above where the river poured into the inlet. They would make a fine roof, layered with bark and clay. He tried not to smash his fingers on the stones he gathered, one by one, to build a fireplace and then some walls. He stopped to pick the spiralled fish out of the periwinkles and chew on their gritty flesh. He eyed plants with caution, remembering the stories about the herb that could kill a man with three of its little heart shaped leaves.

Days went on like this, with hunger and desire always in his belly. The dry stone walls went up until he had a little hut he could just straighten himself in, with a slab roof. No windows. There were holes enough between the stones. Lizards began to claim corners and crevices for their homes. He piled ribbon weed against one wall and that was where he slept. Nights clamoured with creatures and something that lived in the depths of the inlet made an appearance in his dreams almost every night. Frogs sang and another noise mimicked. Someone once told him that sound was the tiger snakes calling to mating frogs, calling to their prey.

He went upstream until he found a clay reserve where the river ate into the banks. The rich ochre he packed into the walls and the roof. It smelt good. He was almost a happy man, until he thought of his mother. Two sons in one blow. Sometimes he could feel her tumult, see her when Boss spoke to her and then her face later, alone.

Finally, he got the fiddle out of its case and sat down by the water to play. He jammed the fiddle against the hollow of flesh between his collar bone and neck, leaned his hoary head over the blemished woman of the fiddle and stroked the strings with the horsehair bow. He drew out Rights of Man, like a string from a ball, slowly, so as not to get tangled and then faster and faster, until it became a dervish and his fingers fell true with every note. The music spun and bounded around the inlet. It became a cacophony, an orchestra, sounds which this place had never heard before. When he slowed and finally stopped, the inlet was silent, as though the birds and the cicadas and the crickets were all in shock and gathering themselves for a suitable retort.

That was the first time he saw her.

The Seal Wife *3

Transmutation

No one was watching him. He was alone. He spat and grabbed the oar before he had to swim after it. He cursed himself and the fickle dinghy that would go to any tide’s beckon. That night he ate raw periwinkles that he collected from where he stood with the oar. They gathered in colonies on the tide line and they reminded him of Frannie’s little black buttons, the ones that traversed up her chest to the brooch at her throat on their wedding day. He wriggled the tip of his knife into the shell and prised each black doorway open, extracted the tiny fish that spiralled into the shell. They were no bigger than a finger nail and tasted of iodine, their ink leaving black marks on his fingers.

He spent a cold night on the mound of ribbon weed, wondering what he was to do. The night hummed and clicked around him, scratched with furtive sounds but he was used to that. It was being alone he couldn’t enjoy and he thought again of Frannie and that clock that ticked beside their bed at home. He forced himself to remember the sound of the clock and like a baby he began to feel comforted ...

... a baby in the dark night squalls for its mother, the storm harasses the house and there is no fire left in the hearth, the clock, tick, tick, tick. The owl and the wind outside but inside just ticking. She picks up the baby and settles into the easy chair and gives him suckle. He gobbles at her breast until the milk begins to rush. She rocks to and fro until the baby sleeps, milk trickling out the corner of his mouth and she comes to my bed. She turns me over so I spoon against her body, cupping herself into me. I harden in the cleft of her buttocks and enter her, half asleep in the darkest night and move inside her slowly, mindless, until my chest is suddenly wet with sweat. I soften and stay there and we sleep together again, no words, just bodies and warmth.

In the morning his oilskin had peeled away and he lay exposed to the slanting sun and stared straight into the sky at an eagle that lay in the warm air above him. He wondered where its mate was. Those tawny, ragged creatures always had a mate.

Something splashed out of the water but when he looked all he saw was a disappearing black fin. His body ached with cold and sadness. He climbed to his feet and brushed away the dried seaweed. What to do.

He spent that day with hunger thudding in his gullet but there was fresh water plenty. It roared down off the mountain and splashed through the black earth into the little harbour. He followed the river upstream to where he found a pool bordered with stone that was grey green with lichen. He crossed the water at the shallow point and scrambled around to the other western side of the inlet.

Long planks of wood poked out of the water like bad teeth. He retrieved one. Then another. Finally, he found a piece with Erica cut into the grain. 

Alms for Sarah Toa x

The Seal Wife *2

Transmutation

Waychinicup by Catherine Gordan

He rowed against the confused slop of waves that hit the cliffs and rolled back into each other. There was a channel of water flowing, a tear in the choppy swell, a clear line cut through the chaos. He lurched nearer. Here was something he’d never seen on this coast. A channel cut into the rocks through an imposing gateway sixty feet high. The inlets were usually sand-locked on the coast around here, to be flushed out by the yearly flooding through the low lying grounds beyond the dunes. This place was made by forces older than floods.

He struggled against the flow of the outgoing tide. He could smell fresh water now, mixing into the brine, little vortex devils that would coax his oars away if only they weren’t held fast by the rowlocks. It seemed that he rowed on the spot and it made a mess of him for his strength after two days was not enough. He checked the huge stone bristling with barnacles for a bearing and never saw it move by him at all. He strained against the tide for an age until it picked him up and washed him back out to sea, as cheerful as though he were a cuttle bone.

For a while he slept in the sun and woke with a thickened tongue, his eyelids glued together with salt and pus. He shook the last of the water into his mouth and looked towards the channel gate. The water was grey like the sky, heavy and silky, and the tide had turned. He started towards the lithic gateway and she let him, she let him into the inlet. It was no struggle as the water poured through the narrow aperture and bore him through in a rush.

The water inside gathered and surged. The inlet had a tide of its own. The river fed the inlet and the sea did too so when they met the body of briny swelled. Every three minutes the tide rose and then fell again, sucking out the juice between the crevices and holes. The breath of the world, he thought.

Water ran off the mountain in great silver streaks and he knew that some of the secret mossy places here would never see the sun. The noise of the ocean, roaring beyond the gates of the inlet, became a harmless background. Things scuttled and flapped away on his approach. There was only sounds; no sight of any creatures. Sea grass swayed beneath the water and brushed against the bottom of his boat. The inlet was completely bound with stone and brilliantly coloured lichens flowered all around.

Then the keel hit coarse orange sand and he lurched out of the boat, slipped over on some underwater boulders. He threw out the fiddle and the axe and the water and sank, exhausted, into a mounded bed of ribbon weed.

“If this is hell then let me stay.” He heard himself with great surprise as his words croaked out, certain of their sentiment but alien to the place. “Happy enough with this hell.”

When he awoke it was dusk. Birds chanted their co-ordinates. The dinghy was gone. He staggered to his feet to see the little boat hurtling back out of the channel on the tide. Past the heads and into the open sea, spinning once against a stone like a dancer. One oar lay stupidly in the water. He waded out to get it, slipping again on the rounded rocks just below the surface. He reached out to grab the handle with the red, port side stripe he’d painted himself only weeks before.

He felt something watching him. He shivered in wet clothes and turned to look behind him to the forested hill that stretched way from the water, where unseen multitudes of feather adorned bushmen must have been crouching, staring back at him. Magenta light changed the grey green forest to the serpentine brilliance of a parrot’s wing and the orange stones only looked redder. He looked back to the water.

Tree oils from the mountain stained it like stewed tea but regular sluicing by the ocean made it not so brown of the river but translucent and mysterious. In the grand nature of the place he felt sure that something equally majestic must live within its depths, something old, lumbering. There is always talk of creatures that man had known once and then forgotten.

Alms for Sarah Toa x